Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative September 2026 news and views. See our News Reports section for coverage of earlier dates, months and years.
Excerpts below are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes"
Sept. 30
Top Headlines
For Republicans trying to outrun a blue wave, the verdict is in: The Dallas midterm convention was a stinker. Don’t take it from us, take it from Texas GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton.Special Report
Sept. 30, 2026. 🚨 34 Days to the Midterms 🚨 The courts have been, at best, imperfect guardians of voting rights. The U.S. Supreme Court’s MAGA majority rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to wreak havoc with mail-in voting and turned away a MAGA re-redistricting map in Missouri. However, the MAGA majority allowed states to proceed with individual inquiries to the flawed SAVE immigration data base, which is likely to result in false flags of noncitizen voters. Special Report: Meta Data Centers
News Roundups
U.S. Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general and a former Trump criminal defense attorney before the president nominated him for Senate confirmation (Shown at U.S. Capitol on July 16, 2026).
Sept. 30, 2026. Tonight I’m bringing you the exclusive Epstein news we’ve been working on. The Trump Justice Department and FBI are withholding a secret FBI interview with a banker tied to Jeffrey Epstein, a record that should have been released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and never was. And Senator Ron Wyden warns it’s likely just the tip of the iceberg.right, Sept. 30, 2026. Ken Paxton, one of Trump’s most loyal Senate candidates, just got caught on tape telling donors that Trump’s midterm convention tanked Republican poll numbers, admitting “everybody’s numbers dropped” even as Trump publicly insists it “helped Ken Paxton a lot.”More On Middle East Wars
More Global News
The New Republic, The Daily Blast: Trump’s Fury at Canada Takes Darker Turn as GOPers Quietly Sound Alarm, Greg Sargent, Sept. 30, 2026. As Trump’s trade war against Canada grows more unhinged, the author of a piece on GOP midterm woes explains how Trump’s anti-Canada derangement could alienate working-class voters.Donald Trump glares angrily while speaking vehementlyMore On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump This Month Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
Sept. 30, 2026. The attacks on Jack Smith expose something far bigger than one ugly Senate hearing: a collision between personal political loyalty and America’s constitutional system…
Sept. 30, 2026. Donald Trump appears to be doing a mafia style bust out of the Kennedy Center according to a new report showing it’s run through every resource it had and is in “free fall.”
Donald Trump used to buy TV ads to lure gamblers into his casinos and bolster his brand. Now he’s just using your taxpayer dollars.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 30, 2026. We need to have a big day peeps. Decisions on ads, where to put final resources will be made based on the q3 fundraising totals for candidates and committees. 
Sept. 30, 2026. At a rambling White House event, Trump tried to blackmail Alaska into voting Republican in the Senate election.Special Report: Smith Hearing 'Complete Disaster' for Republicans?
Sept. 29, 2026. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), above left, tried to claim that Jack Smith, above right, went to a Atlanta Hawks game and met with Fani Willis to push a Trump conspiracy, but Schmidt had everything wrong.
Sept. 30, 2026. Poor Eric Schmitt. It had all been going so well. The junior senator from Missouri had been working hard building a MAGA-pleasing brand as a staunch Trump ally who wasn’t afraid to play footsie with the blood-and-soil right. Just yesterday, Axios reported that Schmitt was “seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate” for JD Vance.Special Report: 'Disgrace and Danger' from FBI Chief?
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Doomsday Scenario, Investigative Commentary: The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel, Part II, Garrett M. Graff, above, Sept. 29, 2026. A quick check-in on the FBI director's latest raft of scandals (including, of course, the bestiality). Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.” More On Trump Team Governance
Sept. 30, 2026. In spite of the amusement we all had at Eric Schmitt’s considerable expense, yesterday’s Jack Smith hearing was a shitshow, not least because Democrats were grandstanding just as much as right wingers.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, She Says Vaccines Killed Her Twins. The Authorities Say She Did, Lisa Miller, Sept. 30, 2026. Andrea Shaw has spent most of the summer alone in a cell in Payette, Idaho, taking comfort from photos of her family, according to her lawyer. Her twins were 18 months old when they died, in May 2025, and her living daughter is three months old.More On Artificial Intelligence, U.S. Markets
Sept. 30, 2026. Trillions of dollars in spending, higher interest rates, hardly any jobs. 
Sept. 30, 2026. President Trump was so, so excited to host the world’s most powerful technology executives at lunch yesterday at the White House.Sept. 30, 2026. As many people before me have pointed out, once you notice that the signature page for Trump’s “morally binding” agreement on AI safety spells “United States” “Unites States,” the entire charade becomes more ominous than it already was.Top Stories
Associated Press, Ex-Trump prosecutor Smith forcefully defends investigations as Republicans assail his team’s tactics, Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer, Sept. 29-30, 2026. Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against President Donald Trump, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he “will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution” from the Trump administration and that he believes the rule of law is being threatened like never before.
Former special counsel Jack Smith forcefully defended his prosecutions of President Donald Trump and his investigative tactics, pushing back against repeated Republican criticism in a congressional hearing Tuesday that featured a senator’s bungled attempt to accuse him of lying about a basketball game.
The hearing offered a forum for Republicans to try to paint Smith as a political operative and assail him anew for what they contend were politicized prosecutions that unfolded during the 2024 presidential race. Democrats rallied in his defense, eliciting testimony on the legal and factual basis for the criminal cases against the then-candidate and decrying the Trump administration’s firing of prosecutors involved in the investigations.
Smith, for his part, defended his work in an hours-long Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — the latest 
congressional effort to revisit federal cases that accused Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 race and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role. And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either,” Smith said. He lamented what he called an unprecedented assault on the rule of law by the Trump administration, along with terminations of his team that he said had deprived the government of crucial expertise and made the country less safe.
“That has never happened in my career. I have never seen anything remotely like it in any Republican or Democratic administration,” he said.
The testimony did nothing to appease Smith’s Republican critics, including Sen. Eric Schmitt, who called Smith a “dirtbag” and a “villain” as he addressed him.
The Missouri senator was also at the center of the hearing’s most memorable moment and gaffe, when he asked Smith whether he recalled attending a professional basketball game in Atlanta in February 2024, around the time Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was facing scrutiny for her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special state prosecutor she hired for the county’s election-interference case against Trump.
Smith appeared perplexed by the question, which tried to make an unsubstantiated link between federal and state prosecutions of Trump.
“I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta,” Smith said. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”Sign up for the Ground Game Newsletter: Your guide to the biggest stories in politics, policy and U.S. elections.Email addressSign up
At that point, staffers held up posterboard displaying text messages that, according to Schmitt, purported to show communications about Smith’s attendance at an NBA game between the hometown Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors.
“I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” Schmitt said.
The confusion appeared resolved minutes later when Smith volunteered that he indeed had gone to a basketball game in February 2024 — an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s matchup at the University of Maryland that had nothing to do with the Atlanta Hawks.
“Could it then be that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said as she chided Schmitt. “That might be the confusion over the names of the team. But perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.”The hearing focused heavily on subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records
Smith was pressed by Republican senators about his access to the phone records of GOP lawmakers as he investigated Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Prosecutors issued subpoenas for toll records of numerous Republican members of Congress who were contacted by Trump or his aides on Jan. 6, 2021, the day supporters of the president rioted inside the U.S. Capitol. Smith has said such subpoenas are common in investigations and were necessary in this instance to understand the “scope of the conspiracy” between Trump and his Republican allies.
The subpoenas, he said Tuesday, provided corroborating evidence that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators sought to exploit the violence of the day by invoking it to try to further delay the congressional certification of Biden’s win.
“They were taking the fact that law enforcement officers had been brutally assaulted at this institution and using that to seek to delay the proceedings further in violation of the law,” Smith said.
Toll records reveal the date, time and duration of phone calls between two parties but not the content of the communications.
Politico, Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead, Kyle Cheney and Chris Marquette, Sept. 30, 2026. It started with a pledge to expose a Biden-era conspiracy to take down President Donald Trump. It ended with a botched attack over basketball tickets.
Armed with subpoena power in Congress and a friendly Justice Department on their side, Republican lawmakers have spent two years promising to expose former special counsel Jack Smith as the leader of an anti-Trump witch hunt that morphed into a full-blown attempt to take down the Republican establishment.
Smith’s appearance Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee — his third time testifying under oath on Capitol Hill, the second time in public — was supposed to be a watershed moment for the GOP intent on extracting a smoking gun ahead of the midterm elections. Instead, the hearing was most memorable for the fusillade of insults hurled by the panel’s Republicans.
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri unsuccessfully sought to implicate Smith in a plot to attend a sporting event as a cover for investigating Trump election interference claims, then called him a “dirtbag.” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said the former prosecutor made him “want to throw up in my mouth.” And Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, comparing him to “Javert from ‘Les Mis,’” said Smith’s probe was “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley insisted the hearing was “not the end” of his investigative work, but the four-hour grilling had the feeling of finality. The Republican-led probe into Smith’s efforts to bring criminal charges against the president has already stretched for two years, and Democrats stand a chance of retaking control of Congress in the midterms.
And at least one Republican member of the panel, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the investigation into Smith had run its course in Congress.
“At this point, I think we kind of know what we know,” Hawley said in an interview following the hearing. “I think at this point, it’s up to the DOJ to either prosecute him for perjury for lying under oath, which I think the House has formally referred him for, … or try to have him disbarred.”
Judiciary Committee Republicans did little Tuesday to challenge the substance of Smith’s criminal case against Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Smith reinforced his contention that Trump mounted an unprecedented criminal assault on the transfer of power, seeking to derail Joe Biden’s victory and then capitalizing on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — unleashed by a mob of his supporters — to further that goal.
Smith also defended the work of his staff and decried the Trump-led Justice Department’s decision to fire them as “illegal.” And he made his most forceful case yet that the probe he led was actually fueled by Republican witnesses who broke from Trump over his handling of the 2020 election.
”It’s very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law and not, were Republicans,” Smith said.
When Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) ripped into Smith for secretly obtaining her late brother Lindsey Graham’s phone records as part of his inquiry, Smith hailed him as a “patriotic public servant” and who likely would have been a featured witness in Trump’s trial — because he eventually concluded Trump’s election fraud claims were false.
Smith similarly hailed Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and former Vice President Mike Pence as heroic figures who were crucial witnesses against the president. Smith ultimately dropped his case after Trump prevailed in the 2024 election. Though he said he remained confident in his ability to secure a conviction at trial, Smith emphasized that Justice Department policy forbids criminal prosecution of a sitting president.
When they weren’t lobbing personal attacks at Smith, Republicans homed in on what they described as procedural flaws of Smith’s investigation. They criticized him for subpoenaing phone records of members of Congress, like Lindsey Graham, who communicated with Trump and his administration during the post-2020 election time frame.
They hit Smith for securing court orders that prevented telecom companies from alerting lawmakers to those subpoenas and challenged his respect for the constitutional protections members of Congress are afforded to avoid scrutiny from federal prosecutors. That line of questioning produced one of the only bipartisan moments of the hearing: a pitch by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for legislation that would limit the ability of prosecutors to obtain secrecy orders when they issue subpoenas in sensitive probes.
Lee is poised to be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the next Congress if Republicans maintain control of the chamber.
Smith used his appearance, as well as friendly questions from the panel’s Democrats, to parry GOP criticism of his tactics. He followed all Justice Department policies and laws, he insisted, and said he had respect for the separation of powers — including Congress’ constitutional protection from executive branch scrutiny.
Smith said he never targeted GOP lawmakers but pursued critical evidence of Trump’s actions and state of mind that would have been necessary to prove his case in court, and he repeatedly returned to an overarching contention: that he had enough evidence to convict Trump of “one of the most serious crimes that’s ever happened in our nation’s history.”
He also reminded lawmakers what he couldn’t say: anything at all about his charges against Trump for hoarding classified information at Mar-a-Lago. Smith’s findings in that probe remain sealed from public view by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who has ordered the Justice Department to keep it secret.
New York Times, Live Updates: Plane to Israel Narrowly Averts Disaster After Pilot Stabbing, David M. Halbfinger, Aaron Boxerman, Natan Odenheimer and Max Bearak, Sept. 30, 2026. Passengers said that they broke into the cockpit and subdued the attacker, who Israeli officials said was one of the pilots. The motive for the attack was not clear.
One pilot stabbed another at the controls of an Emirati flight to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, causing it to suddenly plunge thousands of feet until passengers and the crew won a fight to regain control of the plane.
Passengers described a terrifying fall during the attack, which ended when some of them stepped into the melee and managed to subdue the aggressive pilot. Overhead bins swung open, parents clung to their children, and videos from inside the plane showed at least one wounded man and others on board covered in blood.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Eric Schmitts the Bed, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 30, 2026. For Republicans trying to outrun a blue wave, the verdict is in: The Dallas midterm convention was a stinker. Don’t take it from us, take it from Texas GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton.
“To be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” Paxton said in leaked audio reported today by the New York Times. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
Paxton, who made the remark at a private fundraiser, was answering the question: “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” Who might “he” be, one wonders. Happy Wednesday.
Special Report
The Contrarian, Opinion: Courts Are Not Going to Save Voting Rights, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 30, 2026. 🚨 34 Days to the Midterms 🚨
The courts have been, at best, imperfect guardians of voting rights. The U.S. Supreme Court’s MAGA majority rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to wreak havoc with mail-in voting and turned away a MAGA re-redistricting map in Missouri.
However, the MAGA majority allowed states to proceed with individual inquiries to the flawed SAVE immigration data base, which is likely to result in false flags of noncitizen voters. On this one, “Completely absent from the majority opinion is any analysis of potential harm to voters who might be incorrectly flagged as noncitizens and removed from state voting rolls,” Rick Hasen wrote. “That should have figured in the balance of the equities.” Fortunately, “this case is likely to have limited impact on the midterms, because … the NVRA prohibits mass purges of voters in the 90 days before the election … [meaning] states can still use the database now for individualized determinations.”
Above all else, the massive blow to the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, resulting in the evisceration of Black and Hispanic representation in the South (and elsewhere), hangs over the 2026 election and beyond.
Where does this leave us? Naturally, lawyers and voting-rights advocacy groups who devote themselves to defending voting rights in court continue to sketch out what amounts to a whack-a-mole strategy: Challenging illegal executive orders on their face and again as implemented; winning at the lower courts, then scrambling to defend wins from the predations of a SCOTUS MAGA majority that draws the line only when abject chaos (e.g., Missouri maps, Post Office redesign) threatens to turn an election upside down. Well, when you have a hammer (litigation), everything looks like a nail (a court case).
But this strategy is insufficient, if not misguided. Voting rights hang by a thread, and the future of free and fair elections remains tenuous as long as an overtly partisan, intellectually corrupt MAGA majority sits atop the Supreme Court, prone to use the shadow docket to greenlight Trump regime mischief; Circuit Court decisions depend on the composition of the panel drawn (do you, for example, get the infamous duo of D.C. Circuit Court judges auditioning for the MAGA Supreme Court, such as Neomi Rao and Greg Katsas?); and judge shopping remains endemic. Even with the best lower court judges, judicial remedies are often too little too late or simply not up to the task of disarming MAGA officials bent on suppressing voting rights.
Ultimately, the sanctity of voting rights — the core of our democracy — rests with the voters and the elected branches of government. Unless and until a broad pro-democracy coalition prioritizes voting rights and electing local, state, and federal officials who are committed to implementing the 14th and 15th Amendments as envisioned, preserving the principles underlying the Voting Rights Act, and holding accountable election deniers and suppressors, voting rights will remain fragile at best. Because Republicans have become an anti-democratic party hostile to an inclusive electorate, that means electing Democrats who are committed to an aggressive, pro-democracy agenda. (Let’s start with the basic principle that no one should hold federal, state, or local office in any branch if he or she cannot admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. For now, that means virtually no Republican who can make it through a primary is fit to hold office.)
What would a pro-voting rights agenda look like?
At the federal level, enduring voting protection would require a Democratic president and Congress determined to expand the Supreme Court and implement term limits; reauthorize and clarify the intent of the Voting Rights Act (testing the MAGA Supreme Court majority’s aversion to declaring it outright unconstitutional); and pass a federal statute and/or constitutional amendment enshrining the right to vote (not merely the right to be free of racial discrimination). As to the latter, the Brennan Center explains:
Today, no federal law provides for an explicit, affirmative right to vote. Congress has the power, under the Constitution’s Elections Clause and the 14th Amendment, to pass a law that does just that and then to provide citizens with the legal tools they need to enforce that right....
Congress should use its legislative authority to enact an explicit right to vote that is backed up with a clear mechanism for voters to challenge any infringement of that right. It should specify that any law or practice that makes voting more difficult will be subject to the strictest level of scrutiny by the courts.
In addition, Congress can pass and the president can sign legislation to end gerrymandering once and for all and to fully fund election machinery, including ample protection for state and local officials menaced by violence.
As important as federal officials may be, the real action often is in the states and localities. If we do not want states to abuse the SAVE database, then we must elect state officials who are not bent on conducting reckless witch hunts for noncitizen voters and mandating sloppy voter purges. If we want to prevent a repeat of 2020, then we must elect governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state, and state legislators who will not concoct phony elector schemes or otherwise work to undermine the voters’ will. If we really want democracy to prevail, then we will vote for governors and state lawmakers committed to the National Popular Vote Compact that awards electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. (It has already passed in 18 states plus the District of Columbia, meaning 222 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law have already been accumulated.)
In sum, litigation has been a necessary defensive strategy to prevent any further erosion of voting rights, which is the cornerstone of our democracy. However, it is not a sufficient approach to fortifying our democracy. For that, we need voters and the elected branches of government at all levels to establish hard and fast rules to protect voting rights both in statute and in the Constitution itself.
The good news: Having seen the extent to which MAGA forces will go to suppress voting and cling to power at all costs, voters in the midterms may finally understand just how hostile to democracy today’s MAGA Republican Party has become. In response, they can elect local, state, and federal officials committed to protecting and expanding voting rights so that our right to choose our leaders does not hang on the luck of the draw on a federal Circuit Court panel or on the predilections of the MAGA Supreme Court majority, which has repeatedly shown itself hostile to protecting pluralistic democracy.
The upcoming election will not only decide the balance of power in Congress and the states but also the fate of electoral democracy. That should be all the incentive anyone needs to get out to vote.
Special Report: Meta Data Centers
New York Times, Times Exclusive: How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes, Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, Sept. 30, 2026. Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”
But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.
It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.
Characterizing its A.I. data centers as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.
Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the I.R.S., in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”
Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.
The move caused some unease within Meta’s finance department. The I.R.S. in the past has challenged companies that claimed the credit for basic supplies. While thousands of companies, including other tech giants, get huge benefits from the research tax credit, they do so overwhelmingly for salaries paid to researchers and engineers — the people carrying out innovation.
News Roundups
U.S. Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general and a former Trump criminal defense attorney before the president nominated him for Senate confirmation (Shown at U.S. Capitol on July 16, 2026).
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Major Exclusive: Trump DOJ Buries Secret Epstein Interview, Trump Hit With Large Court Losses, Scrambles to Muzzle His Own AI, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Tonight I’m bringing you the exclusive Epstein news we’ve been working on. The Trump Justice Department and FBI are withholding a secret FBI interview with a banker tied to Jeffrey Epstein, a record that should have been released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and never was. And Senator Ron Wyden warns it’s likely just the tip of the iceberg.
And it was another brutal day for Trump in the courts. An appeals court panel that included one of his own appointees refused to lift sanctions over his IRS settlement, which a federal judge found was manufactured to wipe out his family’s tax bills and create a $1.776 billion fund. At the same time, his Justice Department filed a misconduct complaint against nearly every federal judge in Minnesota for daring to criticize it in the press. Meanwhile, Trump’s shiny new AI site keeps contradicting his biggest lies, and the White House is scrambling to muzzle it, and he celebrated the end of the US mission in Iraq as the end of “a very expensive excursion into Hell” while his own war with Iran drags into its eighth month.
Some powerful people are not going to be happy about tonight’s reporting. They weren’t happy about the last story either, and they won’t be happy about the next one. But we’re not going to stop.
Here’s the news:
EXCLUSIVE: Senator Wyden Accuses DOJ and FBI of Withholding Secret Epstein Banker Interview That Could Blow Door Open, Demands Release of All FBI 302s:
Sen. Ron Wyden is accusing the Justice Department and FBI of withholding a key Epstein record, in a letter obtained exclusively by The Parnas Perspective. In the Sept. 30 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee demands they immediately produce every FBI 302 report, the bureau’s official record of a witness interview, tied to the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. Wyden says his investigators recently learned the FBI possesses a 302 memorializing an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, conducted as part of a criminal investigation into Epstein and his associates. T
hat report was not included in any of the documents DOJ has released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. “The existence of this FBI 302, and its exclusion from the publicly released EFTA files, has heightened my concerns that the DOJ and the FBI are withholding key documents from Congress and the public,” Wyden writes.
Wyden warns the hidden banker interview is likely just the tip of the iceberg. The senator writes that the existence of this undisclosed report “indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” under the law. That raises serious questions about whether the Trump administration has fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the release of Epstein-related records. If Wyden is right, the government has been sitting on at least one interview with a banker connected to Epstein while telling the public the files are out. The letter does not name the banker, the bank they worked for, or when the interview took place.
The demand builds on Wyden’s years-long investigation into the Wall Street banks that kept Epstein’s money flowing. Wyden’s Finance Committee staff has spent years investigating how Epstein financed his sex trafficking operation, and last month he released a report with evidence that executives at JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious transactions in a timely manner. A review of Treasury Department records and internal bank documents found that top Wall Street executives knew about Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld that information from the government and shielded him from federal scrutiny. According to Wyden, Epstein withdrew millions of dollars in cash with no clear business purpose and was party to thousands of suspicious wire transfers worth at least $1.4 billion. “By looking the other way for decades, the banks allowed Epstein to have ready and reliable access to cash necessary to recruit, harbor and transport young women and underage girls for the purpose of human trafficking and sexual abuse,” Wyden writes.
Wyden is demanding every Epstein-related FBI interview report, including any with employees of the three banks. He calls on Blanche and Patel to immediately turn over all 302s related to investigations into Epstein and his associates, “including but not limited to 302s generated from interviews with employees of JPMC, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.” Wyden writes that a thorough review of the undisclosed report, and any others created during the FBI’s investigation, “will be critical to my ongoing investigation of this matter.” The letter puts the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files squarely back under scrutiny, this time with a specific, identifiable record that Wyden says should have been released and wasn’t.
Meanwhile, Norway’s parliament opened public hearings into ties between Jeffrey Epstein and the country’s politicians and diplomats, a scandal that has shaken the nation’s elite. The hearings were triggered by the Justice Department’s January release of millions of Epstein documents, and 11 current and former foreign and development ministers have been summoned, including Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who insisted he never had any relationship with Epstein and that the problems stemmed from a few individuals rather than the foreign ministry as a whole. Former Foreign Minister Børge Brende, who resigned as head of the World Economic Forum over his friendly ties to Epstein, apologized for lying to a Norwegian newspaper last year when he claimed he’d never met him, admitting to three dinners and exchanges by email and text. Former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, former minister Terje Rød-Larsen and ex-diplomat Mona Juul are separately under police investigation on corruption accusations, which all three deny, while Queen Mette-Marit, who has apologized for her friendship with Epstein, is not part of the hearings. Parliament has also appointed an outside commission to examine more than 30 years of Norwegian diplomatic history, with findings due in early 2028.
Trump’s DOJ Files Misconduct Complaint Against Nearly All of Minnesota’s Federal Judges as Appeals Court Rejects His “Collusive” IRS Deal
Attorney General Todd Blanche filed a judicial misconduct complaint against nearly every federal judge in Minnesota after they criticized the Justice Department in the press. The complaint targets the six active judges who spoke on the record to the New York Times, describing the DOJ’s failure to comply with court orders during an immigration enforcement surge as a grave threat to the rule of law. Blanche called their comments “overtly political” and evidence of “an obvious bias” against the Department of Homeland Security, and is demanding they recuse themselves from all DHS-related cases while the complaint is pending before the appeals court. The judges had largely focused on how DOJ staffing shortages appeared to prevent the administration from following their orders, points they’d already made in court. Legal experts note the move may go nowhere, since the bar for disqualifying judges is high and previous administration attacks on the courts have failed.
The judges say they were defending judicial independence, and even a Trump appointee is standing her ground. “We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence,” Judge Nancy E. Brasel, appointed by Trump in his first term, told the Times. “And so we should, in order to keep it.” A February ethics advisory from the Judicial Conference, which Chief Justice John Roberts oversees, said judges can offer “measured defense” against “illegitimate” attacks like intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy court orders, though it urged care with tone and context. The complaint is the latest escalation in the administration’s war on the judiciary, following an unsuccessful DOJ lawsuit against the entire federal bench in Maryland and repeated attacks on judges by name. Judges have warned that the heated rhetoric has raised the specter of threats and intimidation against them.
A federal appeals court refused to lift sanctions a judge imposed over Trump’s IRS settlement, which she found was essentially manufactured. In July, US District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns was collusive, designed to justify a deal wiping out all outstanding federal tax liability for Trump, many of his family members and his businesses. The deal also had the DOJ set up a $1.776 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of political prosecutions. Williams referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar for potential discipline, barred lawyer Daniel Epstein from practicing in South Florida’s federal court for a year, and prohibited the parties from publicly describing the settlement as resolving the lawsuit. Trump’s team asked the 11th Circuit to immediately lift those sanctions and the limits on how they could talk about the deal.
The panel, which included a Trump appointee, said his lawyers offered no real evidence to rebut the collusion finding. Judges Adalberto Jordan and Robin Rosenbaum, both Obama appointees, and Trump appointee Kevin Newsom ruled that Trump’s lawyers “have not made a strong showing that the district court committed clear error in its collusion and bad faith findings.” The ruling was largely on technical grounds, noting the attorneys hadn’t yet faced actual discipline and that Williams is still weighing whether to make Trump pay the legal fees of those who challenged the deal. Norm Eisen, representing 35 former federal judges who pushed to reopen the case, said the court “saw this collusive scheme for exactly what it is,” calling the lawsuit a “sham” and the fund a “slush fund.” Trump’s legal team didn’t address the ruling, instead issuing a statement decrying the tax return leak and saying Trump “continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
Trump Hails Iraq Exit as “End of a Very Expensive Excursion Into Hell” While His Own Iran War Drags Into Its Eighth Month
Trump celebrated the final US withdrawal from Iraq by trashing the war that started it, even as his own war with Iran is being compared to it. In a social media post, Trump called the exit “orderly” and said it “marks the end of a very expensive excursion into Hell,” blaming “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.” The last US troops left an air base in Irbil on Wednesday, ending a 12-year mission against ISIS that began when Iraq invited a smaller US-led force back in 2014, three years after the original post-invasion withdrawal. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the milestone reflects a campaign that “defeated ISIS as an organized military threat,” with the US continuing to provide training and intelligence support. But Trump’s praise comes as his own decision to launch the Iran war has drawn comparisons to Iraq for its undefined mission, now nearing its eighth month.
Iran-backed militias are celebrating the US exit and openly refusing to disarm, while Iraq’s Kurds fear being left defenseless. A Kataib Hezbollah official called it “the expulsion of the occupation forces, defeated,” and warned that any Iraqi government that carries out “American plans” will “be overthrown by all means.” An umbrella group of Iran-backed militias declared it is “not bound by any timeline or agreement” to hand over its weapons, and Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has already pushed the disarmament deadline back to June 2027. Kurdish officials said their region has faced more than 1,000 drone and ballistic-missile attacks during the Iran war, and warned that the departure of US forces “without the provision of a defense system is a matter of concern.” These same militias have attacked Gulf states and coordinated with Yemen’s Houthis against Saudi Arabia since the war began, prompting joint US-Saudi strikes on them in July.
The US has quietly sent Iran a counterproposal on a ceasefire, days after Trump publicly rejected Tehran’s plan. Iranian state media said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi presented the American response to President Masoud Pezeshkian at a cabinet meeting Wednesday, with Reuters reporting the main disagreement is over the sequencing of Iran’s proposed seven-day ceasefire and phased reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The talks are happening through a Qatari intermediary, even though Trump said Saturday “I’m rejecting their deal.” Iran’s top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, mocked Trump as “trapped in a quagmire where he can neither negotiate nor fight.” Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guard released a “letter to the American people” weeks before the midterms, saying the war only ends if Washington admits defeat and urging Americans to take to the streets against Trump.
Three ships were hit in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, even as Gulf oil exports climb back toward prewar levels. The UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre said a crude oil tanker and two other vessels were each struck by unknown projectiles, a worse picture than the single tanker first reported and a direct rebuttal to Trump’s claim of “total control” of the strait. Data firm Kpler said Gulf exports have recovered to about 21.8 million barrels per day, compared to 23.3 million before the war, thanks to Red Sea routes, a pipeline to the Gulf of Oman and a US-protected nighttime corridor through the strait, though those workarounds are slow and costly. The economic damage is spreading across the region, with Egypt’s president saying the Suez Canal has lost $20 billion in revenue since the Gaza war began, with traffic still 60% to 70% below prewar levels. The Treasury also sanctioned 10 individuals and companies in Iran, China, Hong Kong and Pakistan accused of helping Iran’s military acquire weapons and electronics.
Britain now says Iran “played a part” in the weekend incident at an air base used for US strikes on Iran, as Tehran escalates its crackdown at home. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC it was the government’s first confirmation of its assessment of the incident near RAF Fairford, where five British men in their mid-20s were arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act and then released on bail a day later, drawing criticism from Trump and Rubio. Pakistan, meanwhile, signaled it could be drawn into the widening conflict, with its defense minister vowing to use “whatever means are available” to defend Saudi Arabia from the Houthis. Inside Iran, rights groups shared an audio plea from Mahboubeh Shahbani, a 33-year-old woman sentenced to death over January’s anti-regime protests, who begged the world to “do something” after two more protesters were executed. Rights groups say she merely used her motorcycle to carry injured protesters, and Amnesty International says Iran more than doubled its executions in 2025.
Trump’s New AI Site Contradicts His Biggest Lies, and the White House Is Scrambling to Muzzle It
The White House misspelled “United States” under Trump’s signature on the AI safety accord he signed with top tech executives. The document, which Trump posted on Truth Social and the White House emailed out after Tuesday’s summit, identified him as “President of the Unites States,” an error first spotted by Bloomberg’s David Gura. The voluntary accord, signed by Trump and six executives including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, commits companies to internal controls and independent outside audits to make sure AI systems operate as intended, including guarding against cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats. But it has no force of law, and Trump, who has brushed aside AI safety warnings, told reporters he’s seeing “tremendous self-policing” and has repeatedly rejected formal regulation. That puts him at odds with the public, as a CNN poll found 71% of Americans believe the government isn’t doing enough to regulate AI.
Trump’s new AI-powered government portal, America.gov, keeps contradicting his biggest lies using the government’s own records. Asked by the Associated Press about the 2020 election, the site said official federal sources “do not show that widespread fraud changed the 2020 presidential election outcome,” a flat rebuttal of the lie Trump has pushed for nearly six years. Asked about a 2028 run, it cited the 22nd Amendment and noted Trump “has already been elected twice,” and it identified the Pentagon as home to the “Department of Defense,” ignoring his “Department of War” rebrand. On climate change, which Trump calls a “hoax,” it said federal climate pages attribute recent warming largely to human greenhouse gas emissions. Even as Trump claimed onstage to be the first president to give up his salary, the chatbot was telling users that George Washington, Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy all did it before him.
Once the answers started circulating, the White House moved to shut the truth down. While Trump was still speaking at Tuesday’s launch, the chatbot began refusing to answer questions about the 2020 election, telling users it couldn’t respond to “political questions,” and gave the same dodge when asked whether Trump had been impeached or convicted of felonies, both matters of public record. As I reported this morning, the administration is now working to rewrite more of the site’s answers to match Trump’s version of events rather than the government’s own records. Trump had hailed the site, which runs on Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, as “a restoration of America’s founding promise,” while claiming it “cannot, in theory, be hacked.” As it turns out, it didn’t need to be hacked to become a problem for Trump. It just needed to read the government’s own records.
Other news:
Hegseth Doubles Cuts to Military’s Top Brass as Lawmakers Warn of a “Purge.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico that the military will cut 20% of its roughly 800 generals and admirals by Jan. 1, 2027, doubling the 10% reduction he ordered last spring and calling it “accountability and long overdue.” He also unveiled a new four-star command to oversee drones and robotic warfare, a month after the Army ordered a Europe-based drone unit to revert to a traditional infantry battalion, and repeated claims that the US has destroyed Iran’s navy, air force and defenses, even as Iran keeps launching attacks and holding the Strait of Hormuz seven months into the war. Sen. Mark Kelly accused Hegseth of “purging a generation of great leaders” that will take a generation to rebuild, while Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said he wants to see the reasoning first. Trump and Hegseth have already fired or pushed out more than two dozen senior military leaders without public explanation, including Army chief Gen. Randy George, with a number of the departures being women or people of color.
Federal regulators are investigating Trump critic Adam Kinzinger for betting on his own pardon on the prediction platform Kalshi. The former Republican congressman, who was preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden along with other members of the Jan. 6 committee, wagered a total of $669 on two pardon-related Kalshi markets in late 2024 and early 2025 and netted $823, according to screenshots he shared with CNN. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is looking into the trades after Kalshi flagged them, in the first publicly known federal probe of pardon betting markets. Kinzinger admitted the bets, calling it “a dumb bet, to bet on myself,” but denied any insider trading, saying he never discussed pardons with anyone in the Biden White House. The CFTC has recently settled similar cases with George Santos over bets on whether he’d attend the State of the Union and with a former Trump White House teleprompter operator who bet on what Trump would say in speeches. Ironically, Kinzinger himself has called prediction markets a “corruption time bomb” and a “threat to democracy.”
Netanyahu says the pilot who stabbed his co-pilot on an Israel-bound flight may have been trying to crash the plane. Israeli officials said the attacker was an Omani national and that their current assessment is that it was a terror attack, with Defense Minister Israel Katz calling it an “attempted jihadist attack” aimed at killing all of the roughly 170 people on board. The plane sent a general emergency signal and then a hijacking code before plunging about 17,000 feet in two minutes, until passengers and crew forced their way into the cockpit and subdued the attacker. A passenger said off-duty European relief pilots, including one British pilot, pulled the plane out of its dive and landed it safely in Saudi Arabia, where the accused pilot is now being questioned. The passengers finally landed in Israel on a replacement plane eight hours later, with Netanyahu praising those who intervened, saying “they saved many lives.” Opposition leader Yair Lapid cast doubt on Netanyahu’s claim that he’d warned of an attack, saying a security briefing the night before gave no indication of anything similar.
A federal appeals court halted Christa Pike’s execution about an hour before Tennessee was set to carry it out. Pike, 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 11 a.m. Wednesday, becoming the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years, before the court issued a short stay in a 2-1 decision to “properly analyze” the arguments on the merits. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office called it a “technical issue” and said it is asking the Supreme Court to lift the stay. The ACLU is now urging Gov. Bill Lee, who declined to intervene on Tuesday, to respect the court’s decision and call off the execution entirely. Pike, who was 18 when she and her 17-year-old boyfriend killed classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, has never denied her role, saying in her clemency petition, “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid.” Slemmer’s mother said she’s still waiting for the execution, adding that “not a day goes by” she doesn’t think about her daughter.
More than 100 Israeli settlers overwhelmed Israeli forces to attack a Palestinian family trying to return to their seized homes in the West Bank. The Tubasi family had won a high court ruling ordering the state to evict settlers from their homes in Jalud, but only about 15 military police escorted them back during the Sukkot holiday, when settler outposts are packed. The mob forced the family onto a roof before they were evacuated in armored vehicles, then burned the homes and injured three Israeli security personnel. Israeli President Isaac Herzog called it a “moral stain,” and the Red Cross said settler violence has made everyday life “untenable” for Palestinians. Netanyahu condemned the “violent riots” while defending the broader settler movement, and the military said just two suspects have been detained. It came the same day Senate Republicans narrowly blocked a resolution demanding a human rights report on the West Bank, with one Israeli analyst warning “the barrier has been broken.”
Sean “Diddy” Combs is allegedly living a life of luxury in federal prison, complete with massages, cognac and inmates doing his chores. Four men who served in his unit at Fort Dix told NBC News that Combs pays thousands of dollars a month into other prisoners’ commissary accounts for them to clean his cell, do his laundry and cook special meals. They also allege he has access to contraband cellphones, premium liquor smuggled in by guards, and antidepressants bought from other inmates, with one saying of drinking Hennessy with him, “Hell yeah, I drank with him.” NBC also reviewed photos and footage appearing to show Combs using a phone, which sources say he uses to scroll Instagram and view explicit photos sent by an ex-girlfriend. Combs, 56, is serving a 50-month sentence for transportation to engage in prostitution. His spokesperson dismissed the report as scrutiny of “ordinary prison life,” while the Bureau of Prisons said contraband remains “a constant challenge.”
I’m often asked where I go to do research for my reporting. One of the main research tools I use is called Ground News. Ground News shows me how stories are being covered from different political perspectives, and it highlights “blindspots” where only left-wing or right-wing media is covering a story. I worked out a deal with them: if you go to ground.news/AARONP, you can get 40% off Ground News’ top-tier Vantage plan, which gives you unlimited access to all the research tools I use. By subscribing, you support both our channel and their independent team working to keep the media transparent.
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin gave Carnegie Mellon University $3 billion, the largest individual gift ever made to a university. Two billion dollars will fund a new Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, on 35 acres Griffin bought for $1.1 billion in what the seller called the largest land assemblage deal in Florida history. The Miami campus is expected to open in 2028 and serve more than 3,500 students. It’s also expected to bring roughly 300 faculty members and more than 600 staff to the city. The remaining $1 billion goes to the Pittsburgh campus, with about half going to the School of Computer Science, which will be renamed after Griffin. Construction is slated to begin in 2027.
An NBC News test found StubHub showing eight different prices to nine people looking at the exact same Harry Styles ticket at the same time. The ticket’s base price was identical for everyone, but StubHub’s added fees ranged from $72 to $134, meaning the same seat could cost anywhere from $455 to $517. When volunteers checked in incognito mode or on the app while logged out, the price gap mostly disappeared. StubHub said it runs randomized pricing experiments and doesn’t use personal data, but author Lindsay Owens said it’s still unfair, with the company charging some fans more “just to see their favorite show.” StubHub has faced scrutiny before, paying a $10 million FTC settlement over advertising prices without clearly disclosing mandatory fees. The practice is spreading across the economy, with no federal ban on personalized pricing and the FTC only proposing disclosure rules in August.
The Federal Reserve’s watchdog found no criminal wrongdoing in the renovation project Trump used to attack Jerome Powell. A 120-page inspector general report found no “reasonable grounds” to believe federal law was broken, and said the marble, water features and terrace Republicans mocked “did not materially contribute” to cost increases, which it blamed on inflation, limited bidding and design changes. The report did fault the Fed board for mismanaging costs, noting it still hasn’t set a guaranteed maximum price after more than $2 billion in awarded contracts. The findings undercut a DOJ criminal probe of Powell that a judge blocked after finding Trump’s handpicked US attorney Jeanine Pirro had “produced essentially zero evidence.” Pirro’s lingering threat to investigate him is why Powell stayed on the Fed board after his term as chair ended in May, denying Trump an open seat to fill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the report confirms there’s “no basis to restart the President’s witch hunt” against Powell.
A 74-year-old Army veteran is suing an Ohio hospital after surgeons amputated the wrong leg. Sharon Jacks says doctors at Selby General Hospital in Marietta removed her left leg in September 2025 when the surgery, part of her skin cancer treatment, was meant to remove her right. The team had marked the correct leg, realized the error mid-procedure and told her family before she woke up, and four months later she had the right leg amputated too, leaving her a double amputee. The hospital called it an “avoidable event,” said it retrained all surgical staff and that those involved “are no longer in their positions.” The lawsuit names nine defendants and accuses them of gross negligence, battery and reckless conduct, and the surgeon who performed the operation remains licensed in Ohio but is reportedly retired. Jacks is now cancer-free, but her attorney says the error changed everything, from getting dressed to cooking for herself.
A Senate committee advanced Dr. Nicole Saphier, Trump’s third pick for surgeon general, by a single vote. The radiologist and former Fox News contributor cleared the Senate HELP Committee 12-11 after being grilled about vaccines at her confirmation hearing. Saphier told senators she does “not believe childhood vaccines cause autism” and called the MMR vaccine “our greatest tool for combating measles,” breaking with Trump’s recent call to space out the shots. Sen. Bill Cassidy, who pressed her on vaccines, voted yes, while Sen. Bernie Sanders opposed her for having questioned the hepatitis B birth dose. Her confirmation comes amid a measles outbreak that has already reached more than 3,600 cases nationwide this year. She is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Paxton Caught on Hot Mic Trashing Trump’s Convention, Trump Scrambles to Silence AI That Fact-Checks Him, Jack Smith Fallout Grows, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Ken Paxton, one of Trump’s most loyal Senate candidates, just got caught on tape telling donors that Trump’s midterm convention tanked Republican poll numbers, admitting “everybody’s numbers dropped” even as Trump publicly insists it “helped Ken Paxton a lot.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s shiny new AI portal, America.gov, launched by telling users there was no widespread fraud in 2020 and that Trump can’t run for a third term, and the administration is now scrambling to rewrite its answers. And Sen. Eric Schmitt, who was being floated as JD Vance’s running mate just hours before Tuesday’s hearing, is still refusing to admit he accused Jack Smith of perjury over the wrong basketball team.
We also have major new developments in the Cornell case, where a newly obtained transcript shows Jane Doe told campus police “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” a statement the DA now says he never saw. Plus, Trump claims the Iran war will be over “very soon” as another tanker gets hit in the Strait of Hormuz, and the last US troops left Iraq this morning after more than two decades.
Programming note: tonight’s evening report will include the exclusive Epstein news I promised, so keep an eye on your inbox.
Here’s the news:
Republicans Privately Trash Trump’s Convention:
Trump’s midterm convention has come and gone, and Republicans are now privately admitting it hurt them, starting with one of his most loyal candidates. In audio obtained by the New York Times from a private Washington fundraiser last week, Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton was asked “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” and conceded that after the Dallas convention, “it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.” Paxton owes his nomination to Trump, who carried him past Sen. John Cornyn in a bitter primary, and he had a prime seat at the convention in his home state, where Trump praised him onstage while joking “he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.” The Times reports Paxton’s remarks echo private whispers from other Republicans that the Trump-centered gathering was never going to help the party given his sagging approval ratings. Since the convention, the GOP’s midterm outlook has only gotten darker, with Paxton now narrowly trailing Democrat James Talarico in many polls just five weeks from Election Day.
The convention was widely seen as a disaster inside the party before it even began, with most House Republicans surveyed choosing to skip it. A Politico survey of more than 70 GOP House members found 45 planned to blow off the Sept. 9-10 event in Dallas, with one calling it “a waste of time” and the planning “a mess.” Another Republican argued the party should have been courting independents instead of rallying the base, noting “independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.” Members also balked at being asked to pay more than $25,000 to attend, with one saying “I didn’t want to go anyways” and the price tag “made it easier.” Swing-district Rep. Tom Barrett of Michigan made his distance clear, saying “I can’t control what the president’s going to say at the convention, but I can control where I’m at.”
While Republicans quietly concede the damage, Trump and his team are still publicly insisting the convention was a triumph. Trump claimed days after the event that “the convention helped Ken Paxton a lot,” directly contradicting what Paxton told donors behind closed doors. Paxton’s campaign called the Times story “manipulated nonsense” and cited an internal poll showing him up three points, even as Republicans pour staggering sums into Texas, including $20 million from Trump’s MAGA Inc. and more than $100 million from a Thune-aligned super PAC. Before the event, the RNC insisted enthusiasm was “incredible” and promised the convention would generate the momentum to expand GOP majorities in November. Instead, the party is now scrambling to defend seats in states Trump won easily, with candidates cutting him from their ads and asking him not to campaign for them.
Trump’s New AI Site America.gov Contradicts His Biggest Lies, and the Administration Is Scrambling to Fix It
Trump’s new AI-powered government portal, America.gov, is contradicting some of his most repeated claims using the government’s own sources. Asked by the Associated Press about the 2020 election, the site said official federal sources “do not show that widespread fraud changed the 2020 presidential election outcome,” directly undercutting Trump’s years of false claims that the election was stolen. Asked about a 2028 run, it cited the 22nd Amendment and noted Trump “has already been elected twice,” despite Trump repeatedly floating a third term. It also identified the Pentagon as the headquarters of the “Department of Defense,” not the “Department of War” Trump rebranded it as, and said federal climate pages attribute recent warming largely to human greenhouse gas emissions, a direct rebuke of Trump calling climate change a “hoax.” Even on presidential salaries, the chatbot noted that George Washington, Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy all declined their pay before Trump, just as Trump was claiming at the launch event to be the first president to do so.
Now that it’s been called out, the administration is racing to change the answers. This morning, the site had already started modifying its responses, telling users it couldn’t answer “political questions” when asked again about the 2020 election. It gave the same dodge when asked whether Trump had been impeached or convicted of felony charges, both matters of public record. As I’m reporting this morning, the administration is now scrambling to rewrite more of the site’s answers to bring them in line with Trump’s version of events rather than the government’s own records. It’s a telling glimpse at a tool Trump called “revolutionary” and a “restoration of America’s founding promise”: the moment it told the truth, the White House moved to muzzle it.
Eric Schmitt’s VP Hopes Take a Hit After His Botched Jack Smith “Gotcha” Goes Viral
Sen. Eric Schmitt, touted as a top contender to be JD Vance’s 2028 running mate just hours earlier, humiliated himself on national TV trying to catch Jack Smith in a lie. Schmitt asked Smith whether text messages from his team placed him at an Atlanta Hawks-Golden State Warriors game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Fani Willis acknowledged her relationship with Nathan Wade, then accused him of perjury and called him a “dirtbag” when Smith denied it. It turned out Schmitt had misread a text about “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who were discussing saving him a front-row seat at a women’s college game in College Park, Maryland, where Caitlin Clark dropped 38 points for the Iowa Hawkeyes against the Terrapins. Smith attended with US Marshals by his side, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar demanded Schmitt apologize for smearing him over “a confusion about the name of a team.” MS NOW noted the gaffe was a humiliating moment for someone floated as Vance’s running mate, and one likely to haunt him if he tries to raise his national profile.
Even MAGA media couldn’t save him, as right-wing figures who rushed to celebrate the moment quietly deleted their posts. Benny Johnson declared that Schmitt had “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself,” while other MAGA accounts demanded Smith be locked up and Sidney Powell called it “the tip of the proverbial iceberg.” But Sean Hannity and Mark Levin’s show producer both deleted their posts praising Schmitt once the mix-up became clear, and writer Emily Zanotti joked that “the influencer instruction emails went out BEFORE the testimony.” ABC’s Jonathan Karl called the exchange “bizarre,” saying he’d never seen “evidence” introduced so quickly and then hidden. The blowback reached even friendly territory, with Fox’s Brit Hume reportedly chiding Schmitt for bringing it on himself and Sen. Katie Britt caught on camera looking stunned as the attack fell apart.
Rather than own the mistake, Schmitt doubled down, a move that makes it even harder to see him as a serious national candidate. On the Charlie Kirk Show, he accepted praise for catching Smith “on this NBA game” and insisted “my job is to ask the questions,” claiming the Hawks game was the only NBA or men’s college game in Atlanta that night. He then told TMZ he wasn’t embarrassed, repeating that he only asked whether Smith was in Atlanta and continuing to call Smith a liar. When TMZ pointed out there are photos of Smith at the Maryland game, Schmitt grew visibly exasperated and suggested people should question whether Smith really attended. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, refused to defend his colleague, claiming he “didn’t see the exchange.”
New Evidence Emerges in Cornell Gang Rape Case as District Attorney Admits He Never Saw Key Transcript
The Tompkins County DA is reopening the Cornell fraternity gang rape case and says he wants it before a grand jury within 45 days. A former student, identified as Jane Doe, who was 20 at the time, alleges she was pressured into taking ketamine and sexually assaulted by multiple Chi Phi members for hours in October 2024, and has now sued seven former fraternity members and the university. DA Matthew Van Houten declined to bring charges in 2024, saying her sworn statement at the time described the drug use and sexual activity as “voluntary, conscious, and consensual” and did not allege a gang rape. Her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, disputes that account and says she was never contacted by DA investigators after reporting to campus police, calling the reopening “a step in the right direction, albeit a late one.” Gov. Kathy Hochul called the allegations “nothing short of horrifying” and demanded an independent outside review of Cornell’s response.
A newly obtained transcript shows Jane Doe told campus police “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” a statement the DA says he never saw. According to the transcript obtained by CBS New York, Doe said she was “pretty OK” with an initial encounter while very drunk, but drew a sharp line at what happened later in the night, and confirmed she was “very confident” before signing her statement. Van Houten told CBS the sworn statement sent to his office in 2024 made no mention of that remark, saying “I never saw it, never heard it until tonight,” and that if it was omitted, it “needs to be fully investigated by someone outside of Cornell.” He also said there’s no indication police ever interviewed the seven accused men, and that his office doesn’t have access to Cornell’s Title IX records. Ithaca police say the incident was never reported to them, while Cornell says its own sworn police force handled it under established protocol and shared the case with the DA.
Texts and Snapchat messages from the night and its aftermath have become central to both sides of the case. At 1:42 a.m., a fraternity member sent a crude message to a Chi Phi Snapchat group suggesting a woman upstairs was available for sex, and another later asked “Shop still open?” and got the reply “Yea,” messages Van Houten called “disgusting, vulgar” but said don’t speak to the legal question of consent. Two days later, texts obtained by CBS show one defendant apologizing for being too drunk to “shut it down,” with Doe replying that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal” and joking about leaving out “the extra 5 billion men and ketamine” next time. Giuffra says she was traumatized, in denial and avoiding confrontation to get answers about what happened while she was incapacitated. Attorneys for two named defendants deny the allegations, with one saying his client briefly entered the room without touching her and passed a hair follicle test showing no ketamine.
Cornell is fighting back against claims it went easy on the accused, as families reportedly pull applications in protest. President Michael Kotlikoff said two of the accused were expelled, two were suspended for at least two semesters, one graduated before he could be punished, and two were found not responsible, and the fraternity chapter was shut down in 2024. The university called any suggestion of minimal consequences “false” and said that narrative will discourage survivors from coming forward, disputing the lawsuit’s claim that some students were allowed to write essays instead. But Manhattan college adviser Amanda Uhry told the New York Post that all seven of her clients who planned to apply early to Cornell have dropped it, including three children of alumni, saying parents are “so mortified and furious.” Another adviser said international families are asking whether Cornell is even safe, while Ithaca’s mayor has already moved to halt Greek life event permits until the school overhauls its protocols.
Trump Claims Iran War Will Be Over “Very Soon” as Tankers Keep Getting Hit and US Troops Leave Iraq
Trump insisted the Iran war will be over “very soon” but offered no details on how or when. “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’re failing very badly, very badly. That’ll be over with very soon,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. He also promised oil prices would come “tumbling down, just like they were before I had to make that little excursion to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” referring to a war that has now dragged on for seven months. The remarks came days after Trump rejected an Iranian ceasefire proposal over the weekend, saying “that deal would not be acceptable” because Iran wanted the Strait of Hormuz reopened immediately “because they’re losing so badly.” He has not explained what an acceptable end to the war would look like.
An oil tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz just days after Trump claimed “total control” of the waterway. The UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre said Wednesday it received a report that a tanker was hit by an unknown projectile in the strait on Tuesday. The strike undercuts Trump’s weekend boast that “we’re winning tremendously, we have total control of the Hormuz Strait.” The strait has been the primary flashpoint since the US and Israel launched “major combat operations” against Iran on Feb. 28 with massive strikes on military, government and infrastructure targets. Peace talks that began in June based on a memorandum of understanding signed by both countries collapsed as the two sides kept trading strikes, and Trump pivoted in August to what he called a “crushing economic operation.”
The administration announced new sanctions on Iran’s arms procurement networks as regional tensions flare over Netanyahu’s trip to the UAE. The State Department said the sanctions target entities and individuals helping Iran procure weapons, part of the pressure campaign Trump has dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast” and described as an “economic D-Day.” Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Iran has kept trying to arm itself in violation of restored UN measures, and the department is offering up to $15 million for information disrupting the finances of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned of “very dangerous consequences” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United Arab Emirates. Tehran urged regional governments to be wary of an Israeli presence that it said threatens the region’s collective security.
The last US troops left Iraq on Wednesday, ending more than two decades of military presence that began with the 2003 invasion. The remaining forces, part of the coalition fighting the Islamic State, withdrew under an agreement between Baghdad and Washington, with the Iraqi army formally taking over the coalition’s remaining bases. The exit has raised fears of a security vacuum that could embolden Iranian-backed Shiite militias and allow ISIS to regroup, a risk sharpened by the ongoing US war with Iran next door. Iraqi security forces and members of the Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces celebrated with convoys through Baghdad and Najaf. The Iraqi government says it is working to strengthen its military and reaffirm its sovereignty as it takes over full responsibility for the country’s security.
Other news:
A Republican senator blocked a bipartisan bill that would stop Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center without Congress’s approval. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah objected this week when Democrat Jeff Merkley sought unanimous consent to pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act, co-written with Republican Lisa Murkowski, which would ban demolishing any congressionally designated presidential memorial, including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, without lawmakers’ explicit approval. Merkley said Trump “destroyed its programming, and now, he wants to destroy the building itself,” all because the law won’t let him put his name on it. Murkowski, who chairs the subcommittee that funds the center, noted that Congress authorized and funded major renovations, but “what was not authorized is a demolition of the Kennedy Center.” The fight escalated after a federal judge twice blocked renaming the venue the Trump-Kennedy Center, prompting Trump to halt a $257 million renovation, while DOJ lawyers warned in August the building could decay until it had to come down and floated an outdoor amphitheater as a replacement. Lee, a Trump ally who backed efforts to overturn the 2020 election, dismissed the bill as “partisan scaremongering.”
Trump formally gave up his court fight over E. Jean Carroll’s $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict. The 2nd Circuit revealed Tuesday that Trump agreed to dismiss his appeal with prejudice and withdraw his motion to stay disbursement of the money, which had already been paid out to Carroll. The court-held funds, which grew to $5.8 million with interest, were released in July after the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal and a judge ordered them distributed. Trump had rushed to the 2nd Circuit less than an hour after that order seeking to block the payout, only to be rejected, and the Supreme Court turned him down again in August when he asked for a rehearing. Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani called the latest move “a final nail in the coffin,” saying there’s no way Trump can go after the money now. Trump is still asking the Supreme Court to toss the separate $83 million defamation verdict from Carroll’s 2024 trial, while his legal team called the cases “the Carroll Hoaxes.”
California is racing to prepare for a massive “Kelvin wave” that could raise sea levels along the coast by a foot. The underwater band of warm water, driven by El Niño conditions, is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October as it moves toward Alaska, potentially doubling the 8 to 12 inches of sea level rise already caused by climate change over the past century. Rather than crashing like a normal wave, it swells tides from below, and scientists warn that if it coincides with storms and high tides, it could swallow beaches, erode bluffs and flood homes and businesses. A brewing “super” El Niño, possibly the strongest ever recorded, raises the risk of severe winter storms, with climate scientist Daniel Swain calling coastal flooding “practically certain” and noting erosion has already closed a coastal Amtrak line. Experts are comparing it to the winter of 1997-98, when storms caused massive landslides and flooding and 21 of California’s 58 counties were declared disaster areas, and Pacific surface temperatures are warmer now than they were then. Bay Area officials are distributing sandbags and clearing drains, warning this could be one of the most significant El Niño years in memory.
Major food and agriculture corporations are secretly paying social media influencers to push back on RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement. An investigation by the Guardian and Documented found that the industry-funded Center for Food Integrity, whose board includes executives from Chick-fil-A, Cargill and the National Pork Board, launched a campaign called “Gaha: Growing a Healthier America” to counter MAHA messaging on seed oils, pesticides, high-fructose corn syrup and raw milk. Internal documents show the group aimed to create an “echo chamber” among industry groups, with donors of more than $100,000 earning a seat on the campaign’s leadership council. At least six influencers with a combined audience of more than 2.6 million have signed on, generating 13.2 million impressions, with some saying they joined to counter MAHA’s pseudoscientific claims. The industry has reason to worry, as a KFF poll found 64% of Americans say pesticides aren’t regulated enough and 75% say the same about chemical food additives. Former Obama USDA official Jerold Mande called the effort “crisis management,” saying the industry sees MAHA’s cross-partisan appeal as an existential threat even though the Trump administration has largely avoided new regulations.
An Israel-bound FlyDubai flight made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after a reported violent fight between the pilots. The plane, flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv, sent three distress signals over Jordan, including one indicating possible unlawful interference, and plunged about 16,000 feet in two minutes before landing in Tabuk, prompting Israel to scramble fighter jets over hijacking fears. A passenger told the Jerusalem Post one pilot stabbed the other and tried to force him out of the cockpit before Israeli passengers rushed in to subdue the attacker, and Israeli media published photos of a passenger with blood on their shirt. Israeli officials are reportedly investigating whether a pilot tried to crash the plane in an apparent suicide attempt, or whether it was an attempted attack on Israelis. The incident came just days after Netanyahu warned of indications of an attack during Israel’s October elections, though the Israeli military said it had no intelligence of any planned attack. All passengers were safe, both pilots were hospitalized, and Israel’s military chief postponed a planned trip to the US over the incident.
An independent Brazilian news site in the Amazon will not cover next week’s elections after years of threats against its journalists. Tapajós de Fato, which reports on environmental and Indigenous rights violations in Pará state, said its team is “afraid of dying” after incidents including slashed tires, a cat’s severed head left with a note naming co-founder Marcos Wesley Pedroso, and a car deliberately crashed into his vehicle while cyclists circled his home. Police have not identified anyone responsible, and Pedroso said the site went public after years of reporting threats without results. A coalition of press groups recorded 4,400 online attacks on journalists in just two weeks, a 67% jump, as Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio sits in a technical tie with President Lula ahead of the Oct. 4 first round. Press freedom advocate Letícia Kleim warned that “silencing the message by silencing the messenger” harms not just local communities but democracy as a whole. The decision comes four years after British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Amazon.
A New Orleans judge filed a police complaint against a CBS affiliate over its reporting, citing a law that had already been repealed. WWL’s David Hammer reported in August that criminal court judge Kimya Holmes was given a $765,000 home by her then-fiancé, an accountant who had been charged weeks earlier with fraudulently collecting more than $712,000 in Covid relief. The court’s judicial administrator then demanded WWL remove the home’s address and a photo of the fiancé’s leased Corvette’s license plate, and reveal who took the photo, citing a law making it a misdemeanor for media to refuse. But the legislature repealed those provisions effective Aug. 1, before the story ran, and Holmes’ own team relied on an outdated version from the legislature’s website. WWL blurred the details but refused to name its source, and New Orleans police say their investigation is still ongoing even as a media lawyer said “there hasn’t been a crime.” It’s the latest clash between Louisiana courts and the press, after courthouse deputies handcuffed a WWL producer and the station’s attorney in July and a state supreme court justice won a $300,000 libel verdict against the Advocate in August.
Senate Republicans blocked a resolution demanding a State Department report on the killings of nine Americans in the occupied West Bank. The measure from Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen failed 47-51, with Democrat John Fetterman joining Republicans against it and Republican Rand Paul voting in favor. It would have required a report within 30 days on the deaths and on broader human rights conditions, including Israel’s detention of Palestinian children. The victims include 20-year-old Floridian Sayfollah Musallet, beaten to death by settlers who blocked an ambulance for hours, a 14-year-old from New Jersey shot 11 times, and journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, with Van Hollen noting none of the cases has led to accountability. The vote reflects a growing Democratic shift on Israel, after 40 of 47 Democrats voted in April to block a bulldozer sale, compared to just 18 senators who backed Bernie Sanders’ first arms vote in 2024. “If the killing of nine Americans does not justify a report from our own state department,” Van Hollen asked, “what would?”
Two UW-Madison students reported being drugged and sexually assaulted at off-campus fraternity houses, as scrutiny of Greek life intensifies nationwide. One student said they were drugged at a fraternity house on the night of Sept. 26 and inappropriately touched at two separate fraternity houses, an incident now reported to Madison police. The other told the university they were drugged at an off-campus fraternity on Sept. 17 and later sexually assaulted in a campus residence hall by someone they know, though that case was not reported to police and there is no active investigation. The university disclosed both reports in a crime alert Monday, without identifying the fraternities involved, saying “these acts will not be tolerated on campus.” The reports come less than a week after police arrested the 20-year-old president and vice president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a chapter kicked off campus in 2015, after finding about 30 partially clothed 18-year-olds in the fraternity’s 81-degree basement covered in food and condiments, some with injuries consistent with physical assault.
A Russian nuclear-capable bomber crashed during a training mission, killing six crew members. The Tu-95 strategic bomber went down in an unpopulated area of the Amur region in Russia’s far east near the border with China, according to the Defense Ministry, with one crew member surviving and hospitalized. The ministry said the plane was not carrying weapons and investigators have been sent to determine the cause. Regional officials said the pilots “did all they could” to steer away from homes near the village of Krasnoyarovo. The four-engine turboprop has been in service since the Cold War and remains a key part of Russia’s long-range bomber fleet. It has been widely used to fire cruise missiles at Ukraine, and several were destroyed or damaged in Ukraine’s “Spiderweb” drone operation in June 2025.
Former NFL star Antonio Brown is expected to take a plea deal that lets him avoid prison in his attempted murder case. Brown is accused of grabbing a handgun from a security staffer after a celebrity boxing match in Miami in May 2025 and firing two shots at a man he’d fought with earlier, with one bullet grazing the man’s neck. His attorney says Brown will plead no contest to aggravated assault, receive probation and have adjudication withheld, meaning he won’t be a convicted felon, after facing up to 30 years on the original charge. Brown has claimed self-defense, and the victim’s attorney says his client forgives Brown and considers the deal fair. The 38-year-old former All-Pro, who was extradited from Dubai in November 2025, has a long history of legal troubles including domestic violence charges and failure to pay child support. His NFL career effectively ended in 2021 when he stripped off his jersey and pads and ran off the field mid-game, less than a year after winning a Super Bowl with Tom Brady.
A gentle giant named Backpack was crowned champion of Alaska’s Fat Bear Week. Backpack, officially Bear 89, won with more than 100,000 votes, narrowly beating Bear 910 with just over 50% in the final round of the annual online contest at Katmai National Park and Preserve. The son of former champion Holly, he got his name from climbing on his mother’s back as a cub while they swam the Brooks River, and he’s known for avoiding fights with other bears, often sitting on a rock taking in the scenery. Last year’s champion, Chunk, was knocked out in the first round. This year’s bracket featured a record five bear families, reflecting a record number of mothers and cubs at the river this summer. The bears can eat up to 30 salmon a day to bulk up for winter, with large males topping 1,000 pounds before losing up to a third of their body weight during hibernation.A plurality of California voters support a one-time billionaire tax, though it’s still short of a majority. A new NBCUniversal Local/Telemundo poll found 48% of likely voters back Proposition 40, with 38% opposed and 14% undecided, a lead outside the margin of error. The measure would impose a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth more than $1.1 billion, with 90% of revenue going to healthcare to offset Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” and has split Democrats, with Ro Khanna backing it and Gov. Gavin Newsom opposing it. Voters largely shrugged off warnings the ultrarich would flee, with 59% saying they weren’t concerned. Newsom’s own approval is split at 45% to 46%, though 66% of Democrats say they’d be inclined to back him if he runs for president in 2028. The poll also found 64% disapprove of Trump, and 67% say the Iran war is having a great deal of impact on the economy.
The remnants of Hurricane Polo are flooding the US Southwest, forcing evacuations in New Mexico over fears of a dam failure. Polo hit Baja California Sur Tuesday morning with 110 mph winds before weakening and pushing inland, where heavy rain turned dry arroyos into raging rivers across an already soggy region. Residents in several small New Mexico communities along the Rio Grande, including the green chile hub of Hatch, were told to evacuate immediately over a possible dam failure. Helicopters rescued a person clinging to an overturned car west of Phoenix and three people in Utah’s Zion National Park, while a Utah family watched the river sweep around their house and carry off a camper. In Baja, where hundreds sheltered overnight, residents returned to find flooded homes and downed trees but their communities largely intact, with one shopkeeper saying “we were lucky.” The flood threat is expected to move into Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa through Thursday, as Tropical Storm Rachel strengthens off Mexico’s coast.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future, Erika Solomon, Falih Hassan and Eric Schmitt, Sept. 30, 2026. Some Iraqis are celebrating the end of an American military presence that unleashed waves of bloodshed. Others fear what happens next for their country, trapped between Washington and Tehran.
U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed, and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.
After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, American forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.
American forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, the jihadist force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.
With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve — the U.S. military’s official name for the multinational campaign against the Islamic State — the last of the 2,500 U.S. forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.
“The coalition successfully completed its organized withdrawal operation from Erbil,” Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, announced during a ceremony held by U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. Erbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, hosted the last coalition base in Iraq.
“I stand before you at this historic moment, when a nation reclaims its destiny,” Admiral Hulin said, in a speech given in Arabic.
Promising that U.S. and Iraqi forces would forge new security partnerships, Admiral Hulin urged Iraq to remain vigilant, citing an Arabic proverb, “Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion.”
Physical reminders of decades of war are being erased every day. The blast walls that once snaked through Baghdad have come down. Malls, restaurants and construction sites are buzzing in a country determined to reclaim the rhythms of normal life stolen by years of car bombs.
New York Times, Democrats in Congress Embrace a More Punitive Posture Toward Israel, Robert Jimison and Annie Karni, Sept. 30, 2026 (print. ed.). Nearly every Democratic senator voted to advance a measure calling for a human rights report on Israel’s conduct in the West Bank, as some in the party propose punishing settlement activity with sanctions.
Democrats in Congress are increasingly adopting a more punitive approach to dealing with Israel, taking a series of steps in recent days that suggest they would pursue sanctions for building new settlements and other actions against the Jewish state should they win majorities in November’s elections.
On Tuesday, all but one Senate Democrat voted to advance a measure that would force the Trump administration to produce a human rights report examining violence by Israel in the West Bank, including the deaths of Palestinian American citizens, in a rebuke that would once have seemed unthinkable.
The bid failed, but the near-unanimous level of Democratic backing for it reflected the party’s new willingness to embrace steps that had long been considered anathema given the relationship between the United States and its closest Middle East ally.
At the same time, top Democrats in the House and Senate have proposed legislation that would impose sanctions on Israel for building settlements, making it clear to Israeli companies and banks that if they were involved with settlement building they would be penalized. The steps, months after almost half of House Democrats voted to cut off aid to Israel, are the latest sign of an expanding appetite in the party to move beyond expressions of disapproval and toward measures that could reorder the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
“While I was pleased so many of my Democratic colleagues joined this effort, it’s clear the United States must do more,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and the author of the human rights measure. “It is our responsibility to ensure recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars act in line with our laws and our values.”
He added that “this resolution was an opportunity to shed light on a reality that flies in the face of that principle.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
The measure was blocked on a vote of 51 to 47. But it attracted support from almost the entire Democratic caucus, including from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader and a staunch supporter of Israel. The sole Democratic “no” vote was from Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is an unequivocal backer of Israel.
One Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted with Democrats in favor of the resolution.
The issue of Israel and Gaza has repeatedly exposed divisions in the Democratic Party throughout this year’s midterm campaign. But in this case, the vote demonstrated near unity on an issue that drew far less support just two years ago.
In 2024, when Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, forced a vote on a similar resolution seeking a State Department report on whether human rights violations had occurred in Gaza, just 11 Democrats voted to move the resolution forward.
Mr. Van Hollen’s measure invoked a never-tested section of the Foreign Assistance Act that allows Congress to demand information about the human rights practices of countries receiving U.S. security aid, and to cut off the money if an administration refuses to disclose it.
It would have required the State Department to produce an unclassified report examining Israel’s human rights record in the West Bank, including any effort to investigate the cases of nine U.S. citizens “killed by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces.”
More Global News
New York Times, U.K. Believes Iran Was Involved in Incident at Air Base, Burnham Says, Michael D. Shear, Sept. 30, 2026. The British prime minister, Andy Burnham, said there were “strong indications” Iran played a part in the events at R.A.F. Fairford on Sunday, without providing details why.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain said Wednesday that his government believes Iran “played a part” in the incident on Sunday at an air base used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
“There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at R.A.F. Fairford,” Mr. Burnham told the BBC in an interview, referring to the British base about 90 miles outside of London. He added, “It remains an ongoing, complex and serious police investigation, and of course we are working closely with our colleagues in the United States of America.”
The arrest of five men early Sunday morning near the base on suspicion of explosives violations and terrorism triggered more than two days of anxiety as the police and military used a bomb disposal robot to examine three white vans used by the men and evacuated more than 85 nearby homes.
In the hours after the men were arrested, Mr. Burnham had publicly urged people not to speculate about their motive or connections to other countries. The five men, who are British citizens, were released on bail on Monday. The authorities said on Tuesday that they had found no explosives in the vans, only an unspecified quantity of gasoline.
In the BBC interview, the prime minister refused to say why the government believes that Iran was connected to the incident. “We will say more in due course but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part,” he said, adding: “Obviously I wouldn’t say it lightly.”
The Iranian Embassy in Britain on Monday issued a statement rejecting any suggestion that its government was involved in the events at the British base.
Politico, Key allies left out of Trump’s new in-crowd NATO group, Paul McLeary, Stefanie Bolzen and Jack Detsch, Sept. 30, 2026. Some of Europe’s biggest defense spenders — and U.S. allies — were not invited to a Pentagon-led meeting to discuss the alliance.Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby in Brussels.
The Trump administration is excluding several major allies from a gathering of NATO members next month — after threatening to deploy a “naughty and nice list” against governments that have run afoul of the president’s priorities.
The planned meeting in Poland, which Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has spearheaded, is essentially a working group focused on NATO’s future, according to six diplomats familiar with the planning. But many of the countries who didn’t receive an invite — such as the United Kingdom, France and the Baltic countries — are big defense spenders and play key roles in the alliance, leaving their diplomats wondering why they’re being frozen out.
They question whether the administration is playing favorites in a way that could further splinter an alliance already struggling with increasing Russian aggression and depleted weapons stockpiles.
“We’re doing everything that is being asked of us,” said an official from an excluded ally nation. “We’re trying to understand what the criteria is and what the purpose of these meetings are. Not much has been passed on to us yet.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, and the Pentagon declined to comment.
President Donald Trump and his top lieutenants have relentlessly criticized NATO since returning to power, on everything from members’ refusal to back the Iran war to the failure of some countries to spend 5% of their GDP on defense.
“I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” Trump railed in a Truth Social post this year. Last month, he snubbed another ally — South Korea — by abruptly scaling back a planned joint military exercise while complaining about Seoul’s refusal to join the war against Iran.
In April, as POLITICO first reported, the White House came up with something akin to a who’s-in-and-who’s-out list while it looked for ways to punish allies who didn’t adhere to Trump’s wishes.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has echoed that vision. He has encouraged “model allies” and warned that those that do not support U.S. interests will suffer consequences.
While details on the new NATO working group are still vague, it follows the threat of rewarding some at the expense of others.
Colby has held two similar meetings with invitees Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. The countries involved in the meeting — known as the Bergen Group format — insist it’s not meant to rupture the alliance, said a diplomat from one of the invited nations, who like others, was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Instead, the group intends to come up with ideas it can bring to the full alliance for more stress-testing.
“This can be an engine for transformation,” for the whole alliance, the diplomat said. The person acknowledged that some allies are frustrated by the exclusion, especially since many have hit or surpassed the spending targets demanded by the Trump administration.
The U.S. might add Denmark to the exclusive club next given the agreement reached between the two countries to expand the American military footprint in Greenland, according to another person familiar with the planning.
Colby, who has been the catalyst for the initiative, held a first meeting of its kind in Bergen, Norway, in June and invited the six favored allies. “NATO allies that are rapidly meeting their Hague spending commitments, have the scale to contribute, and are ready to get down to practical business,” he wrote on social media after the meeting.
He noted this month at a conference in Washington that “the idea is to pull the whole alliance along,” adding that it “will be a better and stronger NATO that is more durable” and give Europe more military capacity.
Colby has taken a longtime interest in smaller format talks between NATO nations. He has focused in previous years on reviving Germany as a military power to contain Russia and dedicating American troops to deal with China’s rise.
But even invited allies question why Colby and other defense officials have cherry-picked attendees and left out some of the continent’s largest defense powers, such as Britain.
“If they try splitting NATO into the good ones and the bad ones, it is dangerous for the U.S.,” said another of the six diplomats. “But for Europe, this is existential.”
The New Republic, The Daily Blast: Trump’s Fury at Canada Takes Darker Turn as GOPers Quietly Sound Alarm, Greg Sargent, Sept. 30, 2026. As Trump’s trade war against Canada grows more unhinged, the author of a piece on GOP midterm woes explains how Trump’s anti-Canada derangement could alienate working-class voters.Donald Trump glares angrily while speaking vehemently
Donald Trump’s ban on a range of Canadian imports just went into effect, and The New York Times calls this a sign that the trade war has grown “vicious.” In a rambling tirade this week, Trump upped the ante in a dark way, calling Canada “one of the worst countries in the entire world.”
Trump also said, almost in passing, that we get along with China better than we get along with Canada. We think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed just how casually Trump will toss aside a longtime ally. Trump also unleashed his top trade adviser to say sneeringly nasty things about Canada and Canadians, another sign that MAGA nationalism is growing more malicious.
Meanwhile, Republicans tell the Los Angeles Times that the trade war is really bad news for the GOP. In one focus group, almost all swing voters in Michigan opposed it. We talked to New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of GOP midterm woes. She explains why it’s so dumb of Trump to order Americans to hate Canada—and why it’s all tailor-made to get MAGA-adjacent “diesel class” voters to turn on Trump. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump This Month Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
The Hartmann Report, The Final Stage of a Strongman’s Takeover Is Turning the Law Against the People Who Defended It, Thom Hartmann, right, The attacks on Jack Smith expose something far bigger than one ugly Senate hearing: a collision between personal political loyalty and America’s constitutional system…
Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above to restack this Daily Take. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this reporting in front of readers who the MAGA propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.
Watching yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee spectacle was like watching a group of Made Men in the Mafia taking on the witness who broke omertá and talked.
It wasn’t always this way: there was a time when Republicans cared whether our democracy survived. Yesterday’s disgraceful performance, however, proved that today’s GOP only serves the Orange Caligula who squats in the White House like a malignant toad.
In November of 1934 the most decorated Marine in American history, Major General Smedley Butler, sat down in a House hearing room to describe a plot to overthrow the government of the United States, by no coincidence also the goal of Trump’s mob on January 6th.
He testified that a Wall Street bond salesman working for a J.P. Morgan-connected banker, backed by Singer sewing machine oligarch Robert Sterling Clark, had spent a year trying to hire him to lead 500,000 armed veterans to storm the White House.
They told him they had $3 million in cash and $300 million available for the oligarchs’ plan to reduce Franklin Roosevelt to a figurehead and put a “Secretary of General Affairs” in charge of the country. The weapons were to come on credit from Remington Arms, which the du Pont brothers had just taken over, and the “superorganization” of rich men they promised would back up Butler appeared right on schedule during their negotiations as the American Liberty League, financed by the du Pont brothers.
Not one member of Congress, of either party, stood up and called General Butler a liar; to the contrary, they issued a report validating his claims.
Yesterday morning, a few weeks short of ninety-two years later, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee went after Jack Smith — the former special counsel who’d indicted Trump in two federal districts for trying to overthrow our government and stealing our secrets.
Trump’s mob ended up killing several police officers as they beat over 100 of them so severely they ended up in the hospital, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and made a serious effort to hang the vice president.
Instead of coming to hear the evidence or argue for Trump’s innocence (we all saw what he did), they came to destroy Smith and suck up to Trump.
Chairman Chuck Grassley opened the hearing by declaring that “Jack Smith’s corrupt operation undermined the rule of law and threatened our very political institutions,” and later told him, “No matter what you say, there’s no legitimate basis for what you did.”
Ted Cruz whined at Smith, “You have brought the Department of Justice into disrepute.”
Eric Schmitt bizarrely told him he “will go down as a total dirtbag” after getting his details wrong.
John Kennedy of Louisiana, a man who sits on this committee that confirms federal judges, told a career prosecutor, “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
Smith didn’t raise his voice. Instead, he read an opening statement that ought to be carved over the door of the Justice Department.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.
“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions as alleged in the indictments they returned.
“Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”
Smith said all that while the now-corrupted Trump Justice Department is openly investigating him on a criminal referral from Gym Jordan, while the Office of Special Counsel has opened a second probe, and while the president of the United States has publicly called him a “deranged animal” and demanded he be charged with something, anything.
The Republican Party of 1934 was the party of the men who’d financed the plot against Roosevelt, but still its politicians respected the honesty and integrity of the whistleblower. The national commander of the VFW, James Van Zandt, publicly confirmed that Wall Street’s agents had approached him, too, and Van Zandt was a Republican who went on to serve his party for twenty years in Congress.
Butler himself was a lifelong Republican. As was my dad, a Republican activist who disliked FDR, but he still gave my brother (who became a Republican campaign consultant) and me copies of Butler’s book War is a Racket and warned us to beware of any corrupt politicians of either party who’d try to destroy our democracy for their own gain.
That generation’s Republicans could despise a president’s politics but still honor the office and work to save a Democratic president from a coup. They disagreed with FDR on tax cuts and social welfare programs, but they all agreed on the importance of fighting fascism (my dad volunteered for WWII right out of high school) and preserving our form of government with its balance of powers and respect for the Constitution.
Those Republicans are apparently all gone, purged from the party along with Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger. The oligarchs who tried to hire Butler to end America and replace our government with a strongman oligarchy were then outside the government; now they dine with the president and fund virtually every consequential Republican in federal office.
The bad guys are now, in other words, on the inside rather than the outside. And they showed it — sickeningly — with their attempts to pillory Jack Smith.
We all watched the violent mob read Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet aloud and chant “Hang Mike Pence” beneath a gallows they’d built, while the vice president’s Secret Service detail was radioing goodbyes to their families. We all saw Trump’s violent mob beat, tase, and chemical-spray the police officers sworn to protect our nation’s capitol and its inhabitants. We all saw the photographs of classified documents stacked in the public bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
As Smith put it yesterday:
“After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
But the Republican senators didn’t want to hear a word of it: when the anti-democracy anti-American plotters and the party are the same people, the party has no choice left but to destroy the man who investigated them and revealed their crimes and complicity.
This isn’t the first time Made Man Republicans in Congress have twisted themselves into pretzels to kiss mob boss Trump’s ass and prove their fealty.
In the spring of 2020, while Trump was fantasizing about reopening the country by Easter and tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” at armed protesters, the House Freedom Caucus went after Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man whose work through the decades has literally saved millions of lives.
Corrupt on-the-take Republicans Andy Biggs and Ken Buck wrote that the “economic calamity” that came out of the way Trump was handling the pandemic lay with Fauci’s recommendations and suggested Deborah Birx was padding the death count; Biggs branded Fauci a fearmonger who’d “replaced faith with fear” on the very morning Fauci testified that reopening America prematurely would mean needless suffering and death.
Fauci was right. The Lancet Commission later found that roughly 40 percent of the 450,000 Americans dead by early 2021, around 180,000 people, would still be alive if we’d merely matched the rest of the G7 with masks and shutdowns, and a peer-reviewed study in PLOS One put the avoidable-deaths toll here in America under Trump at more than 316,000 by the fall of 2021, most of them in the South, most of them before the vaccines arrived. We had the second-worst Covid death rate in the world.
Fauci, these Republican lickspittles concluded, had to be destroyed for the simple reason that the corpses were Trump’s, and the doctor was the witness who was willing to say so to America.
As I lay out in The Last American President, Roy Cohn, was — in addition to being Trump’s lawyer and mentor — the lawyer for all five of New York’s mob families. He taught Trump well.
— Mob families go after witnesses, so Trump’s toady AG is now “investigating” Jack Smith.
— Mob families reward their soldiers who do the boss’s dirty work, so on his first day back in office Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people from January 6th, including hundreds who’d been convicted by juries for sedition and for assaulting police officers.
— Mob families, when they get control of local politicians, get honest cops fired, just like Trump, Patel, and Blanche are doing with the DOJ, FBI, and Jack Smith.
— And mob families require every Made Man to submit to public demonstrations of their loyalty to the mob boss, which is what Grassley, Cruz, Schmitt, and Kennedy were doing yesterday morning.
Not one of them disputed a single fact in any of Smith’s criminal indictments against Trump. They just made sure the boss saw them sneer.
As I wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, this is what the du Ponts and the Morgans wanted in 1934 when they tried to hire Butler: a government that answers to money instead of the law or the Constitution.
It took ninety years and a failed reality-television host with a documented history of criminal fraud, rape, and mob connections, but they finally got it.
As Smith told the senators yesterday:
“[T]he rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime,” and that “individuals are threatened with criminal prosecutions because they are perceived to have opposed the president.
“Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions and norms.”
No Republican contradicted Smith on the facts; they all know how corrupt and criminal their boss is. They’re just too terrified or bought-off to say it out loud.
Ironically, the Butler hearings opened exactly two weeks after the 1934 midterm elections, when American voters, instead of punishing Roosevelt’s party the way they punish nearly every president’s party, expanded its majorities in both houses and drove the Liberty League’s politics into a ditch.
The oligarchs who wanted to destroy our democracy back then were beaten by one honest general and then by an election. This time the honest man has done his part and bravely said to these craven cowards that he will not be silenced.
The final stage of an attempted strongman takeover is when the law itself has been corrupted, turning the awesome power of the state to imprison against those who’d previously served and enforced the law. Yesterday proved that we’re there now.
The election is five weeks from yesterday. Call your senators at the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you watched what they did to Jack Smith. Check your registration at vote.org, find your state legislators at openstates.org, and then make sure everybody you know does the same thing on November 3.
If you believe the men who saved this country from fascism in 1934 deserve better heirs than the disgusting spectacle we saw yesterday, please share this article, subscribe to the Hartmann Report at hartmannreport.com, and help keep independent, ad-free journalism like this alive.
Democracy’s a team sport, and this is the season. Tag, we’re it!\
And, finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. — 1990 Martin Scorsese film "Goodfellas"
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, which President Trump has sought to rename to include his name first despite a law stating its official name as honoring only the late President Kennedy.
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s Reportedly Doing A Mafia Style Bust Out of the Kennedy Center, Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Donald Trump appears to be doing a mafia style bust out of the Kennedy Center according to a new report showing it’s run through every resource it had and is in “free fall.”
Nineteen months ago, things were complicated at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, but it was not bankrupt, contrary to Donald Trump’s claims.
The Center runs as a nonprofit, and we all know this is something the president can’t understand or respect. Trump was handed an institution “that was better off financially than in most years before covid,” according to a new report from the Washington Post.
And then Donald Trump took over and gave it the mafia-style Bust Out treatment.Trump Tapped Out the Kennedy Center
Under Trump’s leadership, the Kennedy Center has “borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on condition it never be spent, and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying, according to confidential board documents and tax filings reviewed by The Washington Post.”
“This was a pretty stable — large, complicated, but stable — organization,” an expert in arts management, told WaPo. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”
The arts management expert told WaPo it now appears to be “in free fall.”
Trump has claimed that he took over a bankrupt Kennedy Center, but the Post’s review of the documents show that after Trump’s takeover, “both donors and audiences walked away. Ticket income fell by 15 percent in the financial year that ended in September 2025, and gifts dropped by nearly a quarter. The center expects ticket income to fall by more than two-thirds this year, and gifts in the first four months of 2026 were down about 40 percent on the previous quarter, according to an internal report from June.”
The staff was cut from 94 to 16. “The center has also written off $48 million, according to its latest tax filing, and most of it appears related to pledges it no longer expects to collect.”
The Kennedy Center “had long kept a $10 million line of credit that it sometimes dipped into during the year and paid back by year end, according to its audits,” but by September 2025 “it doubled the line to $21 million and has since borrowed against all of it, according to an internal June report.”
This all comes as Trump is reported to want to demolish the Kennedy Center after a court forced him to remove his toxic name from the building, which he had shoved onto the building without consent or reason.
Monday evening, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah blocked an effort by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-ORE) to prohibit Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center.
Constitutional experts say Trump can’t demolish the building so easily, because Congress created the national memorial and the president doesn’t have the unilateral authority to demolish it without explicit congressional approval.
But we all know that Donald Trump does not ask for approval. Just look at the East Wing of the White House.
How The Mafia Bust Out Works
The Bust Out works starts with The Hook, in which the mob offers “protection” or a partnership to a struggling owner drowning in debt. This is followed by The Weekly Cut, when the owner must pay the mob boss a fee regular as clockwork, regardless of whether the business makes money. This is followed by Looting Supplies, in which expensive inventory delivered to the front door is immediately shoved out the back and sold at a heavy discount for pure profit. The mob runs up massive bills and unpaid loans in the Maxing Credit portion of the Bust Out, using the business’ good name and credit line. And then comes The Final Match. Once every asset, drop of credit, and loan option is completely exhausted, they torch the building to collect the insurance payout.
Donald Trump declared bankruptcy six times prior to looting the United States of America as president. He was taught to deny these methods of extraction by Roy Cohn, who mentored Trump in an aggressive, transactional method of business centered on relentless counterattacking, media manipulation, and total denial.
Donald Trump is destroying everything great about America, extracting it for his own benefit and sick pleasure and when told no, he sets upon a vicious destruction meant to cut to the heart of the beloved piece of America he’s attacking.
The idea that any president would put their name on a memorial center for an assassinated president is beyond bizarre and invites psychological analysis that is disturbing. But now we have a report showing how he’s run through the money and assets and good name, like he does with everything he touches, including this country.
Trump is not making America great again. He’s just a gangster, doing what he’s always done, with the spineless help of Republican lawmakers who have gone missing in action even while they cash the paycheck we give them.
Defiance.org, Advocacy: Donald Trump has fully transformed your government into a casino, Miles Taylor, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Donald Trump used to buy TV ads to lure gamblers into his casinos and bolster his brand. Now he’s just using your taxpayer dollars.
If you watched TV this week, you might have seen ads of the president vowing to “rout the fake news media” and urging viewers to “love me,” followed by a strange new tagline: “paid for by the U.S. government.” That’s your money, and it’s paying for the latest vanity project the president has cooked up.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the ads were funded through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that’s supposed to be guarding our ports and borders. By Sunday, the ads had aired more than 2,300 times on local stations alone. As someone who used to help run DHS, I can say without hesitation this is totally unprecedented and head-spinningly corrupt. Border money is supposed to be spent on the border, not on presidential self-promotion, and certainly not weeks before an election.
(Former Bush ethics czar Richard Painter went as far as to say it could be an impeachable offense.)
For me, the ads completed the image of Trump returning to his casino-hustler roots. He used to run gambling houses in Atlantic City. One of them was literally called Trump Castle, and its TV commercials serenaded gamblers with a jingle: “You’re the king! You’re the king of the castle!” (I have to thank the great Elie Honig for pointing this out to me. He remembered it from his youth in New Jersey and sent it to me some months ago. A real gem.)
That casino was apparently so strapped that Trump’s father sent a lawyer to the casino cage with a $3.35 million check to “buy chips,” which New Jersey regulators later called an illegal loan. A year later the Castle went into bankruptcy anyway. Back then, the jingle at least created the illusion that the customer was king, but in Trump’s new castle, the only king is Trump, of course, and the rest of us are peasants funding his lavish lifestyle, profligate spending, and self-dealing. Millions of No Kings marchers have already told him what they think of that arrangement.
Now the whole of the U.S. government looks like his own casino. Indeed, he’s added billions to his fortune since returning to office. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures, including $635 million from sales of his $TRUMP meme coins. The president mints his own tokens and sells them to anybody with a wallet (including people who need something from his administration).
Like any good casino, there’s a high-roller room for those who can spend a little bit more. For instance, Qatar handed over a $400 million jet to please the president. Meanwhile, an Abu Dhabi investment firm used World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin to make a $2 billion investment in Binance, and a few months later Trump pardoned Binance’s founder. Surely just a coincidence.
There’s a cashier’s cage in this one, too. Individuals and corporations are finding a litany of ways to buy influence, and there’s a particularly concerning black box. When I sat down with former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer for our upcoming documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, she described “a feeding frenzy around the pardon process,” with “millions and millions” of dollars changing hands just to get a clemency application in the door. It’s unclear how the money is moving and whether other promises are being made in exchange for clemency. But it reeks of corruption. Meanwhile, Trump has been tempted to dip directly into the cash drawer himself, and he has sought roughly $230 million from his own Justice Department to compensate himself over past investigations.
Casino owners also love a renovation. We’ve all watched as Trump bulldozed the East Wing for a ballroom funded by donors who then pulled in billions in federal contracts… launched an almost billion-dollar makeover of the White House… ripped up the Reflecting Pool with a no-bid contract to a friend… defaced the Kennedy Center until a judge ruled it couldn’t be renamed for him without an act of Congress… tore up the public golf course in D.C. so he could remake it in his own image… broke ground on a gigantic arch in his honor… and draped his face over federal buildings across D.C., to name a few.
The only solace I get from all of this is that the story doesn’t end well for crooked casinos. Trump should know. In 2015, federal regulators fined his Taj Mahal $10 million, reportedly the largest such penalty ever imposed on a casino, after it admitted to failing to report suspicious transactions and keep proper records. Each of these schemes leaves a trail. Eventually, the auditor will arrive to count every chip in the king’s castle. That day is coming, and it will be a very bad day for Donald Trump.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, Hispanic Voters on the Texas Border Have Soured on Trump, Jennifer Medina and Edgar Sandoval, Sept. 30, 2026. Sept. 30, 2026. In 2024, these voters were an essential part of the winning Republican coalition. Now, many feel abandoned and furious, complicating the party’s chances in November.
Jessica Cantu Vuittonet, who runs a coffee shop in San Benito, Texas, cast her first ballot in 2024 — for Donald Trump. Two years later, after her brother was deported, she feels angry and betrayed.
Ariel Salinas, who owns a construction company in McAllen, Texas, can no longer reliably find laborers for his work crews. He blames the president’s immigration policies for his financial headaches.
And Luis Cabrera, a pastor who once mobilized his congregation in Harlingen, Texas, to vote for Republican candidates, is now trying to keep Hispanic evangelicals from giving up on voting altogether.
In 2024, Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley delivered a political earthquake: majority support for Republicans for the first time in modern history, a shift that helped reshape national politics. Now, that support appears to be evaporating even more quickly than it arrived.
In more than two dozen interviews across the region in recent weeks, Hispanic voters said they were furious over the president’s approach to immigration and the economy — the very problems they had counted on him to fix.
Their economic struggles seem to have only gotten worse, they said, shaped by the same forces at play in the rest of the country and exacerbated by the administration’s aggressive tactics on immigration enforcement. Construction has slowed as workers have been deported. Many small business owners say they have lost customers who now stay home to avoid being stopped by immigration agents.
In restaurants and on construction sites, in church lobbies and bars, optimism about the second Trump administration has curdled into a deep sense of abandonment.
“This isn’t anything that we wanted and it certainly isn’t a better life for anyone I know,” said Lupita Garza, 48, who lives in McAllen and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. “Instead of the economy getting stronger, we are weaker. And now we have to be scared of ICE too.”
This growing anger and fear could help determine who controls Congress. Texas Republicans redrew several House districts last year with the assumption that the Hispanic voters who moved toward their party were part of a new, durable coalition. But many of those voters have turned against the Republicans. Some voters say they may vote for Democrats in the November midterms; some may not vote at all.
Recent polls show Democrats leading Republicans among likely Hispanic voters by roughly 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress. The new dynamic is especially clear in Texas’s 15th, 28th and 34th Congressional Districts, which stretch across the Rio Grande Valley. Republican candidates are facing uphill battles despite the fact that Mr. Trump won the same areas by double-digit margins. If James Talarico, the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, is able to beat Ken Paxton, the Republican, his victory will likely be fueled by Hispanic voters here. In one sign of Republican worry, Vice President JD Vance is traveling to the region on Wednesday to rally voters.
For voters like Ms. Vuittonet, 38, enthusiasm for the G.O.P. evaporated months ago.
“They betrayed me, they turned their backs on us,” she said. “Nobody cares about us here, I see that now clearly.”
Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Vuittonet had been worried about the streams of new immigrants coming across the Rio Grande during the Biden administration and had trusted that Mr. Trump would stop them. Although some Trump supporters held signs calling for “mass deportations now” during the 2024 campaign, Ms. Vuittonet never thought such deportations would include people she knew who had lived in the United States for decades.
“I knew that he was going to start deporting people, but that he was going to go after bad criminals, like true hardcore criminals, rapists, killers,” Ms. Vuittonet said, sitting in the small coffee shop she runs from the back of an antique store. She thought of her six children, who range from ages 6 to 12. “Of course I want the streets safe.”
But when her brother was taken to an immigration detention center earlier this year, just days after a scheduled check-in with an immigration official, she said it felt like a punch to the gut.
“Your world truly does go upside down because now it’s not just hurting you — it’s hurting your parents, it’s hurting his children, his grandchildren,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. She quickly began to resent both Washington and the political movement she had enthusiastically embraced.
“I started to hate,” she said. “I started holding resentment and grudges, especially from those people that I rallied with for Trump.”
Just a few years ago, Ms. Vuittonet cheered on the “Trump trains,” loud caravans of pickup trucks flying Trump flags as they crisscrossed South Texas. Now, those flags have vanished.
Ms. Vuittonet has no plans to vote this year.
“At this point with the way things went, it’s hard to trust now — that has been broken,” she said. “We see that red and blue are just two colors. They’re both after the same thing and don’t care about people here.”
New York Times, G.O.P. Nominee in Texas Privately Said Trump’s Convention Hurt Him, Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 30, 2026. Ken Paxton, one of the party’s top Senate candidates and a Trump loyalist, said that “everybody’s numbers dropped” after the event, according to audio obtained by The Times.
Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.
The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.
Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”Paxton’s Private RemarksAn audio recording of comments made by Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, that was obtained by The New York Times
The audio of Mr. Paxton was shared with The Times by an attendee who recorded him speaking at a private fund-raiser in Washington attended by roughly a dozen people. The person, who opposes Mr. Paxton’s campaign and provided the recording to The Times, was granted anonymity because Mr. Paxton’s remarks were private.
Three other people with knowledge of the event confirmed Mr. Paxton’s attendance. Two of these people recalled that Mr. Paxton had been posed this question, and one recalled his response about the negative consequences of Mr. Trump’s convention.
Asked about the remarks, Nick Maddux, a senior Paxton adviser, said that “this is more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times to create a story that doesn’t exist.”
“Our latest poll from the last week has Ken Paxton leading by three points, and every serious pollster will tell you that our numbers have improved since early September,” Mr. Maddux said. “Ken Paxton is going to win this race, and he looks forward to closing strong alongside President Trump including when he comes to Texas this week.”
The event was hosted last Thursday by two Republican lobbyists, Susan Hirschmann and Chris Brinson, in a conference room near Capitol Hill. They did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Paxton’s comments about the convention are notable because of how closely he has aligned himself in public with Mr. Trump, who pushed for the unusual midterm gathering and ensured that much of it would serve as a celebration of his presidency. A longtime Trump loyalist, Mr. Paxton won a costly and bitter primary this year over Senator John Cornyn thanks to the president’s support.
Mr. Paxton figured prominently in the convention, which was held this month in his home state. He occupied a prime seat inside the arena and used the Dallas gathering to mingle with Republican donors and raise money for his allied groups. Onstage, Mr. Trump both praised Mr. Paxton and teased him for his looks and sartorial choices.
“He may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” the president said, “but you know what, he is — he’s the greatest attorney general in America.”
Mr. Paxton’s comments at the Washington fund-raiser echo other private whispers by Republicans that the party’s convention would not be helpful, given Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings.
Since the gathering, the midterm outlook for Republicans has only darkened, leaving Mr. Paxton in a precarious position just five weeks before Election Day.
He has trailed narrowly in many recent polls to his Democratic rival, James Talarico, leaving Republicans hoping that a huge surge of spending from outside groups and Texas’ traditional conservatism can carry Mr. Paxton to victory. Mr. Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has joined the effort to help Mr. Paxton, throwing $20 million behind his bid.
Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: The Last Day Of The Quarter. Let’s Rally For Our Battleground Candidates And Party Committees Today And Make Sure They Close Strong!!!!! Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 30, 2026. We need to have a big day peeps. Decisions on ads, where to put final resources will be made based on the q3 fundraising totals for candidates and committees.
Candidates who’ve raised a lot of money, and have strong polling, may see less ads, as the other side moves on. Those with who look more vulnerable may see the attacks on them increase, making it more likely they lose. So this is an important day, one of the most important of the entire election cycle.
I have a simple appeal today - spend two-thirds of whatever you have left to spend today. Leave the rest for opportunistic support - as the final battlefield clarifies - for mid-October.
I throw a lot of data at you each day. Let’s now look at two bits of data that remind us just how much 2026 has become a year of opportunity for us.
The generic ballot -- will you vote Dem or GOP this November -- has gotten officially into big wave territory in recent days. Here’s a selection of generic ballot polls over the last two weeks -- all are in double digits, big wave territory.
Next, here are the recent polls showing our battleground Senate candidate ahead by 5 points or more, outside of margin of error. All real, credible polls:
Here is the list of battleground Senate polls showing a Republican ahead by 5 or more, outside margin of error:
………………..
It’s blank. For there are no polls showing a Republican ahead outside of margin of error in any battleground Senate race.
Yes, 2026 is a year of opportunity for us, and now we must seize it, together, everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PoliticusUSA, Trump Melts Down And Tries To Blackmail Alaska Into Voting Republican, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 30, 2026. At a rambling White House event, Trump tried to blackmail Alaska into voting Republican in the Senate election.
The guy who caused the high gas prices is now trying to blackmail a red state.
Alaskans are their own people, who do their own thing, but one of the things that Alaska has done fairly consistently is back Republican candidates.
Back when the Republican Party was the party of small government and states’ rights, it made sense that voters in Alaska would be inclined to vote Republican more often than not.
Somehow, under Donald Trump, the Republican Party is no longer a small-government, individual-rights party, and Alaska is now in the president’s crosshairs because it has a vulnerable incumbent Senator, Dan Sullivan, facing a strong challenge from Democrat Mary Perolta.
Just as Trump didn’t do Ashley Hinson of Iowa any favors when he tried to support her campaign, it could be argued that he did even more damage to Sullivan in Alaska with his sleepy mobster routine.
After Trump’s promise of $5,000 checks for everyone, but only if they voted for Republican control of the House and Senate, went absolutely nowhere and might have hurt Republican chances, the president tried again with a more targeted effort focused on Alaska.Trump Says Alaska Can Only Have Lower Gas Prices If They Vote Republican
Started out with the same empty promise that gas prices are going to fall as soon as his Iran war ends, but then things took a turn.
The president said:
Gasoline prices in Alaska are going to tumble. Well, as soon as the war ends, which is going to be soon, the Iran war, uh, prices are going to come way down regardless. But gasoline prices, because of this project and a couple of others in Alaska are going to tumble. Now, uh, if the Democrats come along, I can't speak to that.
They will -- You're going to have double. The, the prices will double if they come along. You'll end up in a depression, recession, something very bad. They have the worst policy. That's why they haven't gotten elected. People have to understand what's happening.
Trump never said that Democrats would raise gas prices. He said that gas prices would go up in Alaska if Democrats won. As if he would impose some sort of punishment on the voters of Alaska for electing a Democratic senator.
Video:
Trump is the reason why gas prices are so high. It is his fault. Voting for Republicans is the one way to make sure that gas prices don’t fall. Republicans won’t push Trump to end his war in Iran. Democrats will.
The president who caused the increase in gas prices has now weaponized his incompetence against a state that votes for a lot of Republicans.
Trump’s comments illustrate how worried Republicans are about losing the Senate seat in Alaska, but the president’s bullying tactics aren’t going to work.
If anything, they will backfire and lead to more Democratic victories.
Special Report: Smith Hearing 'Complete Disaster' for Republicans?
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: The Jack Smith Hearing Is A Complete Disaster For Republicans, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), above left, tried to claim that Jack Smith, above right, went to a Atlanta Hawks game and met with Fani Willis to push a Trump conspiracy, but Schmidt had everything wrong.
Republicans in the Senate are holding on for dear life and trying to cling to their Senate majority. The Jack Smith hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is doing them no favors and is likely harming the GOP’s chances.
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri is a Trump loyalist, and the whole point of the hearing for Republicans is to rewrite history to reframe Smith’s investigations of Donald Trump as an unjust political prosecution.
Schmitt was in full performance mode and called Smith a dirtbag, but things quickly fell apart.
Schmitt used his time questioning Smith to ask, “ Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024?”
Smith: I'm sorry, could you say that again?
Schmitt: Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024?
Smith: What city would that be in?
Schmitt: Atlanta.
Smith: No.
Schmitt: Okay So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024. Is that correct?
Smith: I have no recollection of that.
Schmitt: Okay. Is it your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2024? Let me, let me just give you a little context. Yeah. The day before Fani Willis (shown in an NBC file photo) came clean with her affair with the prosecutor, you know the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump, the next day were you in Atlanta?
Smith: I do not believe so.
Schmitt: Okay. Did you ever go to Atlanta during your time as special counsel?
Sen. Schmitt thought that he had Smith and was setting him up for the conspiracy theory. Schmitt asked Smith if he ever went to Atlanta and met with Fani Willis and Nathan Wade.
Remember, the Republican conspiracy is that Biden directed a political prosecution of Trump that involved federal, local, and state officials. This was all supposedly a vast conspiracy against Trump.
Then Schmitt face-planted in front of the world on national television.
Jack Smith Perjury Trap Backfires
Schmitt briefly flashed supposed text messages, then accused Smith of perjury. “I think you've already perjured yourself.”
Smith then said that he did go to a basketball game, but it was a college game, not an NBA game, a women’s game not a men’s game, and not in Atlanta:
Ranking member. I'll say this very briefly. If this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think February of 2024. But again, that's, you can check that out if that's what we're talking about .
Sen. Amy Klobuchar stepped in and asked, “Could, could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it? And maybe before we show this kind of thing. It was Maryland. I know, but if he was at an Iowa game, is that correct?”
Smith said, “It, it was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. Uh-huh. And so we went to the game. I know. I took my-”
Klobuchar continued, “But that might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.”
Schmitt then got angry, “Whose questioning is this by the way, Mr. Chairman? Well, I, you are the one that showed me- Is, are you, are you using your time, Senator? You- Is this what this is? No, I- Are we just, are we just having like an open session here?”
Schmitt tried to stick with the now-debunked Atlanta conspiracy, but Klobuchar said, “Well, I'm gonna begin my questions now, but I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag and not get the teams wrong.”
During her question time, Klobuchar was able to confirm that Schmitt had everything wrong.
The entire hearing has been a disaster for Republicans who have tried to attack Smith’s family and claim secret plots and conspiracies as part of the Jack Smith investigation.
With gas, grocery, and diesel prices so high, it is impossible to see how these sorts of theatrics and clownery help Senate Republicans.
Instead of conducting real oversight, Senate Republicans are pushing conspiracy theories to please Trump.
This behavior is a perfect example of why voters are enraged and ready to kick Republicans in the House and Senate to the curb.
Emptywheel, Analysis: If Eric Schmitt is “all hat and no cattle,” this is what the hat looks like, Peterr, Sept. 29, 2026. This has not been a good month for Missouri Attorneys General.
First it was the current AG, Catherine Hanaway, and the fight over the gerrymandered map created by the GOP members of the Missouri Legislature. She got a conservative Missouri Supreme Court to systematically and quite thoroughly dismantle her arguments in a unanimous opinion, and then in three separate petitions to the US Supreme Court, had them repeat the beatdown three times with all the understated legal brutality you can pack into a brief per curiam opinion.
Then it was time for the AG that Hanaway was appointed to replace, Andrew Bailey. Bailey left the Missouri AG position to take on the co-deputy directorship of the FBI when it became obvious that the then-current deputy was incapable and rather uninterested in doing that job. Part of the enticement was that Kash Patel was on thin ice, and having Bailey in place would make it easy to elevate him to the top job when Trump tired of the problems created by Patel, which were piling up on DOJ head, Pam Bondi. Sadly for Bailey, while Bondi got the boot, Patel managed to weather the storm and hold his job, and Todd Blanche was elevated to take Bondi’s job. Yesterday, Bailey called it quits on his waiting game, and announced he was leaving the FBI and DC to (checks notes) spend more time with his family back in Missouri.
And today was Eric Schmitt’s turn.
Plenty of others have taken apart what happened in the Senate Judiciary committee in his confrontation with Jack Smith, so go read them for the accounts of that idiocy. Lots of folks expressed surprise at the mess, including Lawrence O’Donnell who put a lot of the fault on Schmitt’s senate staffers. You know who wasn’t surprised at this? Missourians. I’m sorry, Lawrence, but you can’t blame this on poor staff work or lazy staff work. This is who Eric Schmitt is, and has been for quite a while.
He wasn’t always like this. As Jason Hancock wrote in the Missouri Independent,
Schmitt won a seat in the state legislature in 2008 with 55% of the vote in the middle-class suburbs along Interstate 44. Over eight years, he built a conservative record that regularly involved working with Democrats.
He stood with Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon to push insurance coverage for autism treatment. He helped legalize CBD oil for people with intractable epilepsy, drawing on his son Stephen’s experience. After Ferguson, he championed legislation limiting municipalities’ reliance on traffic fines and court fees.
The AFL-CIO endorsed him in 2012.
In a 2014 video tour of the Missouri Senate chamber in Jefferson City, Schmitt said lawmakers’ different backgrounds and opinions made respect important, and that the room reminded him of the need for “a more civil tone in politics, now more than ever.”
Schmitt said he had been inspired by Jack Kemp to “take that conservative message outside of the Republican echo chamber.”
The goal wasn’t merely to beat people who disagreed with you. It was to persuade them.
Schmitt was term-limited out of the state senate in 2016, and was named Missouri’s AG by then-Governor Mike Parsons, to replace the former AG, Josh Hawley, who left for the US Senate after only two years as MO AG.
But a funny thing happened, when Schmitt moved to the AG office. He, like Hawley before him, began looking ahead at the upcoming Senate contest, and decided to seek to become the one to replace retiring GOP Senator Roy Blunt. That’s not the funny part – that’s bog-standard political ladder climbing. What was funny is that the pressures of the GOP primary began to change his approach to politics.
As one of his former conservative GOP colleagues in the MIssouri Senate described in an off-the-record conversation with a Jefferson City acquaintance, Schmitt discovered that whenever he announced an indictment against Democrats or liberals over things like mask requirements or discrimination against white people, his campaign began seeing a nice little bump in his campaign contributions. Then, he realized that if he announced that he would be seeking an indictment, the money would flow in. Then he discovered that if he simply announced he was opening an investigation, the money came in.
And one by one, his GOP primary opponents fell in the polls as Schmitt rose.
Gone was any effort to follow Kemp’s path to go “outside the Republican echo chamber.” Schmitt put himself in the center of the echo chamber, enthusiastically and with his eyes wide open, and started shouting.
When Schmitt headed to take his seat in the US Senate, he left behind him various ongoing legal cases, one of which I’ve discussed here at Emptywheel before:
In late 2021, Schmitt made a big deal about twisting a case in St. Louis county involving the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services into a precedent giving him the power to prohibit schools from enforcing any mask mandates. He sent cease and desist letters to school districts with such mandates, threatening a lawsuit if they did not rescind their policies. Some did just that, but others did not, including the Lee’s Summit Reorganized District #7 in the KC suburbs. Instead, the lawyer for the LSR7 district responded to Schmitt’s letter with one of his own, announcing their intention to file a countersuit, filing a huge shot across Schmitt’s bow.
The letter is a real gem, gutting Schmitt’s claims on numerous grounds. Most damning, from my point of view, was this from the end:
We don’t need to rely on just these general statutes to demonstrate the Attorney General’s lack of authority in this matter. Consider what the Legislature has authorized school districts to do in the face of a pandemic. Under RSMo. § 167.191:
It is unlawful for any child to attend any of the public schools of this state while afflicted with any contagious or infectious disease, or while liable to transmit such disease after having been exposed to it. For the purpose of determining the diseased condition, or the liability of transmitting the disease, the teacher or board of directors may require any child to be examined by a physician, and exclude the child from school so long as there is any liability of such disease being transmitted by the pupil.
This law speaks for itself. Not only may a school district exclude from school a child who has COVID; it may exclude from school a child who has been exposed to COVID and who is liable to transmit it pending a medical test or examination to confirm that the child is not afflicted with the disease.
In short, the duly elected Lee’s Summit R-7 Board of Education will not abandon its statutory duty to govern the operations of the school district. If you follow through on your threat to sue the District, we will defend that suit vigorously, and pursue all remedies available to the District resulting from any suit that violates Missouri Supreme Court Rule 55.03, which requires among other things that any claim “is not presented or maintained for any improper purpose” and that the claim “is warranted by existing law.”
Schmitt was a dummy, and filed the suit anyway, despite the letter from the school district’s attorney. After he won election to the US Senate, the case landed in Andrew Bailey’s lap. Bailey immediately realized exactly what a turd of a case he had on his hands, so he did the right thing. He dropped his suit and asked the school district to do the same with their countersuit. They refused. Instead, they took their Bailey and the state to trial, and when the judge ruled, it was as to affirm the schools all the way down the line. As the KC Star said at the time (paywalled, sorry):
Judge Marco Roldan, in his 18-page ruling, found that Schmitt, a Republican who was elected to the U.S. Senate last year after four years as state attorney general, did not follow Missouri law when he ordered the Lee’s Summit School District to stop enforcing its COVID-19 mitigation efforts in 2021.
“There exists no Missouri law allowing the Attorney General to involve himself in a School District’s efforts to manage COVID-19 or other disease within its schools,” Roldan wrote in his ruling. The ruling offers a scathing rebuke of Schmitt, who had sued Lee’s Summit and dozens of other school districts at the height of the pandemic.
Schmitt regularly touted the suits on social media and used them to elevate himself in his Senate campaign.
“Parents and students followed the Attorney General’s lead, leading to even greater confusion than the pandemic had already caused,” Roldan wrote.
So what happened in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting with Schmitt getting his butt handed to him by Jack Smith is *exactly* what those of us in Missouri expect of Schmitt, because we’ve seen this guy operating like this for years. He took Trump’s approach on the “perfect phone call” and used it as a guide for his approach to his work as Missouri AG, and has continued to do this in the US Senate. He, like Trump, has embraced the Three Great Premises of Idiot America.
Senate Judiciary Committee members Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) display a sign accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of meeting with Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 29, 2026. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Hawkward, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Poor Eric Schmitt. It had all been going so well. The junior senator from Missouri had been working hard building a MAGA-pleasing brand as a staunch Trump ally who wasn’t afraid to play footsie with the blood-and-soil right. Just yesterday, Axios reported that Schmitt was “seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate” for JD Vance.
Then, just hours later, his big break seemed to have arrived—the moment that he thought he was about to launch his MAGA brand into the stratosphere.
And then it all fell apart.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had hauled former Special Counsel Jack Smith in for questioning. Republicans’ goal going in was clear: to harass and belittle a man in the top tier of Donald Trump’s enemies list, and to catch him in a perjury trap if they could.
When Schmitt’s time came to question Smith, he embarked on a bizarre line of questioning intended to link Smith with another Trump enemy: Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis. Hadn’t he traveled to Atlanta in February 2024, just as a scandal was engulfing Willis’s parallel election-fraud prosecution of Trump? Hadn’t he attended an Atlanta Hawks game that very same week? Was it possible he had gone there to meet with Willis, no doubt for some nefarious purpose?
But Smith did something Schmitt hadn’t expected. He denied having attended the Hawks game in question at all. The senator couldn’t believe it. He and his colleagues had hoped to catch Smith in some lie that could be used as a pretext to prosecute him. And now, he thought, he’d been the one to catch him.
Share this newsletter with someone who could use a good laugh.
Schmitt could barely conceal his smug glee as he proceeded: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors–Hawks game on February 3, 2024?” he asked, a grin tugging at his mouth. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself. . . . I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” A few minutes later, he wrapped up his testimony by calling Smith a “dirtbag.”
Unfortunately for Schmitt, he was wrong about all of it. Smith hadn’t been in Atlanta for a Hawks game on the day in question. He’d been in Maryland, watching the Terps women’s basketball team take on the visiting Iowa Hawkeyes. Minutes later, a visibly furious Schmitt was blustering wildly as Sen. Amy Klobuchar icily rubbed his nose in it: “I think people should get their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong. You had the teams wrong, sir.” Amazingly, Schmitt refused to apologize, insisting he’d just been asking questions.
I’ll be honest: It was all highly enjoyable to watch. (If you want to watch us having fun watching it, Sam and I did a video breakdown after the fact yesterday.) JVL likes to say it’s great to watch bad things happen to bad people. Sometimes I see what he means.
But to understand just how bad of shape we’re in as a country, consider this: It’s not clear that this humiliation will hurt Schmitt’s aspirations to higher office in the slightest.
On one side of our great informational divide, Schmitt’s blunder is already going down in infamy. It was extraordinarily viral all day yesterday, with many Hill reporters at a loss to remember the last time a lawmaker had whiffed so hard during testimony. For most of professional Washington and for most people with a mainstream-to-liberal information diet, it will likely be their first association when they think of Schmitt for years to come.
Over the divide, however, things look very different. Schmitt’s apparent “gotcha” moment buzzed quickly around right-wing media. Podcaster Benny Johnson tweeted that Schmitt¹ had “pulled out the receipts” and “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity shared the same moment. Both later quietly deleted their posts, but neither posted any acknowledgment that they’d gotten the story backwards—or even commented on Schmitt’s mistake at all.
Some went even further through the looking glass. After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on the popular Turning Point USA podcast still called the Charlie Kirk Show. The exchanges on the subject are surreal: The interviewers themselves don’t acknowledge that Schmitt’s original gotcha was factually wrong. In fact, they don’t even seem to know it themselves. “You caught him out, by the way, in this NBA game in Atlanta,” one host says. “Yeah,” Schmitt replies.
“Gotta give you your flowers,” the host added again later. “So you had text messages from his team confirming he was going to a Hawks game, and he sat there acting dumbfounded and completely clueless?”
“It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game at that time going on in Atlanta,” Schmitt replied. “He claimed later that he was at another game. Here’s the thing: My job is to ask the questions.”
Special Report: 'Disgrace and Danger' from FBI Chief?
Doomsday Scenario, Investigative Commentary: The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel, Part II, Garrett M. Graff, above, Sept. 29, 2026. A quick check-in on the FBI director's latest raft of scandals (including, of course, the bestiality).
Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”
The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.
The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.
Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told the New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”
In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world's biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.
It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.
This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).
The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”
The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the constitution.
As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey's relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm's length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”
An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from the New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”
Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.
Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.
Patel is having new FBI agents walk the streets of D.C., a stunning misuse of limited bureau resources. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.Upgrade
Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.
In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!
And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation's top law enforcement agency.”
There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.
In his back and forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”
The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”
And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long-term.
Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.
Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.
October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.
None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.
More On Trump Team Governance
New York Times, Democrats Block Stock-Trading Bill, Denying the G.O.P. a Pre-Midterm Win, Annie Karni, Sept. 30, 2026. A Republican measure to limit, but not bar, congressional stock trading faltered in the Senate as Democrats thwarted a G.O.P. bid to show progress on an issue that has rankled voters.
Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation that would limit the ability of members of Congress to trade stock, dismissing it as an empty G.O.P. effort to appeal to widespread voter distrust of public officials ahead of the November elections without actually addressing it.
The Stop Insider Trading Act, which the House passed in July, would bar lawmakers and their spouses and family members from buying individual stocks but allow members of Congress who already own them to keep trading with new notice requirements. It places no restrictions on the president or the vice president.
The measure, which needed 60 votes to pass, was blocked on a party-line vote of 53 to 47, its failure predetermined after Republicans attached sweeping voter ID restrictions opposed by Democrats and some G.O.P. lawmakers that have already been rejected by the Senate six times.
But Democrats said they would have opposed the bill even without the voter ID measure, because it fails to do what voters have been clamoring for: impose an outright ban on congressional stock trading. They accused Republicans of bringing it up in an effort to appear as if they were addressing the issue, which has become politically toxic for both parties.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called it a “toothless” bill that was as “ineffective as a screen door on a submarine.” He noted that it would do nothing to stop President Trump, who he said has made 30,000 stock trades in the past year, from continuing such transactions.
Mr. Schumer called the bill a “last-ditch effort to save face” with voters, but said that “Americans don’t buy it.”
The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan legal organization, also urged Congress to reject the measure because it “does not actually ban congressional stock trading, and it will thus not remove the cloud of distrust that hangs over lawmakers’ suspicious stock sales.”
The bill was brought to the floor as part of a final sprint of legislative moves before the midterm elections by Senate Republicans. They are facing a bleak political landscape with just weeks to go before the balloting, aimed at showing they were responsive to voters’ concerns.
“It would ensure transparency when it comes to stock sales to provide that members of Congress and their families provide public notice of any stock sale,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on the Senate floor. He called it a “simple” but important way “to ensure that members of Congress are held to the standards that Americans should be able to expect of their representatives.”Senator Pete Ricketts, Republican of Nebraska, said passage was necessary to “restore the faith of the American people in the House and in the Senate.”
For House Republicans who voted for an identical measure earlier this year, the bill has provided them with a talking point to appeal to voters on the issue.
In Iowa, for example, an outside group supporting Representative Zach Nunn, a vulnerable Republican, has spent almost $400,000 on an ad highlighting his support for the bill, exaggerating what it does.
“While honest, hard-working Americans struggle at home, fat cat politicians in Washington are getting rich on inside information,” the ad states. Mr. Nunn’s support for the bill, it claims inaccurately, means that “those fat cat lawmakers and their families are prohibited from buying stocks, putting an end to their greed and corruption, and leveling the playing field for hard-working Americans.”
A public backlash against perceived corruption in Washington has shaped the battle for control of Congress, with Democrats and Republicans alike seizing on congressional stock trading and putting it at the forefront of ads in some of the most competitive races in the country.
Candidates in both parties have cited congressional stock trading as a way to portray their opponents as corrupt and out of touch with the financial realities of working-class Americans.
That Louisiana voter was defrauded. And far right propagandists like John Solomon and Margot Cleveland are outraged that someone investigated — using communications asking for details about such things — attempts to defraud loyal MAGAts.
New York Times, Justice Dept. Tries to Rebuke Federal Judges for Speaking to The Times, Mattathias Schwartz and Devlin Barrett, Sept. 30, 2026. Judge Patrick J. Schiltz had warned that the administration’s actions “created a grave threat to the rule of law.” The attorney general accused him of “obvious bias.”
The Justice Department on Wednesday accused two of Minnesota’s federal judges of engaging in misconduct for comments made to The New York Times about how their court handled the administration’s immigration surge in Minneapolis this winter.
In a six-page complaint filed with the Judicial Council of the Eighth Circuit, which includes the Minnesota district, the department alleged that the judges’ comments violated ethics rules that limit what judges are allowed to say publicly, particularly on pending cases. It singles out Judge Patrick J. Schiltz and Judge John R. Tunheim, both of whom were quoted in the Times article.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the judges of “obvious bias” for giving interviews to The Times about the Trump administration’s immigration surge in Minnesota this winter. Judge Schiltz told The Times that the administration’s actions had “created a grave threat to the rule of law.” Mr. Blanche called those comments “overtly political.”
The article, which appeared on Sept. 17, drew on interviews that took place the previous month with all but one of the judges who were active during the weeks when Operation Metro Surge put the Twin Cities, as well as the court, under tremendous pressure. The judges described the challenges they faced when their dockets were swamped with petitions from detainees, criminal cases against protesters and civil cases challenging the administration’s entire approach.
The Justice Department urged a judicial investigation into four other federal judges in Minnesota who spoke to The Times. The department requested that Judge Schiltz and Judge Tunheim be ordered to recuse themselves from matters involving the Department of Homeland Security.
In a statement on Wednesday, Judge Schiltz, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said he was “acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to The New York Times.” He cited an opinion issued this year by a judicial committee, advising that judges are allowed to speak and write on “core judiciary matters,” including the rule of law and judicial independence.
“That is exactly what I did,” he said.
Judge Tunheim, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, declined to comment.
Complaints about judicial misconduct are considered by other judges. The circuit’s chief judge can choose to dismiss the complaint or appoint a committee to investigate further. If an investigative committee is formed, that group can recommend that a judge be censured or impose other punishments.
In cases of extreme misconduct, the Judicial Council, the judiciary’s internal governing body, can refer a judge to Congress for impeachment. Ultimately, federal judges are appointed for life and can be ousted only by Congress.
Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who consults with judges on ethics questions, said he did not believe the judges had engaged in misconduct. The judges’ comments in the article, he added, “described breaches of professional obligations by government lawyers” and “appear to have been directed to matters within their purview as judges rather than broader policy questions.”
A spokesman for The Times said, “Reporting by The New York Times on concerns among federal judges about the conduct of the Justice Department highlights the importance of public officials stepping up to shed light on governmental actions.”
“Seeking to punish or silence those who speak up to journalists about any administration’s agenda undercuts democratic accountability and the public’s right to know,” added the spokesman, Charlie Stadtlander.
The complaint escalates the long-simmering clash between the Trump administration and the district’s bench, which began when federal immigration agents poured into the Twin Cities last winter. It was aggravated by the killing of two Americans by federal agents, and pressure from the Justice Department to issue a warrant for the arrest of Don Lemon, the former cable news anchor.
In January, Judge Schiltz compiled a list of nearly 100 court orders that he said the Trump administration had violated in its effort to sweep up and deport hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including some who had lived in the United States for years. The Minnesota court was inundated with petitions from detainees asking the court to review the legality of their detention. During the first three months of 2025, the court fielded two of those petitions. Over the same period in 2026, it received 1,116 of them.
The Eighth Circuit was one of the few appeals courts to eventually rule in favor of the administration on the legality of its indefinite detention policy. That ruling has been appealed to the Supreme Court.
This is not the first time that the administration has tried to wield the judiciary’s internal disciplinary process against judges who have issued unfavorable rulings. The Justice Department also filed an ethics complaint against Judge James E. Boasberg over comments it claimed he made at a private meeting of judges. That complaint was dismissed earlier this year.
On Wednesday, Mr. Blanche drew a distinction between the criticism leveled against his department by judges and the public criticism he has leveled against them. He noted that he is not a judge and not bound by judicial ethics.
He then seemed to acknowledge the Justice Department had in fact violated orders from the Minnesota judges but said the orders should not have been issued in the first place.
“I’m allowed to get really fired up when, for example, judges in Minnesota complain about us violating court orders but the reason why, that we are, quote, violating court orders is because these judges are violating Supreme Court law, OK, in allowing these cases to be filed,” he said, apparently referring to a case that clarifies which courts have jurisdiction to hear detention challenges.
After sharply criticizing the Minnesota judges on Wednesday, Mr. Blanche added that the department has “total respect for the judiciary. There’s not a prosecutor in this country that should ever, ever violate a court order.”
Last year, Mr. Blanche railed against what he called “rogue judges” who were unfair to the administration.
“It’s a war, man,” Mr. Blanche said at a public event with conservative lawyers. “They have a robe on, but they are more political or certainly as political as the most liberal governor,” he said, adding, “There’s a group of judges that are repeat players, and that’s obviously not by happenstance, that’s intentional.”
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Chuck Grassley and Far Right Propagandists Covering Up How Trump Defrauded MAGAts, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 30, 2026. In spite of the amusement we all had at Eric Schmitt’s considerable expense, yesterday’s Jack Smith hearing was a shitshow, not least because Democrats were grandstanding just as much as right wingers.
As a result, when a very feeble Chuck Grassley played his tired trick of generating outrage over something easily explained, Democrats rarely used their time to give Smith a chance to explain the bullshit right wingers were pretending to be outraged over.
There were three investigative prongs that have fairly obvious answers but which answers Democrats did not elicit from Smith:
Why Smith obtained a bunch of information on Trump’s fundraising (including the PAC fundraising he used to pay legal fees for witnesses who did not incriminate Trump), including checks from large and small donors alike.Why Smith collected information on all the GOP entities that that fundraising flowed into, instead of paying for what Trump said he had raised it for, election integrity.Why it is normal — boring even!! — that Smith obtained communications with journalists from the devices he exploited.
Far right propagandists, including everyone from the Federalist, John Solomon, Murdoch properties, and Washington Times squealed and squealed and squealed, as if collecting journalists’ request for comment from newsmakers about topics they were in the process of making public were some grave assault on the First Amendment.
This is not just performative outrage, but it’s a confession on the part of the far right propagandists of how stupid they are.
It has been public for years that investigators obtained communications involving journalists (indeed, that happens in virtually every investigation of a newsworthy person, including both Jim Comey investigations Solomon has been gleeful over). In fact I showed, in detail, how useful they were in this case three years ago, when I laid out how Josh Dawsey’s queries about the corrupt fundraising Trump was doing between the election and January 6 elicited discussions within the Trump campaign (and, presumably, the White House) about covering up how corrupt that fundraising was.
The fundraising aspect of Trump’s Big Lie has been accessible to investigators, even beyond the fact that there’s boatloads of financial evidence available with a subpoena, because reporters, including Josh Dawsey, were able to track Trump’s fundraising in real time back in 2020, and when they saw what he was doing, they asked the Director of Communications for Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, about it.
Dawsey wrote a story on December 1, 2020, over a month before the Big Lie led to an insurrection, reporting on this scam.
President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $170 million since Election Day, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions.
The influx of political donations is one reason that Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public relations blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden.
Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what is left of the legal fight.
[snip]
The donations are purportedly being solicited for the Official Election Defense Fund, whose name is featured prominently atop the Trump campaign’s website.
There is no such account, however. The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of Nov. 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and that he can use to fund his activities after the presidency.
The day after Dawsey wrote that story, a Trump supporter in Colfax, LA, donated $1,000 that they wanted used, “fighting for election [illegible]” (other of the hundreds of checks Grassley released yesterday even more specifically said they wanted their money spent on election integrity — though many were for the later period when the funds went directly to pay for friendly witnesses).
Back in 2020, Dawsey appears to have gotten no response from Murtaugh.
What happened with his inquiry instead — along with one Politico’s Maggie Severns sent on November 11 and a follow-up question CNN’s Jeremy Diamond sent on November 24, all among the 16 outlets listed by Grassley yesterday — is that Murtaugh, who could have no conceivable attorney client privilege, sent the query to Justin Clark, who otherwise would have attorney-client privilege, along with a bunch of other senior campaign officials, to ask whether they should “still ignore” press inquiries about the fundraising.
In the case of Dawsey’s email, they said things like this to each other:
On Nov 30, 2020, at 7:03 PM, Tim Murtaugh <
I side with no comment. He’s going to write about the split and if we say stuff about legal expenses it will serve to highlight the argument that the fundraising pitch is misleading.
From: Jason Miller <
To: Tim Murtaugh <
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL]$$$$$$
Fair points. Sean -what are the reporting deadlines for these respective entities -12/15? It will be tougher to dodge such answers after reporters can find it themselves.
[snip]
Re: [EXTERNAL]$$$$$$
We should talk tomorrow about whether to just announce this by press release like we would any other fundraising announcement. If we have the numbers we can discuss how the breakdown among entities needs to be messaged. Also key, as Jason pointed out, that POTUS is on board with how it will be described. [my emphasis]
In response to Dawsey’s query back on November 30, 2020, Murtaugh, Clark, Jason Miller, CFO Sean Dollman, and Campaign Manager Bill Stepien exchanged emails recognizing that the fundraising pitch they were using was misleading, strategizing how they were going to continue to distract journalists from the misleading aspect of their pitches after they had to disclose their fundraising, and noting that they were going to ask Trump if he was comfortable with them fluffing journalists on how they were misleading small donors.
And sure enough, it was misleading. That $1,000 from a Louisiana Trump supporter didn’t go to election integrity. It lined the pockets of, among other things, Melania’s favorite dress designer.
For example, from July 2021 to the present, Save America has been paying approximately $9,700 per month to Dan Scavino,171 a political adviser who served in the Trump administration as White House Deputy Chief of Staff.172 Save America was also paying $20,000 per month to an entity called Hudson Digital LLC. Hudson Digital LLC was registered in Delaware twenty days after the attack on the Capitol, on January 26, 2021,173 and began receiving payments from Save America on the day it was registered.174 Hudson Digital LLC has received payments totaling over $420,000, all described as “Digital consulting.”175 No website or any other information or mention of Hudson Digital LLC could be found online.176 Though Hudson Digital LLC is registered as a Delaware company, the FEC ScheduleB listing traces back to an address belonging to Dan and Catherine Scavino.177
[snip]
Through October 2022, Save America has paid nearly $100,000 in “strategy consulting” payments to Herve Pierre Braillard,195 a fashion designer who has been dressing Melania Trump for years.196
[snip]
From January 2021 to June 2022, Save America has also reported over $2.1 million in “legal consulting.” Many firms perform different kinds of practice, but more than 67% of those funds went to law firms that are representing witnesses involved in the Select Committee’s investigation whowere subpoenaed or invited to testify.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, She Says Vaccines Killed Her Twins. The Authorities Say She Did, Lisa Miller, Sept. 30, 2026. Andrea Shaw has spent most of the summer alone in a cell in Payette, Idaho, taking comfort from photos of her family, according to her lawyer. Her twins were 18 months old when they died, in May 2025, and her living daughter is three months old.
She can talk to her husband, Nate, and the baby only by phone or video chat, which she does several times a day. As she waits for her lawyer to drive up from Boise, she reads inspirational books such as “Tuesdays with Morrie.”
Shaw, 23, is charged with the smothering murder of the twins — Tyson, a boy, and Dallas, a girl — in the middle of the night, in the bed that they shared. At trial, scheduled for January, evidence will show that “the only conceivable explanation” for their deaths is that she suffocated them, the Payette County prosecutor Mike Duke wrote in a court filing. Shaw has pleaded not guilty.
Joe Filicetti, Shaw’s lawyer, describes Shaw as “sweet.” In court, in her red-and-white striped uniform, she mostly comes across as young. The Shaw case, grim as it is, might have been a purely local story except for the extraordinary attention it has received from the captains of the nation’s vaccine-skeptical movement. Three days after their twins died, Andrea and Nate Shaw appeared on a video podcast produced by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Looking stricken, the couple told their version of events. The twins had been preemies, Shaw said, and had required intensive medical care. She inoculated them on the recommended schedule without ill effects. But in April 2025, after receiving the D-tap, flu and hepatitis A shots, the toddlers got sick, and when she sought help, clinicians repeatedly dismissed her concerns, she said.
“I wish I was anti-vaccine now,” Shaw concluded, with a wry chuckle.
New York Times, Court Pauses Execution of Tennessee’s Lone Woman on Death Row, Emily Cochrane, Sept. 30, 2026. Christa Pike tortured and murdered a classmate in 1995. She had been set to die on Wednesday, the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
A federal court on Wednesday ordered a pause on the execution of Christa Pike, convicted of the murder of a classmate in 1995, just hours before she was set to die by lethal injection in Nashville.
Ms. Pike, 50, would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. But her lawyers mounted a fierce last-ditch campaign to stop the execution, arguing that her defense at her initial trial had failed to consider her history of child sexual abuse and neglect.
The ruling came after the Supreme Court on Tuesday had declined to intervene in the execution. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, also denied a request to allow Ms. Pike to serve out the remainder of her life in prison.
The office of Jonathan Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, quickly appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court after Wednesday’s ruling, calling it a “technical issue” and vowing to “advocate for the lawfully-imposed sentence.”
Tennessee’s “strong interest in finality and the surviving victims’ right to closure require rejection,” the state wrote in its filing.
The execution had been scheduled for 10 a.m. in Nashville.
Reporters and witnesses had gathered Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. There were white and purple mums on display outside, near large posters of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year-old student Ms. Pike and two others tortured and killed in 1995. Ms. Slemmer’s family, steadfast in their support of the execution over three decades, had cobbled together the money needed to drive from their Florida home.
But on Wednesday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said the pause was necessary to consider the new arguments from Ms. Pike’s legal team and the state’s response.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments,” Judge Jane B. Stranch wrote, joined by Judge Karen Moore.
More On Artificial Intelligence, U.S. Markets
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: One More Reason Americans Hate AI: It Does Nothing for Them, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 30, 2026. Trillions of dollars in spending, higher interest rates, hardly any jobs.
One unifying dynamic in America today: Americans really, really hate AI.
What began as a form of NIMBYism — no one wants a data center in their neighborhood — has broadened into severe doubts about the technology as a whole. For those of us who remember the giddy optimism that greeted the tech boom of the 1990s, the widespread negativity towards AI is astonishing. Here are the results of a new Wall Street Journal poll:
Only 28 percent of Americans believe that AI technology should move full speed ahead. Everyone else wants it slowed down or stopped, temporarily or permanently.
Of course, Donald Trump remains a huge booster. He believes that the public’s antipathy towards AI is just a marketing problem — and that he can solve that problem by forcing everyone to call it “super intelligence”. But the Journal poll also says that only 7 percent of Americans trust Trump’s leadership in regulating AI. Given Trump’s abysmal approval ratings, his advocacy of AI — err, super intelligence — probably taints the technology even further in the eyes of Americans.
Historically, Americans have been technology enthusiasts. As a nation, we’re not Luddites. So what explains Americans’ dislike of AI?
Obviously, there are near-daily prominent warnings that AI will destroy the human race or, failing that, destroy everyone’s job. And these warnings aren’t coming from left-wing cranks — they’re coming from the AI industry itself.
And we should be afraid – very afraid. The power of AI models to hack into supposedly secure systems — and to do so on their own, without prompting and against their owners’ intentions, and to lie to the humans about it — is truly shocking. Moreover, there is surely an element of financially motivated hype: “Our technology is so powerful that it can destroy the world, so you’d better invest in our IPO.” And there is more than a little bit of karma here: the race by the AI giants to reach the holy grail of AGI – artificial general intelligence – was surely a strategy to make vast riches from Wall Street, in contrast to the much more modest (and probably more successful) Chinese strategy of building modest, cost-effective models.
There is also, however, a more prosaic reasons for the public’s dislike of AI: This is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans.
Or to put it a different way, never before in history have corporations spent so much money — playing a major role in soaring interest rates — to create so few jobs.
Data centers themselves are basically banks of blinking servers that employ hardly any workers. Here’s data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a category that includes data centers as well as a number of other activities. Employment in that category has declined since Nov. 2022, often cited as the start of the AI boom because it’s the month ChatGPT was released to the public:
Still, won’t the AI boom at least temporarily create a lot of construction jobs? It will create some, and Jared Bernstein has a good post on how to ensure that these are good jobs. But all indications are that AI investment will create far fewer jobs, even in construction, than expected.
Bear in mind that we are talking about a truly huge investment boom. In Sunday’s primer I cited estimates by Stijn van Nieuwerburgh suggesting that we’re entering by far the biggest capital-expenditure boom in U.S. history, dwarfing even the huge railroad boom that followed the Civil War:
These are projections rather than spending that has already happened. But the AI investment boom is already well underway. Here’s IT investment as a percentage of GDP, which really took off in late 2024 and is already well above its level during the 1990s tech boom:
Given this spending surge, one should expect a sharp rise in nonresidential construction spending — basically construction for businesses rather than housing.
But that’s not what we actually see. Nonresidential construction rose rapidly during the Biden years, largely thanks to that administration’s promotion of clean energy. But nonresidential construction has basically flatlined under Trump, despite the immense AI investment boom:
How is this possible? Because even the physical construction of a data center involves relatively little construction. According to Van Nieuwerburgh, when a multi-billion-dollar AI training campus is built,
About one-third [of the investment spending] reflects the facility and power infrastructure, while roughly two-thirds consists of compute hardware and related IT systems.
So not a lot of conventional construction. And most of the “compute hardware” etc. is imported!
Overall, then, the deep unpopularity of AI isn’t hard to explain. Here we have a technology that is enriching a small number of people, but whose creators warn may destroy millions of jobs if not the world. And even the usual argument for pro-oligarch policies — job creation! — falls flat because hardly any jobs are being created even in the short run.
Will AI’s unpopularity matter? Indicators are that it will. So many things are going wrong for Republicans right now that it’s hard to single out any one issue, but Chris Caldwell has an interesting recent article arguing that the deep unpopularity of data centers may be the tipping point that turns Ohio blue this year, possibly deciding control of the Senate.
Thus there are good reasons, even beyond possible apocalypse, for the public backlash against AI. And that backlash is so strong, and has emerged so quickly, that it may have important political consequences.
Isn’t that super?
New York Times, F.T.C. Investigates OpenAI and Anthropic Over Potential Consumer Harms, David McCabe, Sept. 30, 2026. The agency will examine whether A.I. labs have broken federal laws prohibiting companies from unfair and deceptive practices.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened a broad investigation into whether OpenAI, Anthropic and other artificial intelligence companies have hurt consumers, a person with knowledge of the inquiry said Wednesday, amid growing scrutiny of the technology’s dangers.
The F.T.C. will examine whether the companies have broken federal laws prohibiting companies from unfair and deceptive practices, and is likely to look at potential consumer harm from rogue A.I. systems, the person said. Other violations of those laws can include abusing consumer data or misleading the public about a product’s capabilities.
The agency plans to send formal demands for information to the companies, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential investigation. The F.T.C. also intends to seek testimony from top executives at the companies.
The F.T.C.’s investigation is accelerating as A.I. developers have proved unable to stop their tools from escaping their control and hacking or meddling with other companies and even some government websites. This summer, OpenAI disclosed that its A.I. systems had hacked Hugging Face, another tech company. That revelation was followed by similar disclosures from other A.I. firms, including Anthropic.
The F.T.C. took early steps in its investigation before OpenAI’s July disclosure of the Hugging Face attack, according to the person with knowledge of the inquiry.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: AI Is a Test. Our Country Is Failing, William Kristol, right, Sept. 30, 2026. President Trump was so, so excited to host the world’s most powerful technology executives at lunch yesterday at the White House.
He posted the luncheon’s seating chart on social media. He had some of them dutifully stand behind him in the White House driveway for a follow-up press availability. He was ebullient:
And in a rare compliment not to himself but to others, he called the assembled billionaires “very brilliant.”
So they probably are.
But you don’t have to be very brilliant, you just need to have some common sense, to grasp some elementary facts:
Scientific and technological knowledge can be used for good and for ill.
A basic task of government is to create guardrails and regulations that seek to ensure, as best we can, that the progress of such knowledge doesn’t endanger but rather benefits us.
When dealing with new and not-fully-understood technological progress that is developing at an accelerating pace, it’s good to act prudently and responsibly.
President Trump is, to a truly extraordinary degree, ignoring these self-evident truths. He’s shaping administration policy about artificial intelligence in a way that simply refuses to deal with the real and urgent questions about how AI should be regulated.
And so yesterday’s White House gathering resulted in a vague, voluntary, and non-binding and non-enforceable agreement to commit to safety policies the companies had already committed to during the Biden administration, and that they’ve claimed to be already following.
But Trump did announce one new policy:
We’ve changed the name, officially, today. We’ve changed the name officially to SI. SI instead of AI . . . You know what that means? ‘Super.’ That’s quite an announcement.
Actually, as an announcement, it’s not just laughable. It’s pathetic. One might say super pathetic.
After all, recent months have featured a wide range of news reports about AI spinning out of control.
And less than three weeks ago, we had a thoughtful and sober warning from one of those “very brilliant” men who attended yesterday’s White House lunch. Here’s a reminder of what Anthropic’s Dario Amodei had to say:
Like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. . . . They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. . . .
Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.
And other tech leaders have been issuing very compelling warnings. I recommend this essay by Bill Gates and especially his recent interview with Ezra Klein, in which Gates explains that even before we reach the looming problem of controlling recursive self-improvement, we face an “imminent risk.”
“These are the most powerful tools ever,” Gates says, and our government “doesn’t see how dangerous these things are.” So we are doing nothing to create the “supervisory layer” or regulatory structure that “is needed urgently to prevent bad people from using today’s A.I.s to shut down economies or kill millions of people.”
It’s pretty amazing that Trump and his administration are simply refusing to pay attention to the alarm bells going off in the real world, or to heed the warnings coming from knowledgeable people. It’s almost an unprecedented level of irresponsibility at a historic moment from the executive branch of the federal government.
The Trump administration seems hopeless. But the American public has responded sensibly, and favors government regulation and a pause in frontier AI work. What about our leaders outside the executive branch? Will Congress, business, and civil society step up? We face an urgent and momentous challenge. It’s a real national test. So far we’re failing it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Things Are Going So Badly for Trump… Even JVL has hope on the latest edition of The Next Level.Quick Hits
A REPRIEVE FOR SALVADORANS?: The White House is currently hard at work uprooting the Haitian immigrants who have lived here for years under temporary protected status, canceling their protection this year and deporting hundreds back to Haiti. This month, the Department of Homeland Security was about to end legal status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, too—until, surprisingly, the administration hit the brakes. Politico reports:
The program had been set to end three weeks ago if it wasn’t extended—so far the administration has punted that decision. DHS and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had cleared a termination notice to be published in the Federal Register, and the abrupt halt from the White House took some inside DHS by surprise, according to an administration official and three other people close to the administration.
“It just came down from the White House,” said Mark Krikorian who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that favors restrictions on legal immigration and greater immigration enforcement. “They may just be thinking, let’s make this go away for six months until after the election, not because it’s going to have any direct effect on the election. They just don’t want the news stories about this.”
There’s another possible reason too: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, of CECOT torture dungeon fame, has petitioned the White House not to kick his nationals out. Politico notes that “the cash Salvadoran immigrants send back home is crucial for the nation’s economy.”
THIRD COUNTRIES: One of the cruelest components of Trump’s mass-deportation agenda has been so-called “third-country deportations”—the shipping of migrants to countries with which they have no ties. That policy had been temporarily blocked by federal courts. But yesterday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume the deportations for now, while teeing up further consideration of the case next term. Here’s the New York Times:
James Percival, the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the court’s ruling. In a statement, he called it a “victory.”
“A bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike,” he said. “It’s not too late to get $3,000 and a flight home.” He ended his statement with a link to department instructions for immigrants on how to self-deport.
Trina A. Realmuto, a lawyer for the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and part of the team representing the immigrants, called the emergency decision “a devastating result.” The court, she said in a statement, “has allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they face persecution or torture.”
But she pointed out that the court had agreed to hear full argument in December, saying that Tuesday’s decision “does not decide that the policy is lawful.”
How the Supreme Court will finally rule on the case remains to be seen. But the fact that the case remains ongoing is cold comfort for those who may now be shipped anywhere the White House wishes.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: In the “Unites States” of “Super Intelligence,” “Issues Are Remediated,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right),Sept. 30, 2026. As many people before me have pointed out, once you notice that the signature page for Trump’s “morally binding” agreement on AI safety spells “United States” “Unites States,” the entire charade becomes more ominous than it already was.
Over the course of the day yesterday, Trump first posted a seating chart showing himself surrounded by some of the most powerful (and/or perhaps fraudulent) men in the world, then had lunch with them, then had them sign a non-binding and totally inadequate document (only the signatures of the most powerful men appeared on the same page as Trump’s), then signed an Executive Order (which binds the US government) renaming AI “Super Intelligence.”
This was elder care masquerading as world-saving policy, stringing together some of Trump’s favorite activities — proximity to power, document signings, and arbitrary renamings — for an entire day. I found myself wondering (since he’s not on the seating chart) what was Stephen Miller doing while he had the richest men in history babysitting his ward?
The agreement itself is totally inadequate fluff, like something McKinsey might dream up with no mechanism to ensure it works.
In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.
This starts with every company that is training and deploying frontier models having robust internal processes and controls to ensure that their technology behaves as intended and that any issues are promptly identified and resolved. Therefore, in addition to any other precautions, we believe each company should implement the following four layers of controls and audits:
Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated.Partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended.Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues identified are remediated.
Together, these steps will give each company, its customers, and the public confidence that the technology is operating as intended.
The participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems.
Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations. Regardless of whether this is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are committed to doing this. [my pink emphasis]
Underneath all the bullet points and active verbs, this agreement is designed to be useless, for two main reasons. First, it only requires AI to operate “as intended;” (and the parallel structure in bullet 1 would envision hacks so long as they do what they are intended to do). The self-imagined Masters of the Universe who signed it don’t have to provide assurances about their intentions, which are mostly malign.
In addition, the single thing that such documents must do is assign accountability for implementing it — naming the person who will go to jail for hacks that do not function as intended. This does not. Bullet 2 “empowers” an internal team to ensure that “any issues identified are remediated,” but it doesn’t say that that internal team (or anyone else) has to do the remediation. Bullet 4 requires a committee on the board that will “receive reports” and “ensure any issues identified are remediated.” But it doesn’t hold them accountable for remediating those issues themselves. The passive voice lurks where it is most dangerous, where someone is accountable for remediating the things that go wrong.
But even if the document weren’t so inadequate and the official renaming so pathetic, there is no one left inside the Oval Office with the self-respect or competence to spell “United States” correctly. There is no one inside the Oval Office who gave a rat’s ass to make this propaganda at least look serious.
This was not a commitment to make AI safe for humanity. Rather, it was a commitment to collectively tell the public that the Masters of the Universe can take care of this themselves, without regulation.
And even the propaganda was too slovenly to get basic details right.
New York Times, Hedge Fund’s Near Collapse Lays Bare Risks of Borrowing to Bet on A.I., Matthew Goldstein and Rob Copeland, Sept. 30, 2026. A meltdown at Situational Awareness, an A.I.-focused investment firm, is raising tough questions about the Wall Street banks that lent billions to the upstart firm.
There were, in retrospect, more than a few details about Situational Awareness that might have given a savvy Wall Street lender pause.
The eight-person hedge fund was led by a 24-year-old without a whiff of trading experience. Few people were assigned to monitor investment risk at the fund, which had been created only in 2024, and the chief compliance officer at the time split his time between his apartment in Reno, Nev., and the headquarters in San Francisco, according to regulatory filings and people briefed on the matter.
Yet none of that stopped Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, from lending the hedge fund tens of billions of dollars. That allowed it to build a giant one-way bet on artificial intelligence stocks that imploded over the summer in spectacular fashion when some of its investments suffered steep declines.
Situational Awareness survived by finding a buyer for much of its stocks so it could pay back its lenders. But regulators say the firm’s near collapse revealed a vulnerability still lurking in the market: the perils of banks’ lending lavishly to big investors.
The amount of borrowed money, or what’s known as leverage, in the stock market has never been larger, or grown faster. As of midyear, hedge funds had borrowed nearly $3.7 trillion from banks, the highest amount in more than a decade, according to the Treasury Department, and more than triple what it was just six years ago at the start of the pandemic. Though some bank financing has been used for shorts — investments that pay off when markets fall — most of it has been used to wager that stocks will go ever higher.
Leverage increases the buying power of an investment fund and allows it to add to the money raised from investors. That has helped propel the S&P 500 to 27 record closing highs this year, and a 158 percent gain, including dividends, since 2020.
In a market where many investors have made bets with large amounts of borrowed money, an episode of forced selling can have a domino effect driving down stocks broadly.
“A confident genius with a lot of leeway from his investors, and leverage from his counterparties, can be one of the most dangerous things in finance,” said Tyler Gellasch, president of Healthy Markets Association, which advocates for greater transparency.
In good times, borrowing by hedge funds can supersize investment gains when markets are rising — generating hefty returns for investors and fat fees for the banks. But all the borrowing can have the opposite effect when markets turn.
Banks typically require traders to swiftly pay back their loans once they start experiencing significant losses. To come up with that cash, investors are often forced to sell off their stock investments, which is what happened to Situational Awareness. The firm sold about $20 billion worth of stocks to a rival hedge fund, Kenneth Griffin’s Citadel, at a discount. The market quickly dived, then recovered.
But the regulators now have their eyes on the broader dangers involved.
Frank Smets, head of economic analysis and statistics for the Bank for International Settlements, which helps coordinate the efforts of the world’s central banks, told reporters this month that the near failure of an “A.I.-focused hedge fund served as another reminder of these risks.” The primary risk being that highly leveraged hedge funds would be forced to quickly dump stocks and incite a mass sell-off.
When Situational Awareness began operations in summer 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner, its founder, had never so much as interned at an investment firm.
A German native who had graduated from Columbia University, he gained a measure of fame when OpenAI fired him for reportedly sharing company secrets. Two months later, he wrote an essay in which he mused about raising a fund to capitalize on what he foresaw as the inevitable evolution and power of A.I.
Of the firm’s eight employees, only four worked on managing its investments, a regulatory filing shows. Other than the firm’s compliance officer at the time, the fund did not have a team solely focused on managing investment risk, said two people briefed on the fund’s operations but not permitted to discuss them publicly. Given the billions of dollars in investor money the firm managed, the people said it was unusual to have so few employees monitoring compliance and risk.
In June, a month before the roof fell in, the fund replaced the compliance officer with the general counsel for a hedge fund affiliated with Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm.
Despite these growing pains, Situational Awareness had gone looking for loans from Wall Street at an opportune time.
This spring and early summer, fees generated by banks’ prime brokerage units — which lend primarily to hedge funds — were a major driver of the industry’s record profits. Revenue in so-called equity financing, the bank divisions that house prime brokerage, in the second quarter soared as much as 91 percent at Goldman Sachs, for example.
On some particularly risky trades, Situational Awareness had been paying banks a larger-than-normal spread, or premium over the base line interest rates banks charge — according to one banker involved in the transactions but not permitted to discuss their terms. That amounted to lucrative fees for the lenders.
Emboldened to borrow even more, the firm’s executives asked several lenders to increase leverage from four times the amount of money it has collected from investors to 10 times, according to the banker.
Within weeks of the sell-off at Situational Awareness, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the firm and sent subpoenas to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi and JPMorgan Chase seeking information about trades they financed. Those banks and the S.E.C. have declined to comment on the questioning, and it’s not guaranteed that the investigation will produce accusations of wrongdoing.
Mr. Aschenbrenner declined through a spokesman to be interviewed. Last month, when The New York Times first reported on the subpoenas, the spokesman pledged that the fund would “cooperate to the fullest extent with any regulatory request.”
To help measure systemic risk in the financial industry, hedge funds are required to provide securities regulators with information about their overall borrowing levels. It was part of regulatory package that emerged from the 2008 financial crisis. This year, the S.E.C. and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposed easing some of those rules.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement that the proposal by the Trump administration and the S.E.C. “would make these already shadowy markets even more opaque, creating blind spots for financial regulators that could harm their ability to respond after major market events.”
To some degree, the system worked in the case of Situational Awareness. The losses to the banks appear to have been minimal, largely because Citadel stepped in to buy up assets from Situational Awareness, providing it with the cash to pay back lenders.
Not long after Situational Awareness’s meltdown, JPMorgan all but cut off the firm from borrowing, two people briefed on the relationship said. Talks with Morgan Stanley to provide billions of dollars in additional borrowing fell apart for a spell, but have resumed. Other Wall Street banks are still lending to the hedge fund.
Wealthy investors, who have some $10 billion riding on Situational Awareness, appear to be sticking with the hedge fund. After the summer swoon, the price of A.I. stocks rebounded even though a flurry of A.I. executives called for regulation to slow down advances in the technology. Situational Awareness still holds a valuable stake in Anthropic, the big A.I. firm that is poised to go public in November.
Situational Awareness has significantly increased its hiring and now has 25 employees, including three working on compliance matters, a firm representative said.
If it appears the firm has learned lessons, Mr. Gellasch of the Healthy Markets Association said Wall Street needed to learn some, too.
“Compliance officers and regulators will likely spend years asking how the risks grew so quickly,” he said.
Sept. 29
Top Headlines
Sept. 29, 2026. Jack Smith (above) has finally gotten his wish and is publicly testifying about his investigation and charges against Donald Trump. Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are on a mission to rewrite the history of the 1/6 attack and turn the criminal investigation of Trump into a vast conspiracy theory that it was a political prosecution. 
Sept. 29, 2026. Today, formerspecial counsel Jack Smith, who led criminal investigations into President Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, testifiesbefore the Senate Judiciary Committee.There’s never been a better time. Senate Republicans only have a few work days left before the November midterms, but fear not: They’re still hard at work on the president’s priorities. This morning, for instance, the JudiciaryCommittee is hauling in former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw several criminal investigations into Donald Trump, in the hope of finding some pretext for charging him with crimes. Happy Tuesday.America's High-Tech Rulers
President Trump hugs the world's richest man, the ultra-right Trump funder, election-architect, high-tech executive and federal contractor Elon Musk, an immigrant from South Africa who moved to the United States as the racist white-run apartheid political-police control system ended there (file photo via Politico).
Sept. 29, 2026. Fear, writes Jacob Weisberg, is the great enemy of democracy. Authoritarianism, he reminds us, takes roots not by destroying institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission. In his new book, “Profiles in Cowardice,” he focuses on eight key figures —driven by fear, ambition, or self-preservation— who are emblematic of what he the “Great Capitulation” to Trump 2.0. It’s a familiar list, with a couple of twists:More On Middle East Wars
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Has Trotted Out the Old Republican “Chicken in Every Pot” Scam Again: Who Will Fall For It This Time? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 29, 2026. From Harding’s trickle-down promises to Hoover’s prosperity pitch to Reagan’s tax cut hustle to Trump’s factory announcements, Republicans have a long history of pushing scams before Election Day…Sept. 29, 2026. ‘Heir Apparent’ or Ballot Box Poison?🚨 35 Days to the Midterms 🚨 The last job you should hold if you want to be president turns out to be the vice presidency.News Roundups
The President struggled to remain awake during an Oval Office meeting today (as shown above in a screenshot by Aaron Ruper). During the same meeting, he called Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.”
Sept. 28, 2026. Texas Republicans are staring down a reckoning of their own making today, from a Senate nominee even Karl Rove says would have lost to John Cornyn, to a Railroad Commission candidate whose calls for public executions just resurfaced weeks before the election, to Latino voters who carried Trump in 2024 telling us flat out they’re done with him. It’s the kind of collapse that has strategists in both parties treating a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in three decades as genuinely in play.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Sept. 29, 2026. Our Will Saletan has a great article this morning breaking down Donald Trump’s latest outrageous act: filling America’s airwaves with self-glorifying ads on the taxpayers’ dime. The White House has spent $1.7 million so far from some undisclosed pot of government moneyon such “public service announcements,” which feature Trump looking awesome and bragging about defeating “communism, socialism, and Marxism,” about presiding over “the golden age of America,” about defeating “globalists,” “warmongers,” “the fake news media,” “the deep state,” “the sick political class that hates our country,” and so on.It’s pure MAGA propaganda. It’s blatantly illegal. And it’s right there in public, being beamed out to an audience of millions.More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice
New York Times, Couple Accused of Killing Their Son-in-Law in Bay Area Park, Soumya Karlamangla and Amy Qin, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). Jonathan McKinsey, right, an engineer who worked in the games department for The New York Times, was fatally shot Saturday in a San Francisco suburb. The police have accused his parents-in-law, both 76.
After outrage over allegations in a lawsuit, the Tompkins County district attorney will revisit the decision not to pursue criminal charges against seven fraternity members.More On U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Rights
Israeli-Palestine Struggle: The Political and Cultural Wars
Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). If you’ve heard anything about “NAZA,” the new documentary about the 
war in Gaza, it might be that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so outraged by itthat he has proposed legislation that would revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. So you could assume that the film, which has not yet been released, is about him. Or maybe that it’s about the suffering of Palestinians, with lots of images of bloody corpses, weeping children and hungry families.
A report issued by Mayor Zohran Mamdani describes ways that New York City is funding hate crime prevention and celebrating the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers. After months of tension with some Jewish leaders in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday released a report on antisemitism in New York City, laying out ways to combat hate crimes against Jews while sidestepping any politically fraught discussion of Israel.More Global News
Top Stories
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Analysis: Jack Smith Testifies That Trump Committed Serious Crimes Against The Nation, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Jack Smith (above) has finally gotten his wish and is publicly testifying about his investigation and charges againstDonald Trump. Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are on a mission to rewrite the history of the 1/6 attack and turn the criminal investigation of Trump into a vast conspiracy theory that it was a political prosecution.
In essence, the Democratic members of the committee are trying to discuss Smith’s investigation, while the Republicans are trying to reframe it by creating a fictional narrative.
In his opening statement, former Special Counsel Smith debunked the Republican narrative that he is a partisan who was out to get Trump.
Smith said:
I've been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings. My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalty. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles upon which our country was founded. I believe there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor's decisions must be based on the facts and the law.
Smith wasted no time getting into the Trump investigation.Donald Trump “Committed Serious Crimes”
Smith explained how he approached his job, “The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in the decision to investigate, prosecute, or decline to prosecute. I approach my role as special counsel following these principles. The special counsel's office followed Justice Department policy, observed legal requirements, and took actions based on the facts and the law.”
Video: The former Special Counsel said that the investigation found that Trump committed serious crimes against the nation:
I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump. I made those decisions without regard to President Trump's political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence.
Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.
After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Social Club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place. As with my appearance before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, I am prepared to answer your questions truthfully. I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives.
Because Trump Judge Aileen Cannon has refused to release part two of Smith’s report on the classified documents case, the former Special Counsel is not allowed to discuss what his investigation found beyond what is already in the public record.
Senate Republicans are faced with the prospect of losing their majority in a little more than a month, and they are spending time attempting to whitewash Trump’s legacy of alleged crimes.
All of the evidence will be released someday, but for now, Jack Smith is a reminder that a convicted felon is running the United States into the ground at the worst possible time for Republicans.
Former U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith is sworn in by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa for testimony before the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 29, 2026 (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston).
New York Times, Updates: Jack Smith, Who Charged Trump, Faced Another Grilling Before Congress, Devlin Barrett and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 29, 2026. The former special counsel is appearing before Republicans who have pressed for him to be criminally prosecuted. His appearance is the latest public clash over the use of prosecutorial power in American politics. Here’s the latest.
Jack Smith, who as special counsel twice charged Donald J. Trump with criminal offenses after his first term, is appearing before members of Congress on Tuesday as Republicans vow to scrutinize his every word for possible prosecution. Republican lawmakers have urged that Mr. Smith face charges, claiming his answers about his investigations into Mr. Trump were misleading.
Mr. Smith defended his actions in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying Mr. Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2024 election and unlawfully retained classified documents after leaving office. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others,” he said.
Smith pivoted to critiquing the current Justice Department under Trump for attempting to prosecute people the president does not like: “History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions in the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January of 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort including the vilification of the agents, prosecutors and staff who worked on my team simply because of their unwavering dedication to the rule of law. I myself have been threatened with jail by the president of the United States.”
Jack Smith is now reading his opening statement. He describes his investigation as nonpartisan and says he stands by his decision to bring criminal charges against Trump based on the evidence Trump committed crimes, and Smith says he would bring those charges again against an ex-president based on the same evidence regardless of party.
The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, pushed back against Republican criticism of Jack Smith by describing some of the public evidence against President Trump, like his phone call pressuring Georgia officials over the 2020 election results and his “showing off” classified documents he kept in his home.
Durbin called Republican criticism of Smith “petty, personal and political,” arguing they are “nothing but a smokescreen to distract from the president’s own clear unlawful conduct.”
Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is gluing together different fragments of different investigative activity that spun off from President Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Grassley is twisting basic facts to weave them together to show what he believes was malicious intent. For instance, “Rampart Twelve” was the look at public allegations that several Republican members of Congress, like Representative Lauren Boebert, had given tours to future participants in the riot, and whether those were reconnaissance. Investigators did not find evidence to prove those suspicions and closed the case.
Grassley called that a predecessor to Arctic Frost, the case looking at the Trump campaign’s fraudulent electors scheme. That’s true only insofar as it came earlier in time.
The New Republic, The Morning Line: Here's What's Happening, Michael Tomasky, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Today, formerspecial counsel Jack Smith, who led criminal investigations into President Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, testifiesbefore the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Smith testified before the House back in January. House Republicans sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said in July that the department was investigating Smith. Republicans want him indicted for … something. We’ll be watching to see how the committee’s Democrats push back.
IS THIS A GOOD LOOK?: Also today, Big Tech execs are headed to the White House to have lunch with Donald Trump and Mike Johnson. Expected to attend: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. In other words, some of the least popular men in America right now. Trump calls AI fears a "hoax." Johnson yesterday called AI worries a "Chinese psyop." Meanwhile, a poll shows 63 percent of Americans have at least a moderate fear that AI will destroy the human race.
HOPE YOU’RE STOCKED UP ON CROWN ROYAL: The import ban on many Canadian products, including liquor, kicked in at 12:01 a.m. this morning. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said last week that "we’re still getting what we need from them, in terms of oil, gas, potash." Donald Trump, famous for his predictions, said Canada would come crawling back to cut a deal over "the next three or four weeks."
72 DAYS: Colorado Representative Joe Neguese was on Chris Hayes’s show last night pointing out that the House of Representatives has been in session for a grand total of 72 days this year. "Twenty-six percent of the time," he said. "Unconscionable." Hayes joked that the coup de grâce would be Mike Johnson bringing the House back to pass the college sports bill. Johnson, of course, has called this Congress "the most productive Congress in 80 years." Snopes.com said: "False."
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Impeach Him Again, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 29, 2026. There’s never been a better time.
Senate Republicans only have a few work days left before the November midterms, but fear not: They’re still hard at work on the president’s priorities. This morning, for instance, the Judiciary Committee is hauling in former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw several criminal investigations into Donald Trump, in the hope of finding some pretext for charging him with crimes.
“I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others,” Smith plans to tell the committee, according to his prepared remarks. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.” Happy Tuesday.
America's High-Tech Rulers
President Trump hugs the world's richest man, the ultra-right Trump funder, election-architect, high-tech executive and federal contractor Elon Musk, an immigrant from South Africa who moved to the United States as the racist white-run apartheid political-police control system ended there (file photo via Politico).
To the Contrary, Opinion: Profiles in Cowardice: The Story of Eight Trump-era Quislings, Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Fear, writes Jacob Weisberg, is the great enemy of democracy.
Authoritarianism, he reminds us, takes roots not by destroying institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission.
In his new book, “Profiles in Cowardice,” he focuses on eight key figures —driven by fear, ambition, or self-preservation— who are emblematic of what he the “Great Capitulation” to Trump 2.0. It’s a familiar list, with a couple of twists:
George W. Bush - who can’t bring himself say Trump’s name.Here’s how the NYT review of Weisberg’s book begins:
Say what you like about President Trump, he has ushered in a golden age of cravenness.
A nation long perceived, not least by its own nationals, as resilient and courageous — a people of gallant pioneers, fearless entrepreneurs, irresistible war heroes, nerveless astronauts, brave civil rights activists — is now forced to contemplate an entirely new set of data. It seems that, when placed under mild authoritarian pressure, an extraordinary number of powerful Americans, ostensibly honorable and right-thinking, quickly revealed themselves to be cowardly and unprincipled and made of the wrong stuff.
The journalist Jacob Weisberg is one of the first to attempt to chronicle this new landscape.
And Weisberg joins me on today’s podcast…Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed
A profile in courage: “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.” — Former Special Counsel Jack Smith to the Senate Judiciary Committee, this morning.
Pope Leo (shown this month greeting one of the Special Olympians he hosted at The Vatican) (Vatican media).
“Pope Leo says artificial intelligence safety concerns should be taken seriously” | AP News
Pope Leo XIV said Monday that concerns about artificial intelligence going rogue are not “fake news” and should be taken seriously, insisting that safety issues raised by AI experts should be discussed and acted on.
Leo, who dedicated his first encyclical to AI and protecting humanity in its wake, was asked during a press conference about what the United States and China especially should be doing to prevent AI from posing catastrophic risks to humanity. U.S. President Donald Trump has called concerns about AI going rogue a “hoax.”
“This is a problem that, I think, we need to sit down and talk about,” the American pope told reporters returning home from France. “We can’t just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen.”
Special Report: 'Disgrace and Danger' from FBI Chief?
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Doomsday Scenario, Investigative Commentary: The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel, Part II, Garrett M. Graff, above, Sept. 29, 2026. A quick check-in on the FBI director's latest raft of scandals (including, of course, the bestiality). Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.” The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series. None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.Special Report: Smith Hearing 'Complete Disaster' for Republicans?
Sept. 29, 2026. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), above left, tried to claim that Jack Smith, above right, went to a Atlanta Hawks game and met with Fani Willis to push a Trump conspiracy, but Schmidt had everything wrong.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Israeli Settler Attack in West Bank Blocks Palestinian Family From Returning Home, Natan Odenheimer and Fatima Abdul Karim, Sept. 29, 2026 The Supreme Court ordered the military to ensure a family that fled after repeated attacks could go back. But settlers prevented the efforts, stoking criticism of Israeli policy in the territory.
More than 100 Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and soldiers in the West Bank when the military tried to return a Palestinian family to their home months after they were forced out following a long campaign of violence.
The clashes overnight Monday occurred as the Israeli military and police have been accused of failing to protect Palestinians in the occupied territory, with a surge of settler attacks resulting in few arrests.
In the latest outburst of violence, the settlers set fire to Palestinian homes and wounded three Israeli border police officers when the soldiers tried to return the family, the Toubassis, to their home in the village of Jalud, north of the city of Ramallah, the military said in a statement. Three people were arrested, according to the Israeli police, who said in a statement that they had opened an investigation into the attack.
New York Times, Mideast Oil Exports Rebound Even as Prices Remain Elevated, Peter Eavis, Sept. 29, 2026. More tankers are moving through the Strait of Hormuz as shippers gain confidence, but the global supply of oil is still below demand.
Oil exports from the Middle East have risen sharply this month, some oil analysts say, taking them closer to the level they were at before Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz in March, a rebound that could ease some pressure on global energy prices.
In September, an average of 10 million barrels of oil has gone through the waterway daily, according to Kpler, a firm that tracks oil tankers. Separately, six million barrels of crude a day has left the Persian Gulf states this month through pipelines and ports that bypass the strait, Kpler’s data shows.
Before the war with Iran began at the end of February, around 19 million barrels of crude left the region daily through the waterway and other routes. Because of the difficulty in tracking tankers, export totals supplied by analysts might not reflect the true flow of oil, but most experts say volumes rose significantly this month.
The turnaround has most noticeably occurred in the strait, even though Iran continues to attack tankers. A U.S. military operation aimed at protecting the vessels from the attacks appears to have encouraged more shipments by big exporting countries, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“They are getting a substantial amount of oil out, and it is increasing over time as shippers’ confidence goes up,” said Eugene Gholz, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on conflict in the strait.
President Trump, members of his administration and U.S. military officials have said for weeks that the Strait of Hormuz is open, and that tankers are moving oil through the strait.
Some analysts say the increase in oil exports shows that Iran may be losing its grip on the waterway. In recent months, a U.S. blockade has prevented Iran from exporting oil on tankers, cutting off a valuable source of revenue for the country.
“That tells me the pressure is on Iran, not the United States,” said Martin Navias, a senior research fellow at the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London.
Despite the success in getting more oil out, the per-barrel price is still well above where it was before the war, and higher gasoline and diesel prices are weighing heavily on consumers around the world.E
Even with the recovery in Gulf oil exports, the global supply is below what the world needs, said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners, a financial services firm based in Houston.
“We’re still dealing with a tight market,” Mr. Pickering said.
The 10 million barrels of oil a day that Kpler says is going through the strait is a big improvement from the trickle that made it through early in the war. But it is still well below the 16 million barrels a day that went through before the war.
Some tanker tracking firms have lower numbers. TankerTrackers.com calculates that 7.4 million barrels of crude a day has gone through the strait this month.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Has Trotted Out the Old Republican “Chicken in Every Pot” Scam Again: Who Will Fall For It This Time? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 29, 2026. From Harding’s trickle-down promises to Hoover’s prosperity pitch to Reagan’s tax cut hustle to Trump’s factory announcements, Republicans have a long history of pushing scams before Election Day…
It was October 13, 2018, just 24 days before the midterm election, and then-President Trump held a rally in Richmond, Kentucky for Republican candidates. He told the crowd:
“Thanks to our strong trade and economic policies, Braidy Industries recently broke ground on a new billion-dollar aluminum mill that will create up to 1,500 jobs right next to Ashland, Kentucky.”
Kentucky Republicans thanked him effusively and built the promise of a new Russian-financed Russian-oligarch-owned aluminum plant into their remaining campaign ads, getting a big boost from the announcement. And then, of course, after the election the whole scheme collapsed.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when Trump asked American media to give him live broadcast time for a “major announcement.”
On my radio/TV program we speculated about what his announcement could be: An October Surprise? If so, what? Peace with Iran? He’d discovered a Mexican who’d voted illegally in Georgia and was using that to confiscate ballots? That a backroom AI deal with China that started during Xi’s visit just bore fruit?
Turns out it was just Trump pulling the oldest con in the book: he announced — without any meaningful details — that a company based in India was going to build a giant steel plant in Iowa, a state where Democrats have a strong shot at both the US Senate and even the governor’s race. And he bragged that if Republicans get elected, everybody gets a $5,000 check.
I’ve seen this movie before.
In December of 1993 I was in Kaliningrad, Russia and watched Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the rightwing nationalist running in the parliamentary election that year (Yeltsin was President) — go on TV and promise that everybody who voted for him would get a liter of vodka and a turkey. The news commentators who followed his speech were debating where he’d get all those turkeys, as if it was the most natural promise for a politician to make.
I got a déjà vu feeling yesterday watching Fox “News” cover Trump’s equivalent message to the good citizens of Iowa. If they’d looked up the website for the State Historical Society of Iowa, they’d have found an advertisement for Republican Herber Hoover that ran in October of 1928 titled “A Chicken for Every Pot.”Actual 1928 ad for Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover
Just 11 months before the Black Tuesday crash that threw the entire world into the depths of the Republican Great Depression and set up World War II, Hoover’s ad proudly proclaimed:
“Under higher tariff and lower taxation, America has stabilized output, employment and dividend rates. … Republican prosperity has reduced hours and increased earning capacity, silenced discontent, put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot.’”
If the stakes weren’t so high and the human suffering so deep, these decades of Republican scams would be funny.
Yesterday, I pointed out how Republican politicians intentionally invited millions of immigrants from south of our border to show up and ask for asylum, then screamed about the “caravans” that they, themselves, had created.
But that’s just one of many of these scams the GOP has been running on working people in the years since the Reagan Revolution kicked itself off by slashing tax rates on the morbidly rich while destroying working people’s ability to form or join a union for the second time in the 20th century.
Yep, they’ve run this scam before. There’s just nobody alive who remembers it.
In the election of 1920, Republican Warren Harding convinced Americans to abandon the trust-busting, high tax, progressive policies of Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson in favor of that generation’s version of what we today call Reaganomics.
Harding referred to it as “Horse and Sparrow Economics” — it was just the early 20th century version of what Reagan later repackaged as “trickle-down economics.”
If the horses (rich people) were fed more oats (through tax cuts), more of those oats would pass undigested into the horse manure that then littered the streets of American cities. The sparrows (working class Americans) could then pick the extra oats out of the manure.
In 1920, Warren Harding won the presidency on his campaign slogans of “more industry in government, less government in industry” — privatize and deregulate — and “a return to normality,” his promise to drop the top tax bracket on the morbidly rich from its then-91 percent rate down to 25 percent.
Harding kept both promises, putting the nation into a sugar-high spin called the Roaring ’20s, where the rich got fabulously rich and working-class people were being beaten and murdered by industrialists when they tried to unionize. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (the three Republican presidents from 1920 to 1932) all cheered on the assaults, using phrases like “the right to work” to describe a union-free nation.
In the end, the result of the “horses and sparrows” economics advocated by Harding was the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after World War II).
Become a Hartmann Report Supporter
Reagan’s version of that “trickle down” and “supply side economics” — and the massive tax cuts he, Bush, and Trump gave to their billionaire friends — has gifted us a $40 trillion national debt that’s now starting to freak out the bond market, the foundation of our economic stability.
Reagan, Bush, and Trump all claimed they were for the average working person, but all three put anti-union ideologues in charge of the Labor Department and froze the minimum wage as long as possible. Republicans today — who’ve fought against giving American workers a raise for a century — are trying to campaign on “affordability” and promising that when Trump’s stupid war on Iran ends prices will normalize.
If you believe that, I have some Russian turkeys I can get you at a discount.
Similarly, Republicans claim they’re working to solve America’s energy crisis by expanding federal subsidies and liability limitations on the oil, coal, and natural gas industries while killing off billions in wind and solar projects that would actually produce energy that’s cheaper than anything fossil fuels can generate. The scam is so obvious it’s startling.
They claim to be champions of Social Security and Medicare: remember when Biden said, during a state of the Union speech, that “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” and Republicans stood and booed as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted “Liar!”
Since then, Trump, Musk, and the GOP have fired or laid off thousands of Social Security workers making it harder and harder for people to get their benefits while gutting Medicaid and putting pre-authorization requirements into Medicare in a six-state “experiment” scam to replace real Medicare with profitized Medicare Advantage plans from the giant insurance companies.
For almost fifty years, freaking out about the national debt has been a favorite Republican pastime. But only when a Democrat is in the White House. Americans are figuring out that scam, too, as Trump himself has been responsible for about a quarter of our entire national debt.
Republicans claim to be pro-consumer, but they’ve gutted the federal agencies that protect consumers and consistently vote against any sort of pro-consumer legislation. In 2025 they tried to eliminate funding for, and thus shut down altogether, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created after Bush’s 2008 crash to police abuses by banks, credit-card companies, payday lenders, and other financial firms; the proposal was blocked on procedural grounds in the Senate.
At the same time, Republican regulators have gutted CFPB enforcement, including closing roughly 40 percent of pending investigations and ending public access to consumer complaints.
Then there’s our planet’s environment which Republicans claim to love as they’re promoting fossil fuel use while gutting pollution protections. Trump just lowered our automobile fuel efficiency standards, while dialing back hundreds of EPA and similar types of enforcement actions. All to keep their fossil fuel donors happy, to hell with the next generation.Subscribe
Even the safety of our food supply and easy access to disease-preventing vaccinations are under assault by the sex- and heroin-addicted Republican lawyer Trump put in charge of our public health agencies. And, weirdly, Kennedy polls higher than anybody of the other billionaires in Trump’s cabinet.
And let’s not forget their efforts to pretend the Founders didn’t want an absolute wall between church and state. From posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms to tracking women’s periods and miscarriages to their efforts to outlaw abortion and mifepristone, Republicans daily suck up to rightwing religious fanatics, trashing the hard-fought and hard-won rights of women and non-Christians, all while pretending to honor American traditions.
Republicans don’t want any more brown people coming into America — with three Afghan exceptions, every single person granted asylum in America since Trump was sworn in has been a white South African — and funded billions to ICE to carry out a nationwide terror campaign using Kavanaugh-stop racial profiling and deadly violence.
Billionaire-owned media has helped the GOP carry out these scams ever since Reagan fast-tracked Murdoch’s citizenship and killed the Fairness Doctrine, and today’s crop of billionaires are funneling literally billions into both public donations and dark money campaigns on behalf of Republicans or attacking Democrats.
How much longer will these frauds and ruses work for Republican politicians? We’ll find out in about five weeks. Vote!
Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance (Facebook photo).
The Contrarian, Opinion on Words & Phrases: Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 29, 2026. ‘Heir Apparent’ or Ballot Box Poison?🚨 35 Days to the Midterms 🚨 The last job you should hold if you want to be president turns out to be the vice presidency.
Consider the recent decades of sitting vice presidents who made it to the general election: Richard Nixon 1960 (lost), Hubert Humphrey 1968 (lost), Walter Mondale 1984 (lost), George HW Bush 1988 (the only winner!), Al Gore 2000 (lost), and Kamala Harris 2024 (lost). Aside from Bush 41 — whose boss, Ronald Reagan, left office with a stunningly high approval of 63 percent — any successful former vice presidential candidates took a break (Nixon came back to win in 1972, Joe Biden in 2020). Others failed to even win their party’s nomination (e.g., Dan Quayle in 2000, Mike Pence in 2024).
And yet, Vice President JD Vance, right, serving under an imploding president who may preside over an historic midterm wipeout, seems to have little competition in the “heir apparent” sweepstakes for 2028.
By all appearances, the “heir apparent” label is not so apparent. Republicans might want to consider if that inheritance makes any sense.
Even under the best of circumstances, running a VP would seem a risky bet for Republicans. But lining up behind arguably the most awkward political figure on the national stage, while bearing a Qatari jet-load of baggage — including a war he is already trying to disown (most recently in a readily revealed, ham-handed leak to the New York Times) — seems less than politically astute.
But, if they insist, ‘Go for it!’ Democrats exclaim.
It’s not as if Vance (who has already been mocked for whining that Republicans should get a second chance) had any remarkable pre-VP accomplishments to tout (as opposed to Nixon, Bush 41, or Biden). Virtually his entire career on the national stage has been as second fiddle to a disastrous president. And his cozy relationship with Silicon Valley moguls like Peter Thiel now represents another liability.
Sure, Trump increasingly seems enamored of Vance as his successor, giving him a prominent role in the fascist extravaganza Dallas midterm convention earlier this month. Vance has been dispatched to shore up support in red states where Republicans are faltering. But there is the rub: He did not exactly wow anyone with his embittered Dallas rant (How dare anyone call us racists just ‘cause I played up the lie that Haitians are eating cats and dogs!); and he has never really packed in the MAGA masses at campaign rallies. Should those Republicans whom he stumped for fare poorly, he’s hardly going to get kudos for his campaign talents.
Moreover, depending on the size of the presumed blue wave, Trump’s coronation of Vance may be approaching its expiration date. A massive defeat, in which voters were implored to “Imagine” Trump was on the ballot, would serve as an invitation to blame the Trump-Vance regime for MAGA’s collapse, a legacy from which Vance would find it hard to escape.
The funny thing about the final midterm of a president’s last term (and it is Trump’s last term): As soon as the results are in and the punditry cools down, the president not only becomes a governing lame duck, but a political one as well. Few in the Republican Party may feel obliged to take political cues from Trump after November, especially if his determination to make the election all about him helps incinerate his party’s political fortunes.Subscribed
But if not Vance, who else could lead the Republicans in 2028? The other Trump pet, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has a bigger problem than Vance — namely, direct ownership of the hated Iran forever-war debacle. With Republicans already fleeing from Trump on the issue (albeit not brave enough to actually vote against it), it is hard to see how the mouthpiece for Iranian regime change is going to win over the Republican primary crowd.
The model for Republicans in 2028 might turn out to be none other than Bill Clinton. Convinced that the incumbent president (Bush 41, triumphant after the Gulf War) was so popular that running against him might not be a good career move, many Democratic heavy hitters stood aside in 1992, leaving room to usher in an obscure governor of a small state that Democrats had not won since the Jim Crow era.
Likewise, when 2028 rolls around, Republicans still smarting from an election that is likely to be characterized as “throw the bums out!” (or worse, a repudiation of D.C. swamp creatures in and around the failed president) may be searching for someone untainted by Trump’s myriad debacles. Rather than lining up behind Vance (or Rubio), smarter Republicans with some survival instincts might do well to look for a fresh face; a D.C. outsider (as Trump was in 2016!) with plausible deniability for the calamities that the Trump-Vance regime has visited on the party and on the country.
Pro-democracy forces should be under no illusion that Republicans have any inclination to revert to the “old Republican Party” or renounce white Christian nationalism. That sort of reformation may take years (and multiple defeats). Indeed, the Republican nominee in 2028 very well could be someone even more overtly racist than Trump, someone who readily identifies with the ilk of “blood and soil” nationalists we’ve seen in European far right parties. Fueled with bile and anger, even more convinced that Black and Brown people are destroying “their America,” Republicans’ 2028 pick could advocate an even more frightful version of MAGA. The problem, he (as it will almost certainly be a man) could well say, was that Trump was not violent and racist enough!
Regardless of who they find and what ideology they adopt to assuage their resentment, Republicans in 2028 quite possibly will have little patience for someone who carries the stench of Trump’s detested war, his economic meltdown, his serial failed initiatives, and, most profoundly, the political calamity he provoked in 2026.
In other words, put aside the talk of “heir apparent.” Ignore the 2028 polls (which purely reflect name ID at this point) and prediction markets (uninformed conventional wisdom). Instead, watch the returns on November 3. The worse they are for Republicans, the less the “heir apparent” talk will make sense. Maybe that is why Vance seems so personally desperate to cajole voters to spare Republicans a thrashing. It’s his own political career that is hanging by a thread. And, as of today, it looks ready to snap.
Special Report: 'Disgrace and Danger' from FBI Chief?
Doomsday Scenario, Investigative Commentary: The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel, Part II, Garrett M. Graff, above, Sept. 29, 2026. A quick check-in on the FBI director's latest raft of scandals (including, of course, the bestiality).
Welcome back to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era.Upgrade
Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”
The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.
The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.
Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told the New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”
In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world's biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.
It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.
FBI Director Kash Patel testifying earlier this month on Capitol HIll. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.
This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).
The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”
The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the constitution.
As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey's relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm's length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”
An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from the New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”
Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.
Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.
Patel is having new FBI agents walk the streets of D.C., a stunning misuse of limited bureau resources. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.Upgrade
Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.
In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!
And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation's top law enforcement agency.”
There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.
In his back and forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”
The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”
And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long-term.
Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.
Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.
October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.
None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.
Special Report: Smith Hearing 'Complete Disaster' for Republicans?
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: The Jack Smith Hearing Is A Complete Disaster For Republicans, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), above left, tried to claim that Jack Smith, above right, went to a Atlanta Hawks game and met with Fani Willis to push a Trump conspiracy, but Schmidt had everything wrong.
Republicans in the Senate are holding on for dear life and trying to cling to their Senate majority. The Jack Smith hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is doing them no favors and is likely harming the GOP’s chances.
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri is a Trump loyalist, and the whole point of the hearing for Republicans is to rewrite history to reframe Smith’s investigations of Donald Trump as an unjust political prosecution.
Schmitt was in full performance mode and called Smith a dirtbag, but things quickly fell apart.
Schmitt used his time questioning Smith to ask, “ Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024?”
Smith: I'm sorry, could you say that again?
Schmitt: Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024?
Smith: What city would that be in?
Schmitt: Atlanta.
Smith: No.
Schmitt: Okay So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024. Is that correct?
Smith: I have no recollection of that.
Schmitt: Okay. Is it your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2024? Let me, let me just give you a little context. Yeah. The day before Fani Willis (shown in an NBC file photo) came clean with her affair with the prosecutor, you know the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump, the next day were you in Atlanta?
Smith: I do not believe so.
Schmitt: Okay. Did you ever go to Atlanta during your time as special counsel?
Sen. Schmitt thought that he had Smith and was setting him up for the conspiracy theory. Schmitt asked Smith if he ever went to Atlanta and met with Fani Willis and Nathan Wade.
Remember, the Republican conspiracy is that Biden directed a political prosecution of Trump that involved federal, local, and state officials. This was all supposedly a vast conspiracy against Trump.
Then Schmitt face-planted in front of the world on national television.
Jack Smith Perjury Trap Backfires
Schmitt briefly flashed supposed text messages, then accused Smith of perjury. “I think you've already perjured yourself.”
Smith then said that he did go to a basketball game, but it was a college game, not an NBA game, a women’s game not a men’s game, and not in Atlanta:
Ranking member. I'll say this very briefly. If this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think February of 2024. But again, that's, you can check that out if that's what we're talking about .
Sen. Amy Klobuchar stepped in and asked, “Could, could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it? And maybe before we show this kind of thing. It was Maryland. I know, but if he was at an Iowa game, is that correct?”
Smith said, “It, it was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. Uh-huh. And so we went to the game. I know. I took my-”
Klobuchar continued, “But that might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.”
Schmitt then got angry, “Whose questioning is this by the way, Mr. Chairman? Well, I, you are the one that showed me- Is, are you, are you using your time, Senator? You- Is this what this is? No, I- Are we just, are we just having like an open session here?”
Schmitt tried to stick with the now-debunked Atlanta conspiracy, but Klobuchar said, “Well, I'm gonna begin my questions now, but I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag and not get the teams wrong.”
During her question time, Klobuchar was able to confirm that Schmitt had everything wrong.
The entire hearing has been a disaster for Republicans who have tried to attack Smith’s family and claim secret plots and conspiracies as part of the Jack Smith investigation.
With gas, grocery, and diesel prices so high, it is impossible to see how these sorts of theatrics and clownery help Senate Republicans.
Instead of conducting real oversight, Senate Republicans are pushing conspiracy theories to please Trump.
This behavior is a perfect example of why voters are enraged and ready to kick Republicans in the House and Senate to the curb.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Republicans Fear a 'Texas Reckoning' as Farm Recession Deepens; Trump Guts Title IX, Slashes Student Loans, Expands Taxpayer Ads, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 28, 2026. Texas Republicans are staring down a reckoning of their own making today, from a Senate nominee even Karl Rove says would have lost to John Cornyn, to a Railroad Commission candidate whose calls for public executions just resurfaced weeks before the election, to Latino voters who carried Trump in 2024 telling us flat out they’re done with him. It’s the kind of collapse that has strategists in both parties treating a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in three decades as genuinely in play.
Meanwhile the pain keeps spreading elsewhere. America’s farm belt is buckling under $6-plus diesel, vanishing export markets, and a 20 percent jump in bankruptcies, with farmers telling us they’re not sure it’s worth passing the family farm down anymore. And the administration had itself a busy weekend on its own: gutting Title IX protections for LGBTQ students the same day prosecutors reopened the Cornell gang rape case, finalizing a rule that will cut off federal student loans for degrees like social work and teaching, and airing a third taxpayer-funded ad glorifying Trump, this one pulling straight from his 2024 campaign rhetoric, even as a Republican senator says no official should be spending public money on ads for themselves.
As it currently stands, I’m working on a significant story about the Epstein files that I plan to send you all later this week. I haven’t forgotten about them, not even close, so stay tuned.
White House Updates:
The White House has expanded its taxpayer-funded ad campaign boosting Trump, airing a third spot titled “Final Battle” that reuses black-and-white footage and rhetoric from his 2024 campaign, including him vowing to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists” and “rout the fake news media.” The 30-second ad ran during “Saturday Night Live,” “Fox News Sunday,” and several football broadcasts this weekend, with more than $300,000 spent so far, and it’s unclear which agency is funding it. Democrats and former ethics officials argue the ads likely violate a decades-old federal law barring taxpayer-funded “propaganda,” while the White House insists they’re not campaign ads since Trump isn’t on the ballot and there’s no explicit call to action. Even Republican Sen. John Kennedy pushed back, telling CBS News no official, including Trump, should “spend public money on private ads for themselves,” a concern that echoes the fallout from Kristi Noem’s $200 million DHS ad campaign last year, which Trump publicly criticized before firing her.
The NFL has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take down a video the agency posted using Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins’ highlights, captioned “Our time has come,” in reference to a purported migrant caravan approaching the border. DHS did not directly address whether it sought permission before posting, responding instead with a statement about using “every Weapon at our disposal, from A to X” to secure the border, a nod to Dawkins’ “Weapon X” nickname; neither DHS nor the Eagles have commented further, and efforts to reach Dawkins were unsuccessful. This isn’t the first time government accounts have repurposed sports and pop culture content without clear permission, including a White House post in March mixing military explosion footage with MLB and NFL highlights just days after the Iran war began, and an earlier use of Pokémon imagery that prompted the company to publicly object, saying its “mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda.” Major sports leagues typically require express written consent to use their footage commercially.
The President struggled to remain awake during an Oval Office meeting today (as shown above in a screenshot by Aaron Ruper). During the same meeting, he called Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.”
A worsening farm recession is pushing American farmers to the brink, with diesel prices, trade disputes, and soaring interest rates driving a wave of bankruptcies and forcing multigenerational farms to question whether it’s worth continuing. Diesel, essential for running tractors and combines, has climbed near an all-time high of $6.53 a gallon nationally and $6.82 in Illinois, forcing seventh-generation Illinois farmer John Yeley to buy fuel in small batches for the first time in his adult life rather than in full truckloads, while trade wars with China have cut off soybean markets and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have pushed fertilizer prices up as much as 50 percent in the past year. Farm bankruptcies rose 20 percent in the 12 months ending in June, and attorney Tom Ajamie warned that figure will keep climbing as “a lot of these farmers are on the edge.” Iowa Farmers Union president Aaron Lehman said most farms he knows expect to lose money again this year after losing money last year, calling the run of policy-driven losses “very frustrating” compared to the unpredictability farmers are used to from weather and soil conditions. Yeley, whose family has farmed the same Illinois land since 1852, said three farmers have already gone under in his small county this year and that he wouldn’t wish the current economics on his own teenage children, even as some in Congress push a farm bill and a possible diesel export ban that wouldn’t bring relief in time for this year’s harvest.
Republicans Face a Texas-Sized Problem as the State Could Flip for the First Time in Decades
Latino voters across South Texas who powered Trump’s 2024 breakthrough are turning on him, threatening the very redistricting maps Republicans drew to lock in those gains. Reuters traveled more than 360 miles through South Texas, from San Antonio to McAllen, and spoke with over 30 Latino voters who described Trump as having failed to lower prices despite the chance to do so, with Trump’s national approval now at 32 percent, the lowest of his second term. Saúl Guajardo, a 53-year-old McAllen voter who backed Trump three times, said he’s now “more open than ever” to voting Democrat, while his wife Terrie criticized Trump’s immigration crackdown as too harsh on families. Ramon Barrera, a first-time Trump voter in 2024 known online as “The Texas Tea Guy,” said he’s disappointed enough to back both Democratic congressional candidate Bobby Pulido and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, summing up the mood with “the S&P 500 looks great, but our wallets don’t.” Republicans redrew the 15th and 35th Congressional Districts specifically to preserve Trump’s 2024 Latino support, but both are now rated competitive, with an August Texas Southern University poll showing Pulido, a Latin Grammy winner campaigning in a cowboy hat and handing out “Make Quinceañeras Great Again” hats, leading GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz by five points in a district Trump had carried by 18. Here is Ken Paxton defending a deal with a child predator:
The GOP’s Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, is widely viewed even by fellow Republicans as a weaker candidate than the incumbent Trump pushed out of the race. At the Texas Tribune Festival, Karl Rove said flatly that if John Cornyn were still the nominee “this race would be over,” pointing to Paxton’s baggage, including multiple affairs and $200,000 in home renovations from a businessman for whom he did favors. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis went further, calling Trump’s endorsement of Paxton over Cornyn a “colossal mistake” and an “unforced error” that has put the Senate seat at risk, adding that Republicans “would not be spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Texas if Cornyn had won.” Paxton’s political history includes a 2023 impeachment on corruption allegations that ended in acquittal, a felony securities fraud indictment later dismissed under a pre-trial diversion agreement, and a 2025 divorce filing from his wife of 38 years, Angela Paxton, made “on biblical grounds” citing adultery. His Democratic opponent, pastor and former state legislator James Talarico, would become the first Democrat in more than 30 years to win statewide office in Texas if he wins in November.
A second statewide GOP nominee, Railroad Commission candidate Bo French, has become an outright liability after years of inflammatory posts resurfaced just weeks before the election. French repeatedly called for publicly executing political opponents, including Obama and then-Rep. Adam Schiff, using hashtags like “#HangEmHigh” and writing that “the penalty for treason used to be death, even for a former president,” in posts spanning six years that he has since deleted. He has also asked followers whether Muslims or Jews are the “bigger threat” to America, argued at a CPAC panel that “the problem is actually Islam,” called for deporting 100 million people, and posted a racist claim that a racially diverse University of Texas football student section suggested students were in the country illegally, a claim the Dallas Morning News found included at least one naturalized citizen. The backlash was severe enough that Karl Rove said he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, breaking three decades of exclusively supporting Republicans, while Sen. John Cornyn called French “an embarrassment to the Republican Party” who is “going to drag the whole ticket down.” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had previously called on French to resign as Tarrant County GOP chair over the Muslims-versus-Jews poll and endorsed his primary rival, only to reportedly reverse course once French won the nomination; Gov. Greg Abbott and Paxton have likewise declined to disavow him.
Together, these fractures have election analysts treating Texas as newly competitive up and down the ballot for the first time in decades. Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted Republicans are grappling with whether Latino voters, notoriously swingy, could snap back to Democrats the way they have in other states’ recent special elections. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the 15th Congressional District a toss-up, Cook Political rates it Lean Republican, and a September poll of 1,000 Texas Latinos found nearly two-thirds would be less likely to support candidates who back Trump’s immigration policies. TelevisaUnivision CEO Daniel Alegre described the electorate as persuadable rather than locked in, saying voters will back “the person who is going to make their lives better” rather than voting a straight party line. With Paxton struggling, French mired in scandal, and Gov. Abbott facing Democrat Gina Hinojosa in his bid for a fourth term, Republicans are defending a map and a slate of candidates that increasingly look shakier than the party anticipated when it redrew the state’s districts last year.
Trump strips Title IX Protections:
The Trump administration formally rescinded the Biden-era Title IX rule that extended protections against sexual harassment and assault to LGBTQ students, reinstating a 2020 rule from Betsy DeVos’s tenure, though officials stopped short of publishing a promised amendment defining sex as an “immutable biological classification as either male or female.” Education Secretary Linda McMahon previewed the move on a Fox sports show, framing it as a “full return” to policies ensuring “boys in boys’ sports and girls in girls’ sports,” while highlighting the administration’s broader push, including a settlement with the University of Pennsylvania that erased a transgender swimmer’s records, to block trans students from women’s sports and bathrooms matching their gender identity. Critics like Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center warned the change erodes protections against sexual harassment that “continues to remain pervasive,” noting the discarded 2024 rule had required schools to promptly investigate off-campus complaints and explicitly protected LGBTQIA+ and pregnant students from being pushed out of school. GOP Rep. Tim Walberg, who chairs the House education committee, countered that the reversal “restores longstanding protections for women and girls” and aligns policy with recent court rulings, including a June Supreme Court decision allowing states to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s teams.
The rollback comes as the Education Department faces criticism for inconsistency and inaction elsewhere on sexual misconduct, even as it moves aggressively on gender identity policy. Patel pointed out the department has stayed silent on a high-profile Cornell University lawsuit alleging a student was drugged and gang-raped by seven fraternity members, a case prosecutors are now reopening, even while the department investigates 20 districts over staff-on-student misconduct and faces Democratic criticism for letting a backlog of abuse complaints go unaddressed. The administration has also sued California, Maine, and Minnesota over their gender identity policies and threatened to withhold federal funding from northern Virginia districts, and it’s expected to bypass the standard public comment process when it eventually publishes its formal definition of sex under Title IX. Attorneys who advise schools describe the current environment as a “wild west,” with Title IX consultant Sandra Aboy saying compliance now depends heavily on individual districts’ own ideology, and that some states with trans-inclusive policies are already fighting back with their own lawsuits.
Other news:
The Trump administration has finalized a rule barring federal student loans for degrees the Education Department judges don’t earn enough money, using IRS data to compare graduates’ salaries four years out against people with only a high school diploma and disqualifying any degree that falls short starting in 2027. Fields like social work, art, religious studies, teaching aide programs, music, and cosmetology are expected to be hit hardest, along with for-profit programs generally. The administration frames the move as “accountability” for higher education, but critics, including American Council on Education’s Ted Mitchell, argue it punishes essential, lower-paying work, noting “we need social workers” to handle crises like the fentanyl epidemic and homelessness. Even some conservatives have pushed back, with Alliance Defending Freedom’s Gregory Baylor arguing the government “shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money,” while Stanford professor Jonathan Gienapp warned the policy ignores that a humanities program’s educational value isn’t always tied to immediate earnings.
A New York Times investigation found that after President Trump toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and lifted his own prior ban on Venezuelan gold, the administration rushed to broker gold-trading deals in an industry still riddled with the very corruption and gang violence Trump said he was fighting, and now hundreds of millions of dollars of that gold sits unsold because international refiners won’t touch it. The first deal went to Trafigura, one of the world’s largest trading houses, which won a yearlong right to buy gold from Venezuela’s state-owned Minerven and flew $100 million worth to the US within hours of signing, even though gold began flowing before the company or independent auditors had ever visited the mines. Reporters found that Minerven’s mines sit in gang-controlled territory where local miners and brigades pay roughly 20 percent of their gold to the Tren de Guayana gang as protection money, a practice so entrenched it’s locally known as “el sistema,” meaning at least some of the gold now imported into the US is tied to organized crime. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum personally helped broker the deal and brought bars of the gold to a White House celebration with Trump, even as Venezuela’s own interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, was reportedly skeptical but had little leverage to push back since she depends on Washington to stay in power.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito abruptly reversed course and stepped aside from a major climate change case, after previously insisting he had no reason to recuse despite calls from left-leaning groups over his oil company stock holdings. The case involves Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy seeking to toss out a Colorado lawsuit from Boulder seeking climate damages, with broad nationwide implications expected from the ruling, which is set to be argued next week. Alito doesn’t own stock in either company directly but holds shares in ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and five other energy firms that could benefit if the court sides with the oil companies, since ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 have themselves warned shareholders about the financial risks posed by similar climate lawsuits nationwide. A Consumer Watchdog spokesperson said the recusal was “the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” pointing to those very disclosures as evidence of his conflict of interest. Alito had actually recused himself from an earlier, related appeal in the same Colorado case back in 2023, something the court later called “inadvertent,” before reversing that position and declining to step aside again until this new reversal. His recusal now raises the possibility of a 4-8 4-4 split on the 6-3 conservative court, which would leave the major legal issues unresolved, while some conservatives have separately pushed for liberal Justice Elena Kagan to recuse over an unrelated controversy involving a climate chapter in a judicial reference manual she wrote a brief foreword to.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Not Impeach Him? Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 29, 2026. Our Will Saletan has a great article this morning breaking down Donald Trump’s latest outrageous act: filling America’s airwaves with self-glorifying ads on the taxpayers’ dime.
The White House has spent $1.7 million so far from some undisclosed pot of government money on such “public service announcements,” which feature Trump looking awesome and bragging about defeating “communism, socialism, and Marxism,” about presiding over “the golden age of America,” about defeating “globalists,” “warmongers,” “the fake news media,” “the deep state,” “the sick political class that hates our country,” and so on.
It’s pure MAGA propaganda. It’s blatantly illegal. And it’s right there in public, being beamed out to an audience of millions.
Watching it, I couldn’t help but think: Remind me why we shouldn’t impeach this guy again?
Conventional wisdom among Democrats today is that pursuing a third Trump impeachment would be a mistake, both now and if Democrats surge back to power in Congress next year. “Democrats have the evidence to call for Trump’s impeachment,” Austin Sarat wrote in a column for MSNOW earlier this year. “But that’s not what they should pursue.” Last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) sounded a similar note: “What I will encourage my colleagues to not do [if they win Congress], especially those who have more fire in their belly in this area, is don’t be impeaching anybody. Let’s just get back to work.”
Even some of Trump’s most firebreathing foes agree. Yesterday, I spoke to Norm Eisen, who served as counsel to House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment and now spearheads Democracy Defenders Action, a group dedicated to fighting Trump’s abuses in court. “He’s more deserving of impeachment than he was when we impeached him, or after January 6th when he was impeached a second time,” Eisen said. “What could be worse than prosecuting people who you know to be innocent, but who are your political adversaries? That is as low as any leader can sink. It is the very definition of tyranny.”
“In a sane world,” Eisen added, “he would be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. But these senatorial lapdogs in his own party are not going to do the right thing. So you simply have to temper the aspiration against that reality.” He thinks Democrats should aim for “lower-hanging fruit” and impeach not Trump, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
And hey: Maybe he’s right. But before that conventional wisdom solidifies into Democratic doctrine, let me make the counterargument.
The conventional wisdom that Trump would slide through impeachments unscathed began in the aftermath of his first one, in 2019. Democrats had a strong case to bring those articles: The president’s conditioning of military aid to Ukraine on the Ukrainian government helping him dig up dirt on Joe Biden was an astonishing abuse of U.S. foreign policy. His refusal to comply at all with Congress’s investigation was clearly sufficient reason for his impeachment for obstruction of Congress.
But in retrospect, it’s clear that that particular impeachment was a difficult one to sell the public on. It involved our policy toward a small nation halfway around the world, one that didn’t (yet) loom large in the popular consciousness. It was rooted in the testimony of a sequence of public servants, from Gordon Sondland to Fiona Hill, who the public hadn’t previously known. The actual facts of what made Trump’s conduct so rotten were a bit difficult to explain. And crucially, the whole thing played out against a backdrop of relative economic good vibes. It was easy enough, in retrospect, for Trump to turn the whole thing into a political Rorschach test: They say the phone call was bad, but I say it was perfect, so who are you gonna believe?
Trump’s second impeachment came pretty close to working—yeah, it was ten votes short of actual conviction, but it was the biggest majority for convicting a president in American history. And that was in a Senate with fifty Republicans.
A future impeachment would be different—and not just because there might be more Democrats. So many of Trump’s open abuses of power over the last two years are easy to comprehend and have played out right in the open. It would simply be a matter of congressional Democrats picking their favorites.
Since returning to office, Trump has constantly tried to gobble up federal powers that Congress never gave him, resulting in repeated smackdowns by the courts. He has turned the Justice Department upside-down in his single-minded quest to prosecute his enemies, casting multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices into chaos to install lackeys who would bring sham prosecutions against the likes of James Comey and Letitia James.
And he has carried himself as every bit the autocrat he wants to be: enriching himself and his allies at the public expense, turning the federal government into his personal propaganda machine.
And crucially, he has done all this at a time of worsening economic conditions. This is perhaps the biggest difference between today and 2019. Voters no longer see Trump’s out-of-control behavior as some sideshow to the real story of his basically competent governance. Today, they have begun to wake to the fact that America has a genuine maniac at the helm, one who has bogged down the economy with pointless tariffs and begotten an energy crisis with a pointless war in Iran. Spotlighting his criminal and authoritarian behavior today intensifies these concerns, driving home the notion that Trump is running the country into the ground because he is focused on punishing his own enemies, padding his own pockets, and soothing his own vanity.
So by all means, Democrats: Go out and win your blue wave. But when you come back to Washington, let’s not write off the possibility of working to toss out America’s aspiring dictator.
AROUND THE BULWARK
They’re F*cking Thieves… The Trump administration stole our tax dollars to run a campaign ad during NFL games on Sunday. BILL KRISTOL and PATRICK GASPARD join TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily to talk about Trump’s illegal campaign ads and the brave Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.Quick Hits
TRIGGERED: The ad Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, shown in a file photo at right, released yesterday looked like GOP boilerplate: a 30-second anti-moochers spot highlighting her state’s “welfare to work” requirement. But the ad 
kicked off a right-wing social media firestorm for one simple reason: The ad’s video-gaming, cheeto-snarfing welfare recipient was a young white man.
MAGA influencers went ballistic. How dare Sanders put down the whites, they fumed, when it’s black people who are statistically likelier to be on welfare? “Young right-wing Christian American gamers are some of the most patriotic people in society,” wrote podcaster Kangmin Lee. “This Antiwhite ad should be taken down, the comms team fired, and the Governor’s Office issue an apology,” said pizzagate/fascism enthusiast Jack Posobiec. “This is how you end a national political career before it even begins,” tutted MAGA lawyer Will Chamberlain.
In point of fact, the majority of welfare recipients in Arkansas are white. But something tells us the denouncers aren’t actually concerned about Sanders’s supposed crimes against statistics.
THEY HATE TO SEE IT: Senate Republicans, Politico reports, aren’t crazy about Donald Trump using taxpayer dollars to air his campaign ads. Their basic take: Man, do you HAVE to?
“I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters. No public official “should spend public money on private ads for themselves,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) agreed it wasn’t appropriate: “No, it’s not even a close question.” So did Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.): “These are taxpayer dollars. People say it wasn’t that much money. Well, you go talk to people that are struggling and figure out whether or not they think it was that much money.”
It’s good to see GOP senators pushing back on Trump’s state-funded political propaganda. It’s just too bad that the Senate, as a purely ceremonial body, lacks the ability to do anything about it.
More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice
Democracy Docket, Analysis: Will Trump's DOJ defy a judge’s order on citizenship lists? Andrew Wyrich, Sept. 28, 2026. The Trump administration has a history of not complying with court orders — and there are some troubling 
signs it may do so again, so it can implement a plan for “citizenship lists” ahead of the midterms. Meanwhile, a federal judge found that the administration likely violated federal law when it schemed to cut states’ anti-terror funds for not imposing voting restrictions.
One more thing: The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) held its “long conference” today. The Democracy Docket team broke down several critical election cases the justices may be considering hearing this term.
All that and more is on the docket today. See you tomorrow!Icon-Banner_NEWS2
Trump admin was ordered to give 30 days notice before releasing citizenship lists. It might not comply
Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to disclose any plans to publish voter eligibility lists or a related internet portal 30 days in advance.
But there are worrying signs that the Department of Justice may defy the judge’s order, which could let it move forward with the lists — part of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive order — before Election Day.
➤ Why the Trump admin may not comply
Judge strikes down Trump’s bid to cut states’ anti-terror funds unless they impose new voting restrictions
A federal judge found the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency likely violated federal law in conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding on changes to how states and local jurisdictions administer elections.
➤ More on this win for voters
Our new bulletin board is live. Find ways you can volunteer, attend rallies, write petitions and much more.EXPLORE THE BULLETIN BOARD
Supreme Court could take up these critical election cases as new term begins
The U.S. Supreme Court’s fall term kicks off today with the “long conference,” when the justices gather to decide which cases they will hear over the coming months. Here are some that could have big impacts on voting and democracy.
➤ Five cases you need to know about
The latest from Missouri: Trump rages at SCOTUS, ruling praised by pro-voter groups
In the wake of SCOTUS slapping down a Republican gerrymandering scheme in Missouri, pro-voting groups praised the decision to give voters the final say on the redrawn map.
Meanwhile, Trump whined about the Court’s decision in a post on social media.
SCOTUS also went out of its way to slam Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) for creating the redistricting mess.
For the first time in this back-and-forth drama, SCOTUS decided to explain itself. In doing so, the Court clarified one of its most controversial legal doctrines while inadvertently proving one of the primary criticisms of its “shadow docket” practices.
➤ How the Missouri mess forced the Court to clarify the Purcell principle
‘Fine with me’: GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins backs federal troops at polls
The Trump administration has floated the idea of sending federal troops to voting sites for months. Now, Rep. Mike Collins (R), the GOP candidate for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat, said he was “fine” with that idea.
➤ Read Collins’ full comments
Report: Trump wanted all mail ballots sent by certified mail
Trump’s plan to restrict mail voting through the United States Postal Service — which has been blocked for the midterms — was supposed to be even more prohibitive, requiring all mail ballots to be sent by certified mail, according to a new report.
➤ More on Trump’s original plan
ICYMI: Texas registration snafu leaves thousands of voters off rolls
Last week, we reported on how tens of thousands of voters in Texas are not on county rolls because the state incorrectly processed their voter registration applications.
If you missed the story, video journalist Emily Gross breaks it all down for you in a new video.
New York Times, Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees, Dustin Volz, Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). In an internal memo, the F.B.I. said it believed the hackers may have stolen sensitive information on all of its employees.
The theft by a criminal hacking group of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau rushing to protect its personnel as an uncertain deadline loomed.
Nearly a week after the group, known as ShinyHunters, revealed it had pilfered intimate details about bureau personnel from the agency’s jobs portal and threatened to leak them online, F.B.I. investigators are still piecing together how the breach took place and the total damage.
The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more, according to a New York Times analysis of some of the records. Some are already comparing it to China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again.
Many F.B.I. employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials. The next day, F.B.I. staff received an email reminding them that October is cybersecurity awareness month, which struck some as tone deaf in light of the breach, one of those people said.
On Friday, bureau leaders, in an internal memo to its rank and file, declared the hack a cybersecurity incident and acknowledged its employees had personal information stolen.
“We are operating under the premise that the threat actor is also exfiltrating PII of all F.B.I. employees,” according to the memo, which was described by someone who had seen it, using the abbreviation for personally identifiable information.
The memo said the agency would offer virtual briefings in the weeks ahead and instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with A.I.-generated voices. “Bureau leadership remains committed to supporting the safety of you and your family,” it said.
Still, many past and present personnel remain in the dark about whether their data has been purloined. In recent days, some have anxiously asked Times reporters whether their names are contained in the hacked data, wondering whether they needed to take steps to protect themselves or their families.
In a statement on Monday, the agency said it was “working around the clock to investigate the cyber incident involving FBIJobs.gov and is in regular communication with anyone who may be impacted — including multiple bureau-wide communications within 24 hours of public reporting.”
It added, “The F.B.I. treats the security of its information and the safety of its work force as top priorities, and our investigation is ongoing.”
In announcing its hack, ShinyHunters, believed to be a loose collective of young hackers operating across the globe, said it had targeted the F.B.I. as retribution for a public advisory the bureau had issued in the spring, warning that the group was known to harass victims and family members with threatening or coercive maneuvers. In their note, the hackers demanded that the F.B.I. “correct or simply REMOVE” the advisory or risk further consequences.
In an email to The Times on Friday, ShinyHunters said that the bureau had until the end of Tuesday to fulfill its request, even as the hackers themselves appeared to acknowledge that the bureau was unlikely to acquiesce.
That note left open the possibility that the hackers would not dump the data online, even as the group reiterated its deadline. But on Monday, in a new statement, the group claimed it never intended to do so.
“Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data,” the group said. “We have never intended to nor have we ever planned to.” It added that the hack and threat to the F.B.I. was a “marketing campaign to protect our business” and said that “we are not taking any further actions” with the data, including revealing more about what is contained in the files.
“We seek no escalation as our goals have widely been accomplished,” it said.
It remains to be seen what ShinyHunters will do, and security researchers warned that even if they did not publish it online they could still sell it to other criminals or foreign governments.
U.S. Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general and a former Trump criminal defense attorney before the president nominated him for Senate confirmation (Shown at U.S. Capitol on July 16, 2026).
New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Justices to Allow It to Deny Hormones to Trans Inmates, Ann E. Marimow, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). The Bureau of Prisons policy, which has been blocked by lower courts, would give transgender prisoners access to psychotherapy and antidepressants instead of certain gender-transition medical treatments.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to clear the way for federal prison officials to stop providing certain gender-transition medical treatments to transgender inmates.
Soon after returning to office, President Trump signed an executive order directing that imprisoned trans women be housed in men’s facilities. It also barred transgender inmates from receiving gender transition medical treatments for gender dysphoria — significant distress linked to a mismatch between a person’s birth sex and gender identity.
Lower courts, however, have blocked the policy and ruled that transgender inmates must continue to receive hormone therapy while a lawsuit over the executive order moves forward. The lawsuit was filed by three trans inmates on behalf of about 2,000 transgender individuals.
John Sauer, the solicitor general, on Monday asked the justices to intervene on an emergency basis, arguing that the government and the public were being harmed because the lower courts have blocked a policy that prison administrators have ”determined is necessary to maintain institutional security.”
The Supreme Court requested a response from lawyers for the trans prisoners by Oct. 8.
The prison policy is one of a series of actions by the administration limiting transgender rights. The president also directed government agencies to withdraw federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. And the administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the U.S. military to fully enforce its ban on transgender service members. That case remains pending.
The Supreme Court has in recent years dealt with several cases involving transgender individuals. In June, the court upheld two state laws barring the participation of transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams. Last year, the court upheld a state law prohibiting some medical treatments for transgender youths, rejecting arguments that it violated the Constitution.
At the Bureau of Prisons, officials have taken the position that the benefits of hormone therapy are unclear for adults with gender dysphoria. The policy allows trans prisoners to receive psychotherapy and antidepressants but not hormone therapy or items like undergarments that match their identities.
Lawyers for transgender prisoners have said gender-transition treatment, which can include cross-sex hormones, social transition and in some cases surgery, is the only approach known to effectively treat gender dysphoria. The treatment has come under scrutiny for adolescents but has been accepted as effective for adults for several decades, and is supported by the major medical and mental health organizations in the United States.
In their suit, the trans inmates argue the administration’s policy violated their constitutional rights, including the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. They said the administration’s policy amounts to a denial of medically necessary care that has been prescribed by medical providers
Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District Court in Washington has issued several rulings halting the policy nationwide while litigation has continued. He said the Bureau of Prisons did not adequately “consider its own experience providing gender-affirming care under its prior policy.”
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the government’s request to block the judge’s order, writing that prison officials had not adequately explained their security concerns about providing gender-transition care.
New York Times, Second Prosecutor Quits Trump’s ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case, Alan Feuer, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). The resignation adds to the setbacks to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to fulfill the president’s desire to take revenge against the federal officials who have investigated him.
A senior prosecutor working on the so-called grand conspiracy investigation into a wide array of President Trump’s enemies has resigned from the case, adding to the turmoil that has recently plagued the inquiry, according to people familiar with the matter.
The prosecutor, Kurt Olsen, stepped down from the case on Monday after facing issues with his security clearance, one of the people said, making him the second prosecutor in a month to do so.
Mr. Olsen’s unexpected departure came only three weeks after the prosecutor in charge of the case, Joseph diGenova, also abruptly quit his post. Mr. diGenova, who is 81 and served as the U.S. attorney in Washington during the Reagan administration, stepped down after his superiors in Washington lost patience with him for his taking too much time in bringing charges.
The twin resignations, in such proximity, were a serious setback to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to follow through on the president’s desire to take revenge against the many federal officials who have investigated him over the past decade. The case had already had significant staffing shake-ups — including its first lead prosecutor being sidelined after telling her superiors there was insufficient evidence for charges to be filed.
One of the lead F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, Jack Eckenrode, also departed in recent weeks, according to the people familiar the matter. Mr. Eckenrode was best known for having spent years under the special counsel, John H. Durham, investigating the investigators in the inquiry into the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The grand conspiracy case has long been the most ambitious — and far-fetched — of the many retributive investigations that Mr. Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors trying to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and another into his mishandling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 — into a single, multiyear plot to damage his political prospects.
The day after Mr. diGenova quit, lawyers for one of the central targets of case, John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, spoke to Mr. Olsen, according to court papers. The lawyers said that Mr. Olsen told them that the inquiry involved “multiple” grand jury investigations in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., including a “far-reaching” one that touched on a key aspect of the classified documents investigation: the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
Mr. Olsen’s problems with his security clearance complicated his ability to remain involved in an investigation in which classified materials figured prominently, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Just last week, lawyers for a group of former F.B.I. agents who took part in the search of Mar-a-Lago and were subpoenaed to testify about it in front of the grand jury said in court papers that the search had been conducted properly.
Mr. Olsen came to the grand conspiracy case with no experience as a prosecutor. He had previously served in the White House as the director of “election security and integrity” and in late 2020, he pushed the Justice Department to file a motion to the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Trump, asking the justices to nullify the election that year.
Mr. Olsen was central in persuading the F.B.I. to search an election office in Fulton County, Ga., in late January and haul away boxes of ballots as part of an effort to investigate the 2020 race. He also pushed the bureau — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to look into allegations that an election technology firm whose owner had bought Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been falsely blamed for rigging the 2020 election, had also manipulated voter registration records in Bexar County, Texas.
Mr. Olsen’s departure has added to the leadership void atop the grand conspiracy case, which is nominally being run by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-friendly U.S. attorney in Miami. It remains unclear who is now in charge of the day-to-day management of the inquiry. But the Justice Department has plans to put two more prosecutors on the case.
Jeremy Saland, the lawyer for one of the named defendants, said Monday that his client did nothing but respond to and make an “immature comment on Snapchat.” He called the lawsuit “intentionally dishonest.”
New York Times, Cornell Sexual Assault Investigation to Be Reopened, Sharon Otterman and Hurubie Meko, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). After outrage over allegations in a lawsuit, the Tompkins County district attorney will revisit the decision not to pursue criminal charges against seven fraternity members.
A New York prosecutor said Monday that he would reopen an investigation into accusations of a 2024 sexual assault at Cornell University, two weeks after a woman filed a lawsuit accusing the school and law enforcement officials of not doing enough to investigate her case.
In her lawsuit, the woman alleged that she was plied with alcohol and drugs and then raped by multiple men at the Chi Phi fraternity house on Oct. 19, 2024, when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate. She said she reported the incident to the Cornell University Police Department several weeks later, but that no criminal charges were filed by prosecutors.
Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, said in a statement on Monday that he was now reconsidering that decision. He said that while the original statement the woman gave to police did not seem to warrant criminal charges, he would now let a grand jury decide.Thumbnail of page 1Read the statement from the Tompkins County district attorney
The district attorney for Tompkins County in New York said he is reopening an investigation into a report of a sexual assault at Cornell University.Read Document 9 pages
“Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped,” he said in the statement.
Mr. Van Houten said he would now reopen the investigation “recognizing that the process of healing from trauma is personal and different for every human.” A senior female prosecutor has been assigned, and any additional allegations from the lawsuit will be considered. ABC News first reported Mr. Van Houten’s comments on the investigation.
“Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence,” Mr. Van Houten added.
Thomas Giuffra, who represents the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said on Monday that his client’s report to the police at the time was not materially different to what is in the lawsuit.
“Once she was emotionally ready, she went to the university police and bravely shared what had occurred to her,” he said.
She never heard from the police again, her lawyer said. Mr. Giuffra said that until his client filed her lawsuit earlier this month, she had not been contacted by investigators from the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office or any investigators trained in interviewing survivors of rape.
The lawsuit, which has received national attention, has cast a spotlight on a persistent issue of accusations of sexual assault among students on Cornell’s campus, and sparked anger in Ithaca, New York, and beyond over how Cornell handled the woman’s initial allegations.
Mr. Van Houten said he and his staff had received many calls and emails questioning why he had not prosecuted the case, including some that were insulting and threatening. An editorial in the Cornell student newspaper printed the names of the accused men and demanded that the university reveal why at least some of them were allowed back on campus after the university’s own investigation.
The lawsuit alleged that the seven accused fraternity members were given the opportunity to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to Cornell.” Critics have seized on that line as evidence they were treated with leniency.
But Cornell said the essays were only part of the consequences the students faced. After the woman’s 2024 allegation, the Cornell police provided information to the district attorney and the university investigated the incident through its administrative disciplinary system. The men involved were “issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions,” Cornell said in a statement on Monday.
The university released an earlier statement to the campus on Nov. 26, 2024, about “ongoing investigations into the serious and deeply disturbing allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence at the Chi Phi fraternity house.”
It also convened a task force on sexual assault, which made recommendations. A 2025 survey conducted by the university found that 35 percent of undergraduate women reported experiencing “nonconsensual sexual contact” during their time at Cornell, an increase from the 23 percent in the 2023 survey.
Chi Phi, the fraternity chapter where the woman said the assault occurred, was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus, Cornell said Monday. “Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” its statement said.
The woman participated in the administrative disciplinary process, and later withdrew from Cornell, Mr. Giuffra said.
The lawsuit contains harrowing details of the alleged assaults, as well as a screen shot of a lewd Snapchat conversation in which one fraternity member appears to invite many others to join in. Mr. Giuffra said that chat, which went on for several pages, had been provided to the university as evidence. The lawsuit states that during the assaults, the woman was under the influence of both alcohol and ketamine, a drug she alleges she was pressured into snorting and had not tried before.
Named as defendants in the lawsuit are Cornell; the Chi Phi fraternity; the woman’s own sorority, Delta Delta Delta; an off-campus bar that allegedly served her alcohol; and the seven fraternity members who are alleged to have been involved in the assault.
Chi Phi did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tri Delta said it couldn’t comment on pending litigation but added that as an organization “we are committed to supporting women and victims of sexual violence.”
New York Times, Couple Accused of Killing Their Son-in-Law in Bay Area Park, Soumya Karlamangla and Amy Qin, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). Jonathan McKinsey, an engineer who worked in the games department for The New York Times, was fatally shot Saturday in a San Francisco suburb. The police have accused his parents-in-law, both 76.
A Bay Area couple have been accused of shooting and killing their son-in-law in a suburban sports park on Saturday afternoon, the local police said.
The man, Jonathan McKinsey, 40, right, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. in a parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, an athletic complex and playground in Dublin, Calif., about 35 miles east of downtown San Francisco, according to Dublin Police Services.
Mr. McKinsey was director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, according to a company spokesman. Before Mr. McKinsey began working at The Times in 2023, he worked for several tech companies including Splunk, Coursera and Oracle, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The authorities arrested Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 76, in the shooting. They are a married couple who live in Dublin and are the parents of Mr. McKinsey’s wife, the police said.
No motive was described by the police for the shooting, but Mr. McKinsey and his wife had a turbulent marriage and were living separately, records show. Each had filed requests for domestic violence restraining orders against the other last year in Alameda County. Mr. McKinsey had also pleaded not guilty last year to two charges of misdemeanor child abuse.
Mr. McKinsey was a transgender man and accused his wife, Candice Jang, and his in-laws of abusing him because of his identity, according to his filing for a restraining order in December 2025. He said his mother-in-law called him and one of his sons a “pervert” and a “monster” after the boy tried on dresses, and he accused his father-in-law of punching him in the chest while he was recovering from double mastectomy surgery.
New York Times, ICE Plans 5,000 New Hires to Help With Deportation Drive, Alexandra Berzon and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 29, 2026. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing for another hiring surge to support President Trump’s deportation campaign, with a goal of bringing on 5,000 new employees by the end of the year, according to four people familiar with the plans.
The hiring would expand the agency’s work force by around 17 percent and draw on substantial new funding provided by Congress. The agency had already staffed up drastically since President Trump took office,growing by about 8,000, to reach 29,000 employees as of July, according to federal data.
Most of the recruits are expected to be deportation officers, who participate in a variety of enforcement activities, from arresting targets to case management.
ICE has sharply ramped up its enforcement in the past few months with an aggressive arrest campaign bolstered by an infusion of more than $100 billion from Congress. Amid the campaign, agents have been under pressure to work seven days a week, and ICEoffices have assigned more agents to immigration enforcement.
Last year’s hiring effort drew criticism for its size and speed, as officers were let into the agency with limited or no initial vetting. By the spring, hundreds of those new hires had been removed.
This time, the agency plans to employ stricter standards for checking out new hires, one person familiar with the procedures said. But it is unclear if ICE can adequately vet and hire an onslaught of new applicants or will run into some of the same concerns.
A similar surge last year resulted in undervetted officers initially being let in and then removed as the agency skipped basic checks for new recruits.
Israeli-Palestine Struggle: The Political and Cultural Wars
New York Times, Opinion: There Is a Word So Powerful It Need Be Spoken Only Once, M. Gessen, Sept. 29, 2026 (print ed.). If you’ve heard anything about “NAZA,” the new documentary about the war in Gaza, it might be that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, above, was so outraged by it that he has proposed legislation that would revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. So you could assume that the film, which has not yet been released, is about him. Or maybe that it’s about the suffering of Palestinians, with lots of images of bloody corpses, weeping children and hungry families.
But it’s nothing like that. The film consists almost entirely of calm interviews with Israeli military officers and soldiers, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night against a backdrop of generic glass-and-steel towers.
In these interviews, the speakers (whose identities are obscured) describe the mechanics of total surveillance in Gaza, the artificial intelligence systems that analyze surveillance footage to identify human targets and the calculus of what the military calls NAZA, or the number of civilians it’s permissible to kill alongside any given target.
One interviewee describes targeting people who are running toward a food distribution site. Another guesses that his body count numbers in the thousands. (The Israel Defense Forces have denied the allegations in the film, cast doubt on the film’s sources and insisted that decisions about who it strikes are made by “human personnel” only. The culture minister, Miki Zohar, has accused the filmmakers of treason.)
The night before I saw the movie at a press screening, Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer who was a consultant on the film, told me that it was “a movie about Tel Aviv,” the sophisticated, stylish city in which Sfard himself lives. He meant that it’s about the educated, cosmopolitan Israelis serving in elite units. Not the violent ideologue politicians or a few bad-apple soldiers on whom Israelis blame some of the wanton violence in Gaza, but rather the people making day-to-day decisions.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.
More than halfway through the film, Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.
The word doesn’t appear in the movie again.
A different but similarly contested term, on the other hand, appears over and over, landing with brutal force every time. The term is “terrorism,” or “terrorist.” At least one of the A.I. systems used by Israeli intelligence identifies suspected terrorists by patterns of phone calls and social connections, among other data.
Does the system make mistakes? Of course it does, one interviewee readily acknowledges. He continues: A baker whose shop is near Hamas headquarters, for example, might have patterns of movement and contact that, to A.I., look similar to those of a Hamas fighter. (Just such a case is described in the podcast “The Gaza Chef,” produced by the German newspaper Die Zeit, which built on some of Abraham’s reporting to examine the targeted killing of a man named Mahmoud Almadhoun, who ran a soup kitchen near a hospital Israeli intelligence had identified as a Hamas stronghold.)
Once the system categorizes the person as a terrorist, he becomes a human target. Members of his family or staff could be killed along with him. This is where NAZA comes in: the acceptable number of additional casualties rises along with the perceived importance of the human target. It may be 20, 50 or even 100. People.
The word “terrorism” appears in a different context in a clip the makers of “NAZA” pulled from a 1986 episode of the PBS program “Firing Line,” in which a young Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting his edited volume “Terrorism: How the West Can Win.” In his perfectly unaccented American English, he offers a clear definition of terrorism: “The systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming and menacing of innocents, of civilians for political goals.” Unspoken but unmissable is that this definition applies to the actions of the Israeli military and to the state it serves.
“NAZA” opens at the IFC Center in New York City’s Greenwich Village on Wednesday. Just a few blocks away, the Quad Cinema will be showing another movie about Israel, called “Checkout.” It’s the story of a hapless Mossad agent who is facing forced retirement when he suddenly spots what seems to be the mark of a lifetime, a high-level militant posing as a businessman.
Absurd and violent high jinks ensue, and — spoiler alert — the businessman ends up dead. Too late, however, the agent realizes it may have been a case of mistaken identity. And so the forces of Israeli intelligence must be marshaled to eradicate any semblance of doubt and brand the businessman a terrorist, posthumously.
“Checkout” is a dark comedy, and it was finished before Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the deadly attack by Hamas that catalyzed the war in Gaza. I have known the director and screenwriter, Jonathan Dekel, for a few years. I like interviewing him, because he is unusually open about his ethical struggles and cognitive contradictions.
Like the subjects of “NAZA,” he has served in an elite intelligence unit. In his 30s, he moved with his family to what is known in Hebrew as Neve Shalom and in Arabic as Wahat al-Salam, a co-living village created by Jewish and Palestinian Israeli families. He has told me he wanted to make sure that his three children would not serve in the Israeli military. But on the day of the Hamas attack, he drove straight to his old unit and reported for reserve duty, without being called up, and served for two years. Then he moved to New York, in part, he told me, to sever the bond with the Israeli military, or perhaps to escape the contradiction of wearing a uniform while living in a peacenik village.
I met up with Dekel again before going to see “Checkout.” He was telling me that he and his wife were flying back to Israel to vote in next month’s election, spending so much money on tickets that they may not be able to visit again for a family wedding a few months later. It’s that important to unseat Netanyahu, Dekel said, because only then would Israel have a chance. Only then would he see a way to move back to Israel and continue raising his kids there, because the war in Gaza and the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank might cease and the air-raid alerts in Israel might grow less frequent and Dekel would be able to set the example he wants for his children.
And then, unprompted, he added: “I don’t think what’s going on in Gaza is a genocide.” It’s horrible, he acknowledged. The Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians, and continues to kill civilians. “But it’s just war.”
I see his point, in a sense. What’s happening in Gaza, as depicted in “NAZA,” is also what his own movie depicts. When that hypothetical baker is killed, or that real-life chef, or that fictional businessman, the system, or the humans in charge of the system, don’t say that they made a mistake: They say that they killed a terrorist. And the people who died because they happened to be nearby are just NAZA.
Take the number of official targets and multiply it by the number of bystanders it’s permissible to kill in order to reach the targets, and pretty soon, Abraham says in the film, “you end up with all of Gaza.” Anyone can die, and the death will be “just war.” The difference between the practice depicted in “Checkout,” the comedy, and the unrelenting, unbearable horror described in “NAZA” is scale. Now, it’s industrial. That’s what makes it a genocide. It really is that unequivocal, and perhaps this is why the makers of “NAZA” didn’t need to use the word more than once.
New York Times, Mamdani Announces Plan to Fight Antisemitism, Without Discussing Israel, Sally Goldenberg and Dana Rubinstein, Sept. 29, 2026.A report issued by Mayor Zohran Mamdani describes ways that New York City is funding hate crime prevention and celebrating the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers.
After months of tension with some Jewish leaders in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, right, on Tuesday released a report on antisemitism in New York City, laying out ways to combat hate crimes against Jews while sidestepping any politically fraught discussion of Israel.
Throughout the 35-page report, Mr. Mamdani’s administration details how it intends to take on antisemitism, including with tens of millions of dollars it has already allocated for hate crime prevention, as well as programs to continue celebrating Jewish traditions.
Mr. Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel, has spoken less about the issue in recent weeks, after acknowledging in a widely watched video in July that he lacked the authority to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as he had promised to do. In August, a group of rabbis beseeched the mayor to pay greater attention to the effects his criticisms could have on the city, which is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel and where concerns about antisemitism remain high.
The report’s omission of any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects the sensitive and fraught politics around the issue. Prominent Jewish leaders say the growing opposition to Israel and the war in Gaza has at times spilled over into antisemitic rhetoric. Supporters of the Palestinian cause, including some progressive Jewish groups, say they should be free to critique Israel’s conduct without being accused of antisemitism.
The report recommends continuing and expanding many existing city policies, such as teaching public school students about the Holocaust and providing training to city workers on “understanding Jewish experiences.”
There are also new ideas, if modest, including highlighting the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers on the thousands of LinkNYC kiosks that provide Wi-Fi coverage on city streets, and a pledge to demand more federal support for educational centers and museums about the Holocaust in the city.
The report comes at a moment of particular significance for Jews around the world, who are celebrating the High Holy Days amid increased fears of antisemitic violence.
More Global News
The New Republic, Trump Asks African Reporter How Ebola Is Going, Malcolm Ferguson, Sept. 29, 2026. Reminder that Trump cut funds that could have helped Africa stop the spread of Ebola.
Donald Trump’s response to the ongoing Rwanda-Congo conflict involved deflecting to the Ebola virus beforeshutting down the line of questioning entirely.
The question came from White House correspondent Hariana Verás, the first African journalist accredited to the White House.
“She loves Africa, she always asks about Africa. She never talks about any other place,” Trump said before hearing Verás’s question. “Good job. Go ahead.”
“You, among many other administrations … you are the only one who started to do something to end the 30-year war in the [Democratic Republic of Congo],” said Verás, referring to the peace agreement Trump brokered between the presidents of Congo and Rwanda at the White House last December and again in March.
The fighting has continued since then as most of the peace deal remains unimplemented. Meanwhile, more than seven million people have been displaced as a result of the worsening conflict, according to the Center on Foreign Relations.
“Rwanda is still violating,” Verás continued, probing if Trump intended to do anything about the shattered arrangement.
“Yeah, we’re going to stop it, if there is a violation we know about it,” Trump shrugged. “We ended the war with Congo and Rwanda, and they both signed it and both agreed, so, well look, I just heard about it a little while ago, if there’s a problem we’ll stop it.”
But Verás wasn’t satisfied by the president’s response.
“Mr. President, I just came from the DRC. I was there a month ago. I witnessed, again, Rwanda still killing a lot of Congolese,” Verás pressed.
“And you witnessed that?” Trump asked.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Verás continued. “And I have evidence.”
That apparently inspired Trump to switch gears.
“How is Ebola going?” Trump retorted, bringing up the regional viral crisis aggravated by federal cuts to USAID earlier this year.
“Oh, Ebola is under control,” Verás said. “I spoke with the director of the World Health Organization at the [United Nations], and he said it is under control. But still the country needs some help to fight Ebola. But still, the biggest problem is the war.”
“I’ll make sure it works out,” Trump mumbled. “That’s what I do. I make sure things work out.”
Then he pivoted to the next reporter.
Sept. 28
Top Headlines
Semafor Business, Opinion: Shallow bonhomie, Andy Browne, Sept. 28, 2026. The image of President Donald Trump waiting at the foot of the stairs of an Air China Boeing-747 to personally greet Chinese leader Xi Jinping is historic, and not just because it’s the first Joint Base Andrews tarmac greeting for a foreign leader since 1962.This weekend, an old Trump campaign ad was back on airwaves across the country, with Trump railing against the “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” vowing to expel the “deep state” and “warmongers,” and declaring this “the final battle.” In 2024, the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign. Now, the ad discloses, it is “paid for by the U.S. Government.” Your tax dollars at work. Happy Monday.Special Report: Trump Team's Dangerous Panic, Desperation
Sept. 28, 2026. What’s just sticking with me this morning is how everything is going to s___ for Trump - economically, geopolitically, electorally -- and yet he seems unwilling, unable to do anything about it. He’s become the opposite of powerful -- impotent.Special Report: Long-Term GOP Strategy
Longterm Republican Political Playbook (Hartmann Report Graphic).
Sept. 28, 2026. Create the crisis, make working Americans suffer, reward the billionaires, blame Democrats for the wreckage, then campaign as the only people who can fix it.Special Report
News Roundups
Sept. 28, 2026. Texas Republicans are staring down a reckoning of their own making today, from a Senate nominee even Karl Rove says would have lost to John Cornyn, to a Railroad Commission candidate whose calls for public executions just resurfaced weeks before the election, to Latino voters who carried Trump in 2024 telling us flat out they’re done with him. It’s the kind of collapse that has strategists in both parties treating a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in three decades as genuinely in play.Sept. 28, 2026. Diesel prices hitting record highs are exposing new fractures in Trump’s own party weeks before the midterms, with Republican Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan now calling for an end to the Iran war as the fuel costs driving it batter their voters. The same price surge is straining food banks nationwide, forcing some to burn through reserve funds and swap beef for canned chicken as a new report finds families skipping meals to get by. A separate analysis found AI tools are now quietly inflating hospital bills by flagging patients as sicker without changing the care they receive.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Israel Keeps Expanding Into Gaza Despite Cease-Fire, Satellite Images Show, Samuel Granados and Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 28, 2026. On paper, the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has been in effect for almost a year. In reality, Israel has entrenched and expanded its control in the Palestinian territory — and its leaders say they have little intention of withdrawing any time soon.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Trump White House aide Dan Scavino, 50, posted what appears to be an AI-generated video (above) showing him popping champagne with what seems to be his second wife, Erin Elmore, and the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump. The video is set to the tune of Pitbull’s hit song “Don’t Stop the Party.
Sept. 28, 2026. Some thoughts on civic virtue. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville takes to the Senate floor to warn of pilots who might be secret “furries,”; our ambassador to Greece boasts about engineering the collapse of the government of Romania;¹ Trump uses taxpayer $$ for an unhinged new MAGA ad; and a champagne-soaked White House Deputy Chief of Staff posts the perfect midterm messaging (above) for the floundering GOP.
Country Club outside Chicago, wearing an extra-large suit that bulged along his lower back and a pastel baby blue tie. With a huge grin across his face, a jovial Donald Trump gushed about the “nice reception” he was receiving as the honorary chairman of the Presidents Cup.Almost immediately after that, his right arm jerked back and forth, his face went blank, and his mouth opened to suck in as much air as possible, because on live television, with dozens of cameras pointed right at him, a very loud voice from the crowd yelled directly at him, calling him a “F*CKING P*DOPHILE” for the entire world to hear.
Trump, he can do it again. The attack on drop boxes, unseen by the media, will determine the midterms nationwide. In 2020, the Attorney General of Texas confessed to stealing the vote for Donald Trump in Texas. “Confess” is the wrong word, I suppose, because on the Steve Bannon podcast, Ken Paxton proudly crowed about his felonious attack on Black voters. It’s unbelievable, but if you watch our video, you’ll have to believe your eyes and ears.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 28, 2026. 36 Days to the Midterms. The blue wave is cresting five weeks ahead of Election Day. The extent of the wave depends on a range of factors, from a late money surge/negative ad dump from desperate MAGA Republicans to the propensity of Republican voters as the election approaches to “come home” to their party to the danger of Democrats’ overconfidence and reliance on “good news” polls, which may be subject to the same sort of error rate we saw in primaries.Sept. 28, 2026. If Trump had a political superpower, it was his ability to convince his supporters of a false reality where down is up, but when it comes to the Iran war and prices, it isn’t working.Sept. 28, 2026. When Pope Leo XIV speaks, Americans tend to listen. He is, after all, the first American pope. On the other hand, there’ve been scores of American cardinals since the first was appointed in 1875. Those of us who aren’t in the Church don’t necessarily hear much about what they have to say.Sept. 28, 2026. If Trump had a political superpower, it was his ability to convince his supporters of a false reality where down is up, but when it comes to the Iran war and prices, it isn’t working.More On Trump Team U.S. Governance
More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice
More On U.S. Immigration Law, Rights, Racism
More On Artificial Intelligence
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
More On U.S. Media, Sports, Culture
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Sept. 28, 2026. There are a lot of ways that Sheri Mecklenburg’s twin mic drop last week (her motion to intervene and the liberation of her resignation letter) may change the outcome of this week’s hearing in the Broadview 6 case.Top Stories
Semafor Business, Opinion: Shallow bonhomie, Andy Browne, Sept. 28, 2026. The image of President Donald Trump waiting at the foot of the stairs of an Air China Boeing-747 to personally greet Chinese leader Xi Jinping is historic, and not just because it’s the first Joint Base Andrews tarmac greeting for a foreign leader since 1962.
Back then, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was the leader of a close American ally. Xi Jinping leads America’s paramount adversary.
In rolling out the red carpet, Trump underscored how rapidly the balance of power in the relationship has shifted. China has “basically tamed the United States,” Rush Doshi, a Georgetown University professor and former Biden administration official, told me of Xi’s warm welcome, which also included a 21-gun salute and a flyover by B-1B bombers, far exceeding the courtesies extended to Trump in Beijing in May.
In classic diplomacy, protocol giveaways are supposed to be reciprocated by substantive concessions. Otherwise, why bother? Xi offered two pandas for the Atlanta zoo — and seemed to please Trump by admiring the granite used to construct the new White House helipad — but little else.
There was talk of an AI hotline to share information about risks, but the history of such a US-China “red phone” actually working is thin. An agreement to extend a trade truce for two months only underscored its fragility.
The week was an exercise in shallow bonhomie.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: ‘We Are Losing Our Soul as a Nation, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 28, 2026. What we saw in Springfield, Ohio.
The less popular Trump gets, the more shameless his open lawlessness becomes. This weekend, an old Trump campaign ad was back on airwaves across the country, with Trump railing against the “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” vowing to expel the “deep state” and “warmongers,” and declaring this “the final battle.”
In 2024, the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign. Now, the ad discloses, it is “paid for by the U.S. Government.” Your tax dollars at work. Happy Monday.
Special Report: Trump Team's Dangerous Panic, Desperation
Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: Trump Has Become What He Feared Most - Impotent, Not Powerful, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 28, 2026. What’s just sticking with me this morning is how everything is going to s___ for Trump - economically, geopolitically, electorally -- and yet he seems unwilling, unable to do anything about it. He’s become the opposite of powerful -- impotent.
Sure he has his ballroom, his Qatari plane, the arch, the Kennedy Center, his state dinners -- the trappings of power -- but it is just not clear that in his idiocy, many manifest failures, mental and physical decline, and historic rejection that he still has power itself.
Look at this headline, below, from Reuters, a form of “Trump got played”:
He’s completely lost control of his war in the Middle East. Brent crude is back up to $108 a barrel this morning:
The Fed raised interest rates against his commands and the global markets’ vote of no confidence in his leadership is becoming more intense and dangerous by the day:
It’s not like he hasn’t tried to make things better. It’s just that everything has tried -- some of it batshit crazy -- has failed:His party has begun breaking from him in a very public way on AI and data centers:Republicans are running away from mass deportation all over the country:
There has been bi-partisan condemnation of his inviting Putin to the G20:
Every day he is getting stories like this:
And of course the most profound evidence of his flaccid impotency comes every day in the polls (via FiftyPlusOne).
The power that remains is the power given to Trump not by the consent of the governed -- which he no longer has -- or our Constitution but by the corrupt Roberts Court, and by the illicit money of the oligarchs.
It is not clear at this point that the money of the oligarchs can prevent the coming wave from wiping out Republicans across the country this November.
Which means that he is likely to lean much harder in the coming days on that one last vestige of power that he has left -- that somehow the Court will allow his dark, desperate, and illiberal schemes to remain in power without winning the election, as they did in their decision to allow his ridiculous SAVE database to proceed last week.
We’ve gotten a glimpse of what might be coming our way last week when Trump 1) at the UN both threatened genocide and war crimes against Iran and celebrated his taking of Venezuela, acts that brazenly violate the UN Charter and International Law 2) defied lower court orders and banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House 3) Started running wildly illegal commercials bolstering himself in the election, paid for by stolen monies from taxpayers. Here’s the second of those two ads, which ran across the county this weekend. I will admit there is almost something comical about it now…..
I write all this for I think this election is becoming not just an opportunity to regain power in Washington and all across the country but to do severe damage to the legitimacy of the regime and the MAGA project itself. For the people will have spoken. A significant course correction will be required. Trump will have to let go of his tariffs, of his barbaric assault on health care, of his ruinous and gluttonous tax cuts, of the most ridiculous parts of his cabinet, of his support of Russia, of his power, of his ballroom, of his arch - all things he should have let go of before this election. Or what, Simon, what if he doesn’t? I don’t know how it is going to happen but he will have to give all that up for if we have the election we all want to have he will have lost more than an election - he will have lost legitimacy, and power; and we will have to use the legitimacy and power we will now have to do what the American people demand and let the Trumpian chips fall where they may……
As we’ve heard from so many this cycle the best way to ensure Trump doesn’t get away with something in the coming months is by winning this election by a huge margin, making whatever dark schemes he is conjuring now far less likely to be successful. But in our planning we must assume this battle to win a free and fair election and take power next January is contested by Trump and his quisling AG every step of the way……which is why we not only support our battleground candidates and start parties but also the New Battlefield Project of the state parties, a project which is helping the state parties across the country prepare and then execute for whatever he and his global allies throw our way in the coming months……
And so, my friends, it is that time……Time To Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Prepare For The F____ To Come -- For It Is Coming
Special Report: Long-Term GOP Strategy
Longterm Republican Political Playbook (Hartmann Report Graphic).
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The Republican Playbook: Break America, Blame Democrats, Then Promise to Save It, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 28, 2026. Create the crisis, make working Americans suffer, reward the billionaires, blame Democrats for the wreckage, then campaign as the only people who can fix it.
It’s not working any more, this scam Republicans have been running for 45 years, although Trump and many others are trying their best to revive it.
Their strategy has always been simple: break things here in America, create chaos and a mess, hurt working class people while making billionaires richer, and then campaign on fixing what they screwed up.
Two years ago, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers stood in a grocery store for an advertisement blaming Joe Biden for the price of eggs (without mentioning the bird flu that was jacking prices). This week he’s back in nearly the same folksy jacket telling voters that it’s time for Trump to end his illegal war against Iran so gas prices can come down.
Rogers new ad leaves out, of course, the fact that he’d cheered for the war on the day it began in February, claiming Iran was an imminent threat to the United States (it wasn’t and isn’t), and hit multiple rightwing podcasts and media opportunities to demand Americans unite behind Trump in prosecuting the war.
He’s not alone. Just last week, Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson voted to keep the war going — after voting six times previously to support Trump and his war — but a few days ago cut a desperate ad calling for a swift end to the fighting.
Iowa Republicans Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both in tight House races, suddenly discovered the War Powers Act and joined Democrats to limit the president they’d been backing. Down in Florida, Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released an ad warning that Miller’s brutal masked goons have gone too far and that Hispanic voters now feel betrayed.
Americans have noticed who lit these particular fires. A New York Times/Siena poll this month found 50 percent of registered voters trust Democrats over Republicans to handle foreign wars, and GOP whackadoodle Nancy Mace, on her way out of Congress, told reporters she’s expecting a “bloodbath” at the polls this November.
Trump himself, asked on Meet the Press how a seven-month war squares with two campaigns with hundreds of promises of no new wars, answered that he “didn’t promise anything” and stormed out of the interview like a petulant 10-year-old.
This is just the latest in a 45-year-long Republican scam where they break something in America, blame it on the Democrats, and then run for election on a promise to fix what they broke.
Probably their most successful of these scams since the Clinton years has been to invite non-citizens from south of the border to come into the US whenever a Democrat is in the White House, falsely claiming that the Democrat had “opened the border.” This lie, of course, encourages desperate people to head north and that gives the GOP and their media operations the photo-op they need.
Just google “open border” and “congressman,” “congresswoman,” or “senator” and you’ll get a list of Republican politicians too long to print. These are the quotes that coyotes — human smugglers — print out and distribute to desperate people in Central and South America as advertisements to get people to trade their lives’ savings for transportation to the Rio Grande.
Not one single Democratic president ever “opened” the border or declared it open. It’s a complete lie, top to bottom, that Republicans and billionaire-owned media repeat obsessively.
Obama, in fact, deported more people than Trump did in his first term. But Republicans still use that lie to roll out the red carpet to wannabe immigrants.
At the top of that list of Republicans lying about Democrats “opening the border,” of course, you’ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues cranking this stuff out during the last two years of Biden’s presidency so they could use the immigrant issue to get Trump back into the White House in 2024. Here’s a tiny sample from the months leading up to recent elections:
— Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the “Biden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision”;— Rick Scott wants everybody to know that “Americans Don’t Want [Biden’s] Open Borders”;— Marco Rubio says there’s “Nothing Compassionate About Biden’s Open Border Policies”;— Rand Paul is so extreme he tells us Senator Rubio “is the one for an open border”;— Josh Hawley says “Biden’s Open Border Policy Has Created a Moral Crisis”;— Tom Cotton “Insists the Border is Wide Open”;— Ron Johnson wants the world to know that “Our National Security is at Risk Because Democrats have Turned Border Security into a Partisan Issue”;— Marjorie Taylor Greene “BLASTS Open Border Hypocrites”;— Mo Brooks opposes “Socialist Democrats’ Open Border Policies for Helping Kill Americans”;— Lauren Boebert says the “Root Cause” of the open border crisis “is in the White House”;— Matt Gaetz “revealed a complex and deceitful agenda by Joe Biden’s Democrat administration to evade our Southern Border law enforcement”;— Gym Jordan says “Biden’s Deliberate Support of Illegal Immigration Could Lead to Impeachment”;— Kevin McCarthy says the Biden Administration has “Utterly Failed” to secure the “open border”;— Elise Stefanik proclaims “Biden’s Open Border Policies have been a Complete Disaster.”— Tom Cole’s website features “Biden’s Open Border America”;— Bob Goode brags about introducing legislation named the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act”;— John Rose “Calls Out Biden’s Open Border Policies”;— Paul Gosar claims Biden is “Destroying America with His Open Border Policies”;— Roger Williams complains about the “Democrats’ Open Border Problem”;— Tom Cole wants the world to know that Biden’s “open border policies have given the green light to migrants and bad actors from around the world…”;— Gus Bilirakis “Denounces Dangerous Open Border Policies on the House Floor”;
The list goes on and on, every single one from a Republican.
And these messages have spread all across Central and South America, just as Republicans hoped they would, driven by human smugglers following the profit motive.
All based on an intentional Republican campaign lie that has worked well for them since they first used it on Clinton in the 1990s.
And here we go again, although this time Marjorie Taylor Greene called bullshit on her former colleagues.
Last Thursday, around 400 Hondurans — families with kids among them — crossed a bridge from Guatemala into Chiapas, Mexico on foot. Rightwing influencers, knowing the drill, immediately began to promote this new coming “invasion.” PJ Media ran the story under a headline that literally tied the caravan to a coming Democratic Congress.
Marjorie Taylor Greene was having none of it, though, writing on social media:
“We have not seen a caravan headed to the US southern border in several years, why now? Oh, yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”
Yep, it’s an old scam but an effective one. Essentially, what Republicans have been doing — since Reagan first told us government was our problem and he’d take care of ruining it for us — is to smash out our windows and then offer to sell us homeowners’ insurance.
It’s a hustle. Just like “trickle down.” And “small government,” “waste, fraud, and abuse,” “guns keep us safe,” “global warming is a hoax,” and “originalism.”
Greene would know. In October 2018, two weeks before the midterms the last time he was president, she cheered when Trump declared a caravan a thousand miles from Texas an “invasion,” ordered a showy force of 5,200 troops to the border, and told Republicans that it’d be a great midterm issue for them.
In the seven days before Election Day that year Fox News used the word “caravan” 1,202 times.
In an astonishing display of transparent cynicism, the Pentagon dropped the operation’s patriotic name the morning after the polls closed, and the troops were going home two weeks later. All the panic vanished the day after the election, weeks before most of the migrants got anywhere near our border.
Then in 2024, with Biden in the White House, Republicans demanded an immigration/border bill, got the most conservative one in a generation from their own senator, James Lankford, and then were forced to kill it because Trump wanted to crank up his racist base with fears of brown-skinned hordes on the march to regain the White House.
That’s the entire Republican business model, and it’s older than Trump. Republicans manufacture the fear, or the crisis, or the deficit, and then campaign as the only people who can protect you from it. The “product” never has to work, because fear is their real product and has been since the days of Joe McCarthy.
Ronald Reagan set it up in its modern form. In 1976 Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, told Republican insiders they’d never win as the party of Scrooge and should instead become a second Santa Claus, handing out tax cuts as freely as Democrats handed out programs, then screaming about the debt the moment a Democrat took office.
Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 28, tripled the national debt, and sold it with a promise of prosperity for everybody. Republicans (and Reagan) knew it was a lie; his former budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much in The Atlantic before Reagan’s first term was half over.
And now that scam has transferred almost $80 trillion from working people into the money bins of the top 1 percent, gutting the middle class, and Republicans are still pitching billionaire tax cuts as the cure for all our ills.
Then there’s the destruction of America’s small businesses so big business fatcats would back the GOP. Reagan’s Justice Department rewrote the merger guidelines in 1982 and the share of proposed mergers the government challenged fell to seven-tenths of one percent, which is how we ended up with a small handful of companies controlling our grocery chains, hospital systems, airlines, insurance, banking, drugs, retail, and even the oil companies that Rogers is now complaining about in his bizarre new ads.
And let’s not forget freezing the wages of workers, as I mentioned here last week. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and union membership fell from about a third of our workforce when he took office to under a tenth today, and every Republican since has campaigned on pretending to be in favor of raising your pay while, with their other hand behind their back, voting in Congress to freeze the minimum wage and make it harder for people to form or join a union.
Once they’d gotten away with these scams and still gotten elected (with the help of billionaire-owned media), governing by scam became the GOP’s go-to habit.
They’ve kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009 and are running this fall on “affordability.”
They passed a “Big Beautiful” bill last summer that the Congressional Budget Office says will add $3.4 trillion to our debt, knock 10 million people off their health insurance, and cut more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid and food assistance.
And, the CBO found, the result is (predictably) that resources will decrease for households at the bottom while rising for those at the top. Four million fewer people are getting SNAP already, because of that bill. And you can bet your bottom dollar that when this really bites over the next two years Republicans will be blaming Democrats and offering to fix the problems that they themselves created.
Then Trump began throwing around tariffs, particularly against countries he wanted to give him gifts, jets, or business deals for Uday and Qusay, all while cynically pretended it’d bring manufacturing back to the US and raise wages.
Republicans have, in other words, spent the past forty-five years telling us our “big” government is the problem while expanding its reach into your doctor’s office, your ballot, and now your constitutional right to walk down the street without getting shot by ICE thugs or having to show your citizenship papers to a masked man who refuses to identify himself.
Each of these moves was sold as a rescue from a problem the Republicans themselves had created, vibrating with urgency in the last few weeks before an election.
What’s different this year is that the timing has blown up in their faces.
When a war hawk like Rogers, whose own former primary opponent Justin Amash says he’s losing badly, goes soft on a war he championed, or when a sitting president says he never promised the thing his rallies chanted for two years, people can suddenly see the scam in the plain light of day. Even the caravan, the oldest trick in the book, drew a former MAGA congresswoman outing this strategy to her own followers.
Reagan got a laugh in 1986 by saying the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Forty-five years and the DOGE gutting of FEMA on, nobody’s laughing except the Republicans who keep getting elected by low-information voters hooked on billionaire-owned media.
The simple reality — that previous generations understood well — is that government is the only institution with the power to lay a floor beneath which working people and the poor can’t fall, whether that floor is a wage, a pension, an education, a hospital bed, or a border policy that’s actually enforced instead of advertised.
Republicans have spent four decades pulling up the floorboards and then charging admission to watch people fall through. This November they’re asking to be paid again to fix the problems they themselves created. The polls, however, are telling us that even formerly Republican voters have finally figured out the con.
So check your registration at vote.org, because the caravan story will be replaced by another outrageous panic next week (trans people? Iran strikes back at us in a 9/11 style? the “caravan” arrives?) and the only thing that beats a fear campaign is turnout.
And if this piece helped you see the pattern, please share it and support the Hartmann Report so we can keep pulling these threads and exposing these cons.
Special Report
New York Times, Times investigation: Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won’t Touch It, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Tyler Pager and Rebecca R. Ruiz, Sept. 28, 2026. The administration is brokering deals in a notoriously corrupt industry, including one with a company that the United States deems a security threat.
In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.
The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.
Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.
On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.
“Usually, you have to be in the Olympics to bring back the gold,” Mr. Burgum later said at an energy conference, regaling listeners with the tale of how he had opened Venezuela’s gold pipeline.
The gold trading deal exemplified how Mr. Trump used the capture of Mr. Maduro to gain control of Venezuela’s resources. First, he took charge of Venezuela’s oil exports. Next, his administration turned to Venezuela’s mineral wealth.ImageFour people work in rocky, red-brown terrain, using hoses to spray water. The background features a large, steep earthen bank.
Open-pit mines carry great risks of corruption and environmental damage. Venezuela has few formal subterranean mines.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
That included one of the world’s largest untapped gold reserves at a time when the prices were near record highs and buyers were hungry for it.
The Trump administration and its business allies said that gold sales would benefit the U.S. economy; help develop Venezuela’s mining region; and deprive criminals and corrupt officials of income.
But a New York Times investigation, from the mines of southern Venezuela to the White House to the trading houses of Europe, found that Mr. Trump aligned America with an industry that is still plagued by the very criminality that he said he was fighting by arresting Mr. Maduro.
Planes carried gold out of Venezuela before companies had even visited the mines. Some of that gold, The Times found, is linked to miners who pay gang protection money. That allows criminals to profit from the administration’s signature deal.
And American financiers are investing in a mine tied to gangsters as part of a deal brokered by the Trump administration.
Venezuelan gold had once benefited American adversaries like Iran. Mr. Trump sought to redirect it to the United States to be refined.
But partly as a consequence of the administration’s hasty approach, all that gold — hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth — sits untouched in warehouses, according to three people with knowledge of the shipments. Refiners would need to guarantee, under international rules, that the gold has not funded gangs, environmental destruction or corruption.
“Do we want to be the first refiner to publicly announce that we are receiving Venezuelan gold?” Simon Houghton-Dodd of Asahi Refining mused at a recent industry gathering in London.
This account of Mr. Trump’s gold rush is based on interviews with miners and refiners in El Callao, the heart of Venezuelan mining, as well as on interviews with White House and Venezuelan government officials, industry leaders and global commodities brokers.
Some spoke on the condition of anonymity, either because they were not authorized to speak publicly or because doing so would jeopardize their livelihoods or safety.
The gold arrangement is a crystallization of Mr. Trump’s long-held views on Venezuela, natural resources and U.S. power. Mr. Maduro was a dictator who oversaw a corrupt and violent system, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly cut deals with such leaders.
What set Mr. Maduro apart, besides his refusal to yield to Mr. Trump’s demand that he leave office, was that he controlled a nation rich with resources and traded them with America’s adversaries. Mr. Trump, particularly in his second term, has declared that the U.S. must have access to key minerals worldwide and expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere.
In January, Mr. Trump sent U.S. commandos to remove Mr. Maduro from power. He then moved to bring Venezuela’s riches under American control. It was a gamble that investment would bring reform, and not the other way around.ImageA black helicopter with rotors on a helipad. People stand by it; one wears a "DEA" jacket.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Republicans Fear a 'Texas Reckoning' as Farm Recession Deepens; Trump Guts Title IX, Slashes Student Loans, Expands Taxpayer Ads, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 28, 2026. Texas Republicans are staring down a reckoning of their own making today, from a Senate nominee even Karl Rove says would have lost to John Cornyn, to a Railroad Commission candidate whose calls for public executions just resurfaced weeks before the election, to Latino voters who carried Trump in 2024 telling us flat out they’re done with him. It’s the kind of collapse that has strategists in both parties treating a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in three decades as genuinely in play.
Meanwhile the pain keeps spreading elsewhere. America’s farm belt is buckling under $6-plus diesel, vanishing export markets, and a 20 percent jump in bankruptcies, with farmers telling us they’re not sure it’s worth passing the family farm down anymore. And the administration had itself a busy weekend on its own: gutting Title IX protections for LGBTQ students the same day prosecutors reopened the Cornell gang rape case, finalizing a rule that will cut off federal student loans for degrees like social work and teaching, and airing a third taxpayer-funded ad glorifying Trump, this one pulling straight from his 2024 campaign rhetoric, even as a Republican senator says no official should be spending public money on ads for themselves.
As it currently stands, I’m working on a significant story about the Epstein files that I plan to send you all later this week. I haven’t forgotten about them, not even close, so stay tuned.
White House Updates:
The White House has expanded its taxpayer-funded ad campaign boosting Trump, airing a third spot titled “Final Battle” that reuses black-and-white footage and rhetoric from his 2024 campaign, including him vowing to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists” and “rout the fake news media.” The 30-second ad ran during “Saturday Night Live,” “Fox News Sunday,” and several football broadcasts this weekend, with more than $300,000 spent so far, and it’s unclear which agency is funding it. Democrats and former ethics officials argue the ads likely violate a decades-old federal law barring taxpayer-funded “propaganda,” while the White House insists they’re not campaign ads since Trump isn’t on the ballot and there’s no explicit call to action. Even Republican Sen. John Kennedy pushed back, telling CBS News no official, including Trump, should “spend public money on private ads for themselves,” a concern that echoes the fallout from Kristi Noem’s $200 million DHS ad campaign last year, which Trump publicly criticized before firing her.
The NFL has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take down a video the agency posted using Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins’ highlights, captioned “Our time has come,” in reference to a purported migrant caravan approaching the border. DHS did not directly address whether it sought permission before posting, responding instead with a statement about using “every Weapon at our disposal, from A to X” to secure the border, a nod to Dawkins’ “Weapon X” nickname; neither DHS nor the Eagles have commented further, and efforts to reach Dawkins were unsuccessful. This isn’t the first time government accounts have repurposed sports and pop culture content without clear permission, including a White House post in March mixing military explosion footage with MLB and NFL highlights just days after the Iran war began, and an earlier use of Pokémon imagery that prompted the company to publicly object, saying its “mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda.” Major sports leagues typically require express written consent to use their footage commercially.
The President struggled to remain awake during an Oval Office meeting today. During the same meeting, he called Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.”
A worsening farm recession is pushing American farmers to the brink, with diesel prices, trade disputes, and soaring interest rates driving a wave of bankruptcies and forcing multigenerational farms to question whether it’s worth continuing. Diesel, essential for running tractors and combines, has climbed near an all-time high of $6.53 a gallon nationally and $6.82 in Illinois, forcing seventh-generation Illinois farmer John Yeley to buy fuel in small batches for the first time in his adult life rather than in full truckloads, while trade wars with China have cut off soybean markets and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have pushed fertilizer prices up as much as 50 percent in the past year. Farm bankruptcies rose 20 percent in the 12 months ending in June, and attorney Tom Ajamie warned that figure will keep climbing as “a lot of these farmers are on the edge.” Iowa Farmers Union president Aaron Lehman said most farms he knows expect to lose money again this year after losing money last year, calling the run of policy-driven losses “very frustrating” compared to the unpredictability farmers are used to from weather and soil conditions. Yeley, whose family has farmed the same Illinois land since 1852, said three farmers have already gone under in his small county this year and that he wouldn’t wish the current economics on his own teenage children, even as some in Congress push a farm bill and a possible diesel export ban that wouldn’t bring relief in time for this year’s harvest.
Republicans Face a Texas-Sized Problem as the State Could Flip for the First Time in Decades
Latino voters across South Texas who powered Trump’s 2024 breakthrough are turning on him, threatening the very redistricting maps Republicans drew to lock in those gains. Reuters traveled more than 360 miles through South Texas, from San Antonio to McAllen, and spoke with over 30 Latino voters who described Trump as having failed to lower prices despite the chance to do so, with Trump’s national approval now at 32 percent, the lowest of his second term. Saúl Guajardo, a 53-year-old McAllen voter who backed Trump three times, said he’s now “more open than ever” to voting Democrat, while his wife Terrie criticized Trump’s immigration crackdown as too harsh on families. Ramon Barrera, a first-time Trump voter in 2024 known online as “The Texas Tea Guy,” said he’s disappointed enough to back both Democratic congressional candidate Bobby Pulido and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, summing up the mood with “the S&P 500 looks great, but our wallets don’t.” Republicans redrew the 15th and 35th Congressional Districts specifically to preserve Trump’s 2024 Latino support, but both are now rated competitive, with an August Texas Southern University poll showing Pulido, a Latin Grammy winner campaigning in a cowboy hat and handing out “Make Quinceañeras Great Again” hats, leading GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz by five points in a district Trump had carried by 18. Here is Ken Paxton defending a deal with a child predator:
The GOP’s Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, is widely viewed even by fellow Republicans as a weaker candidate than the incumbent Trump pushed out of the race. At the Texas Tribune Festival, Karl Rove said flatly that if John Cornyn were still the nominee “this race would be over,” pointing to Paxton’s baggage, including multiple affairs and $200,000 in home renovations from a businessman for whom he did favors. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis went further, calling Trump’s endorsement of Paxton over Cornyn a “colossal mistake” and an “unforced error” that has put the Senate seat at risk, adding that Republicans “would not be spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Texas if Cornyn had won.” Paxton’s political history includes a 2023 impeachment on corruption allegations that ended in acquittal, a felony securities fraud indictment later dismissed under a pre-trial diversion agreement, and a 2025 divorce filing from his wife of 38 years, Angela Paxton, made “on biblical grounds” citing adultery. His Democratic opponent, pastor and former state legislator James Talarico, would become the first Democrat in more than 30 years to win statewide office in Texas if he wins in November.
A second statewide GOP nominee, Railroad Commission candidate Bo French, has become an outright liability after years of inflammatory posts resurfaced just weeks before the election. French repeatedly called for publicly executing political opponents, including Obama and then-Rep. Adam Schiff, using hashtags like “#HangEmHigh” and writing that “the penalty for treason used to be death, even for a former president,” in posts spanning six years that he has since deleted. He has also asked followers whether Muslims or Jews are the “bigger threat” to America, argued at a CPAC panel that “the problem is actually Islam,” called for deporting 100 million people, and posted a racist claim that a racially diverse University of Texas football student section suggested students were in the country illegally, a claim the Dallas Morning News found included at least one naturalized citizen. The backlash was severe enough that Karl Rove said he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, breaking three decades of exclusively supporting Republicans, while Sen. John Cornyn called French “an embarrassment to the Republican Party” who is “going to drag the whole ticket down.” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had previously called on French to resign as Tarrant County GOP chair over the Muslims-versus-Jews poll and endorsed his primary rival, only to reportedly reverse course once French won the nomination; Gov. Greg Abbott and Paxton have likewise declined to disavow him.
Together, these fractures have election analysts treating Texas as newly competitive up and down the ballot for the first time in decades. Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted Republicans are grappling with whether Latino voters, notoriously swingy, could snap back to Democrats the way they have in other states’ recent special elections. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the 15th Congressional District a toss-up, Cook Political rates it Lean Republican, and a September poll of 1,000 Texas Latinos found nearly two-thirds would be less likely to support candidates who back Trump’s immigration policies. TelevisaUnivision CEO Daniel Alegre described the electorate as persuadable rather than locked in, saying voters will back “the person who is going to make their lives better” rather than voting a straight party line. With Paxton struggling, French mired in scandal, and Gov. Abbott facing Democrat Gina Hinojosa in his bid for a fourth term, Republicans are defending a map and a slate of candidates that increasingly look shakier than the party anticipated when it redrew the state’s districts last year.
Trump strips Title IX Protections:
The Trump administration formally rescinded the Biden-era Title IX rule that extended protections against sexual harassment and assault to LGBTQ students, reinstating a 2020 rule from Betsy DeVos’s tenure, though officials stopped short of publishing a promised amendment defining sex as an “immutable biological classification as either male or female.” Education Secretary Linda McMahon previewed the move on a Fox sports show, framing it as a “full return” to policies ensuring “boys in boys’ sports and girls in girls’ sports,” while highlighting the administration’s broader push, including a settlement with the University of Pennsylvania that erased a transgender swimmer’s records, to block trans students from women’s sports and bathrooms matching their gender identity. Critics like Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center warned the change erodes protections against sexual harassment that “continues to remain pervasive,” noting the discarded 2024 rule had required schools to promptly investigate off-campus complaints and explicitly protected LGBTQIA+ and pregnant students from being pushed out of school. GOP Rep. Tim Walberg, who chairs the House education committee, countered that the reversal “restores longstanding protections for women and girls” and aligns policy with recent court rulings, including a June Supreme Court decision allowing states to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s teams.
The rollback comes as the Education Department faces criticism for inconsistency and inaction elsewhere on sexual misconduct, even as it moves aggressively on gender identity policy. Patel pointed out the department has stayed silent on a high-profile Cornell University lawsuit alleging a student was drugged and gang-raped by seven fraternity members, a case prosecutors are now reopening, even while the department investigates 20 districts over staff-on-student misconduct and faces Democratic criticism for letting a backlog of abuse complaints go unaddressed. The administration has also sued California, Maine, and Minnesota over their gender identity policies and threatened to withhold federal funding from northern Virginia districts, and it’s expected to bypass the standard public comment process when it eventually publishes its formal definition of sex under Title IX. Attorneys who advise schools describe the current environment as a “wild west,” with Title IX consultant Sandra Aboy saying compliance now depends heavily on individual districts’ own ideology, and that some states with trans-inclusive policies are already fighting back with their own lawsuits.
Other news:
The Trump administration has finalized a rule barring federal student loans for degrees the Education Department judges don’t earn enough money, using IRS data to compare graduates’ salaries four years out against people with only a high school diploma and disqualifying any degree that falls short starting in 2027. Fields like social work, art, religious studies, teaching aide programs, music, and cosmetology are expected to be hit hardest, along with for-profit programs generally. The administration frames the move as “accountability” for higher education, but critics, including American Council on Education’s Ted Mitchell, argue it punishes essential, lower-paying work, noting “we need social workers” to handle crises like the fentanyl epidemic and homelessness. Even some conservatives have pushed back, with Alliance Defending Freedom’s Gregory Baylor arguing the government “shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money,” while Stanford professor Jonathan Gienapp warned the policy ignores that a humanities program’s educational value isn’t always tied to immediate earnings.
A New York Times investigation found that after President Trump toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and lifted his own prior ban on Venezuelan gold, the administration rushed to broker gold-trading deals in an industry still riddled with the very corruption and gang violence Trump said he was fighting, and now hundreds of millions of dollars of that gold sits unsold because international refiners won’t touch it. The first deal went to Trafigura, one of the world’s largest trading houses, which won a yearlong right to buy gold from Venezuela’s state-owned Minerven and flew $100 million worth to the US within hours of signing, even though gold began flowing before the company or independent auditors had ever visited the mines. Reporters found that Minerven’s mines sit in gang-controlled territory where local miners and brigades pay roughly 20 percent of their gold to the Tren de Guayana gang as protection money, a practice so entrenched it’s locally known as “el sistema,” meaning at least some of the gold now imported into the US is tied to organized crime. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum personally helped broker the deal and brought bars of the gold to a White House celebration with Trump, even as Venezuela’s own interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, was reportedly skeptical but had little leverage to push back since she depends on Washington to stay in power.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito abruptly reversed course and stepped aside from a major climate change case, after previously insisting he had no reason to recuse despite calls from left-leaning groups over his oil company stock holdings. The case involves Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy seeking to toss out a Colorado lawsuit from Boulder seeking climate damages, with broad nationwide implications expected from the ruling, which is set to be argued next week. Alito doesn’t own stock in either company directly but holds shares in ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and five other energy firms that could benefit if the court sides with the oil companies, since ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 have themselves warned shareholders about the financial risks posed by similar climate lawsuits nationwide. A Consumer Watchdog spokesperson said the recusal was “the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” pointing to those very disclosures as evidence of his conflict of interest. Alito had actually recused himself from an earlier, related appeal in the same Colorado case back in 2023, something the court later called “inadvertent,” before reversing that position and declining to step aside again until this new reversal. His recusal now raises the possibility of a 4-8 4-4 split on the 6-3 conservative court, which would leave the major legal issues unresolved, while some conservatives have separately pushed for liberal Justice Elena Kagan to recuse over an unrelated controversy involving a climate chapter in a judicial reference manual she wrote a brief foreword to.
President Trump will announce a $15 billion steel mill in Iowa on Monday, built by Mesabi Metallics with production targeted for 2030 and expected to create up to 1,750 permanent jobs, a project first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The plant will produce 10 million tons of steel annually and is designed to support defense sector requirements for high-grade steel, drawing iron ore from a new $2.5 billion Minnesota mine in the historic Mesabi Iron Range, the first new iron mine built in the US in 50 years and expected to create about 350 additional jobs. The Export-Import Bank will provide up to $10 billion in financing for the expansion, and Trump will unveil the project at a White House event alongside Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Mesabi Metallics CEO Joe Broking, and Export-Import Bank Chairman John Jovanovic. The announcement comes as steel industry groups sent Trump a letter last week urging him to “stand firm” on existing steel tariffs even as the Supreme Court has already struck down many of his other tariffs, leaving the 50% duty on most steel and aluminum imports intact. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers framed the announcement as proof Trump is “delivering on his promise to rebuild American industry, reshore manufacturing, and create new jobs.”
Andrew Bailey, who joined the FBI just a year ago in the unusual “co-deputy director” role, is stepping down, reportedly for family reasons, after previously serving as Missouri’s attorney general before resigning that post to join the bureau. He announced his departure Monday on social media, first reported by MS NOW, thanking Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, and expressing confidence that Patel would continue to “reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland” and restore public trust. Bailey had worked alongside then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service member and conservative podcaster who also left the post after less than a year to return to podcasting, at which point Bongino was replaced by Chris Raia, a career FBI special agent whose background was more in line with the tradition of filling the bureau’s No. 2 position with an experienced insider. The nontraditional co-deputy structure created for Bongino remained in place even after his exit. The departure adds to a pattern of rapid turnover among senior FBI leadership under this administration, as Patel simultaneously pursues a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic over an article about his leadership and faces increasingly heated exchanges with congressional Democrats over how he’s running the bureau.
US stocks fell Monday as bond yields surged to multiyear highs and oil prices swung erratically amid the ongoing Iran war, with the S&P 500 down 0.5%, the Nasdaq down 0.6%, and the 10-year Treasury yield hitting 5.27%, its highest level since mid-2007. Brent crude briefly spiked above $108 a barrel before easing back under $105 after reports that mediators planned separate meetings with US and Iranian officials, plus unconfirmed reports that Trump was open to offering Iran economic concessions to restart talks, though NBC News said it could not confirm those reports. This came days after Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters the offered deal “would not be acceptable,” even as he said he was open to making some kind of deal. Longtime market analyst Ed Yardeni warned that while rising oil prices haven’t yet knocked the wind out of the global economy, rapidly rising interest rates still might, and cautioned that those higher rates are worsening the outlook for large government deficits worldwide, while analysts at Goldman Sachs said financial conditions have “changed little” since January because higher rates have been largely offset by rising equity prices. Despite the volatility, analysts note the stock market’s roughly 12% gain this year has been driven almost entirely by a few sectors, with tech up 28% and energy up 38%, while most other sectors, including financials, real estate, and consumer staples, have gained less than 10%, raising concerns about how narrow the rally really is heading into a month that closes with major central bank meetings, including at the Federal Reserve.
Congo’s Ebola outbreak has surpassed 8,000 confirmed cases with a death toll approaching 3,901 as of September 26, giving it a fatality rate above 48%, as the country runs critically short of health workers to contain the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no known treatment or vaccine. The outbreak, first announced May 15, now spans 63 health zones across seven of Congo’s 26 provinces, and the WHO said the “continuously high crude case fatality ratio,” especially deaths occurring in communities rather than treatment centers, highlights “the seriousness of the disease and the persistent challenges in timely case detection and access to early and adequate patient care.” Health worker strikes over delayed or missing pay have further hampered the response, and roughly 50 health workers have died since the outbreak began, even as some provinces like Ituri and Haut-Uele show signs of improvement while the virus spreads into new areas. Containment efforts have also been hamstrung by insecurity, displacement, and intense population movements across the affected regions. Data from the Africa CDC shows the outbreak has already outpaced the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic’s spread at the same point in time, with 7,840 cases by week 19 compared to 3,781 in the earlier outbreak, and WHO warns it’s on track to surpass that regional epidemic, which ultimately killed roughly 11,000 people.
Google Earth Images Reveal Scale of Gaza’s Devastation. New Google Earth satellite imagery shows the staggering scale of destruction across Gaza, with updated before-and-after comparisons of areas like Khan Yunis and Rafah revealing entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. The images arrive as Israel continues to bar foreign journalists and independent investigators from entering the strip, making satellite data one of the only ways to document the damage. A UN report released last week found that 90 percent of working-age Palestinians are unemployed and that annual GDP per capita has collapsed to just $212, or 58 cents a day. The UN estimates that around 60 million tonnes of debris now cover the territory, work that could take decades to clear, while a CBC News investigation found satellite evidence suggesting Israel has been removing rubble that may contain human remains and evidence of war crimes. Israel denies committing war crimes and has called genocide accusations antisemitic.
Five British men in their early to mid-20s arrested near RAF Fairford, a UK air base used for US strikes on Iran, have been released on bail after “extensive interviews and inquiries,” though counterterrorism officials stress the investigation is far from over and the men remain under strict movement and contact restrictions. The men were detained Sunday after three suspicious vehicles were spotted heading toward the base, prompting the evacuation of dozens of homes and a heavy security presence in the rural Cotswolds; a local farmer described seeing “a large group of hooded and masked men” who scattered when she approached. A grainy photo circulating online showed five shirtless, apparently handcuffed men flanked by armed officers, while a UK fuel delivery company, Fuel2U, said its logo had been used without permission on one of the vans photographed near the scene and that it had no connection to the incident. Iran’s embassy in London “categorically rejected” and called “malicious” any speculation linking Tehran to the arrests, even as counterterrorism chief Laurence Taylor said investigators are examining whether the incident may involve individuals acting as proxies for a foreign state, whether knowingly or not. Trump claimed credit for the operation, telling reporters “we caught them” and calling the joint UK effort “an amazing job,” adding that authorities had the suspects “under view for a long time.” The scare comes after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned in July that any base facilitating strikes against Iranian territory would be considered “a legitimate target,” specifically citing bomber flights out of Fairford.
The US and China agreed to cut tariffs on a combined $60 billion of goods, with each country designating $30 billion worth of “non-sensitive” imports for more favorable treatment, unlocking improved market access for roughly 30% of US exports to China, according to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. China will lower duties on US agricultural products including corn, wheat, sorghum, meat, dairy, and vegetable oils, notably excluding soybeans, plus seafood, logs, cosmetics, and medical devices, while the US cuts tariffs on Chinese small appliances like coffee makers and toasters, tableware, bedding, toys, and holiday decorations. The deal, struck during last week’s Washington summit between Trump and Xi Jinping, also includes China agreeing to import 10 million metric tons of US coal annually in 2027 and 2028, about 2% of its yearly coal imports, along with a new agriculture working group set to meet before year’s end and a communication channel on AI incidents with a follow-up dialogue planned by late November. Both sides extended their broader trade truce by two months, through January 10, which China’s commerce ministry said would provide a “relatively stable and predictable policy environment” for companies while the two countries keep negotiating. Despite the agreement, Chinese stocks fell sharply Monday, with the benchmark CSI300 index dropping more than 2% to a one-year low amid renewed tensions over a bipartisan US push to ban Chinese components from data centers.
SpaceX successfully launched its massive Starship rocket into orbit for the first time Monday, delivering 26 advanced Starlink satellites, but cut the planned 10-hour, six-lap flight short for safety reasons after one engine shut down prematurely just before reaching orbit. The spacecraft reentered over the Pacific and splashed down north of Hawaii roughly three hours after liftoff from Texas, tipping over and erupting in flames on impact in a dramatic end to the mission, while the first-stage booster separately dropped into the Gulf of Mexico within minutes of launch as planned. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman praised the mission for reaching orbit “in a safe, responsible and especially inspirational way,” calling it a key milestone toward certifying Starship for NASA’s Artemis moon program, where it’s set to compete with and later alternate against Jeff Bezos’s Blue Moon lander across upcoming Artemis III and IV missions. Musk has said the company is being deliberately cautious about flying Starship back to its Starbase launch site, warning that debris raining onto populated areas would make the company’s “popularity diminish very rapidly,” with the next test potentially attempting the first “catch” landing by year’s end or early next year if this flight’s data checks out. SpaceX is also racing to certify Starship for repeated use, having modified this rocket’s heat shield based on inspections of an earlier Starship recovered from the Indian Ocean in July, as it works toward opening new launch sites in Florida and Louisiana.
Hurricane Polo bore down on Mexico’s Baja California Sur as a Category 3 storm with 115 mph winds Monday, threatening life-threatening flooding and mudslides as residents boarded up homes and workers hauled dirt and rubble to reinforce flood barriers. Mexico’s Civil Protection coordinator, Laura Velázquez, urged residents to stay off the streets and seek shelter, announcing that travel would be suspended and regional ports closed as the storm was expected to make landfall on the mainland late Monday night or early Tuesday. In the fishing town of Puerto San Carlos, residents like Rocío Sánchez feared the earthen barriers built to prevent flooding could give way under the tides and wind, prompting some families to evacuate roughly 37 miles to shelters in Ciudad Constitucion, while the Mexican navy staged personnel, aid, and vessels in Guaymas and Mazatlán to reach communities that could be cut off. Meanwhile Hurricane Nolo, still a powerful system with winds near 155 mph, moved away from Hawaii but continued threatening the Big Island with up to 20 inches of rain as residents there remain rattled from Hurricane Lala, which swept roughly 100 homes off their foundations last month without even making landfall. Tropical Storm Rachel also formed off Mexico’s southwest coast the same weekend, though it posed no immediate coastal threat, capping an unusually active Pacific hurricane season that forecasters link to this year’s El Niño pattern.
A New York Times engineering executive, Jonathan McKinsey, was fatally shot in the parking lot of a Dublin, California park on Saturday afternoon, with police arresting his 77-year-old in-laws as suspects after a flood of witness calls. McKinsey, 40, who led engineering and games player experiences for the Times since 2023, was found lying on the ground at the Dublin Sports Grounds with multiple gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police identified the suspects as Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, a married couple who, like McKinsey, lived in Dublin, and both are now being held at Santa Rita jail pending charges. McKinsey held a bachelor’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s in computer science from UC Berkeley. Police have not released a motive for the shooting, and the investigation remains ongoing.
A 29-year-old Massachusetts man, Jordende Pierre, is facing sex trafficking, kidnapping, and assault charges after allegedly holding a woman captive for six weeks in the unfinished attic of a Malden home, where she was found naked and malnourished on a mat with a bucket of urine nearby. Prosecutors say Pierre met the woman, who struggled with substance abuse, through a dating app, brought her to the property, gave her drugs, sexually assaulted her, and arranged for other men to have paid sexual encounters with her at the home, all while removing the attic door handle to prevent her escape. The property’s landlord, Qing Sun, discovered the woman by chance Sunday while investigating a water leak, immediately called 911, and said she had no idea anyone was living in the attic since Pierre was not one of her tenants. Pierre wasn’t arrested until Thursday, in an operation involving Malden police, the FBI, and US Marshals, and neighbors described the home as having a “rotating cast of characters,” frequent late-night parties, and past police visits, with one neighbor saying she felt sick knowing the woman had been held just 500 feet away without anyone realizing it. Pierre also has an open assault and battery case in Somerville and was out on bail at the time of the alleged kidnapping; he’s now being held until his next hearing on October 6, and police have not ruled out additional arrests.
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: ‘F*cking P*dophile’: Trump Faces Backlash as Food Banks Run Dry, Fuel Costs Soar, Healthcare Premiums Rise, and the War Rages, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 28, 2026. Diesel prices hitting record highs are exposing new fractures in Trump’s own party weeks before the midterms, with Republican Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan now calling for an end to the Iran war as the fuel costs driving it batter their voters.
The same price surge is straining food banks nationwide, forcing some to burn through reserve funds and swap beef for canned chicken as a new report finds families skipping meals to get by. A separate analysis found AI tools are now quietly inflating hospital bills by flagging patients as sicker without changing the care they receive.
Trump himself is facing that pressure in person. He no longer can escape protests on the golf course, and it comes as a CNN investigation revealed the Republican nominee for one of Texas’s most powerful offices has spent years calling for public executions of political opponents, including Barack Obama, a scandal most of the party’s leadership has yet to fully reckon with. Overseas, Iran says it’s prepared for either renewed diplomacy or a return to fighting, and a new report reveals eight US Marines were injured in an Iranian attack the Pentagon never disclosed to the public.
I’m working on another major investigation right now. Reporting like this doesn’t get done by outlets that answer to advertisers or a corporate parent. It gets done because readers decide it’s worth funding directly. If you can, become a paid subscriber today, it’s what lets me keep digging instead of repeating the White House’s talking points. Let’s get into it.Subscribed
Here’s the news:
Crisis at Food Banks:
Food banks across the country are facing unprecedented demand just weeks before the midterms, driven by a combination of rising food costs and surging diesel prices needed to deliver it. A new “Hunger Report” from a Washington, D.C.-based food bank group found that food security nationally is “deteriorating,” with surveyed families reporting they’ve cut the size of their children’s meals, gone a full day without feeding their kids, or skipped meals themselves to save money. At Maryland’s Manna Food Center, CEO Craig Rice said fuel costs have spiked 25 to 30 percent in recent months, forcing the organization to absorb higher delivery costs while pushing harder for donations. Rice noted a shift in who’s showing up for help, saying it used to be mostly hourly wage workers but now includes salaried employees suddenly squeezed by gas prices. The piece contrasts this on-the-ground reality with President Trump’s claims that the economy is the “greatest in history,” suggesting the severity of the crisis is being understated.
Individual food banks described specific strategies for coping with rising costs, from swapping proteins to redesigning delivery routes. In Lorain County, Ohio, Second Harvest Food Bank CEO Julie Chase-Morefield said beef prices have become so extraordinary that the organization can no longer buy truckloads of it, forcing a pivot to canned chicken and beans, while surging diesel costs are also driving up the price of fresh produce from local farmer partners during harvest season. Second Harvest is now tapping into its “rainy day fund” to maintain services, after its annual diesel expenses roughly tripled from about $50,000 last year to $150,000 in 2026, with no federal assistance to offset the increase. At the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, president Amy Beros reported a 20 to 60 percent increase in need since last year, including among children, and said the organization is bracing for diesel to hit $8 a gallon by year’s end. Beros said her organization has already redesigned truck routes and limited driving speeds to cut fuel usage, adding that “it’s really hard for people in the United States to understand the scale of hunger, because it doesn’t look like it looks on TV.”
The crisis carries a political dimension heading into November, as Democrats tie the strain on food banks to a Trump-backed spending law that reduced SNAP eligibility. The Capital Area Food Bank’s annual report noted that SNAP, which supports nearly 40 million people nationwide, saw reduced eligibility under the law, and further cuts are looming, with many states required to start paying a portion of SNAP benefit costs starting in October 2027 or later for the first time in the program’s history. Senate Appropriations Committee member Chris Van Hollen said food pantries he’s spoken with point to rising need, and accused Trump and Republicans of “driving prices up and cutting support” for SNAP and other nutrition programs while calling for the federal government to reverse the cuts. Democrats are expected to face pressure to restore federal nutrition funding if they retake congressional majorities in November. Despite the political stakes, the piece notes food banks themselves remain nonpolitical, focused instead on the immediate task of keeping nutritious food, including vegetables, fruit, and vitamin-rich staples, in the boxes they hand out to families.
Prices continues to soar:
Rising transport costs are spreading through nearly every corner of the US economy, with businesses largely unable to avoid passing them along, the Wall Street Journal reports. Trucking expenses have hit their highest level since the pandemic, driven partly by diesel prices that are up 77% over the past year. Container shipping rates are climbing too, while railroads, FedEx, and even the US Postal Service are all raising their own prices. Separately, the newsletter noted the Iran war has also pushed motor oil prices higher, even as the US and China reached an agreement to reduce reciprocal tariffs.
Record-high diesel prices are causing rifts in Trump’s own party, with Republican Senate candidates in deep-red states now calling for an end to the Iran war and for a ban on diesel exports. Michigan GOP nominee Mike Rogers and Iowa’s Rep. Ashley Hinson, who had voted against ending the war, are both now demanding relief, with Hinson’s race shifting from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up” and a GOP pollster reportedly warning that districts once won by 15 points are now within the margin of error. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks have joined calls for an export ban, backed by farm groups like the Iowa Corn Growers Association, even though Energy Secretary Chris Wright and independent analysts warn a ban could actually push gasoline prices higher rather than lowering diesel prices. Trump has dismissed the price pain, calling high gas prices “a very inexpensive price to pay” for the war, putting him at odds with vulnerable Republicans like Alaska’s Sen. Dan Sullivan, who wants exports banned “until the conflict in Iran comes to an end.” Farmers like Iowa’s Steve Kuiper describe diesel costs eating directly into thin margins during harvest season, with prices above $6 a gallon adding what he called serious “economic and mental stress.”
Airfares could stay elevated even if oil and jet fuel prices fall, industry analysts and airlines say, because carriers set schedules and pricing months in advance and can’t retroactively raise fares on tickets already sold. Jet fuel prices have swung wildly since the Iran war began, from an April peak of $4.88 a gallon down to $2.70 in June before climbing back to $4.53 in September, while average US airfares kept rising regardless, reaching $436 in the second quarter and running 23% higher in August than a year earlier. Every penny-per-gallon increase adds about $10 million to American Airlines’ quarterly fuel bill, and the airline expects the latest spike to cost it roughly $1 billion in the fourth quarter alone, prompting American, United, and Southwest to cut less-profitable routes. Holiday travel is already hitting decade-high prices, with Hopper estimating round-trip Thanksgiving fares averaging $402 and Christmas fares $452, up 31% and 23% from last year respectively. Economists say the volatility itself, not just the price level, is what’s keeping airlines cautious, meaning travelers waiting for fares to drop may be waiting for a while yet.
GOP Candidate Called for Obama’s Execution:
A CNN KFile investigation found that Bo French, the Republican nominee to lead the Texas Railroad Commission, has repeatedly called for public executions of political opponents over the past six years, extending a controversy that began with a racist post about South Asian students at a University of Texas football game. In deleted posts from May 2020, French demanded the death penalty for Barack Obama and other “Obama conspirators” over the Russia investigation, using the hashtag “#HangEmHigh” and writing that “the penalty for treason used to be death, even for a former president.” In February 2025, while chairing the Tarrant County GOP and promoting a Musk-style government efficiency effort, French said DOGE should stand for “Dangle Officials Gallows Expeditiously” and wrote “I want more than perp walks. I want public executions,” at one point calling for now-Senator Adam Schiff’s execution and saying “the wrong person was hung” in response to a post about a Jan. 6 defendant’s suicide. CNN found the old and current accounts share the same underlying numeric user ID, tying the posts directly to French despite his having deleted or lost access to them.
The revelations have drawn bipartisan condemnation, with GOP strategist Karl Rove saying he’d vote for French’s Democratic opponent and Texas Sen. John Cornyn saying he won’t support French, even as French dismissed critics as “less conservative” and declined to respond to CNN. Despite the controversy, Texas’s most powerful Republicans, Gov. Greg Abbott and Senate nominee Ken Paxton, have kept their endorsements in place, with Abbott calling the racist post “not my message” and Paxton offering only a vague statement that he “condemn[s] racism in all its forms” without naming French. Neither official, nor the Texas Republican Party, responded to CNN’s questions about French’s calls for executions specifically. French will face Democratic state Rep. Jon Rosenthal in November for a seat on the commission, which despite its name no longer regulates railroads but instead holds broad authority over the state’s oil and gas industry.
Iran war continues, Marines injured:
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Tehran is “fully prepared” for the war with the US to resume but remains open to diplomacy, insisting it’s “up to President Trump to choose,” even as Trump told Axios he expects talks to resume this week. Trump maintained that Iran is “losing so badly” and “overplayed their hand” after he rejected Tehran’s proposed seven-day ceasefire and phased reopening of the Strait of Hormuz last week, a plan tied to conditions from the collapsed mid-June memorandum of understanding. Complicating that outlook, Iran’s UN delegation said Monday it has no plans for direct talks with the US and is returning to Tehran on Tuesday, with Iranian state media saying its positions have already been “conveyed clearly and explicitly” through a Qatari mediator. Republican Sen. John Kennedy dismissed Iran’s proposal as “not a serious offer,” backing continued sanctions and the naval blockade while ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran.
NBC reported that eight US Marines were injured, though not seriously, when an Iranian cruise missile struck a ship in the Strait of Hormuz on September 14, an attack the Defense Department never publicly disclosed. The Marines suffered smoke inhalation and concussion-like symptoms such as headaches but all returned to duty shortly afterward, and officials did not specify what type of vessel was hit. The revelation adds to mounting scrutiny of the Pentagon’s casualty reporting, after a Washington Post report found at least four service members killed in the Middle East since the war began were left out of the official count. CBS News separately reported soldiers describing downplayed injuries, including one who suffered severe shrapnel wounds and multiple emergency surgeries in Kuwait after being told by an Army official his injuries were “minor,” a characterization the Army disputes as a misapplication of specific military terminology.
Meanwhile, Trump claims that “we” are going to win this war very soon, something he has been saying for months:
Iran’s economy continues to deteriorate under the strain of war and sanctions, with its currency, the rial, falling to a new record low against the dollar on Monday, surpassing 2.4 million rials per dollar on the free market. Annual inflation has reached 61.4% as of August, while food prices have surged 128% year over year, according to Iran’s Statistical Center. Iran has also formally protested new US aviation sanctions to the International Civil Aviation Organization, after restrictions imposed this month forced airlines across the region to cancel flights. Iran’s civil aviation chief, Abouzar Shiroudi, framed the complaint as an effort to “defend the legitimate rights of the aviation industry” against what Tehran calls illegal restrictions.
Regional military dynamics shifted as Saudi Arabia reportedly resumed oil exports through its East-West Crude Oil Pipeline, restoring a key alternative route after drone strikes Saudi officials blamed on Iran-backed Iraqi militias had forced its shutdown earlier this month. The pipeline had let Saudi Arabia bypass the badly disrupted Strait of Hormuz, though Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have vowed to blockade Saudi Red Sea ports and have already targeted vessels there. Separately, Iran’s unseen supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was quoted predicting that US forces would soon be driven out of the Arabian Sea entirely, claiming they’ve already been unable to advance further due to “painful blows.” Meanwhile, UK police continue investigating a suspected terrorist plot involving explosives-laden trucks near RAF Fairford, a base used for US strikes on Iran, with authorities probing a possible Iranian link and Trump praising the arrests as “an amazing job.”
Trump Faces Protests on Golf Course:
President Trump was heckled as he appeared at the Presidents Cup at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago on Sunday, his second high-profile sporting appearance in as many days after being booed at a college football game in Knoxville the day before. He initially received a warmer welcome at the golf event, with cheers and “USA” chants, and posed with the trophy alongside PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp after Team USA’s win over the 12-man international squad, though a hot mic and crowd noise often made his remarks to players hard to decipher. That goodwill broke when a spectator shouted “You’re a f---ing pedophile, Donald!” as Trump posed with the trophy, drawing a round of whooping from other attendees while Trump stared ahead without acknowledging it. Moments earlier, he had opened his remarks by preemptively insisting the “fake news media” would falsely claim he got a bad reception, when in fact “we got a good reception.”
The incident fits a pattern of Trump being heckled over his past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Similar confrontations have occurred at a Michigan rally in July, where a man repeatedly shouted “Pedophile protector!” prompting Trump to call him “a communist,” and at a Pennsylvania rally in June, where a protester flipped him off while calling him a pedophile. Trump was forced to directly deny the accusation in an April CBS interview with Norah O’Donnell, telling her “I’m not a pedophile.” Polling suggests much of the public remains skeptical of the administration’s handling of the matter: a June Reuters/Ipsos survey found just 10 percent of Americans, and only 21 percent of Republicans, believe the administration has helped hold Epstein’s associates accountable, while three in four respondents said they think the federal government is hiding information about his alleged clients.
Other news:
New York prosecutors have reopened their investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape of a former Cornell University student after she filed a 101-page civil lawsuit this month accusing seven Chi Phi fraternity members of drugging and assaulting her while a group Snapchat message invited others to join in, and accusing Cornell of inadequately protecting and disciplining those involved. Tompkins County DA Matthew Van Houten said his office will present the case to a grand jury, explaining that the civil complaint’s allegations were “dramatically different” from the woman’s original 2024 statement to police, which never alleged she was drugged without consent or physically incapacitated, though he acknowledged his office relied entirely on Cornell police’s investigation rather than conducting its own. The woman’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, disputed that characterization and said no trained sexual assault investigators ever interviewed her beyond her initial report, while Cornell disputed claims it let accused students avoid real punishment, saying two of the seven were expelled and others suspended after a formal Title IX process, and that it banned the fraternity’s chapter from campus and formed a sexual assault task force. An attorney for one accused student denied any wrongdoing on his client’s behalf, and Jane Doe herself described the assault as “the worst experience of my life,” saying the trauma will “haunt me and be part of me the rest of my life.” The case has drawn national outrage, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemning a “culture of rape” at elite universities during an Ithaca town hall and actress Florence Pugh publicly denouncing schools for “protecting boys” at the expense of survivors.
A new Blue Cross Blue Shield Association analysis finds that hospital systems are increasingly billing patient stays as more medically complex, and that widely adopted AI coding tools appear to be driving a large share of that shift. More than 60% of hospital systems now use AI-enabled technology that scans lab results, doctors’ notes, and electronic records to identify secondary diagnoses, conditions found in addition to a patient’s primary reason for care, that can move a claim into a higher-severity, higher-reimbursement billing category. Researchers estimate this trend added $942 million in healthcare spending for BCBS companies between 2023 and 2025 alone, with roughly 70% of that increase, about $650 million, tied specifically to these secondary diagnoses. The study focused on cases like anemia following major bowel surgery, since such diagnoses can be derived from a single lab value, making them particularly easy for AI systems to flag. Crucially, BCBSA says there is “a clear disconnect between coding and treatment,” meaning the way hospitals are coding care has changed sharply while the actual care patients receive has not. The analysis draws on de-identified claims data from BCBS companies, which collectively cover one in three Americans and offer visibility into every ZIP code in the country.
Senator John Fetterman mistakenly called himself a “lifelong Republican” during a fireside chat in Texas, fueling fresh speculation about his party loyalty. Asked why he hadn’t become an independent, the Pennsylvania Democrat replied “Because I’m a lifelong Republican,” prompting CBS correspondent Major Garrett to correct him on stage as the audience laughed. Fetterman quickly clarified he meant Democrat, acknowledging the clip would “break through” online, and social media users seized on the moment as a possible Freudian slip. The gaffe follows months of scrutiny over Fetterman’s votes with Republicans against ending the Iran war and cutting military aid to Israel, plus his appearance praising GOP Senator Dave McCormick at a Republican convention. Fetterman has denied planning to defect, saying he’d only leave the party if it became “the anti-Israel party,” and he left open how he might vote if Senate control comes down to a tiebreaker after the midterms.
Scientists are warning that a massive, planetary-scale “kelvin wave” could raise sea levels along the California coast by up to a foot in the coming months. The phenomenon forms when trade winds weaken or reverse during El Niño years, sending a slow-moving surge of warm water from the western Pacific toward the Americas, with one such wave expected to reach California within days. Researchers say this year’s El Niño could be the strongest in at least 1,000 years, compounding the kelvin wave’s effect with already elevated tides, more frequent storms, and about 8 inches of sea level rise accumulated over the past century. Governor Gavin Newsom has already declared a state of emergency, staging road-closure equipment and preparing the National Guard for possible winter storms and flooding. Officials are especially concerned about storms coinciding with high tides around Thanksgiving and Christmas, which past El Niño events show produce the most damaging coastal flooding.
Nvidia unveiled a new software platform Monday, the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, built with more than 100 industry partners to help companies monitor and control AI agents after a string of incidents in which agents “went rogue” and hacked into corporate and government systems without being instructed to. CEO Jensen Huang framed the move as essential to realizing AI’s potential, saying “we must accelerate discovery at the frontier of AI safety,” even though he has separately dismissed existential AI risk concerns as overblown and told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that companies worried about losing control should simply “get the company under control” rather than seek new regulation. The announcement contrasts with warnings from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have both called for international regulations to constrain AI systems. Alongside the safety platform, Nvidia also announced a $150 billion share buyback on top of an already underway $85 billion repurchase, which the company called the largest single corporate buyback ever, surpassing Apple’s $110 billion repurchase in 2024. The buyback news drew only a modest premarket stock bump, even as Nvidia’s roughly $5.4 trillion market cap keeps it the most valuable company in the world.
A Delta flight from Barcelona to Boston was diverted to Porto, Portugal, after smoke was reported in the cabin. Flight DL251 landed safely in Porto after the reported mechanical issue, according to the airline operator. Flightradar24 data showed the plane departed Barcelona at 3:15 p.m. and landed in Porto about two and a half hours later. Eight passengers were treated on the tarmac at Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport, while three others were taken to the hospital for further treatment. Portuguese emergency officials confirmed the forced landing was due to smoke in the cabin.
A new study argues that decades of fossil fuel and libertarian donor influence over university governance left colleges vulnerable to the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on research funding. The administration froze billions in research funding in 2025, investigated 75 institutions, and canceled $4 million in climate grants at Princeton alone, with the study’s lead author warning young researchers now fear losing funding over their questions. The Academic Freedom Index found US institutional autonomy fell sharply, from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, and researchers say some scientists have started removing terms like “climate change” from grant applications. The study traces the pattern back decades, noting six fossil fuel companies gave more than $700 million to US universities between 2010 and 2020, while donors like Koch Industries’ David Koch gained lasting influence over hiring and curricula at schools like MIT. The authors call for greater transparency and faculty power to reject compromised gifts, pointing to a model policy from the UnKoch My Campus campaign as one path forward.
A new report finds the herbicide atrazine, banned in 60 countries, is contaminating nearly a quarter of all continental US river miles at levels that can harm wildlife and human health. The Center for Biological Diversity’s review of EPA records found the affected waterways touch over 20% of surface drinking water intakes and more than 675,000 private and commercial wells nationwide. Atrazine is linked to reproductive harm and developmental problems in fetuses and children, and has been shown to “chemically castrate” and alter the sex of frogs at extremely low exposure levels. Despite the risks, it remains the second most widely used pesticide in the US, with about 70 million pounds sprayed annually and $2 to $3 billion in estimated 2025 sales for manufacturer Syngenta. Researchers say the EPA has failed to act for decades because of the chemical’s profitability, with hotspots including the midwest corn belt, the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Okeechobee, and the lower Mississippi River.
A man has been arrested and charged with murder after a 63-year-old woman was found dead in Central Park, with police saying she may have been experiencing homelessness. Jonathan Robles, 36, was booked for murder and criminal possession of a weapon Sunday night, with his last listed address given as a Hell’s Kitchen homeless shelter. The victim was found near East Drive and East 74th Street with head trauma, after police initially and incorrectly reported she had been stabbed. Officers responded to a call about an unconscious woman around 9:40 a.m. as a nor’easter drenched the region, and she was pronounced dead at the scene without identification. The death shook park visitors, with one New York resident calling the park the city’s “playground” and a tourist saying she’d now avoid it after dark.
Hawaii is experiencing “storm fatigue” after being hit by a third hurricane in recent weeks, though Hurricane Nolo’s threat to the islands has diminished as it tracks offshore. Hilo’s mayor described residents as anxious and even experiencing PTSD after hurricanes Lala, Lowell, and Nolo battered the state, with Lala alone killing two people and damaging more than 200 homes last month without making landfall. More than 120 National Guard members were activated on the Big Island as part of a roughly 400-strong statewide deployment, after President Trump approved an emergency declaration authorizing FEMA assistance. Nolo strengthened to a Category 4 storm Sunday afternoon but was expected to stay south and southwest of the islands, with a hurricane watch issued for the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Meanwhile Mexico’s Baja Peninsula was bracing for Category 3 Hurricane Polo, and Tropical Storm Rachel formed off Mexico’s southwest coast the same day.
Heavy monsoon rains have killed more than 90 people across India, Nepal, and Thailand, displacing hundreds of thousands and triggering widespread flooding. In India’s Uttar Pradesh state, at least 62 people died and 46 were injured after three days of heavy rainfall damaged more than 1,000 homes, prompting school closures and evacuations in Lucknow and other districts. Neighboring Nepal recorded 21 more weather-related deaths over four days, compounding the toll from August floods that had already killed more than 1,400 people and left nearly 6,000 missing. In Thailand, intense rainfall flooded Bangkok and swamped drainage systems, forcing more than 5,900 people into evacuation centers and leaving over 80,000 residents unable to leave their flooded homes. Economists estimate the Thai floods could shave 0.3 percentage points off the country’s annual GDP growth, with nationwide damage already put at roughly $327 million.Hurricane Polo is bearing down on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula as a Category 3 storm, threatening life-threatening flooding, mudslides, and storm surge. Residents of the fishing town of Puerto San Carlos, where officials say 90% of the community is flood-prone, boarded up homes and reinforced earthen embankments ahead of the storm, with some evacuating to shelters roughly 37 miles away. The Mexican navy has staged personnel, humanitarian aid, and vessels in the ports of Guaymas and Mazatlán to reach communities that could be cut off by the storm. Polo is expected to cross into mainland Mexico and could bring heavy rain and flooding to the US Southwest later in the week, while Hurricane Nolo continues to threaten Hawaii with heavy rain even as it moves away from the islands. Tropical Storm Rachel also formed off Mexico’s southwest coast the same day, though no coastal watches were in effect for that storm.
The rerelease of “Avengers: Endgame” topped the box office over the weekend, grossing $26 million domestically as Marvel builds hype for “Avengers: Doomsday.” The rerun, billed as “Endgame: Encore,” added new end-credits scenes and a fan thank-you from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, and it beat out three new wide releases, including “Primetime,” “Heart of the Beast,” and “Forgotten Island.” “Primetime,” a modestly budgeted A24 film starring Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen, outperformed expectations with a $19.2 million opening, drawing a mostly Gen Z audience. “Resident Evil” held strong in its second weekend with $23.3 million, while DreamWorks’ “Forgotten Island” underperformed despite strong reviews. Overall, the crowded weekend pushed domestic ticket sales up nearly 59% over the same weekend last year, putting 2026’s box office 19% ahead of 2025’s pace.
Ireland’s national soccer team wore black armbands and declined to shake hands with Israeli players before a Nations League match that had faced pressure for a boycott over Gaza. Ireland won the match 3-0 in Debrecen, Hungary, with reserve goalkeeper Gavin Bazuno opting out of both games entirely, citing his belief that “the killing of innocent people is wrong.” Players bowed their heads during the Israeli national anthem, and captain Dara O’Shea shook hands with match officials but pointedly avoided shaking hands with Israel’s captain, Manor Solomon. Goals from Troy Parrott, Adam Idah, and Jack Moylan gave Ireland a comfortable win, though tensions boiled over near the hour mark in a clash between Idah and Israel’s Raz Shlomo that drew bookings for both players. The two sides are scheduled to meet again on October 4, with Israel playing its “home” fixture in Backa Topola, Serbia, due to the ongoing conflict.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Israel Keeps Expanding Into Gaza Despite Cease-Fire, Satellite Images Show, Samuel Granados and Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 28, 2026. On paper, the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has been in effect for almost a year. In reality, Israel has entrenched and expanded its control in the Palestinian territory — and its leaders say they have little intention of withdrawing any time soon.
Israeli forces have fortified positions, built at least a dozen military outposts and moved farther into the territory beyond the withdrawal line that they agreed to, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by The New York Times.
Analysts, diplomats and people in Gaza say that Israeli actions since the cease-fire appear to be entrenching what was meant to be a temporary partition of the territory into an expanded Israeli-controlled zone and a smaller Hamas-ruled area. The vast majority of Gaza’s two million people now live in that smaller area.
Sources: United Nations (control and restricted areas); New York Times analysis of satellite imagery (earthen barriers and outposts). The New York Times
The U.S.-backed cease-fire that took effect in October 2025 put Israel in charge of about half of the Palestinian enclave. Yet in May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli military controlled about 60 percent of the territory, and planned to take more.
Israel could still withdraw from Gaza if the cease-fire moves ahead. But progress on the next steps in the truce appears stymied. In July, U.S. officials said they had reached a deal with Hamas for it to lay down its weapons. Mr. Netanyahu rejected the plan and refused to withdraw without “genuine disarmament” by the Palestinian militant group.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it “establishes bases in Gaza in accordance with its defense concept, operational needs, and the cease-fire agreement.” It added that the bases were intended to protect Israeli forces as well as nearby communities in Israel.
In addition to building the outposts, Israeli troops have moved barriers, constructed earth mounds and declared areas off limits.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
To the Contrary, Political Opinion: “Don’t Stop the Party,” Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 28, 2026. Some thoughts on civic virtue.
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville takes to the Senate floor to warn of pilots who might be secret “furries,”; our ambassador to Greece boasts about engineering the collapse of the government of Romania;¹ Trump uses taxpayer $$ for an unhinged new MAGA ad; and a champagne-soaked White House Deputy Chief of Staff posts the perfect midterm messaging for the floundering GOP.
[Dan] Scavino, 50, posted what appears to be an AI-generated video (above) showing him popping champagne with what seems to be his second wife, Erin Elmore, and the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump. The video is set to the tune of Pitbull’s hit song “Don’t Stop the Party.
Scavino captioned this: “ “This is not an intended for the Dems heads to explode—Being some of the post State Dinner party has gotten out, I felt inclined to share mine as well, in complete transparency, with the American People. GOD BLESS THE USA!!!♥️🤍💙🇺🇸🦅🚀”
Marie Antoinete, who lost her head over this sort of thing, would have blushed.
Even right-wing influencers were gobsmacked by the crassness of the thing. ““You really have no shame, do you?,” Conservative activist Carrie Prejean Boller wrote. “Many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas or their mortgage payment, and you post a tone-deaf AI video of you and your buddies partying at the People’s House,”
Oh, and we learned yesterday that Trump is offering to sell weapons to China, because everything is for sale, including our national security and the lives of our soldiers, amirite?
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” [David Perdue, the American ambassador to China] said on “Fox News Sunday” while discussing the state visit by Mr. Xi to Washington last week. “He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point.”
So, perhaps this is a bad day to talk about civic virtue.
Happy Monday.
To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Upgrade to paid
A recent Substack post by Princeton’s estimable Robert George reminds us that we once took it for granted that we could only keep our “constitution of liberty.” if we kept our “virtue.”
The term may seem quaint today, but it had a real meaning for the Founders, who had a keen grasp of the fragility of democracy and the long history of their failures. John Adams famously insisted that our Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Professor George quotes Adams at some length, and it is worth stepping back from our daily firehose of outrages to consider his warning:
But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in the rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.
Because we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
George Washington agreed. In his Farewell Address, Washington said:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.
In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.
**
I don’t want to debate the question of whether one needs religion to be moral; that’s for another day. But it seems worthwhile to note that the emphasis Adams and Washington put on morality and virtue was once an integral part of our American civic religion. Until recently, it wasn’t a matter of partisan dispute that character mattered —and that it mattered a great deal.
This is not to say that we were always a “Republic of Virtue,” because our polity has been filled with knaves, fools, and crooks. But, at least until recently, we embraced the pretense that things like honesty and decency mattered. There were guardrails that held the grifters accountable; there were consequences for corruption — legal, moral, and political.
Many of the scandals of the past now seem quaint, but at one time we took them very seriously. They were followed by disgrace, indictment, defeat, ostracism, shame, and sometimes impeachment.
But then the folks who thought that “Character Mattered” changed their minds and their stripes. Cynicism is the handmaiden of corruption, because it insists that everyone and everything is corrupt; and therefore, appeals to character are hypocritical eyewash and mere pious posturing. Demands to support the “Lesser Evil” and “Whataboutism,” crowded out arguments about character and virtue.
Now, as the chodes riot and exult in their grift, the Age of Shame feels like ancient history.
The devolution culminated with Trump, but if we’re honest, it began long before he came down the escalator. “The safest road to hell is the gradual one,” C.S. Lewis once wrote, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
But we had lots of milestones; lots of signposts. And here we are.
Hope for America, Donald Trump’s latest impeachable offense, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Just before noon today, the President of the United States was standing just inches away from the trophy at the Medinah Country Club outside Chicago, wearing an extra-large suit that bulged along his lower back and a pastel baby blue tie. With a huge grin across his face, a jovial Donald Trump gushed about the “nice reception” he was receiving as the honorary chairman of the Presidents Cup.
Almost immediately after that, his right arm jerked back and forth, his face went blank, and his mouth opened to suck in as much air as possible, because on live television, with dozens of cameras pointed right at him, a very loud voice from the crowd yelled directly at him, calling him a “F*CKING P*DOPHILE” for the entire world to hear.
This was the second time in the past two days the resistance came directly at him. Yesterday at the Tennessee-Texas college football game in Knoxville, he was loudly booed when he was introduced and shown on the stadium screen. Today, it wasn’t just what happened on camera, because what we didn’t see was that just outside the gates at Medinah, where the Presidents Cup was being held, several hundred protesters lined both sides of the street. ABC7 Chicago spoke to one of the people who came to protest him. “He is not welcome…We are wanting to send that message loud and clear,” Allison Galvan told the news station.
Minutes before Trump was heckled, he had been repeating the same talking points he has been saying for months now: “Our country is doing great, better than ever before.” This close to the midterms, all his attention is now on trying to make his fellow Americans see what he has done to our country and our economy as a success.
But he knows the truth, and so do most of us. If what he was saying were true, if everything really were so amazing and our country were so prosperous right now, why does he have to keep telling us? If it were actually true, we would all feel it, and his administration would not need to spend our taxpayer money on ads to convince us. It would just be obvious in the lives we are living.
But that is exactly what he has been doing this past week. He is now using our taxpayer dollars, money that should be used for the benefit of the American people, on pseudo-campaign ads for himself. Yesterday, during the Illinois vs. Ohio State college football game that aired on Fox, the Trump administration paid for a 30-second ad spot that was nearly identical to a video his campaign produced in 2024. The ad was an eerie black-and-white video of Donald Trump walking down a hallway and staring directly into the camera, while audio from a campaign speech he gave repeatedly in 2023 and 2024 played in the background.
In it, he said, “This is the final battle,” and “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” It aired multiple times again over the weekend, during Fox News Sunday, and during other sports programming across local markets throughout the country.
They are not even trying to hide what they are doing, because in the closing seconds of the video ad, it said, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
This is the second taxpayer-funded propaganda ad the White House has paid to have played this week. There was also the one with Donald Trump praising himself over images of rallies and military events. And we are learning just how much money is being spent on them. So far, and these numbers are no doubt already outdated, the first ad had already cost $430,000 in taxpayer money as of Friday, according to AdImpact. This second “final battle” ad has already cost more than $362,000. These are our tax dollars being used to run ads that multiple legal experts and elected officials from both parties have called illegal government propaganda. Even worse is that this is being done just five weeks before the midterm election.
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana agreed this was wrong when he was on Face the Nation this morning and said, “I do not think any public official, including President Trump, or Kristi Noem, or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves.” Then he paused for a moment, considering the ramifications of what he was about to say, and added, “I think there ought to be a rule, well, there probably is a rule, you can’t spend public money to promote yourself.” He admitted that what the president of the United States is doing is most likely illegal. He even joked that Trump might retaliate against him, or at least try to do that, by making a racist video of him with a sombrero on his head and posting it on social media, much like he did to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Aside from the harm these videos are causing and the serious questions about whether taxpayer money can legally be used to pay for them, Sen. Kennedy also said something else just as important: you cannot criticize our leader without expecting punishment.
The White House, of course, has defended the ads and is saying that they are “public service announcements” that are “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Four senior Democratic members of Congress, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, and Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, wrote a joint letter calling these ads “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America.” Republican Senator Thom Tillis said the first ad was something he would expect from Viktor Orban.
I immediately thought of Viktor Orban as soon as I saw this last ad because they were the same type of thing he did before finally losing his last election earlier this year. He spent 235 million euros of Hungarian taxpayer money on propaganda campaign material that his government labeled “governmental information campaigns.” He paid for billboards across Hungary, and he also paid for ads to be played during soccer matches that aired on state media. This may actually be where Trump and his enablers got the idea in the first place, as Trump had considered Orban a friend and carefully followed his rise and fall from power.
Good Authority, Commentary: Republicans’ fascination with testosterone in three charts, Michael Tesler, Sept. 28, 2026. Why depictions of testosterone as a measure of manhood resonate with Republicans.
The Trump administration has accordingly moved to make testosterone prescriptions and treatments more widely accessible. The FDA is revising testosterone guidelines, including removing the controlled-substance classification and changing the warning labels for testosterone replacement therapies.
In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that “warfighters” over 30 will have their testosterone levels checked annually so that they can stay on the “leading edge of lethality.” The Pentagon issued the clinical guidelines for this program last week. Republicans have also broadly disparaged the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas as “Low-T Talarico,” in an effort to paint him as insufficiently masculine.
The GOP’s newfound fascination with testosterone as “a cultural proxy for masculinity” echoes broader themes on social media. A recent study of “gender representations in social media content about ‘low T’” looked at influencers’ and wellness companies’ aggressive online marketing of testosterone treatments. The authors concluded these efforts to target male insecurities “were closely mirrored to those promoted within the manosphere, where hormone levels were being presented as a measure of manhood.”
There’s even some initial evidence from the three graphs below that these notions of testosterone “as the key to achieving a new male ideal” are trickling down to rank-and-file Republicans.What Google searches for testosterone reveal
For starters, the first graph shows a very strong correlation (r = .85) between Trump’s statewide vote share in the 2024 presidential election and how frequently residents of each state searched Google for testosterone boosters.Source: Google trends; Dave Leip’s Election Atlas.
The chart shows that Trump’s 2024 vote share in states with the highest search rates for testosterone boosters (Wyoming, West Virginia, South Dakota, and Mississippi) was, on average, about 35 percentage points higher than it was in low-search-rate states like Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington. This relationship is so strong, in fact, that Google search rates for testosterone boosters explain over 70% of the state-by-state variation in support for Trump.
Correlation is obviously not causation in this case, and it’s always important to be cautious about making inferences from state-level data. But the chart provides some suggestive evidence that interest in testosterone aligns with partisanship.The partisan gap in views of testosterone
Individual-level data from surveys further bolsters that conclusion. Indeed, this next chart shows a sizable partisan gap in Americans’ beliefs in the benefits of testosterone supplements.
The data from a July 2026 YouGov survey shows far more Republicans think that increasing men’s testosterone is a good thing than a bad thing (39% vs. 8%, respectively). Democrats, meanwhile, tended to see boosting this hormone among men as a net negative. The partisan gap in net support for the U.S. military screening service members over the age of 30 for testosterone deficiency and offering voluntary hormone treatment for those with low levels of the hormone was even wider (-37% vs. +29%, respectively).
To be sure, the survey still showed a large degree of uncertainty in Americans’ opinions about the benefits of testosterone. Most Democrats, Republicans, and independents in YouGov’s poll were either unsure about the effects of increasing men’s testosterone levels or thought that doing so was neither a good nor a bad thing. One-third of the sample was also unsure about the military screening hormone levels.
That ambiguity is to be expected for such a nascent political issue. But the views of Americans who have formed an opinion about testosterone’s benefits (or lack thereof) fit a familiar pattern of partisan polarization.Republicans think society is too soft and feminine
Republicans’ and Democrats’ divergent views of testosterone dovetail with the growing partisan divide over gender roles in American society. Collette Marcelin, John Sides, and I have documented that polarizing trend in several survey questions, including the one below from the Public Religion Research Institute.
This third chart shows that more Republicans over the past decade think that society has become “too soft and feminine,” while fewer Democrats do. In fact, around three-quarters of Republicans agreed with that statement in 2024, compared to less than one-fifth of Democrats.
Those results are particularly relevant for understanding the GOP’s interest in testosterone. Manosphere influencers around the globe treat the secular decline in testosterone levels as an existential threat to masculinity – while simultaneously “portraying femininity as undesirable or shameful for men.” By these accounts, testosterone is the antidote to the feminization of American society.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that cultural and political representations of testosterone as a measure of manhood are resonating with Republicans in an era when GOP voters increasingly think traditional masculinity is under threat from a society that has become too soft and feminine.
Greg Palast Investigates, Analysis: How Paxton Will Steal Texas, Greg Palast, right, Sept. 27, 2026. The Senate candidate stole it for Trump, he can do it again. The attack on drop boxes, unseen by the media, will determine the midterms nationwide.
In 2020, the Attorney General of Texas confessed to stealing the vote for Donald Trump in Texas. “Confess” is the wrong word, I suppose, because on the Steve Bannon podcast, Ken Paxton proudly crowed about his felonious attack on Black voters. It’s unbelievable, but if you watch our video, you’ll have to believe your eyes and ears.
Jim Crow Reloaded: The Attack on Mail-in Voting
Paxton, not coincidentally, is running for the US Senate in Texas against James Talarico. Control of the Senate, control of our future, may come down to this Texas ballot robbery scheme. Here’s a bit of Paxton’s boasting confession:
“Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County [Houston] mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million. Those were all ‘illegal,’ and we were able to stop every one of them. Had we not done that, Donald Trump would have lost the election.”
What few Americans know is that Houston, Harris County, has the largest Black population in the USA. Not Detroit nor Atlanta nor DC. If a candidate loses Houston big, they lose Texas.
The only way Texas stays Red is if they can block the Black vote in Houston. (And no, Mr. Paxton, sending ballots to Black people is not “illegal.”)
So, just eliminate mail-in voting and force Black voters to wait in line for hours and hours, and hey, you’ve kept the state Red.
And it’s not just Texas. The Georgia Senate race, where Sen. Jon Ossoff is running for his life, may come down to the same game. Under new laws passed by the State’s GOP legislature, the number of drop boxes have been slashed by 75%. Worse, the state has ordered all drop boxes locked in offices at 5pm, meaning Black voters working for a living will have to face hours in line if they want to drop off their ballot.
In our 5-minute video, Jim Crow Reloaded Episode 3, you can watch me wait in line (2 hours long) with Black voters in Atlanta and the 5-hours long wait I observed in Dayton, a “Chocolate” city, versus my hunting for a line in Toledo — there was none — a white city. So, it’s no mystery why African-Americans turn to mail-in or drop box voting.
All over America, an orange despot in the White House has gone on the warpath against mail-in voting. His weapon is a documentary. Called 2000 Mules, it accuses Black men, thousands of them, of taking $10 from Jewish billionaires for each ballot they stuff into a ballot box. You may think the accusation a bit psycho, but it’s been damn effective, the excuse for Georgia and Texas to severely restrict access to mail-in balloting.
2000 Mules wrongly accuses this man of illegally stuffing ballots.
What can YOU do about it? First, sign up at SaveYourVote.org. At SaveYourVote.org you can get the real skinny on what is politely called “vote suppression.” Let’s call it what it is: “Ku Klux Klanning the Vote.”
At Save Your Vote you can also watch the full series, Jim Crow Reloaded with Palast Investigative Fund vote protection activist Edward Ward. And you can find out how to save your own vote, then save others.
And spread the video, share it with everyone you know. That’s the request, the DEMAND, of our partners at the NAACP Atlanta, RainbowPUSH Coalition, Transformative Justice Coalition, and SVREP’s Latino Mobilization.
And if you think this video and the prior two are important, then, for the Lord and Justice, give us the funds to produce the remaining six episodes. These films are used in training young activists like Edward to not just get out the vote, but to get it COUNTED.
More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Rights, Justice
Democracy Docket, Analysis: Will Trump's DOJ defy a judge’s order on citizenship lists? Andrew Wyrich, Sept. 28, 2026. The Trump administration has a history of not complying with court orders — and there are some troubling signs it may do so again, so it can implement a plan for “citizenship lists” ahead of the midterms. Meanwhile, a federal judge found that the administration likely violated federal law when it schemed to cut states’ anti-terror funds for not imposing voting restrictions.
One more thing: The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) held its “long conference” today. The Democracy Docket team broke down several critical election cases the justices may be considering hearing this term.
All that and more is on the docket today. See you tomorrow!Icon-Banner_NEWS2
Trump admin was ordered to give 30 days notice before releasing citizenship lists. It might not comply
Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to disclose any plans to publish voter eligibility lists or a related internet portal 30 days in advance.
But there are worrying signs that the Department of Justice may defy the judge’s order, which could let it move forward with the lists — part of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive order — before Election Day.
➤ Why the Trump admin may not comply
Judge strikes down Trump’s bid to cut states’ anti-terror funds unless they impose new voting restrictions
A federal judge found the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency likely violated federal law in conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding on changes to how states and local jurisdictions administer elections.
➤ More on this win for voters
Our new bulletin board is live. Find ways you can volunteer, attend rallies, write petitions and much more.EXPLORE THE BULLETIN BOARD
Supreme Court could take up these critical election cases as new term begins
The U.S. Supreme Court’s fall term kicks off today with the “long conference,” when the justices gather to decide which cases they will hear over the coming months. Here are some that could have big impacts on voting and democracy.
➤ Five cases you need to know about
The latest from Missouri: Trump rages at SCOTUS, ruling praised by pro-voter groups
In the wake of SCOTUS slapping down a Republican gerrymandering scheme in Missouri, pro-voting groups praised the decision to give voters the final say on the redrawn map.
Meanwhile, Trump whined about the Court’s decision in a post on social media.
SCOTUS also went out of its way to slam Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) for creating the redistricting mess.
For the first time in this back-and-forth drama, SCOTUS decided to explain itself. In doing so, the Court clarified one of its most controversial legal doctrines while inadvertently proving one of the primary criticisms of its “shadow docket” practices.
➤ How the Missouri mess forced the Court to clarify the Purcell principle
‘Fine with me’: GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins backs federal troops at polls
The Trump administration has floated the idea of sending federal troops to voting sites for months. Now, Rep. Mike Collins (R), the GOP candidate for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat, said he was “fine” with that idea.
➤ Read Collins’ full comments
Report: Trump wanted all mail ballots sent by certified mail
Trump’s plan to restrict mail voting through the United States Postal Service — which has been blocked for the midterms — was supposed to be even more prohibitive, requiring all mail ballots to be sent by certified mail, according to a new report.
➤ More on Trump’s original plan
ICYMI: Texas registration snafu leaves thousands of voters off rolls
Last week, we reported on how tens of thousands of voters in Texas are not on county rolls because the state incorrectly processed their voter registration applications.
If you missed the story, video journalist Emily Gross breaks it all down for you in a new video.
New York Times, Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees, Dustin Volz, Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman, Sept. 28, 2026. In an internal memo, the F.B.I. said it believed the hackers may have stolen sensitive information on all of its employees.
The theft by a criminal hacking group of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau rushing to protect its personnel as an uncertain deadline loomed.
Nearly a week after the group, known as ShinyHunters, revealed it had pilfered intimate details about bureau personnel from the agency’s jobs portal and threatened to leak them online, F.B.I. investigators are still piecing together how the breach took place and the total damage.
The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more, according to a New York Times analysis of some of the records. Some are already comparing it to China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again.
Many F.B.I. employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials. The next day, F.B.I. staff received an email reminding them that October is cybersecurity awareness month, which struck some as tone deaf in light of the breach, one of those people said.
On Friday, bureau leaders, in an internal memo to its rank and file, declared the hack a cybersecurity incident and acknowledged its employees had personal information stolen.
“We are operating under the premise that the threat actor is also exfiltrating PII of all F.B.I. employees,” according to the memo, which was described by someone who had seen it, using the abbreviation for personally identifiable information.
The memo said the agency would offer virtual briefings in the weeks ahead and instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with A.I.-generated voices. “Bureau leadership remains committed to supporting the safety of you and your family,” it said.
Still, many past and present personnel remain in the dark about whether their data has been purloined. In recent days, some have anxiously asked Times reporters whether their names are contained in the hacked data, wondering whether they needed to take steps to protect themselves or their families.
In a statement on Monday, the agency said it was “working around the clock to investigate the cyber incident involving FBIJobs.gov and is in regular communication with anyone who may be impacted — including multiple bureau-wide communications within 24 hours of public reporting.”
It added, “The F.B.I. treats the security of its information and the safety of its work force as top priorities, and our investigation is ongoing.”
In announcing its hack, ShinyHunters, believed to be a loose collective of young hackers operating across the globe, said it had targeted the F.B.I. as retribution for a public advisory the bureau had issued in the spring, warning that the group was known to harass victims and family members with threatening or coercive maneuvers. In their note, the hackers demanded that the F.B.I. “correct or simply REMOVE” the advisory or risk further consequences.
In an email to The Times on Friday, ShinyHunters said that the bureau had until the end of Tuesday to fulfill its request, even as the hackers themselves appeared to acknowledge that the bureau was unlikely to acquiesce.
That note left open the possibility that the hackers would not dump the data online, even as the group reiterated its deadline. But on Monday, in a new statement, the group claimed it never intended to do so.
“Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data,” the group said. “We have never intended to nor have we ever planned to.” It added that the hack and threat to the F.B.I. was a “marketing campaign to protect our business” and said that “we are not taking any further actions” with the data, including revealing more about what is contained in the files.
“We seek no escalation as our goals have widely been accomplished,” it said.
It remains to be seen what ShinyHunters will do, and security researchers warned that even if they did not publish it online they could still sell it to other criminals or foreign governments.
The Atlantic, The problem with Trump’s new taxpayer-funded ads, David A. Graham, Sept. 28, 2026. New taxpayer-funded ads featuring President Trump are wildly inappropriate and clearly violate the intent of the law. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to stop.
Your tax dollars are at work—promoting Donald Trump to the American people.
In the past few days, two new ads appeared on some television channels. One, in black and white, features Trump walking down a hall and staring into the camera. In a voice-over, he says, “This is the final battle with you at my side.” The other features clips of Trump giving a speech at Mount Rushmore. But the most striking words are the ones on the bottom of the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
These are part of a series. Last week, as my colleague Matt Viser wrote, the administration aired an ad that featured images of Trump looking resolute and imposing, with the words “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY” superimposed for most of the spot, which also flashes various empty Trump policy boasts. (“Largest tax cuts in history,” which is flatly false; “reigniting American manufacturing,” which is dubious.) The soundtrack, apparently used without permission, is the musician JMSN’s song “Love Me.” To date, taxpayers have spent at least $443,000 on this ad alone, according to the Associated Press.
The White House calls these “public service announcements,” intended only to remind “Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson told Viser. Taken at face value, this is the latest example of Trump’s Sun King–esque attempt to conflate himself and the state. This administration has named a new visa program the “Trump Gold Card,” tried to place his name before John F. Kennedy’s on an official memorial, established a 47-day training program at ICE to honor his number in the presidential sequence, printed his portrait in passports, and last week launched something called “Trump TV” under White House auspices. (It’s a glorified streaming-video app.) But the White House’s claim that these are PSAs should not be taken at face value. A much simpler term exists to describe them: propaganda.
Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, pointed out that Trump’s political operation has plenty of cash to spend—almost $416 million as of August 31—and compared him to the strongman whom Hungarians toppled earlier this year: “Using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.” Another GOP senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, said yesterday that no public official “should spend public money on private ads for themselves.” He added: “I think there oughta be a rule—well, there probably is a rule—you can’t spend public money to promote yourself.”
Indeed, there is a rule. The law bars the use of taxpayer money on “publicity or propaganda.” The problem is how one defines that. The administration has cited past PSAs, including an anti-drug ad during the George W. Bush administration and a pro-COVID-vaccine spot from the Biden years, to justify the newest ads. The White House insists that these ads are not promoting Trump, because he is not currently running for election. “The PSAs are clearly not political,” an official told NBC News. “The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”
These pretexts are so skimpy that they would make a fig leaf shrivel in shame. The ads lean heavily on the White House’s big talking points this cycle, such as dark warnings about “communism.” Trump is not on the ballot, but he has repeatedly begged his supporters to treat this election as a referendum on him—writing on Truth Social this morning, “MAGA, pretend I am on the ballot.” Finally, the new ad is just a new version of one that his campaign produced late in the 2024 presidential race, only this time paid for with public money. (Perhaps someone should have edited out the line where Trump promises to “expel the warmongers from our government,” which hasn’t aged so well.)
Yet just because the ads are wildly inappropriate, redolent of personalist dictators, and clearly violate the intent of the law, that doesn’t mean they can easily be stopped. A reasonable viewer will know that the ads are intended to boost Trump and Republicans in the midterms, but because the spots don’t have the “call to action” that qualifies them as campaign advocacy under the law, they may not violate the letter of the law. And even if they did, who would police that? Both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, whom the ad is intended to help. The Federal Election Commission doesn’t have a quorum to take action, because Trump has declined to nominate members. And anyway, the Supreme Court has consistently granted the president very wide leeway for any “official” actions.
Kennedy’s there-oughta-be-a-rule response is understandable, but one big lesson of the Trump era is that writing a law to prevent every potential abuse of power is impossible. Attempting to do so would tie Congress up in reams of mind-numbing legislation. Courts might strike some of it down; other parts would be impossible to enforce; and a sufficiently motivated administration would simply find nefarious work-arounds, just as this one has. A functioning democracy cannot be just a matter of statute. It requires good faith and some measure of virtue from its officeholders. No law can substitute for character in leaders.
That makes these transgressions primarily a matter for voters, not legislators or regulators. And in the case of the campaign ads, they can weigh in soon. As Paul Krugman writes, Trump’s personal unpopularity is already a drag on Republican candidates, so emphasizing his role would seem to be politically unwise. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars broadcasting a song called “Love me,” but you can’t make voters love you.
New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Justices to Allow It to Deny Hormones to Trans Inmates, Ann E. Marimow, Sept. 28, 2026. The Bureau of Prisons policy, which has been blocked by lower courts, would give transgender prisoners access to psychotherapy and antidepressants instead of certain gender-transition medical treatments.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to clear the way for federal prison officials to stop providing certain gender-transition medical treatments to transgender inmates.
Soon after returning to office, President Trump signed an executive order directing that imprisoned trans women be housed in men’s facilities. It also barred transgender inmates from receiving gender transition medical treatments for gender dysphoria — significant distress linked to a mismatch between a person’s birth sex and gender identity.
Lower courts, however, have blocked the policy and ruled that transgender inmates must continue to receive hormone therapy while a lawsuit over the executive order moves forward. The lawsuit was filed by three trans inmates on behalf of about 2,000 transgender individuals.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, on Monday asked the justices to intervene on an emergency basis, arguing that the government and the public were being harmed because the lower courts have blocked a policy that prison administrators have ”determined is necessary to maintain institutional security.”
The Supreme Court requested a response from lawyers for the trans prisoners by Oct. 8.
The prison policy is one of a series of actions by the administration limiting transgender rights. The president also directed government agencies to withdraw federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. And the administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the U.S. military to fully enforce its ban on transgender service members. That case remains pending.
The Supreme Court has in recent years dealt with several cases involving transgender individuals. In June, the court upheld two state laws barring the participation of transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams. Last year, the court upheld a state law prohibiting some medical treatments for transgender youths, rejecting arguments that it violated the Constitution.
At the Bureau of Prisons, officials have taken the position that the benefits of hormone therapy are unclear for adults with gender dysphoria. The policy allows trans prisoners to receive psychotherapy and antidepressants but not hormone therapy or items like undergarments that match their identities.
Lawyers for transgender prisoners have said gender-transition treatment, which can include cross-sex hormones, social transition and in some cases surgery, is the only approach known to effectively treat gender dysphoria. The treatment has come under scrutiny for adolescents but has been accepted as effective for adults for several decades, and is supported by the major medical and mental health organizations in the United States.
In their suit, the trans inmates argue the administration’s policy violated their constitutional rights, including the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. They said the administration’s policy amounts to a denial of medically necessary care that has been prescribed by medical providers
Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District Court in Washington has issued several rulings halting the policy nationwide while litigation has continued. He said the Bureau of Prisons did not adequately “consider its own experience providing gender-affirming care under its prior policy.”
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the government’s request to block the judge’s order, writing that prison officials had not adequately explained their security concerns about providing gender-transition care.
New York Times, Second Prosecutor Quits Trump’s ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case, Alan Feuer, Sept. 28, 2026. The resignation adds to the setbacks to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to fulfill the president’s desire to take revenge against the federal officials who have investigated him.
A senior prosecutor working on the so-called grand conspiracy investigation into a wide array of President Trump’s enemies has resigned from the case, adding to the turmoil that has recently plagued the inquiry, according to people familiar with the matter.
The prosecutor, Kurt Olsen, stepped down from the case on Monday after facing issues with his security clearance, one of the people said, making him the second prosecutor in a month to do so.
Mr. Olsen’s unexpected departure came only three weeks after the prosecutor in charge of the case, Joseph diGenova, also abruptly quit his post. Mr. diGenova, who is 81 and served as the U.S. attorney in Washington during the Reagan administration, stepped down after his superiors in Washington lost patience with him for his taking too much time in bringing charges.
The twin resignations, in such proximity, were a serious setback to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to follow through on the president’s desire to take revenge against the many federal officials who have investigated him over the past decade. The case had already had significant staffing shake-ups — including its first lead prosecutor being sidelined after telling her superiors there was insufficient evidence for charges to be filed.
One of the lead F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, Jack Eckenrode, also departed in recent weeks, according to the people familiar the matter. Mr. Eckenrode was best known for having spent years under the special counsel, John H. Durham, investigating the investigators in the inquiry into the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The grand conspiracy case has long been the most ambitious — and far-fetched — of the many retributive investigations that Mr. Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors trying to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and another into his mishandling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 — into a single, multiyear plot to damage his political prospects.
The day after Mr. diGenova quit, lawyers for one of the central targets of case, John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, spoke to Mr. Olsen, according to court papers. The lawyers said that Mr. Olsen told them that the inquiry involved “multiple” grand jury investigations in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., including a “far-reaching” one that touched on a key aspect of the classified documents investigation: the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
Mr. Olsen’s problems with his security clearance complicated his ability to remain involved in an investigation in which classified materials figured prominently, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Just last week, lawyers for a group of former F.B.I. agents who took part in the search of Mar-a-Lago and were subpoenaed to testify about it in front of the grand jury said in court papers that the search had been conducted properly.
Mr. Olsen did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Olsen came to the grand conspiracy case with no experience as a prosecutor. He had previously served in the White House as the director of “election security and integrity” and in late 2020, he pushed the Justice Department to file a motion to the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Trump, asking the justices to nullify the election that year.
Mr. Olsen was central in persuading the F.B.I. to search an election office in Fulton County, Ga., in late January and haul away boxes of ballots as part of an effort to investigate the 2020 race. He also pushed the bureau — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to look into allegations that an election technology firm whose owner had bought Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been falsely blamed for rigging the 2020 election, had also manipulated voter registration records in Bexar County, Texas.
Mr. Olsen’s departure has added to the leadership void atop the grand conspiracy case, which is nominally being run by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-friendly U.S. attorney in Miami. It remains unclear who is now in charge of the day-to-day management of the inquiry. But the Justice Department has plans to put two more prosecutors on the case.
Jeremy Saland, the lawyer for one of the named defendants, said Monday that his client did nothing but respond to and make an “immature comment on Snapchat.” He called the lawsuit “intentionally dishonest.”
New York Times, Cornell Sexual Assault Investigation to Be Reopened, Sharon Otterman and Hurubie Meko, Sept. 28, 2026. After outrage over allegations in a lawsuit, the Tompkins County district attorney will revisit the decision not to pursue criminal charges against seven fraternity members.
A New York prosecutor said Monday that he would reopen an investigation into accusations of a 2024 sexual assault at Cornell University, two weeks after a woman filed a lawsuit accusing the school and law enforcement officials of not doing enough to investigate her case.
In her lawsuit, the woman alleged that she was plied with alcohol and drugs and then raped by multiple men at the Chi Phi fraternity house on Oct. 19, 2024, when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate. She said she reported the incident to the Cornell University Police Department several weeks later, but that no criminal charges were filed by prosecutors.
Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, said in a statement on Monday that he was now reconsidering that decision. He said that while the original statement the woman gave to police did not seem to warrant criminal charges, he would now let a grand jury decide.Thumbnail of page 1Read the statement from the Tompkins County district attorney
The district attorney for Tompkins County in New York said he is reopening an investigation into a report of a sexual assault at Cornell University.Read Document 9 pages
“Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped,” he said in the statement.
Mr. Van Houten said he would now reopen the investigation “recognizing that the process of healing from trauma is personal and different for every human.” A senior female prosecutor has been assigned, and any additional allegations from the lawsuit will be considered. ABC News first reported Mr. Van Houten’s comments on the investigation.
“Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence,” Mr. Van Houten added.
Thomas Giuffra, who represents the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said on Monday that his client’s report to the police at the time was not materially different to what is in the lawsuit.
“Once she was emotionally ready, she went to the university police and bravely shared what had occurred to her,” he said.
She never heard from the police again, her lawyer said. Mr. Giuffra said that until his client filed her lawsuit earlier this month, she had not been contacted by investigators from the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office or any investigators trained in interviewing survivors of rape.
The lawsuit, which has received national attention, has cast a spotlight on a persistent issue of accusations of sexual assault among students on Cornell’s campus, and sparked anger in Ithaca, New York, and beyond over how Cornell handled the woman’s initial allegations.
Mr. Van Houten said he and his staff had received many calls and emails questioning why he had not prosecuted the case, including some that were insulting and threatening. An editorial in the Cornell student newspaper printed the names of the accused men and demanded that the university reveal why at least some of them were allowed back on campus after the university’s own investigation.
The lawsuit alleged that the seven accused fraternity members were given the opportunity to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to Cornell.” Critics have seized on that line as evidence they were treated with leniency.
But Cornell said the essays were only part of the consequences the students faced. After the woman’s 2024 allegation, the Cornell police provided information to the district attorney and the university investigated the incident through its administrative disciplinary system. The men involved were “issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions,” Cornell said in a statement on Monday.
The university released an earlier statement to the campus on Nov. 26, 2024, about “ongoing investigations into the serious and deeply disturbing allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence at the Chi Phi fraternity house.”
It also convened a task force on sexual assault, which made recommendations. A 2025 survey conducted by the university found that 35 percent of undergraduate women reported experiencing “nonconsensual sexual contact” during their time at Cornell, an increase from the 23 percent in the 2023 survey.
Chi Phi, the fraternity chapter where the woman said the assault occurred, was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus, Cornell said Monday. “Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” its statement said.
The woman participated in the administrative disciplinary process, and later withdrew from Cornell, Mr. Giuffra said.
The lawsuit contains harrowing details of the alleged assaults, as well as a screen shot of a lewd Snapchat conversation in which one fraternity member appears to invite many others to join in. Mr. Giuffra said that chat, which went on for several pages, had been provided to the university as evidence. The lawsuit states that during the assaults, the woman was under the influence of both alcohol and ketamine, a drug she alleges she was pressured into snorting and had not tried before.
Named as defendants in the lawsuit are Cornell; the Chi Phi fraternity; the woman’s own sorority, Delta Delta Delta; an off-campus bar that allegedly served her alcohol; and the seven fraternity members who are alleged to have been involved in the assault.
Chi Phi did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tri Delta said it couldn’t comment on pending litigation but added that as an organization “we are committed to supporting women and victims of sexual violence.”
New York Times, Couple Accused of Killing Their Son-in-Law in Bay Area Park, Soumya Karlamangla and Amy Qin, Sept. 28, 2026. Jonathan McKinsey, an engineer who worked in the games department for The New York Times, was fatally shot Saturday in a San Francisco suburb. The police have accused his parents-in-law, both 76.
A Bay Area couple have been accused of shooting and killing their son-in-law in a suburban sports park on Saturday afternoon, the local police said.
The man, Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. in a parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, an athletic complex and playground in Dublin, Calif., about 35 miles east of downtown San Francisco, according to Dublin Police Services.
Mr. McKinsey was director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, according to a company spokesman. Before Mr. McKinsey began working at The Times in 2023, he worked for several tech companies including Splunk, Coursera and Oracle, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The authorities arrested Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 76, in the shooting. They are a married couple who live in Dublin and are the parents of Mr. McKinsey’s wife, the police said.
No motive was described by the police for the shooting, but Mr. McKinsey and his wife had a turbulent marriage and were living separately, records show. Each had filed requests for domestic violence restraining orders against the other last year in Alameda County. Mr. McKinsey had also pleaded not guilty last year to two charges of misdemeanor child abuse.
Mr. McKinsey was a transgender man and accused his wife, Candice Jang, and his in-laws of abusing him because of his identity, according to his filing for a restraining order in December 2025. He said his mother-in-law called him and one of his sons a “pervert” and a “monster” after the boy tried on dresses, and he accused his father-in-law of punching him in the chest while he was recovering from double mastectomy surgery in 2010.
More On U.S. Immigration Law, Rights, Racism
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Hard Lessons of Springfield, Jonathan V. Last, Sept. 28, 2026. There are plenty of people happy about what is happening to the Haitian community.
1. Ohio
I’m back from Ohio, where we did a Bulwark LIVE benefit show on Friday night, and I want to talk with you about the experience. Because there were some good lessons and some hard lessons. We’ll start with the good.
As of this writing, you guys—the Bulwark community—have raised $351,000 for the Haitian community in Springfield. I am dumbstruck by your generosity. Here’s what that money buys:
The Haitian community in Springfield is under siege. People who came to America legally and built productive, beautiful lives now hide in their homes, afraid to go outside because masked, armed agents of the state may abduct them. They cannot go grocery shopping. If they are sick or hurt, they cannot go to the doctor or the hospital. They cannot take their children to school.
They need help. And you all stepped up to give it. I am, once again, overwhelmed with gratitude for the goodness in your hearts. Thank you.
The singer John Legend sent a message to the show on Friday night and it was powerful. I hope you’ll watch the video because even though it’s six minutes long, it is worth your time.
Here’s the transcript:
Hello. Years ago, I joined my friend, Skip Gates, on a show called Finding Your Roots, and I learned something about my family that changed the way I think about my home state of Ohio.
One of my ancestors, his name was Peyton Polly. He was born into slavery in Kentucky. And when his master passed away, he granted Peyton his freedom in his will. And when Peyton gained that freedom, he brought his family across the Ohio River to build a life in Ohio—a free state.
But some people in Peyton’s former master’s family were not happy about this development. And one night in 1850, armed men crossed into Ohio, broke into the Pollys’ home, and kidnapped eight children, carrying them back across the river into slavery. Devastating. But Ohio responded. The governor, the legislature, they took up the cause. They sent investigators and lawyers to fight to bring those children home.
Now, I hesitated to tell that story because I don’t want to compare slavery to what’s happening now. It is not the same as the immigration debate we’re having today. But I’ve never forgotten what that family story taught me.
One, is that my family has a legacy we can be proud of. But also, that when our neighbors’ freedom, safety, and dignity were in doubt, the state of Ohio stepped up for us. Ohio was a free state, a major part of the Underground Railroad, a place where people sought refuge and freedom. They often found it in Ohio.
So in 2026, we have to challenge ourselves. We have to ask the question, what kind of state are we going to be? I want to thank the Bulwark team for making room for this conversation. I want to thank my friend Patrick Gaspard for inviting me to be a part of it. Before I was John Legend, I was a kid growing up in Springfield, Ohio, the son of a factory worker, the son of a seamstress. I learned to sing in the church. I started playing the piano when I was five. Springfield made me. So when I hear Springfield being talked about on national television, I don’t hear a talking point. I don’t see a political football. I see my home! I see my people.
Like communities across this country, people in Springfield, they want the basics: good schools, affordable housing, good jobs, health care, safe neighborhoods, a fair shot at building a good life. But when those things feel out of reach, we’re too often told to blame somebody else. That another family has to lose for yours to get ahead. And that opportunity for others is a loss for you. I don’t believe that zero-sum thinking is how we build a stronger Springfield. I don’t believe that’s how we build a stronger America. The Haitian families who came to Springfield, they came looking for safety and a future. Over time, they became classmates, coworkers, business owners, teammates, friends, caregivers, neighbors.
Tonight I want to say the name of one of those neighbors, Pierre Damas Bel. Pierre was 20 years old. He came here from Haiti in 2024. He graduated from my high school, Springfield High School, with honors. He played soccer and was active in JROTC. He had just started at Wright State University. He wanted to become a doctor. He should have become a doctor. He should have had so much life ahead of him. Instead, his family is grieving him.
To Pierre’s father, his family, his friends, his teammates, his teachers, I send you my love tonight. To every Haitian family in Springfield carrying fear and uncertainty, I send you love. To my hometown, I send you love. And to Ohio, the state that will always be a part of who I am, I send you love.
But love has to mean more than what we say. Love has to mean showing up. And everyone here tonight has already done that. Thank you. You are directly supporting the Haitian Support Center and families in Springfield who need help right now. Thank you.
And this is about TPS, but it’s also about our entire immigration policy—how we treat people, whether we can hold on to our humanity. We have seen leaders across the aisle in Ohio who do that, and we can too. Tonight we help. In November, we make our voices heard. And always we keep organizing. Keep building coalitions. Keep pushing for a more humane way forward. May Ohio always be the place that it was for my ancestors, a place with a big, beautiful heart. One that welcomes the refugee, extends a helping hand to the stranger, one that fights for freedom and believes in the expansiveness of the American dream. Thank you.
This is the way—the only way. We show up for each other.
Donate to the Haitian Support Center. But now, I’m afraid we have to talk about the hard lesson.
2. Bad Wolves
When we went to Minneapolis last winter we encountered a city and a state united against totalitarianism. Literally every person I met was outraged at what the federal government was doing. Thousands of volunteers organized to help. The governor, the mayor, the local police were all united in trying to protect both citizens and immigrants. I’m sure there were, somewhere in Minnesota, people who celebrated the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, but they were unwilling to show their faces because they knew, at the instinctual level, that it would make them pariahs in the community.
Ohio is not Minnesota.
I was only on the ground for a short period of time and it was obvious that there are plenty of people who are happy to see Haitians being criminalized, arrested, and deported.
I picked this up from conversations with people who were polite about it, and from remarks made by people who were less polite about it, including people who were unhappy with us doing a show to benefit the Haitian community.
And in general, the level of support for the Haitian community has been nothing like the mobilization in Minnesota. There are brave and generous volunteers working to help, but they seem to be the minority.
The governor of Ohio has refused to step in—at all—even though his sympathies are obviously with the Haitians. He knows better, but has been cuckolded by his cowardice.
On Saturday, the day after our benefit, Nazis marched through Springfield.
Really. That happened.
It was a small group. Maybe a couple dozen black-clad men. But they had two swastika flags and they knew what they were doing. There’s a reason they were marching in Springfield and not Columbus.
Also, unlike in Minneapolis, these guys understood that there is a baseline level of support for their position.
I wish that Springfield was an uplifting story about the power of community coming together in the face of authoritarianism. But it wasn’t.
It’s the story of parts of the community coming together to oppose authoritarianism while other parts stand off to the side either quietly nodding in support of the authoritarians or openly cheering them on.
Springfield is a story not about the power of community but about the importance of power.
It is not enough to help victims. We also have to organize to fight and win power. And if we get power, we must use it. Without illusions or remorse.
Put this on a pillow: If Democrats regain power then every member of the Trump regime should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. From Jared Kushner and Corey Lewandowski down to the lowest-level ICE employee.
Every business executive who bribed the president, every government employee who got rich, every agent who roughed up an immigrant—they should all live in fear of the law.
If there’s evidence that one of these guys jaywalked, or falsified an expense report, or listed a vacation property as a primary residence, they should be facing down a freight train of accountability.
No transgression should be too small to sit beneath the notice of the next administration.
The first lesson of Springfield is that we can help our neighbors.
The second lesson is that this moment is not just the result of a rogue regime operating outside the scope of its mandate.
It turns out that many Americans did not know they were fascists—but when the time came, they did indeed find out.
3. One Last Thing
I want to be clear about the persecutions of Springfield’s Haitians. These are people who overwhelmingly came here legally. And they have been overwhelmingly law-abiding and productive.
The only reason they have not become citizens is because U.S. law did not provide such a pathway. The president and vice president issued blood libels about this community during the 2024 campaign.
Subsequently the vice president said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention . . . then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The administration then revoked the protected legal status of this community. This is judicially blessed ethnic cleansing motivated by nothing—nothing—other than naked white nationalism.
America has a long history of this stuff. John Legend talked about some of it. Free states and slave states; lynchings and kidnappings.
My theory is that race is at the bottom of the Trump phenomenon, too. That at the end of the day race overwhelms everything else: Class, education, income, religion.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
The Contrarian, Opinion: A Defining Moment of Religious Pluralism, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 28, 2026. 36 Days to the Midterms.
The blue wave is cresting five weeks ahead of Election Day. The extent of the wave depends on a range of factors, from a late money surge/negative ad dump from desperate MAGA Republicans to the propensity of Republican voters as the election approaches to “come home” to their party to the danger of Democrats’ overconfidence and reliance on “good news” polls, which may be subject to the same sort of error rate we saw in primaries.
Regardless of the final margins, we nevertheless see evidence that, at least in one critical respect, the fascist MAGA movement has not entirely remade the fabric of American democracy. Instead, we may be seeing, finally, a backlash to Republicans’ embrace of white Christian nationalism, the noxious ideology that America is a white Christian nation for the benefit of those “real” Americans descended from white Europeans who merely tolerate (or don’t) others’ presence.waving flag of United States of AmericaPhoto by Brad Dodson on Unsplash
It turns out that Americans believe in religious freedom, diversity, and democracy, not racist theocracy. “While 56 percent of Republicans support Christian nationalism, only 32 percent of Americans overall do,” a survey from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Meanings of Democracy Lab of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University recently showed. “Majorities in all but four states reject Christian nationalism.” Helping fuel the backlash is the rise of progressive Democrats who “are openly embracing their Christian faith and challenging Christian nationalism’s claim to be the true embodiment of Christianity.” It is about time.
The numbers are striking. “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year … a number close observers say is unheard-of in recent memory,” the New York Times reported. “Even after the winnowing of the primaries, there will be seven running this fall. On the Republican side, there are only three.”
In contrast to the blasphemous deification of Donald Trump and MAGA self-proclaimed Christians’ frightful propensity to justify everything from concentration camps to war crimes to endemic lying as part of the mission to save white Christians from supposed obliteration, progressive Democrats are offering a different take on Christian values.
Melissa Deckman, PRRI’s CEO, and Ruth Braunstein, director of the SNF Agora Institute, wrote recently for Newsweek:
Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott, an ordained Lutheran minister running in her state’s 3rd Congressional District, argues that Democrats have long avoided religious language because “all they’ve seen is the religious right and religious extremism.” Presbyterian minister Lindsay James says she was moved to run for Congress after the 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill” put 27,000 Iowans in her district at risk of losing health coverage, noting that her chaplaincy work showed her firsthand what that loss would mean for families struggling to get by.
In Alaska, congressional candidate and Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz says he feels a moral obligation to speak out against Trump-era GOP policy, often invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan: “It’s important to remember that if someone is hoping to just be an innocent bystander, that’s not an option. You’re either helping or you’re part of the problem.”
Add to these the high-profile Senate nominees James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who have an opportunity not only to run up the score for Democrats in red states and districts but also to repudiate the notion that Christians have some religious obligation to vote for a party whose moral outrages and support for abhorrent behavior (e.g., covering up for a pedophile and his enablers) should disturb all but the most hardened MAGA cultists.
To be clear, the shift is among white Christians. Black churches have remained bastions of social activism, continuing the legacy running from abolition to the civil rights movement. What is new is the degree to which white Christians are responding to the call to return to the moral foundations of Christianity. (“Millions of Americans, including many Christians, look at Trump’s second term and see a litany of moral outrages: the sudden deportation of neighbors, the withdrawal of food aid and health care benefits and a war with no clear aim or endpoint.”)
For the first time in decades, white Christians are tying faith to political advocacy. “By hewing closely to Christian priorities like feeding the poor, the Democrats running as pastors have a chance to speak to Americans who are hungry for a different relationship between religion and politics, who want to see religion as a moral compass rather than a political agenda,” the New York Times noted. (And it provides a powerful counterweight to the Trumpian notion that empathy is “toxic.”)
At issue is whether Christianity, or frankly God, is the province of one party. For years, progressive groups such as the Interfaith Alliance have advocated for religious diversity, an essential component of pluralistic democracy embodied in the First Amendment. Now, their leaders see a spiritual revival to accompany a pro-diversity political movement.
“I have become convinced that we are indeed experiencing what we so desperately need, a great awakening in our own time,” Paul Raushenbush, the president of Interfaith Alliance, said in his September 19 keynote address for the William M. Johnson Lecture Series at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. “Unlike previous examples of religious revival, our awakening is not attached to a single faith tradition or leader, but rather is a broad stirring inspired by a combination of a radical spirituality of nonviolent resistance, a named moral ethic of loving our neighbor, and driven by a promise of a democracy that can be made a reality by and for the people.” (Certainly, one factor in this “great awakening” is a widespread yearning for personal connection, something more emotionally sustaining than impersonal, often angry and cruel online discourse.)
Democrats remain a diverse party with a much higher percentage of “none of the above” voters (who reject any religious affiliation), so this is not about creating a left-wing theocratic party. Instead, as Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor and founder of the progressive Christian nonprofit Vote Common Good told the Times, Democrats finally seem determined to push back against Republicans who paint “Democrats as hostile to the Christian faith.” Rather than Christianize the Democratic Party, progressive Christians are making the case that the party must “include religious people in the pro-democracy movement.”
If Democratic candidates identifying as progressive Christians win in November, they will help sustain a Democratic blue wave but also, and more important, reaffirm the ideals of a country founded by religious dissenters and renegades who suffered from repressive established religion. Their wins would repudiate the noxious idea that America was founded for the benefit of white Christians rather than as a pluralistic democracy. And finally, for Christians longing to get mean-spirited, racist, xenophobic ideology masquerading as faith out of the pews, public acceptance of spiritual role models may reaffirm their own faith tradition that looks to churches for spiritual and social connection, not political indoctrination.
In short, defeat of white Christian nationalism at the hands of a diverse political electorate that includes millions of faithful Christians would be transformative for Democrats, democracy, and American Christianity. What a fitting rebuke to white Christian nationalism that would be.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s Gaslighting Isn’t Working As Even His Biggest Fans Are Leaving, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 28, 2026. If Trump had a political superpower, it was his ability to convince his supporters of a false reality where down is up, but when it comes to the Iran war and prices, it isn’t working.
After more than a decade of Trump on the national political stage, America has watched Donald Trump build his own realities. Trump was born rich, so he has never had to live in a world constrained by reality.
Trump has spent his entire life making his money by building and selling a false reality around himself. In a previous era, Trump would have been called a flim-flam man.
When Donald Trump took over a political party, his false realities became the dogma of one of the two major political parties. Trump was amplified, and his unwavering commitment to living in his own universe attracted others who mistook delusion for strength and vision.
Trump isn’t a gifted politician. He isn’t a great communicator, personally liked, respected, or a master of the levers of government.
The president’s superpower has been in the ability to build false worlds, but Trump has run into a reality that has neutralized his one power.
Here is what Trump had to say about inflation and gas prices when returning to the White House:
And a lot of good things are happening, including for our farmers. Thank you all very much. One thing I have to say, with the exception of oil, which is lower than the Biden administration, and we no longer have to worry about nuclear weapons with Iran 'cause they're wiped out. But with the exception of oil, everything is going down.
We have it going down. We inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country, and it's going really down. 401(k)s are at their all-time high. The stock markets are at their all-time high, and our country is doing really well.
Everything that Trump said was false, stretched, or cherry-picked, but there are growing signs that even some of his most devoted supporters have lost faith.The Hardcore MAGAs Have Been Shaken
If you have seen any Trump speech for years, he always shouts out the Front Row Joes, which are a group of Trump super fans that show up at every one of his public events. The Trump political team always places these folks up front, and they are some of the president’s most dedicated supporters.
Politico reported that some of the Joes have had enough:
When Trisha Hope tells Playbook that Trump is “a fraud and liar,” and Rick Frazier says “he can’t be trusted,” Republicans should hear alarm bells.
Hope saw her faith shaken during a July 8, 2025 Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked then-AG Pam Bondi about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Before she could answer, Trump interrupted: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”
“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope said. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”
The war with Iran vindicated those feelings. “He’s said the war is over 600 different times. He tells us they don’t have a military, they don’t have a navy. They’re still blowing up things. It’s just all lies.”
“Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier told Playbook. “He promoted himself as a no-war president. That didn’t work out.”
Some of the people who most believed in Trump are starting to see what this president is all about.
There are two levels at work in this situation.
In the short term, Trump can’t gaslight his way through the midterms, because what he is trying to sell keeps running into the realities that people are seeing at the gas pump and grocery store.
The bigger long-term problem for Republicans is that Donald Trump’s support is non-transferable. Republicans have tried for years, but they have consistently lost or, at best, woefully underperformed in elections without Trump on the ballot.
Many of the president’s supporters may stop participating in politics when he is gone, so how does a political party built around Donald Trump survive without him?
The myths aren’t being bought. Supporters are leaving, and Donald Trump is the flim-flam man who has been exposed as a charlatan.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Do Not Look Away, William Kristol, right, Sept. 28, 2026. When Pope Leo XIV speaks, Americans tend to listen. He is, after all, the first American pope.
On the other hand, there’ve been scores of American cardinals since the first was appointed in 1875. Those of us who aren’t in the Church don’t necessarily hear much about what they have to say.
I read about what Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, said yesterday thanks to Christopher Hale’s excellent newsletter, Letters from Leo, which covers developments in the Catholic Church. Last night, Hale reported on McElroy’s speech at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.
A word about McElroy. He was born in San Francisco in 1954 and graduated from Harvard in 1975, where he studied history. He took an M.A. in American history the next year at Stanford. He then attended seminary and was ordained in the priesthood in 1980. As a priest, he pursued further studies, earning a degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. His dissertation was on the great liberal American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, whose writings in the mid-twentieth century sought to reconcile Catholicism and American liberal democracy and to ground a defense of religious pluralism and religious freedom in both liberal and Catholic thought.
After rising through the church’s ranks to become bishop of San Diego, McElroy was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2022, and then archbishop of Washington in March 2025. A couple of months later, he participated in the conclave that elected his fellow American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, pope.
As Hale explains, the occasion for McElroy’s speech was the church’s annual day of recognition of migrants and refugees. The cardinal’s text was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he pulled no punches. We as a nation have not been good Samaritans.
For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.
Indeed, McElroy explained, we have failed to live up to the two great legacies that shape America’s duty to the stranger: the command in Deuteronomy that “you shall not violate the rights of the alien or the orphan,” and the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. The cardinal deplored the fact that, in the last eighteen months, our country has traded that legacy for “suspicion, division, cruelty, and violence.” And in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty, “we are losing our soul as a nation.”
McElroy noted that there are more than a million people who had been living here legally who have now lost or are losing temporary protected status. “These refugees never broke any law,” he said. They are being deported because “the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigration history is rampant once again in our nation.”
McElroy’s words particularly hit home for me. I’d returned the day before from the Bulwark event in Dayton, Ohio, on behalf of the Haitian Support Center in nearby Springfield, where we visited Friday afternoon.
Share this newsletter with someone who wants a way to fight back.
It was inspiring to see the fortitude of immigrants we met there. It was heartening to see how many citizens are rallying to their support, coming from elsewhere in Ohio to bring food packages to Haitian families who have lost their work permits so have no income, and who now can’t venture outside their homes for fear of ICE.
It’s also inspiring that so many of you in the Bulwark community have contributed to support the Haitians in Springfield. When I wrote Friday morning, donations amounted to an already impressive $85,000. This morning they stand at more than $340,000.
So that’s all uplifting. But I must also say that it’s depressing and infuriating to see the city of Springfield and its people suffering under a cruel and unjust assault from our own government.
Our government’s policies are appalling and shameful. And so, as Cardinal McElroy put it yesterday, we need not to avert our eyes but to “recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name and fight every dimension of it.” And we need to “seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil, or replace them.”
In five weeks, we can replace a whole bunch of them.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Said It Out Loud. His Cabinet Says It Never Happened. WILL SALETAN meticulously breaks down Todd Blanche’s defense of Trump’s press crackdown, Mike Waltz getting confronted with the president’s own words, and the shifting story about the war with Iran.Quick Hits
BLOOD MONEY: Ever since he decapitated Venezuela’s government last year by arresting President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pursued a policy toward the South American nation that can best be described as ‘Make Colonialism Great Again.’ The White House didn’t just help itself to Venezuela’s oil reserves—it also immediately began opening up U.S. access to the country’s notoriously corrupt gold market. The New York Times reports:
In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.
The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.
Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.
On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.
The Times investigation is full of staggering details about how Trump has brokered deals between U.S. business interests and, functionally, Venezuelan criminal interests—so much so that Venezuelan gold is now piling up in U.S. warehouses, with refiners unwilling to touch it lest they violate laws about financing gangs, environmental destruction, or corruption. Read the whole thing.
WHEN DONALD MET DARIO: Donald Trump’s position on AI existential risk is simple: What, you worrywarts don’t think I can handle it? Days after insisting that he wants to leave the regulation of AI development “exactly where it is”—in other words, not regulated at all—the president again said last night that “we will straighten it out if and when a problem occurs.”
“I don’t worry about it,” Trump said. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, you know, trillions of dollars worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Will meeting with one of America’s leading AI worriers change his mind? Last night, Trump reportedly had dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei is in a strange position: He’s head of a company that leads an industry that Trump consistently champions and defends, but he’s also repeatedly feuded with the Trump administration—in fact, that government still considers the company a “supply chain risk.” Furthermore, many in MAGA are convinced Amodei is a left-wing wacko. We’ll be eager to hear how that meeting went if we get reporting out of it today.
YOU GET A BAG OF CASH! AND YOU GET A BAG OF CASH!: Companies investing in the AI boom, blindsided by the spike in public opposition to data center development, are now pulling out every carrot they can think of to woo communities into accepting new construction. But many of those communities are still saying, “no, thanks.” The Wall Street Journal reports:
The letters started arriving in June, from a big developer who said he would give $10,000 to every family in town. They could spend it on anything. “Really whatever you want,” the developer wrote.
To get the money, the township just needed to let NorthPoint Development build its data center, the first of 15 buildings the firm planned on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills. Then, $10,000 checks would go out to each of the 4,500 households there. It would be a $45 million payout, the developer wrote.
For many in Hazle Township, which has a median household income of about $60,000, a payout of $10,000 would be a significant sum. Even after taxes, it could cover about six months of rent for a two-bedroom apartment or many more months of groceries or fuel.
But regardless of income, job status or location, few of the people in Hazle Township interviewed by The Wall Street Journal indicated that they are eager to welcome the data center for the payout.
MS NOW, Maine voters remember Susan Collins’ vote for Kavanaugh, but will that make them vote for Troy Jackson? Will McDuffie, Sept. 27, 2026. Some voters in Maine are disappointed in Susan Collins’ vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but it’s unclear if Troy Jackson can take advantage of that.Maine voters weigh in on key Senate race.
Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson and fellow Democrats are hoping to finally oust GOP Sen. Susan Collins by focusing on her decisive vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, a justice who joined the majority in the Dobbs decision.
Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, shaking the 2022 midterms, reproductive rights have re-emerged as a central campaign issue in Maine, where Jackson aims to prevail where his party fell short six years ago. He has made the issue a core component of his pitch to voters in areas like Portland and its southern suburbs that include a healthy composition of politically moderate female voters.
“The fact that, just recently, [Collins] said that she doesn’t regret her vote on Kavanaugh says everything to me because I sure as hell do, and everybody else in this state and everybody else in this country does,” Jackson said at a town hall this week in the Portland suburb Scarborough.
But Jackson faces some headwinds in his attempts to sell reproductive rights as a core issue this fall. And he lacks potential ammunition in the form of Gov. Janet Mills, the most powerful female Democrat in Maine — who has not endorsed the Democratic nominee.
Jackson and Mills have a notoriously icy history, something Jackson was candid about during his run for governor.
“We obviously disagreed a lot — it’s no secret,” he said in April. “I mean, the governor vetoed more than 40 of my bills.”
A spokesperson for Mills said Jackson hasn’t sought her support.
“Since becoming the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Jackson has not reached out to the Governor to seek her support,” the spokesperson, Ben Goodman, said in a statement. “The Governor believes it’s crucial that Democrats retake the U.S. Senate majority and stand up to President Trump, and she would welcome a conversation with Mr. Jackson.”
A Jackson spokesperson declined to comment.
While Jackson helped advance a bill to protect abortion rights that Mills signed into law in 2023, he opposed abortion rights early in his career. His previous position on this issue was used against him when he ran in the Democratic primary for governor earlier this year.
Jackson has framed his evolution as a genuine change of heart from someone who grew up in a deeply conservative part of rural Maine.
“I grew up in a very strong French Catholic area, you know, conflicted on that all the time,” he said on the “Pine State Politics” podcast in April.
But, he said, “I talked to many people who, you know, had those stories, and it just came to me that … reproductive access is healthcare, and that really came to me eventually, and I started to understand that.”
Reproductive Freedom For All, an abortion rights advocacy group, endorsed Jackson last month. Mini Timmaraju, the group’s president, appeared with the candidate at a “Women for Troy” event in a backyard in Brunswick in August.
At that event, she touted Jackson’s evolution, saying he “learned tough lessons, really listened to his constituents, had really tough conversations with people who were upset with him, looked them dead in the eye and said, ‘I regret that.’”
Collins “pretends she’s pro-choice,” Timmaraju told the intimate crowd. “She can’t hide behind that label anymore as she guts our fundamental freedoms and guts our economic affordability in the state.”
After this story was published, a Collins spokesperson responded to MS NOW’s request for comment with a statement attacking Jackson’s record on the issue.
“Troy Jackson has flip-flopped his abortion position from a stance of being strictly pro-life with no exceptions for any reason, to now saying he is supportive of all abortions, including late-term abortions,” spokesperson Blake Kernen said. “Senator Collins has consistently been pro-choice and was recognized just last year by Planned Parenthood for her long record of protecting women’s rights.”
Collins reiterated Friday that she did not regret voting to confirm Kavanaugh in 2018. But she has said she disagrees with the justice’s Dobbs vote and claimed he assured her before the confirmation vote that he believed that Roe v. Wade was settled law.More articlesSusan Collins’ defense of her Kavanaugh confirmation vote suffers from a key flawSteve BenenSusan Collins is surrounded by media as she walks.Susan Collins had four years to prepare for this question — and botched the answerSusan RinkunasSen. Susan Collins speaks with a reporter outside of the Senate Chambers at the U.S. Capitol.
But her caveats don’t seem to be convincing a number of Maine women who have yet to forgive her for putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Regi Robnett, a 71-year-old independent voter, said she used to vote for Collins, but she and the senator “don’t agree as much anymore.”
“I think it really changed with Kavanaugh. When she voted for Kavanaugh, I was like, I can’t believe she voted for Kavanaugh. And then Roe v. Wade went away,” Robnett told MS NOW outside a library in South Portland.
In a focus group held recently by MS NOW contributor Elise Jordan, Maine women, all of whom had voted at least once for Collins in their lifetime, criticized the senator’s Kavanaugh vote.
“The Brett Kavanaugh vote was one that really resonated with me, how a woman could put back Roe v. Wade and everything like that, knowing what we fought so hard in all these years, to be going backwards, and for her to side that way, I really lost a lot of respect,” one woman in the group said.
Jackson must also contend with the fact that Democrats tried using Collins’ vote for Kavanaugh against her in 2020.
“That was the entire campaign in 2020. The entire campaign was Brett Kavanaugh. It was the whole thing,” a person close to the Collins campaign told MS NOW. “She already faced this Brett Kavanaugh thing in 2020 and handled it well.”
And even some voters dismayed at Collins’ support of Kavanaugh may still vote for her in November.
The woman in the focus group who said she “lost a lot of respect” for Collins acknowledged that she still leaned toward voting for the senator.
“I don’t think that’s going to be the key thing,” a Democratic political insider in Maine, granted anonymity to speak freely about the race, told MS NOW about reproductive rights. The issue ranked low in an NBC News survey among issues voters nationally see as the most important facing the country.
A video filmed from southern Gaza shows the scale of an earthen barrier and ditch that the Israeli military built in mid-July, as well as a yellow concrete boundary block.
New York Times, Black Voters Are Warming to Talarico in Texas. Turnout Is the Bigger Test, J. David Goodman, Sept. 28, 2026. Black voters largely rejected James Talarico in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Recent interviews suggest the hard feelings may be wearing off.
When Durrell Douglas asked Black residents around Houston about the U.S. Senate race two months ago, there was little excitement for James Talarico, the Democratic nominee.
“There’s no pulse,” Mr. Douglas, a community organizer and podcaster, said at the time about Mr. Talarico’s campaign. “No energy.”
It was not entirely surprising: Black voters across Texas had overwhelmingly favored Mr. Talarico’s primary opponent, Jasmine Crockett, a Black congresswoman and prominent critic of Republicans. Many, like Mr. Douglas, who held a fund-raiser for Ms. Crockett, were disappointed when she lost.
But as summer turned to fall, those feelings appeared to fade.
In interviews with Black voters and political consultants in Texas, few expressed hesitation about supporting Mr. Talarico. Most were far more turned off by his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general. Some praised Mr. Talarico’s efforts to spend time in Black communities across Texas, speaking at churches and appearing on podcasts and radio shows with large Black audiences, like the Breakfast Club.
“I told somebody you were coming up here, and they said, ‘Oh his internals must show he’s down bad with Black people,’” one of the hosts of the Breakfast Club, Charlamagne Tha God, said to Mr. Talarico at the start of an hourlong conversation. “Is that the case?”
“Actually, it shows the opposite,” Mr. Talarico said. “But we have a lot more work to do.”
Recent public polls have shown Mr. Talarico with a commanding lead over Mr. Paxton among Black voters. Surveys indicate he has more Black voter support than past Democrats running for U.S. Senate at similar times in the campaign cycle. In June, when the tensions of the primary campaign were still fresh, Mr. Talarico was outpacing Beto O’Rourke, a white congressman who ran for Senate in 2018, and Colin Allred, a Black congressman who ran in 2024, according to polls by the University of Texas at Austin.
But to win statewide in Texas, something a Democrat has not done in decades, Mr. Talarico must do more than just win with Black voters, political consultants said; he needs them to turn out in large numbers. Failure to do so could make winning impossible.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s Gaslighting Isn’t Working As Even His Biggest Fans Are Leaving, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 28, 2026. If Trump had a political superpower, it was his ability to convince his supporters of a false reality where down is up, but when it comes to the Iran war and prices, it isn’t working.
After more than a decade of Trump on the national political stage, America has watched Donald Trump build his own realities. Trump was born rich, so he has never had to live in a world constrained by reality.
Trump has spent his entire life making his money by building and selling a false reality around himself. In a previous era, Trump would have been called a flim-flam man.
When Donald Trump took over a political party, his false realities became the dogma of one of the two major political parties. Trump was amplified, and his unwavering commitment to living in his own universe attracted others who mistook delusion for strength and vision.
Trump isn’t a gifted politician. He isn’t a great communicator, personally liked, respected, or a master of the levers of government.
The president’s superpower has been in the ability to build false worlds, but Trump has run into a reality that has neutralized his one power.
Here is what Trump had to say about inflation and gas prices when returning to the White House:
And a lot of good things are happening, including for our farmers. Thank you all very much. One thing I have to say, with the exception of oil, which is lower than the Biden administration, and we no longer have to worry about nuclear weapons with Iran 'cause they're wiped out. But with the exception of oil, everything is going down.
We have it going down. We inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country, and it's going really down. 401(k)s are at their all-time high. The stock markets are at their all-time high, and our country is doing really well.
Everything that Trump said was false, stretched, or cherry-picked, but there are growing signs that even some of his most devoted supporters have lost faith.The Hardcore MAGAs Have Been Shaken
If you have seen any Trump speech for years, he always shouts out the Front Row Joes, which are a group of Trump super fans that show up at every one of his public events. The Trump political team always places these folks up front, and they are some of the president’s most dedicated supporters.
Politico reported that some of the Joes have had enough:
When Trisha Hope tells Playbook that Trump is “a fraud and liar,” and Rick Frazier says “he can’t be trusted,” Republicans should hear alarm bells.
Hope saw her faith shaken during a July 8, 2025 Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked then-AG Pam Bondi about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Before she could answer, Trump interrupted: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”
“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope said. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”
The war with Iran vindicated those feelings. “He’s said the war is over 600 different times. He tells us they don’t have a military, they don’t have a navy. They’re still blowing up things. It’s just all lies.”
“Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier told Playbook. “He promoted himself as a no-war president. That didn’t work out.”
Some of the people who most believed in Trump are starting to see what this president is all about.
There are two levels at work in this situation.
In the short term, Trump can’t gaslight his way through the midterms, because what he is trying to sell keeps running into the realities that people are seeing at the gas pump and grocery store.
The bigger long-term problem for Republicans is that Donald Trump’s support is non-transferable. Republicans have tried for years, but they have consistently lost or, at best, woefully underperformed in elections without Trump on the ballot.
Many of the president’s supporters may stop participating in politics when he is gone, so how does a political party built around Donald Trump survive without him?
The myths aren’t being bought. Supporters are leaving, and Donald Trump is the flim-flam man who has been exposed as a charlatan.
More On Trump Team U.S. Governance
New York Times, Trump Offered to Sell Arms to China, U.S. Ambassador Says, Edward Wong, Sept. 28, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump made the offer to Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said David Perdue, the ambassador to China. The White House later said the U.S. had no plans for such a sale.
President Trump has asked Xi Jinping, the leader of China, whether he would like to buy American weapons, David Perdue, the American ambassador to China, said in a television interview on Sunday.
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Mr. Perdue said on “Fox News Sunday” while discussing the state visit by Mr. Xi to Washington last week. “He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point.”
Mr. Perdue did not give further details and did not reveal Mr. Xi’s reply.
An admission that the American president offered to sell arms to China is extraordinary. The Communist-ruled nation is considered by most American policymakers and legislators of both parties to be the greatest military, economic and diplomatic rival of the United States — the only real challenger to America as a superpower.
When asked for comment, the White House said through a U.S. official that the United States had no plans to sell arms to China. The State Department said in a statement that “U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China has the world’s fastest-growing military, and for decades U.S. officials across administrations, including in the current one, have warned of a potential military clash between the two nuclear-armed powers in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly over the island of Taiwan or China’s aggressive actions in territory claimed by U.S. allies in the South and East China Seas.
Chinese defense companies, with the approval of the Chinese government, are supporting adversaries of the United States, including Iran and Russia, by selling them dual-use equipment and satellite imagery, as well as planning the secret export of weapons, according to U.S. officials. The United States has imposed sanctions on some Chinese companies.
The United States has been the dominant military power in the Asia-Pacific region, but that strength is fading relative to China’s, especially as the Trump administration diverts resources from the region for use in its war against Iran. In recent years, the U.S. defense industry has also struggled to manufacture weapons systems at a rate considered sufficient for global needs by American officials.
“If there was any ambiguity about whether President Trump views China as a security threat, this disclosure by @USAmbChina Perdue puts the question to rest,” Ryan Hass, a former career diplomat and White House national security official who is director of the China center at the Brookings Institution, wrote on social media.
“Trump’s offer to sell weapons to China will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China’s spear,” he added.
Those partners include the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan, the de facto independent island and democracy that the Chinese Communist Party seeks to rule.
Mr. Trump has been withholding a $14 billion sale of weapons to Taiwan, even though the U.S. government has been required by law since 1979 to send arms of a defensive nature to the island. The latest arms package was put together by State Department officials and was approved by congressional leaders early this year, but has since languished at the department, The New York Times reported.
Senators sent a bipartisan letter in May to Mr. Trump urging him to move forward with the sales. On Wednesday, hours before Mr. Xi arrived in Washington, four Republican senators led by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking for the same thing.
More On U.S. Media, Sports, Culture
New York Times, Senate Resoundingly Approves Sweeping College Sports Measure, Carl Hulse, Sept. 28, 2026. The outlook for the legislation, which seeks to stabilize the unsettled collegiate sports landscape, is uncertain in the House. It was one of the last congressional actions before the midterms.
The Senate on Monday approved a sweeping remake of collegiate sports regulations in an effort to restore stability to an athletic landscape that has been upended by constant transfers, frequent shifts in conference membership and an infusion of money from wealthy boosters eager to lure top talent.
Known as the Protect College Sports Act, the bill passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 77 to 22, making it one of the last major pieces of business to be tackled by lawmakers before the midterm elections. It was a bid by Congress to lay out significant new rules and standards governing popular college sports that are a mainstay of American life as well as a path to an education for student athletes.
Authors of the legislation, which faces an uncertain future in the House, said aggressive congressional intervention was necessary because a series of legal rulings had sowed chaos in college sports. They warned that the current financial path of colleges and universities was unsustainable, would decrease competition and could cause schools to jettison less popular sports that were not as lucrative as football.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and it is only Congress that can fix it,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, a chief proponent of the bill.
But it has run into fierce opposition from Black lawmakers and others who say the measure restricts opportunities for players, many of them Black, while doing little to hold down the pay or mobility of top coaches.
The legislation would limit college athletes to one transfer before they would have to sit out a season, as they had in the past before court rulings opened the transfer “portal,” spurring thousands of athletes to try to change schools each year. It also would set eligibility at five years. It would protect the right of college athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image and likeness” and institute guarantees for scholarships and health care.
The measure also would grant the N.C.A.A., the governing body of college sports, a limited antitrust exemption while remaining silent on collective bargaining by student athletes. It attempts to discourage schools from jumping from conference to conference and it imposes new restrictions on agents for athletes.
“Sports is about any given Saturday,” said Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the lead Democratic sponsor of the bill. “It is not about whether you have a billionaire in your backyard. It is about whether you can coach and recruit and develop and maintain and have academic performance and have fairness.”
Despite the Senate approval, opponents blasted the measure as unfair to players. An amendment to cap coaching salaries at $5 million and limit their contract buyouts to one year’s salary was defeated Monday as the authors beat back a series of proposed changes. Democratic opponents also were unhappy with the lack of clarity about future collective bargaining.
"It’s a bill for the control and power of the N.C.A.A. and member institutions,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a top opponent of the legislation. “It is not about athletes who are winning their rights, winning court cases, gaining leverage, and now are having that taken away from them.”
But resistance to the bill was no match for the major sports conferences, state schools, big-name coaches and other powerful interest groups that got behind it, including airing television spots that featured high-profile figures such as Deion Sanders, the former professional sports star who is now the head football coach at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The colleges and the conferences and the boosters flooded this place,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut another leading opponent of the bill. “It is a hard slog when the players have no money and no representation. Ultimately, this is going to be really bad for student athletes and destructive of the college sports model because these kids aren’t going to stick around very long if they are not getting paid what they are worth.”
Others said Congress should have stayed out of the fight.
“The people who oversee the post office now want to run college sports. What could go wrong?” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. He said he doubted that the founding fathers ever envisioned that “Congress would one day be in charge of dictating the rules for college sports.
More On Artificial Intelligence
Semafor, Analysis: The White House and its allies are lonely in their insistence that AI development in America must accelerate without governments setting ground rules, Ashley Gold, Sept. 28, 2026. At the UN General Assembly in New York, as well as in meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington, Trump’s team was clear: US companies are the leaders in AI, they plan to keep it that way, and they reject any international attempts to rein in the technology.
Trump, with his call to leave AI “exactly where it is,” contrasts with Xi, who said responsible AI development is necessary — as other Chinese officials said this week that they support a global governance framework. Meanwhile, frontier labs are pushing forward with their own self-regulatory schemes, which will ask them to agree on testing standards in a highly competitive environment.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
New York Times, Watchdog Agency Pulls Back on Markets Enforcement Under Trump, Sharon LaFraniere, Sept. 28, 2026. The fate of two cotton brokers highlights how the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has scaled back its regulatory actions not just for crypto cases but also for the kinds of cases it has long policed.
For years, American cotton farmers suspected that they were getting cheated by powerful companies that bought and sold their goods to overseas buyers.
When a whistle-blower came forward who appeared to validate those suspicions in 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulatory agency, began an investigation.
During the last months of the Biden administration, the agency reached a settlement against one of the trading companies, Olam Group. The firm agreed to pay a $3.25 million fine after the C.F.T.C. found it had misled the markets about its cotton exports to China.
By that point, that same whistle-blower had accused Louis Dreyfus Company of doing the same thing.
But just as lawyers for the C.F.T.C. were on the verge of recommending civil charges against Louis Dreyfus, the Trump administration took over. The agency’s newly appointed acting chairwoman shut down the investigation, questioning whether the evidence was adequate, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the inquiry who described internal matters on the condition of anonymity.
The handling of the Louis Dreyfus matter came in the midst of an enormous rollback in enforcement at the C.F.T.C., a small but important agency that oversees the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar commodities markets.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Sheri Mecklenburg Debunks Andrew Boutros’ Claim to have “Spoken Extensively to the Prosecutors,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 28, 2026. There are a lot of ways that Sheri Mecklenburg’s twin mic drop last week (her motion to intervene and the liberation of her resignation letter) may change the outcome of this week’s hearing in the Broadview 6 case.
I’m working on a post about why US Attorney Andrew Boutros was panicked enough about the prosecutorial decision-making so as to waive privilege in the case; I laid out that he did here.
But I want to point to a more nuanced detail.
In her resignation letter, Mecklenburg, below right, documented a range of specifics regarding the May 21 hearing at which this case fell apart.
This decision to keep me and my attorneys in the dark was consistent with your handling of this matter from the outset. No one consulted me about any transcript redactions. I had nothing to hide and in fact demonstrated quite the opposite in memorializing brief and incidental interactions with two grand jurors. You declined to notify me about the May 21, 2026 Court hearing, which I had the indignity of learning about after-the-fact from the media. I would have expected the leadership of the Office to ensure that a career prosecutor whose conduct and reputation were about to be publicly condemned received notice and an opportunity to be heard. Had I been afforded that basic fairness at the outset, I believe matters would not have reached this point.
Since I was not present, I was a convenient target to be scapegoated and publicly vilified. You recklessly agreed in court that I had committed misconduct without even asking for my account, fully reviewing the record or briefing the law. That evening, you sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges. You then publicly announced an investigation of my conduct spanning twenty years. These inexplicable actions severely damaged a reputation I worked hard to build over decades and have damaged my prospects for future employment and income.
Throughout all of this, I remained silent. But now the defense has leveled additional false and inflammatory accusations against me that the Office has not rebutted and apparently has no intention of rebutting. At the same time, you have threatened to terminate me if I attempt to rebut the false allegations and bring additional matters to the Court’s attention. You remind me that I am still a DOJ employee when you want to silence me, but you have not treated me as a DOJ employee throughout this matter, including when, in May, you placed me on leave and cut off my devices and credentials without any notice. Your adverse actions from the beginning have forced me to retain personal counsel to defend conduct undertaken as part of my employment, yet you have refused to indemnify me for the substantial resulting expense. Despite the adverse impact on my finances, you cannot buy my silence by dangling continued leave.
Those details include:
Boutros, below left, gave Mecklenburg no notice of the hearing; she learned about it when a journalist contacted her about it.Mecklenburg was not present; the three other AUSAs, including Matthew Skiba and William Hogan, 
were.Immediately after the hearing, Boutros sent out an office-wide email “laying responsibility at my feet.” The public reporting on that email focuses, instead, on the way Boutros hailed the three AUSAs present that day as “courageous.”Sometime in May (it’s not clear whether before or after that email), Boutros put her (and only her) on leave and shut down Mecklenburg’s DOJ credentials.
But the most important detail is that Boutros did not reach out to Mecklenburg at all.
In that May 21 hearing, Boutros claimed he had “spoken extensively to the prosecutors.”
I know Your Honor has indicated that you may hold a hearing or will hold a hearing. We obviously defer to Your Honor. But I did want you to know from me, that from my assessment, having spoken extensively to the prosecutors, I do not believe that whatever errors were done specifically as it relates to the redactions, were done intentionally or with a desire to mislead the Court.
And if Your Honor wants to hear more about that, I’m happy to come back and explain why that is the case.
True. He said that in context of the grand jury redactions, which were done long after Mecklenburg left the prosecution.
But it is relevant to something exonerees argued back in July, when arguing that DOJ’s agreement to pay attorneys fees mooted any discovery: Boutros rested his claim there was no need to investigate further on having discussed the case with prosecutors.
The Defendants’ concern that the payment of the attorneys’ fees by the U.S. Attorney’s Office will keep the truth and scope of the misconduct that occurred in this case hidden forever stems in large part from the public and private statements by U.S. Attorney Boutros regarding this case. A review of U.S. Attorney Boutros’ statements makes clear that he does not believe any misconduct actually occurred and thus no meaningful investigation or accountability can be counted on from his Office.5
U.S. Attorney Boutros previously informed the Court that he has already investigated this matter to his satisfaction and has sincerely determined that no deliberate misconduct occurred:
It is my very sincere belief, Your Honor, that no prosecutor acted intentionally in misleading you, and that there was no desire to mislead the Court and no deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecutors.
5-21-26 Tr. at 50:17-21 (emphasis added). While this Court might hold out hope that U.S. Attorney Boutros would change his “sincere belief” after he investigates and realizes the true extent of the deception and fraud his prosecutors committed in this matter, he has foreclosed that route by stating he has, from his perspective, already fully investigated the matter and stands by his misguided belief that no misconduct occurred.
But I did want you to know from me, that from my assessment, having spoken extensively to the prosecutors, I do not believe that whatever errors were done specifically as it relates to the redactions, were done intentionally or with a desire to mislead the Court.6
5-21-26 Tr. at 50:23-51:2 (emphasis added).
Perhaps the most troubling statement by U.S. Attorney Boutros regarding is the message he sent to all employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, literally within just a few hours of leaving the courtroom where this Court made clear its severe displeasure with the misconduct that occurred in this matter, and Mr. Boutros was forced to dismisss this case with prejudice. Rather than being chastened by all that had been exposed to date, immediately thereafter the U.S. Attorney wrote an office-wide email to publicly commend the conduct and actions of the AUSAs at the center of this self-created storm:
[T]oday was an important day for the Office. We saw three courageous prosecutors …fight long and hard for a case they inherited when a colleague departed the Office. These prosecutors fought for the rule of law . . . Our Prosecutors were strong and courageous.May 21, 2026 email from U.S. Attorney Boutros to all employees at U.S. Attorney’s Office (emphasis added). Thus, the public record created by U.S. Attorney Boutros regarding this case demonstrates he not only does not see or comprehend the grave misconduct committed by his prosecutors over the past nine months in directly deceiving this Court (among other things), but that he is actually sending the message to all the young (and old) prosecutors in the Office that the behavior of these prosecutors should be praised and thought of as “strong,” “courageous,” and having “fought for the rule of law,” when exactly the opposite should have been the message delivered from the lead law enforcement official in our district. The government’s general agreement to write a check should not cause the Court to divest its authority to bring to light the web of misconduct that has now only begun to be exposed.
5 The agreement to stipulate that attorneys’ fees are warranted while continuing to publicly deny any wrongdoing further illustrates the need for this Court to initiate further investigation into this matter. Given the parties involved include political appointees at the highest levels of both the local and national Department of Justice offices, it is clear there will be no proper or objective investigation done unless the Court directs it. This Court, therefore, is the community’s only hope for pursuing transparency and accountability
6 Notably, U.S. Attorney Boutros offered to share with the Court (and presumably the public) why he holds such a sincere belief, “And if Your Honor wants to hear more about that, I’m happy to come back and explain why that is the case.” 5-21-26 Tr. at 51:3-4. We respectfully submit the Court should take him up on that offer. And to the extent the Government was sincere about this offer, perhaps they will join in this request for the Court to hold hearings on this matter. [all emphasis original]
Effectively, Boutros was himself vouching at that hearing in May, assuring Judge Perry — in a hearing where she made clear DOJ’s presumption of regularity had disappeared — that, based on his conversations with prosecutors, she didn’t need to investigate prosecutors’ conduct any further.
But, we now know, he only spoke to three of the prosecutors — the three he called “strong and courageous” even as he lambasted Mecklenburg.
Sept. 27
Top Headlines
Robert Reich via Substack, Sunday thought: Nauseous Optimism, Robert Reich, right, 
retired professor and U.S. Labor Secretary, Sept. 27, 2026. Looking toward November 3, I feel optimistic about the midterm elections, just over five weeks away. But my stomach aches when I think of what’s at stake.
Democracy Docket founder, Sept. 27, 2026. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can resume using its voter suppression database to help Republicans remove voters from the rolls, I called it what it is: a terrible decision that will empower election deniers at a time when our elections are already under attack.Sept. 27, 2026. Blogs Internet and New Media, Foreign Influence, Weaponized DOJ. Last week, DOJ announced its intention to intervene in two EU lawsuits in which Elon Musk is contesting a €120 million fine under the Digital Services Act. It’s unclear where this will go. One reason, I suspect, the EU hasn’t punished all the other ways Elon has violated the DSA, is because this fine has nothing to do with censorship. It has to do with fraud and transparency. It’s a fight they where there should be no question the EU is in the right. And now, DOJ has joined Xitter to defend Elon’s fraudulent ways.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, A ‘Big Problem’: Trump’s War With Iran Drags Down Republicans in Midterms, Tim Balk, Sept. 27, 2026. As their November picture darkens, and gas and diesel prices soar, some Republicans who backed the war for months are now changing their tune.More On U.S. Governance
MS NOW, Trump aides explore attaching president’s name to Ford’s Theatre, Brian Bennett, Laura Barrón-López and Jake Traylor, Sept. 23, 2026. The playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated has been mentioned among federal properties that could carry the president’s name, people familiar with the effort told MS NOW.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Big, Monopoly Round-Up and Opinion: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude, Matt Stoller, right, and Lee Hepner, 
Sept. 27, 2026. The most important news is that Paramount and Warner Bros. overcame the key 
hurdle to closing their deal, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 Democratic state attorneys general dropped their opposition. It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, 
and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connectedowner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt,feckless, and aligned with capital.More On U.S. Media, Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Insider Deals
trip with LindellTV and Real America’s Voice, and then announced, “I love an open, free press.” That is where this day began. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner had asked whether he only wanted supportive outlets in the White House press pool. He responded by calling her network fake news. A president who wants to choose which reporters can question him is trying to choose what the rest of us get to hear.
Sept. 27, 2026. Trump’s war on the free press is continuing.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 27, 2026. Let’s start with a selection of recent polls showing our Senate candidates up by 5 points or more, outside the margin of error, in their races:
Sept. 27, 2026. Donny Convict truly is the worst of us. He’s a burst trash bag of personality defects. Can you think of something that isn’t wrong with him? Sept. 27, 2026. Perhaps you can detect a theme here: TIME: Republican Panic Sets In Over Prospects of a Massive Blue Wave. With less than six weeks to go until Election Day, the sentiment among Republicans is shifting from nervous to fatalistic, as a pileup of bad news has many convinced they are heading toward an electoral disaster.
One of the most biting insults in Alaska politics is to be accused of being aligned with the “Lower 48,” code for candidates taking marching orders from powerful forces in the contiguous United States rather than sticking up for Alaskans.
Byron Donalds (above) is quietly putting some distance between himself and Trump. More On Artificial Intelligence, Impacts, Global Regulation
New York Times, As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind, Adam Satariano and Cecilia Kang, Sept. 27, 2026. The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.News Roundups
Sept. 27, 2026. If you needed one image to sum up where this administration is right now, Dan Scavino handed it to you this weekend: a champagne-popping, Pitbull-scored celebration video, posted while millions of Americans are struggling to afford groceries, gas, and rent. It backfired so badly that even Trump’s own allies piled on.Sept. 27, 2026. As promised, our Sunday tradition continues: another weekly good news update. Share one piece of good news from your week in the comments, and pass this along so someone else can join in too.Special Report: Insider Revisits The 1990s Clinton Impeachment, Independent Counsel Scandals
Mobology, Intermezzo: “The President’s critics demanded a showdown on the issue of morality—and we gave it to them,” Dan E. Moldea, right, 
Sept. 27, 2026. My investigation of the suicide of Vincent Foster led to my allegations of OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] leaks, which led to my arguably decisive role in the impeachment drama. Looking back and regardless of all the consequences, I would do it again.More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
Sept. 27, 2026. There’s an old aphorism in military affairs to the effect that amateurs talk about strategy, but professionals talk about logistics. The financial version of this aphorism might be that cable TV touts talk about stocks, but serious economic analysts talk about bonds.More Global News
New York Times, 5 Arrested as Terrorism Suspects Near U.K. Air Base Used by U.S., Michael D. Shear and Amelia Nierenberg, Sept. 27, 2026. British counterterrorism police said the men were arrested after three suspicious vehicles appeared to be traveling toward R.A.F. Fairford early on Sunday.
Drumcree Orange Parade Go Ahead On Nationalist Garvaghy Road: A sudden revival of the 1990s confrontations between Orange Order marchers and Catholic demonstrators puts the police back in the middle — and leaders of Northern Ireland’s supposed unity government on opposite sides.Robert Reich via Substack, Sunday thought: Nauseous Optimism, Robert Reich, right, retired professor and U.S. Labor Secretary, Sept. 27, 2026. Looking toward November 3, I feel optimistic about the midterm elections, just over five weeks away. But my stomach aches when I think of what’s at stake.
Call me nauseously optimistic. [To friends and subscribers,] I suspect you’re in a similar place.
If it were only the polls, I’d feel reasonably good. Here’s one that stuck out for me: The share of Republicans who say the economy is better than a year ago has collapsed from over 70 percent in January to 29 percent in September, according to last week’s New York Times/Siena poll.
Here’s another: According to a Wall Street Journal poll, just 37 percent of Americans approve of the job that Trump is doing — the lowest approval rating of any president heading into a midterm election in Journal polls dating to 1990.
Another good sign: Because of Trump’s unpopular war, his dreaded tariffs, and their effect on prices, Republicans in tight races are starting to tiptoe away from Trump. In recent days, Maine Senator Susan Collins and Kansas Senator Roger Marshall have distanced themselves from Trump on tariff policies that they say hurt small businesses and rural communities in Maine and aircraft production in Kansas. Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts has questioned whether consumers would see lower prices from Trump’s decision to temporarily allow more foreign beef imports into the U.S., a move that’s opposed by ranchers. All three senators are seeking reelection this year.
In the House, seven Republicans, including a group facing tough reelection races, joined Democrats this past week in passing a measure directing Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities against Iran unless Congress authorizes the war.
Republicans are also uneasy with Trump’s refusal to regulate AI, data centers, or even Flock Safety cameras — which most Americans now oppose.
And I think this is fascinating: Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70 percent from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election. Monthly mentions of his name have fallen 30 percent since the U.S. launched the war in late February.
All encouraging.
But what makes my stomach churn is the vast amounts of money from some of the worst right-wing billionaires in America (cue Elon Musk) now being poured into key races to finance a barrage of ads favoring Republican candidates and making stuff up about Democrats and progressives.
My stomach also aches when I think about what Trump and his regime may try (and have already tried) to do to interfere with our elections and further erode public trust in them. On Friday, for example, the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on a federal voter database pushed by Trump. Even worse, his regime refuses to rule out sending ICE agents to polling places.
So our work over the next five weeks is essential — phoning, writing, canvassing, getting out the vote, and, to the extent we can, funding candidates who will help average working Americans.
Yes, money talks, and Trump is a vicious dictator. But there are far more of us than there are Trump’s billionaires — more of us to do the talking and the organizing and the mobilizing. And far more of us to guard our electoral system than there are Trump lapdogs and agents.
And always remember this: We’re on the right side — the side of the people seeking the common good rather than the corporate and techno-billionaires seeking additional wealth and power for themselves.
Which is why I’m nauseously optimistic that we will prevail in just over five weeks. And you? How do you feel?
Democracy Docket, Legal Analysis and Advocacy: Justice Jackson found a bright side. I am not sure I see one, Marc Elias, right, Democracy Docket founder, Sept. 27, 2026. When the U.S. Supreme Court (above) ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can resume using its voter suppression database to help Republicans remove voters from the rolls, I called it what it is: a terrible decision that will empower election deniers at a time when our elections are already under attack.
Since then, some lawyers and pundits have argued that the decision's impact will be quite limited. They point to a passage in the dissent suggesting there might be "a bright side to today's opinion."
Because federal law bars mass removals of voters in the 90 days before Election Day, Justice Jackson argues, the ruling "will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system."
Let me begin by saying that I agree with Justice Jackson: federal law prohibits mass voter purges close to an election, and only individualized removals are permitted. I also agree with her that even these individual removals pose concrete harm to lawful voters and undermine free and fair elections.
But Justice Jackson was writing in dissent. The majority opinion is far cagier on this question. Indeed, the Court has agreed to hear a case later this year that could test exactly this interpretation of federal law.
Justice Jackson's optimism rests on the majority's acknowledgment that the quiet period "limits the potential impact" of its ruling. But read the rest of the passage, and the bright side dims considerably.
The majority went on to say that the lower court's order prevented "the Federal Government from using the modified SAVE program to conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law during this period."
Then, in a footnote, the conservative justices added that they will consider the scope of the quiet period in a separate case scheduled for argument later this year, and that "we do not need to decide it here."
In that case, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, which the Court will hear in December, the RNC, backed by the Trump Justice Department, argues that Arizona may cancel the registrations of voters it deems noncitizens during the 90-day quiet period.
Put simply, Justice Jackson's "bright side" depends on Republican state and local election officials following federal law, and on the Supreme Court holding firm if election deniers try to purge voters.
If the past is prologue, the signs are not hopeful.
In 2024, the Supreme Court let Virginia resume a noncitizen removal program launched on the first day of the quiet period, over the objections of the district court and the 4th Circuit. It never explained why.
For its part, the Trump Justice Department has already told a federal appeals court that it does not read the quiet period the way Justice Jackson does. In March, it argued that the quiet period "does not apply to efforts by a State to remove noncitizens who could never have qualified as 'voters.'"
Under that theory, systematic purges of alleged noncitizens could continue right up to Election Day.
This is exactly what the DOJ is arguing in Mi Familia Vota. It asserts that federal law does not protect people "who were ineligible and improperly registered to vote in the first place" and it insists that "systematic checks within the 90-day window are the only way" for states to keep noncitizens off the rolls.
Admittedly, when this case was before the D.C. Circuit, the DOJ conceded that the "90-day limitation was 'fatal'" to a claim of imminent harm premised on systematic voter-roll maintenance. But this DOJ is shameless, and it will reverse course whenever it believes doing so will help Trump suppress the vote.
It already has.
In its Mi Familia Vota brief, the DOJ admits that it "previously construed the NVRA the same way" that Justice Jackson and I do. But after Trump came back into power, the DOJ says that now it "has reached the opposite conclusion."
Justice Jackson is right about the law. If I had confidence in Republican election officials, the Justice Department and the conservative Supreme Court majority, I would be less worried.
But I don't.
With little more than a month to go until Election Day, my job is to worry. I am paid to look around corners and see what might go wrong, not simply to assume that everything will go right.
Donald Trump knows his party is going to lose this election. He has escalated his attacks on our elections at every stage. Last-minute voter purges and mass voter challenges are not out of the question.
I am confident we have the legal tools to fight back, but I don't accept that these threats won't materialize.
That is why I don't see the bright side. The quiet period is only as strong as the officials who obey it and the courts that enforce it. I trust neither.
Hoping for the best is not a strategy. Being ready to fight is.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: DOJ Intervenes in EU to Help Elon Musk Defraud Users, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 27, 2026. Blogs Internet and New Media, Foreign Influence, Weaponized DOJ.
Last week, DOJ announced its intention to intervene in two EU lawsuits in which Elon Musk is contesting a €120 million fine under the Digital Services Act.
The United States filed an application to intervene in the captioned cases, X Internet and X Holdings v. Commission, Case No. T-114/26 and Musk v. Commission, Case No. T-121/26, before the General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union (GCEU) in Luxembourg in support of the applications to annul the Dec. 5, 2025, Decision of the European Commission that found them liable for violations of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and imposed a fine of €120,000,000 jointly and severally, based on “the total worldwide annual turnover of the single economic unit ultimately controlled by Elon Musk or that of X Holdings Corp.”
“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “We will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory overreach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth.”
This is, tactically, an effort to ensure that Xitter [x, formerly Twitter] can continue to export fascist propaganda to the EU as part of an effort to undermine democracy.
But the coverage of DOJ’s intervention has largely ignored what the judgment was for.
It was not, as you might suspect given the point of the intervention, a complaint that European countries oppose the way Elon has platformed and boosted Nazis on his platform. The EU has yet to do anything about that!
Nor is it an attempt to hold Elon accountable for the way he has boosted fascist mobs in the UK and (to a lesser degree) in Ireland. Again, to the extent that it has jurisdiction, the EU has done nothing about that.
Nor is it an attempt to fine Xitter for platforming AI CSAM or involuntary revenge porn, though France is investigating the former (Ireland is investigating Xitter for permitting children to access pornography).
All of that has gone unpunished so far.
Instead, the EU’s fine arose from three issues: Xitter’s insinuation that Blue Checks involve some kind of “verification,” its refusal to provide an ads repository (which is the only way to check what kind of disinformation and scams a platform is profiting off of), and thwarting research into the platform.
Deceptive design of X’s ‘blue checkmark’
X’s use of the ‘blue checkmark’ for ‘verified accounts’ deceives users. This violates the DSA obligation for online platforms to prohibit deceptive design practices on their services. On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified’ status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with. This deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors. While the DSA does not mandate user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.Lack of transparency of X’s ads repository
X’s advertisement repository fails to meet the transparency and accessibility requirements of the DSA. Accessible and searchable ad repositories are critical for researchers and civil society to detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, coordinated information operations and fake advertisements.
X incorporates design features and access barriers, such as excessive delays in processing, which undermine the purpose of ad repositories. X’s ads repository also lacks critical information, such as the content and topic of the advertisement, as well as the legal entity paying for it. This hinders researchers and the public to independently scrutinise any potential risks in online advertising.Failure to provide researchers access to public data
X fails to meet its DSA obligations to provide researchers with access to the platform’s public data. For instance, X’s terms of service prohibit eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, including through scraping. Moreover, X’s processes for researchers’ access to public data impose unnecessary barriers, effectively undermining research into several systemic risks in the European Union.
The fine issued today was calculated taking into account the nature of these infringements, their gravity in terms of affected EU users, and their duration.
This is the first non-compliance decision under the DSA.
The latter two are about providing the transparency to discover how the platform is being used. The first is about fraud.
And while no one (besides me, as far as I know) has mentioned it, Xitter continues to defraud users, even after attempting to make its Blue Check policy clear.
What does the blue checkmark mean?
The blue checkmark means that the account has an active subscription to X Premium and meets our eligibility requirements. It does not mean that the account has been ID verified. You can read about ID verification on the X platform here.
Starting April 1, 2023 we began winding down our legacy Verification program and accounts that were verified under the previous criteria (active, notable, and authentic) did not retain a blue checkmark unless they are subscribed to X Premium.
Subscribers need to meet our eligibility criteria below to receive or retain the blue checkmark.
X supports freedom of speech and does not endorse or validate the views expressed on accounts featuring blue checkmarks.
Eligibility criteria for the blue checkmark
Only accounts actively subscribed to X Premium are eligible to receive the blue checkmark.
Except that’s not true. I can assure you there are people on Xitter whose accounts show a Blue Check who are not paying for a Premium membership.
It’s unclear where this will go. One reason, I suspect, the EU hasn’t punished all the other ways Elon has violated the DSA, is because this fine has nothing to do with censorship. It has to do with fraud and transparency. It’s a fight they where there should be no question the EU is in the right.
And now, DOJ has joined Xitter to defend Elon’s fraudulent ways.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, A ‘Big Problem’: Trump’s War With Iran Drags Down Republicans in Midterms, Tim Balk, Sept. 27, 2026. As their November picture darkens, and gas and diesel prices soar, some Republicans who backed the war for months are now changing their tune.
As President Trump warned in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in recent days that he might “annihilate” Iran, a growing number of Republicans were scrambling to find distance from a costly war that has swelled into a midterm crisis for the party.
The split screen showed how Mr. Trump and his party’s battleground candidates are increasingly at odds as the November elections approach. With no clear resolution in sight, the war has sent the prices of gasoline, diesel and heating oil upward, and cost increases have spilled across the economy. Mortgage rates have also climbed to seven percent, squeezing prospective homeowners already struggling with inflation.
While Mr. Trump is talking about escalating the war if he cannot strike a deal with Iran, Republicans in competitive races are losing patience with the fighting.
Representative Ashley Hinson, the party’s Senate nominee in Iowa, called at a news conference Friday for an “immediate” end to the war, saying she was “incredibly frustrated” by rising costs. Former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee in the Senate race in Michigan and an early cheerleader for the war, released an advertisement on Monday in which he declared that it “needs to end.”
Brinker Harding, a Republican trying to win a swing Nebraska congressional district that has been in his party’s hands for nearly a decade, said in an interview Friday that “we need to bring the war in Iran to a close as quickly as possible.” And Senator Jon Husted, who is working to fend off the Democratic former senator 
Sherrod Brown, told reporters on Friday that “we got to bring the war to a close” — even as he added that any resolution should be on “acceptable” terms.
Still, many Republicans have been cautious about crossing Mr. Trump, fearing a backlash that could alienate Republican voters they need in November. Despite Ms. Hinson’s and Mr. Husted’s calls for an end to the war, they recently voted against resolutions to rein in Mr. Trump’s ability to carry on the conflict.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump said he rejected Iran’s latest cease-fire proposal, another signal that Republicans’ calls for an end to the war would not be swiftly answered. The proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz — a vital oil-shipping corridor before the war — and restarted negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
More On U.S. Governance
MS NOW, Trump aides explore attaching president’s name to Ford’s Theatre, Brian Bennett, Laura Barrón-López and Jake Traylor, Sept. 23, 2026. The playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated has been mentioned among federal properties that could carry the president’s name, people familiar with the effort told MS NOW.
As President Donald Trump fights to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, administration officials are circulating a list of government sites that could have his name affixed to them in some way, according to people familiar with the effort.
One landmark that has emerged in the discussions among administration officials has raised eyebrows: Ford’s Theatre, the playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
It is unclear how seriously the theater is being considered or how the administration would attach Trump’s name to it. One administration official said the idea had been discussed, but they didn’t know where it stood. The prospect sparked a flurry of discussion over the past week among people responsible for the historic site.
The discussions underscore how much of a priority honoring the president has become inside parts of the Trump administration — even as the Iran war nears its eighth month, diesel prices hit an all-time high, the midterm elections approach in six weeks and most Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance.
White House officials, advisers and allies pitch ideas such as naming buildings after Trump to get on the president’s good side, a former administration official told MS NOW, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. The president’s view, the official said: “Why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me.”
“They know flattery gets them everything,” the former official said, adding that people wait to hear “How can I help you?” in return.
One person with knowledge of the broader renaming effort who requested anonymity to address a sensitive topic said officials were looking for buildings and other sites that could carry the president’s name while presenting an easier legal path than the Kennedy Center push.
Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House, where Lincoln later died, are owned by the Interior Department and maintained by the National Park Service as the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. The Interior Department manages roughly a fifth of the nation’s land, including the 433 units of the National Park System, more than 570 national wildlife refuges and hundreds of dams and reservoirs across the West.
Since returning to office, Trump has imprinted himself on Washington, D.C. In addition to the Kennedy Center, his appointees have renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace for him; put his likeness on U.S. passports, an NPS pass and a 24-karat gold $1 coin; hung large banners adorned with his face outside the departments of Justice, Labor and Agriculture; moved ahead with plans for a 250-foot “triumphal” arch near Arlington National Cemetery; discussed opening a promenade at the Lincoln Memorial; demolished the East Wing of the White House to make way for a new ballroom built to his specifications; and paved over the White House’s Rose Garden for a Mar-a-Lago-style patio.
The president and top administration officials have also reportedly discussed putting his name on Penn Station in New York, Dulles International Airport in Virginia and the new Washington Commanders stadium. Trump has denied pursuing the renaming of Penn Station. Some Republican lawmakers have gone so far as introducing legislation to rename Dulles for Trump. And then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in November that it would be “beautiful” for the Commanders’ stadium to bear Trump’s name.
Ford’s Theatre might be a bit different. The scene of one of the great tragedies and turning points of American history, it is a working theater, a museum and a living memorial to Lincoln.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Big, Monopoly Round-Up and Opinion: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude, Matt Stoller, right, and Lee Hepner, Sept. 27, 2026. The unorthodox development isn’t that politicians caved; it’s that people noticed it.
The most important news is that Paramount and Warner Bros. overcame the key hurdle to closing their deal, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 Democratic state attorneys general dropped their opposition, which I discussed on Monday in detail. It isn’t quite done, the judge hasn’t agreed to approve the consent decree, and there are amicus briefs and a well-received letter from Senator Cory Booker that the judge will hear arguments about. But it’s hard to imagine this one being paused for legal reasons.
It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connectedowner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, 
feckless, and aligned with capital.
But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond.
David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)
David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, wasn’t alone in his empire-building ambitions. It takes a village to centralize media. Wall Street was fully on board, as was the defense bar. In August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the state challenge to the Paramount-Warner merger has the potential to “deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system.” Donald Trump pushed the deal, but so did Democrat Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. So did Tom Cruise. So did the Director’s Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. So did California Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra, and much of the state legislature.
The other group were populists on the left, the anti-monopoly world, artists, the Writer’s Guild of America East and West, and the public itself. What they lacked in money and organization they made up for in grassroots support. Most voters do not think the deal will be good, and Californians supported challenging the merger 49-30. This fight was a line in the sand for the masters of the universe, who have been fighting against a pushback on AI data centers, and a billionaire tax, and before that, Lina Khan’s attempt to revive antitrust law.
New York Times, Fact Check: White House Claim of Finding $250 Billion in Fraud Uses Questionable Numbers, Linda Qiu, Sept. 27, 2026. The ledger used by a task force created by President Trump is difficult to verify and includes cases that were identified and went to trial during the Biden administration.
Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.
“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.
Yet some of the numbers Mr. Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.
In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledger chronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Mr. Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements and financial fines.
It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.
The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.
Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3 to 7 percent of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.
Mr. Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing.
“There’s absolutely no question it’s a ramp-up of effort, and there’s absolutely no question that there’s an opportunity to use technology, especially artificial intelligence, in ways that didn’t exist in the past,” said David Walker, who led the Government Accountability Office as the comptroller general in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
But, he said, the figures the task force has cited are “assertions that have not been validated by independent parties.”
Over the years, various inspectors generals have struggled to quantify their anti-fraud work in broad strokes, as the task force has done, given the vast differences in how different agencies investigate cases and measure impact, said Mark Greenblatt, a former inspector general for the Interior Department who once led the council of inspectors general.
It is entirely possible that the task force’s figures are accurate, he added.
But given that Mr. Trump fired more than a dozen independent inspectors general (including Mr. Greenblatt) at the beginning of his second term and installed political allies in their place, “there’s no one that can look at those numbers in detail and share with the American people whether they are valid, transparent and that the methodology is sound,” he said.
Fuzzy Figures and Possible Double-Counting
The task force’s description of its largest “fraud actions” offers few details about how it arrived at the estimates, making it impossible to verify the reliability of those figures.
Government watchdog agencies must abide by rigorous standards, explain their methodology when compiling reports on improper payments and fraud, and work within a system of checks and balances. For example, if the Government Accountability Office made a recommendation to an agency that estimated a cost savings, the agency had to agree with the estimate; if it did not, the accountability office’s own inspector general had to verify and reconcile the figures, Mr. Walker said.
The senior White House official said that the task force’s methodology was produced by an economist who is a fraud expert and conveyed to agencies, which then determined fraud figures and reported back to the task force. The official added that task force staff members did not oversee the accounting, which was compiled by career workers in respective agencies.
About half of what the task force casts as the $245.7 billion in “fraud uncovered” on its ledger can be attributed to the Small Business Administration. But neither the ledger nor the August news release elaborates on what that figure refers to.
When asked, a spokeswoman for the agency referred to a 2023 estimate, calculated by its inspector general, of $200 billion in pandemic-era fraud. She said the agency had identified about $122 billion of that figure as potentially fraudulent, but did not provide further details.
After repeated requests by The New York Times for additional documentation, the agency announced on Wednesday that it had provided the Internal Revenue Service with tax information associated with pandemic-era loans earlier this year, and that the I.R.S. had identified discrepancies associated with about $100 billion in loans. The announcement did not detail what the discrepancies or suspected tax violations may entail, but said that the tax agency was examining cases.
What the administration has described as other instances of anti-fraud victories appear to refer twice to the same actions or cases. The senior White House official denied that the task force double-counted any figures, saying that it included developments merely as informational updates. But whether the total figures include double-counting — as a ledger of government funding cuts maintained by the Department of Government Efficiency did — cannot be verified given that there is no breakdown.
The White House news release includes as “key actions and victories” the June captures of two fugitives accused of orchestrating Medicare fraud schemes that totaled $4.9 billion. But another key action encompasses charges against 455 defendants — including those two fugitives — accused of orchestrating health care fraud schemes totaling more than $6.5 billion.
Another key action details the April suspension of payments to 447 hospice providers in Los Angeles “with estimated fraud exceeding $600 million.” But a later action lists separately the May suspension of some 800 hospices, including the initial 447 providers. A news release from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notes that it suspended $70 million in Medicare payments to 800 hospices in Los Angeles that billed Medicare $1.4 billion last year.
Taking Credit for Old Cases
Fraud cases often span years as investigators gather evidence, prosecutors bring charges, juries deliver convictions and judges issue sentences across different administrations. Many figures the task force has reported take credit for work conducted under previous administrations and local governments.
“They deserve credit for taking them through the finish line,” Mr. Greenblatt said. “I don’t want to denigrate it, but to make it sound like all of the effort, you know, occurred during the life span of the task force is a sleight of hand, in my view.”
The White House declared that the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which was established in April, “took enforcement action in schemes totaling over $340 million in its first week alone.”
But according to the department’s own announcement, the bulk of that amount — nearly $280 million — represented people sentenced in fraud cases uncovered and tried months before the establishment of the fraud task force or even the second Trump administration itself.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Trump ‘Steals’ Taxpayer Dollars for for Personal Ad Blitz, GOP Senators Turn on Trump Jr., Press War Escalates, and Much More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 27, 2026. If you needed one image to sum up where this administration is right now, Dan Scavino handed it to you this weekend: a champagne-popping, Pitbull-scored celebration video, posted while millions of Americans are struggling to afford groceries, gas, and rent. It backfired so badly that even Trump’s own allies piled on.
That video landed the same weekend the White House aired its third taxpayer-funded ad in recent days, this one featuring Trump warning of a “final battle” against “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” all paid for with public money a little over a month before the midterms.
And it’s not just optics. Five Senate Republicans are now breaking ranks to support investigating Donald Trump Jr. over a Russian oligarch bankrolling his wedding, while the fight over press access at the White House keeps escalating, with the Attorney General now arguing openly that being in the building is “a privilege, not a right.”
I’m knee deep in another major investigation right now, and it’s already got folks rattled, some are even calling to attack my work. Good. That tells me I’m hitting something real.
Let’s get into it.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino Draws Backlash From His Own Party Over a Champagne-Popping Celebration Video Set to Pitbull. Scavino posted what appears to be an AI-generated video of himself popping champagne alongside his wife Erin Elmore and Eric and Lara Trump, set to Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party,” captioning it as a transparent share of his own post-State Dinner celebration and writing “GOD BLESS THE USA!!!” Rather than provoking Democrats as he seemingly intended, the video instead infuriated conservatives, with Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg sarcastically calling it exactly the midterm messaging the GOP needs, and activist Carrie Prejean Boller accusing Scavino of tone-deafness given how many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas, or their mortgage. Meghan McCain and Never-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell also piled on, with Longwell likening it to “real fall of Rome sh-t,” while other self-described MAGA accounts called the display of wealth astonishingly out of touch.
The backlash lands as polling points to a potential GOP wipeout in the November midterms, with Trump’s own advisers reportedly urging him to focus on affordability and a growing number of Republicans, including some he’s endorsed, quietly scrubbing his name from their campaign websites. Even so, Trump has doubled down on tying the midterms to his own record, telling supporters at a recent Republican midterm conference to “pretend that I am on the ballot.”
White House Airs Another Taxpayer-Funded Ad Featuring Trump Warning of a “Final Battle,” the Third Such Ad Tracked in Recent Days. The latest government-funded ad shows Trump walking down a hallway as audio plays of him vowing to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists,” rout “the fake news media,” and “liberate America from these villains once and for all,” language echoing a 2023 Veterans Day speech, and it aired during at least two NFL broadcasts on Fox this Sunday. The ad is nearly identical to a video Trump posted to Truth Social during his 2024 campaign, minus six seconds featuring his campaign logo and a text-to-join number, with “Paid for by the US Government” displayed on screen instead. The White House has defended the ads, including two previous ones tracked by AdImpact this week featuring Trump denouncing communism and socialism and another showing him at Mount Rushmore, by comparing them to past administrations’ public service announcements on Medicare or COVID vaccination, insisting they are “very clearly not campaign ads” and calling them “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Government watchdog group Common Cause has pushed back, with policy vice president Carol Evans questioning why taxpayer funds are being used to promote the president’s image just over a month before the midterms and suggesting the ads could amount to prohibited “propaganda.” The ads arrive amid Trump’s all-time low approval rating and a tense political climate ahead of November, adding fuel to concerns that public funds are being used for what critics see as thinly veiled campaign messaging.
Senator John Kennedy argued that no public official, including President Trump, Kristi Noem, or himself, should be spending public money on private ads promoting themselves. He acknowledged the position might not be popular within his own party, joking that he may end up wearing a sombrero for saying so, but added that he also believes there should be a rule barring any politician from having a building named after them while they’re still alive.
Marjorie Taylor Greene slams the Republican Party over a new “migrant caravan” this close to another election:
GOP Support of Investigating Trump Jr. Rapidly Grows:
Five Senate Republicans now support investigating Donald Trump Jr. over his wedding party being partially bankrolled by a Russian oligarch, marking a rare bipartisan crack in GOP loyalty to the president’s family. Senator Thom Tillis, who is retiring in January, blasted the arrangement as “stupid on stilts,” saying he’d like to see Trump Jr. explain “the rationale” behind accepting money from a Putin-connected businessman for an island wedding party just 37 days before the midterms. Senator John Cornyn said he’s “with Sen. Curtis” and would support an investigation, while Senator Lisa Murkowski said she was glad Curtis spoke up, adding “it doesn’t make any difference if you’re Republican or Democrat, if you’re Trump or you’re Biden.” Senator Bill Cassidy also conceded on CBS that the situation looked “really bad.” Tillis noted the scandal is unfolding “at a time when we need our pros on the field” heading into a critical election, saying he can’t imagine how it helps Republicans’ chances.
Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, right, and Donald Trump Jr. (Reuters photo).
The controversy centers on Umar Kremlev, a Russian boxing official with close ties to Vladimir Putin, who helped cover the cost of a private island rental and fireworks display for Donald Trump Jr.’s May wedding to Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. Bettina Trump described Kremlev on Instagram as a “dear friend” who “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations” after the wedding. Senator John Curtis of Utah was the first Republican to call it “corruption,” writing to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin urging a subpoena of Trump Jr. over his business dealings, foreign relationships, and any instance where his connection to his father provided value. Curtis explicitly compared the standard to the scrutiny Republicans applied to Hunter Biden, writing “a toaster is a wedding gift, a private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” and warning that “trust us” wasn’t a sufficient answer then or now. It’s not the first time Trump Jr.’s Russia ties have drawn scrutiny, since he was a central figure in the Mueller investigation after attending a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.
President Trump has defended the arrangement as “totally allowed,” claiming his son intends to reimburse Kremlev, though no details have emerged on whether or when that repayment might happen. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer dismissed the growing GOP concern as an attempt to create “a new Russia hoax” and attack a “private citizen,” but critics noted the argument ignores that private citizens are routinely subpoenaed, including Hunter Biden, whom House Republicans investigated for years without ever bringing impeachment articles to a vote. ProPublica’s original reporting found Kremlev “secretly bankrolled” hundreds of thousands of dollars in wedding expenses and even helped plan the event, despite the two men appearing to have met only recently, leaving open questions about his motives. MS NOW’s Steve Benen noted that five sitting GOP senators taking the matter seriously is unusual after years of Republican indifference to Trump-related scandals, even as it remains unclear whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will actually act on the request. The dispute lands amid broader GOP unease about Trump’s political standing, with the party also facing headwinds over the war in Iran, high gas prices, and slipping approval numbers ahead of November’s elections.
Trump’s Increased Attacks on Press:
Donald Trump suggested tearing down the Press Briefing room in the White House. Today, Donald Trump posted the following image seeking to possibly restore the FDR pool, which currently sits under the press briefing room, with gold trim.
Attorney General Todd Blanche Defends Trump’s White House Media Ban, Calling Press Access “a Privilege... Not a Right”. Attorney General Todd Blanche argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the administration’s ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House is justified because access to the building is a privilege rather than a constitutional right, framing the move as a response to Trump being “sick and tired” of reporting he considers inaccurate. The dispute has continued even after a judge issued a temporary restraining order last Thursday requiring the White House to restore the outlets’ credentials, since CNN was again barred from the press pool traveling with the president on Air Force One over the weekend. Blanche insisted the White House routinely decides which reporters fly with the president and that CNN’s exclusion wasn’t unusual, while separately maintaining the three outlets’ reporting amounted to a “national security problem,” a claim the judge overseeing the case explicitly rejected, writing that nothing in the record suggested the ban was motivated by security concerns rather than Trump’s stated frustration with the outlets’ truthfulness and tone. Former President Bill Clinton weighed in at the Clinton Global Initiative summit, saying he’d often wanted to ban the White House press corps himself but never did, adding “the law should be what it is.” The clash comes as Trump’s approval rating sits at an all-time low of 32% according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, even as public trust in the media itself remains low, with only 28% of Americans expressing significant confidence in news outlets to report fairly and accurately, according to a 2025 Gallup survey.
Iran war:
Trump rejects Iran’s Strait of Hormuz reopening proposal, telling reporters “I’m rejecting their deal,” and Axios he expects talks to resume this coming week even though “it is not the deal that I want to make.” He hasn’t ruled out further strikes before the midterms, while Iranian FM Araghchi says Tehran hasn’t been formally notified and remains “fully prepared for the war to be resumed” but open to diplomacy if Trump chooses it. Iran’s President Pezeshkian told CBS News that Iran would allow U.N. nuclear inspectors in as part of a long-term ceasefire, while denying any pursuit of nuclear weapons on religious grounds, and said Tehran wants a deal before November’s midterms. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Kennedy called Iran’s offer “not a serious offer” and backed continued sanctions and blockade, while Rep. Himes warned Iran now effectively controls midterm outcomes by threatening oil-price spikes via Houthi attacks on shipping.
The war’s economic and diplomatic fallout is widening: Treasury Secretary Bessent touted new isolation measures (UAE, Turkey and Oman cutting off Iranian airlines and banks) under “Operation Economic Outcast,” while Brent crude sat around $103-104/barrel and Trump pressed Xi Jinping to boost Chinese oil output to ease the squeeze, even as China publicly pushed back on U.S. Gulf policy at the U.N. and the U.S. ambassador said Beijing has given Iran indirect support. Russia’s Lavrov offered to help stabilize the Gulf, and mediators (Qatar, Oman) continued shuttling between Washington and Tehran, with technical-level talks reportedly progressing via envoys Witkoff and Kushner even as Iran’s IRGC claimed it captured a U.S. underwater drone in the Strait of Hormuz.
The conflict is also spreading regionally: Iran-backed Houthis have seized Yemen’s Red Sea coast and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, blockading Saudi energy exports and striking Riyadh and Khamis Mushait, prompting U.N. Security Council condemnation and a Saudi call for a national “general mobilization”; a Saudi strike on Houthi-held Taiz reportedly killed seven civilians. Netanyahu’s combative U.N. address (”moral cowards,” vow to keep “winning”) triggered a mass walkout that Iranian officials called “louder than any speech,” while Riyadh warned the world is failing to protect Gulf shipping and Saudi schools in Riyadh shifted to a week of remote learning amid the heightened tensions. Yemen’s healthcare system is also described as collapsing under the strain of the widening war, with hospitals overwhelmed and over 130,000 people displaced.
Other news:
Five Men Arrested on Terrorism Charges After Explosives Found in Vans Near a UK Air Base Used by US Forces Against Iran. Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Iran is behind a suspected bomb plot after armed officers discovered materials consistent with improvised explosive devices in three vans parked minutes from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, a base that hosts US Air Force bomber missions against Iran.
Three people were killed and four others wounded in a mass shooting at an after-hours spot in Detroit early Sunday, according to police. Officers responded within four minutes after a ShotSpotter alert and a 911 call around 7:30 a.m., finding three men fatally shot, while two men and two women, all believed to be in their 20s and 30s, were taken to hospitals in private vehicles. Police Chief Todd Bettison said a fight broke out and escalated into gun violence, describing the location as an after-hours spot he compared to a strip club, and noted the address had already generated seven police calls this year. Bettison stressed that “no one deserves to have their life ended or to be wounded by gun violence” regardless of what was occurring at the location. Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield urged anyone with information to come forward, calling the violence heartbreaking for the community.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of anti-corruption and consumer protection legislation, cracking down on meme coins issued by public officials and targeting crypto fraud. The centerpiece bill bars California officials from issuing meme coins and blocks companies from listing coins that use an official’s likeness, a direct rebuke of Trump’s own meme coin, which nearly a million buyers have lost more than $3 billion on while Trump personally profited an estimated $636 million. Newsom said “no official should profit off their office,” framing the package as the opposite of the self-dealing associated with the Trump administration. Additional measures target crypto money laundering, ban speculative ticket resales, crack down on scalped restaurant and tee time reservations, and strengthen consumers’ control over their personal data, including a new insurance privacy law. In total, Newsom signed eleven bills, building on anti-corruption measures California has passed since 2019 covering campaign finance, foreign contributions, and conflict-of-interest disclosures.
Swiss voters appeared set to reject a referendum that would have imposed a stricter, constitutionally defined form of neutrality, blocking Switzerland from imposing sanctions or cooperating with NATO. Projections showed more than two-thirds voting against the measure, which was backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party in response to Bern’s sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. A University of Bern political scientist said Swiss voters generally support the government’s current approach to neutrality and back the Russia sanctions, and don’t want that to change. The proposal would have barred Switzerland from joining or cooperating with any military alliance absent an attack and required UN approval before joining sanctions, but most parties and the Swiss government opposed it, with the foreign minister warning it would harm national security. Backers argued neutrality has kept Switzerland out of major wars for two centuries and said Russia now views the country as a party to the conflict because of the sanctions.
Bill Gates said reaching a global agreement on AI regulation will likely be harder than Cold War-era negotiations to limit nuclear weapons, pushing back gently on Trump’s anti-regulation stance. Speaking on “Meet the Press,” Gates argued that imposing monitoring systems on AI companies wouldn’t handicap the U.S. in any technological race with China, and pointed to past instances where American leadership on global challenges like aviation safety and nuclear weapons benefited from cooperation with allies. He said the most immediate danger is bad actors using AI for fraud, cyberattacks, or attacks on infrastructure, warning that “small groups with AI can do what only the biggest countries could do.” Gates called for internal monitoring systems at AI labs rather than relying solely on a “kill switch,” and said such safeguards could be added without slowing development. He also discussed his foundation’s work expanding AI’s reliability in non-English languages and addressed his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein, calling the relationship “regrettable” and accusing Epstein of using it to boost his own reputation.
UN and aid agencies are undertaking one of the largest rubble-clearance operations in modern history in Gaza, where an estimated 61 million tonnes of war debris may still contain up to 10,000 bodies. After more than two years of work, only about 907,000 tonnes, roughly 1.5% of the total, have been removed, with Israeli restrictions barring most heavy equipment from entering the territory on “dual-use” grounds. Workers have cleared 580 kilometers of roads and are recycling crushed concrete for reuse in road repairs and shelter foundations, using aging, poorly maintained crushers because new machinery cannot be brought in. The UNDP is coordinating with the Red Cross and mine-clearing organizations to locate and document human remains and mark unexploded ordnance, which remains a serious hazard for both workers and returning residents. Officials say clearing debris has already revived local economies, with many damaged shops reopening within about 20 days of nearby rubble removal.
Two Giant Pandas Arrive at Zoo Atlanta in a Rare Loan From China, Part of Beijing’s Long Tradition of “Panda Diplomacy”. Ping Ping, a male, and Fu Shuang, a female, landed in Atlanta via FedEx flight Sunday from Chengdu, becoming the third pair of pandas to arrive in the US in the past two years and marking Zoo Atlanta’s return to hosting the animals after sending its previous four pandas back to China in 2024. The bears will spend about a month in a biosecure quarantine area before the public can see them, while the zoo spent the past year expanding enclosures and training keepers specifically for their care, and China has kept several of its own veterinarians and breeders on site to assist. The loan, which costs roughly a million dollars a year and stipulates that any future cubs will eventually return to China, comes just a day after Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Washington visit, during which he and President Trump extended a trade truce and agreed to establish an AI hotline. Panda diplomacy dates back to Mao Zedong’s original 1972 gift to the US following Nixon’s historic visit, and Xi referenced that legacy directly, calling the giant panda “an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and Americans.” Local residents and businesses have already embraced the pandas’ arrival, with families eager to visit and at least one nearby deli hanging a bilingual welcome sign, even as the gesture offers a rare moment of goodwill amid broader US-China tensions over AI competition and an ongoing trade war.
A powerful nor’easter has uncovered what may be the remains of a 19th-century shipwreck on Nantucket’s south shore, likely from the schooner Warren Sawyer, which sank in 1884. A local journalist spotted and filmed the wooden remnants Saturday, marking what he believes is the first time wreckage has resurfaced since similar fragments were found in December 2022 and February 2023. Researchers previously concluded the earlier fragments were “most likely” from the Warren Sawyer, a three-masted schooner that wrecked near Miacomet Beach while carrying cotton bales and scrap metal from New Orleans to Boston. A museum official cautioned that more investigation is needed to confirm the new remnants share the same origin. Shipwrecks were common near Nantucket in the era, and residents have long scavenged items that wash ashore from historic wrecks.
Thousands of protesters camped overnight in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza after the forced eviction of an 87-year-old woman ignited widespread outrage over Spain’s housing crisis. María del Carmen Abascal was carried from her apartment on a stretcher after living there for more than seven decades, and demonstrators are now demanding stronger tenant protections, anti-fraud measures, and a ban on evictions when no alternative housing exists. Her rent had been raised from 500 to 2,650 euros by an investment fund after the building changed ownership, before being lowered to 1,650 euros, still more than she could afford on her pension. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed Abascal directly at a rally, promising a housing decree next week, though Abascal herself has blamed him for her situation. The protests echo Spain’s 2011 “indignados” movement, as the country faces an estimated shortage of 550,000 homes and ranks near the bottom of OECD nations for public rental housing.
A powerful, slow-moving nor’easter has flooded coastal communities across the Northeast and left more than 130,000 customers without power, with forecasters warning of continued tidal flooding into the evening. The storm, which killed a New York City housing authority worker when a tree fell Saturday, has lingered near Long Island and northern New Jersey, bringing heavy rain, strong winds, and dangerous surf from New Jersey to New England. The heaviest outages have hit the New Jersey shore, Long Island, and coastal Connecticut, where downed trees have damaged homes, blocked streets, and knocked out power lines. FEMA said response coordination centers are operating at an “enhanced posture,” and the storm has already disrupted travel, canceling hundreds of flights at Boston Logan and cutting off highway access to North Carolina’s Hatteras Island. Forecasters say the storm could be the first of several this fall driven by an unusual El Niño pattern, though its impact remains far below that of Superstorm Sandy.
A’ja Wilson won the Associated Press WNBA Player of the Year award for an unprecedented third consecutive year, receiving 15 of 17 first-place votes. Wilson led the league in scoring at 26.2 points per game while shooting nearly 53% from the field, also averaging 9.4 rebounds, a career-best 3.2 assists, and 1.9 blocks, and called the achievement an honor given the league’s deep talent. It marks her fourth AP Player of the Year award overall, breaking a tie with Breanna Stewart for the most in the award’s history. Angel Reese was named Defensive Player of the Year after leading the league in rebounds for a third straight season, while Minnesota’s Olivia Miles was a unanimous Rookie of the Year pick after setting the WNBA rookie scoring record. Other winners included Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve for Coach of the Year, Caitlin Clark for Comeback Player of the Year, Dallas’ Jessica Shepard for Most Improved Player, and Golden State’s Janelle Salaun for Sixth Woman of the Year.
The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Updates!! So Much Good News!! Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 27, 2026. As promised, our Sunday tradition continues: another weekly good news update. Share one piece of good news from your week in the comments, and pass this along so someone else can join in too.
I’ve got two pieces of good news this week. On the personal side, my daughter started crawling, and honestly, nothing in the news cycle this week came close to how exciting that was to watch. On the professional side, we’ve now been the number one news Substack in the world for more than eighteen consecutive months, and our growth is actually accelerating this year as we reach more households every week. We are also working on another big investigation, so stay tuned.
At a time when TikTok and other platforms are actively censoring my work, and much of the media landscape keeps drifting closer to power instead of further from it, I’m proud to remain fully independent. No advertisers dictate my coverage. No political office shapes my reporting. I answer only to you.
If you believe in what we’re building, independent journalism that cuts through the noise and reaches millions with clarity and honesty, subscribe today and help us keep going. The momentum is real. Let’s build on it.Subscribed
Here’s the good news:
Sandy Hook Promise Says Its Prevention Programs Have Helped Stop 20 Planned School Shootings Since 2018. Sandy Hook Promise announced that its Say Something Anonymous Reporting System and “Know the Signs” prevention programs have now contributed to 20 verified averted school shootings, with the most recent intervention taking place in Arkansas after an anonymous tip helped law enforcement act before a potential tragedy. The milestone coincides with new Marist Poll data showing 96% of parents believe training students, teachers, and staff to recognize and report warning signs is effective, even as 69% worry warning signs could still be missed and another 69% worry about the mental health toll gun violence could have on their kids. Co-founder and CEO Nicole Hockley said the number represents real families whose children came home safely and had an ordinary day, made possible when people notice something is wrong and have the courage to speak up. Co-founder Mark Barden added that the milestone proves prevention works, but said the organization’s job isn’t finished until every school and community has access to these programs and prevention becomes a standard part of how school safety is approached. Sandy Hook Promise, founded by family members who lost loved ones in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, continues to push the “Know the Signs” curriculum alongside broader school safety and youth mental health policy work at the state and federal level.
Baltimore’s “Radical Street Librarian” Brings Free Books to Kids Through a Converted Trolley. A Baltimore woman known as Ms. Maze, or Storybook Maze on social media, has gone viral for using a green and gold trolley to deliver free books to hundreds of children in the city’s book deserts. The idea grew out of a moment in 2024 when she was reading to her nieces on her stoop and realized neighborhood kids gathering around had no books of their own at home, which pushed her to leave her full-time librarian job and start giving away books from her car and hosting stoop story time. After noticing that children coming into libraries weren’t the same kids she met on the street, she decided a trolley could reach multiple communities at once and reframe reading as something fun rather than something that felt like schoolwork. The trolley had its full rollout this summer, making stops at football practices, parks, and festivals where anywhere from 50 to 130 kids board in a single day, and Ms. Maze also runs it like an ice cream truck through neighborhoods, ringing a bell and reading to kids on their stoops. She relies on a wish list and GoFundMe to keep her mostly children’s book collection stocked, is expanding into genres like graphic novels and horror to reach teens and adults too, and is now working on adding book vending machines and eventually more trolleys to the rotation.
More On U.S. Media, Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Insider Deals
Hope for America, Trump replaces CNN with LindellTV in further free press assault, Heather Delaney Reese, Sept. 27, 2026. Donald Trump told a female reporter to be “quiet,” replaced CNN on his Tennessee trip with LindellTV and Real America’s Voice, and then announced, “I love an open, free press.”
That is where this day began. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner had asked whether he only wanted supportive outlets in the White House press pool. He responded by calling her network fake news. A president who wants to choose which reporters can question him is trying to choose what the rest of us get to hear.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 25, 2026 [Trump v. Media Trump Hunt for Monuments, Glory], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Trump’s war on the free press is continuing.
Last night, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the White House would not allow reporters from CNN on Air Force One as part of the press pool to cover the president as he traveled to Tennessee for a college football game. CNN is a member of the pool made up of the five major TV networks. The other two outlets Trump tried to ban from the White House, MS NOW and Politico, are part of a different pool. CNN was scheduled to provide the television footage for the trip.
At 6:51 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Why should perpetrators of FAKE NEWS, like CNN and MSDNC, be allowed access to a very sacred place, the White House? Despite my big Election Win, almost 100% of “TRUMP” coverage is negative, and has been for years!”
He followed up at 8:22 with “FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!! IT HAS GONE ON FAR TOO LONG, AT A TREMENDOUS COST TO OUR COUNTRY.”
Later in the morning, he told reporters: “I love an open, free press. What I don’t like is the fake press. What we don’t want is—we don’t want fake news.”
As bad news continues to plague the administration, Trump has reasons for wanting to control the press.
On Thursday, in a scathing letter, a key prosecutor in the case of the six people charged with felonies after a protest outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview detention facility in Illinois—the Broadview Six—resigned under protest.
Sheri Mecklenburg was a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice who was near retirement and appeared to have doubts about the felony charges against the six protesters. In the protest, people surrounded an ICE vehicle, but only the six, all of whom were active in Democratic politics, were charged.
When the cases fell apart because of prosecutorial misconduct, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Andrew Boutros, a strong Trump supporter, laid all of the blame for the misconduct on Mecklenburg, claiming he had been out of the loop in how the case was progressing.
But in her resignation letter, Mecklenburg said she was retiring so she could defend herself. She wrote that she had kept Boutros fully informed of the case and that he was using her as a scapegoat for his own misconduct. She said he had “personally directed” the felony prosecution after she objected “that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges.” She says he threatened to fire her if she tried to push back on the false allegations.
Mecklenburg’s resignation and allegations illuminate the Trump administration’s efforts to persecute political opponents. Boutros’s tenure as U.S. attorney has been so problematic that there had been an exodus of senior officials from the office, and more than 100 former prosecutors signed a letter warning of failure of leadership in the office and the poisoning of the office with “once-forbidden political considerations.”
Perhaps of more concern to Trump is the report yesterday from Julia Jacobs of the New York Times that whistleblowers who used to work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say that six months ago, Trump loyalists running the center cancelled plans to fix the leaking roof they now claim is so dangerous the center must be closed and repaired. Those repairs, they say, will require the addition of Trump’s name to the building.
The whistleblowers claim that the center’s board put the $1.4 million that had been allocated to fix the roof toward Trump’s repainting of the building’s columns, which cost $4.4 million.
As his job approval numbers continue to decline and as individuals and the courts try to stop his unlawful actions, Trump is pushing ever harder to cement his power.
The courts have given him leeway in national security, and he is using that leeway. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that 69% of the American people disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Iran—59% of them strongly—and only 27% approve (15% strongly).
And yet, on Friday, September 25, Alexander Ward and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has told aides that he is planning to start bombing Iran again after the midterm elections. Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reopen talks about nuclear weapons if the U.S. ends its blockade of Iranian ports, but Trump has rejected the offer, and his belief that the Iranians won’t meet his demands makes him think he’ll need to ramp up strikes again.
But, the reporters say, Trump’s views could shift over the coming weeks as conditions, including the midterms, change.
At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 22, Trump told the heads of state and heads of government in the audience that his administration is “seeking a fundamental change” in the government of Cuba.
James LaPorta of CBS News reports that the U.S. Army Reserve is considering whether it can provide support units, including police forces and medical personnel, to the U.S. Southern Command, which covers Latin America south of Mexico, the waters around Central and South America, and the Caribbean, including Cuba.
The memo CBS reviewed doesn’t say for what operation the troops would be needed “in 90 to 120 days,” but LaPorta reports that “multiple U.S. officials” said the planning is for a potential operation aimed at Cuba.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Trump has invited Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to the Group of 20 (G20) summit in December in Miami, Florida. The G20 is a forum of the world’s biggest advanced and emerging economies to coordinate economic policy, and by extending the invitation, Trump is offering to welcome Putin back into global organizations without ending his invasion of Ukraine. The administration suggests that Putin will be more likely to end the war if he is included than if he is not, a position critics note gives Putin legitimacy without changing his behavior.
Yesterday, as Casey He of Politico reported, fourteen senators led by Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Trump to rescind the invitation. “President Putin bears sole responsibility for launching Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine,” they wrote. “Allowing him to participate in a G20 Summit in the United States raises serious concerns about legitimizing and normalizing a government that continues to attack Ukrainian civilian targets every day.”
Today, Pranshu Verma of the Washington Post reported that earlier this month, the U.S. and Russia worked together to weaken a United Nations plan to regulate AI weapons. They stripped out a provision to make sure humans review the targets AI has selected for a military strike—a provision that would likely have avoided the U.S. strike on the Iranian school at the start of the Iran War—and took out requirements that AI systems must act in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner. They also removed a requirement that those using the systems take “ethical considerations” into account.
At the same time he is flexing U.S. muscle internationally, Trump is also continuing to try to cement as much power as he can at home.
Continuing to try to lock the United States into the use of fossil fuels, today he announced he was getting rid of the vehicle fuel economy standards established under former President Joe Biden.
Yesterday the administration announced it is refusing to spend $810 million Congress appropriated on a bipartisan basis to fund research in Health and Human Services and for programs that serve immigrants and minority groups, calling it “wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that watches over how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, is very clear that such “pocket rescissions” are illegal. The Constitution places the power of the purse in Congress alone, requiring the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If the president can decide not to fund programs Congress has appropriated funding for, he effectively takes over the power of the purse. And yet, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has claimed the right to such power.
As Frank Thorp V and Kyla Guilfoil of NBC News reported, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the move a “theft from the American people.”
“Russ Vought’s message to Congress is that your votes don’t count, and your laws are optional,” Murray said. “It is now time for my Republican colleagues who said they would never let this happen to stand up and join us to stop this, and remind this administration this is not how this works.”
And so, while Trump is trying to cement power, opposition continues to grow.
But now it appears that Trump has yet another power move on his mind.
Jake Spring and Stephanie Apstein of the Washington Post reported tonight that the administration is considering hosting a Major League Baseball game at a national park. It has been scouting where it could build a baseball facility in Grand Teton National Park.
Hope for America, Opinion: The Trump curse strikes again, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Sept. 26, 2026. At 10:00 this morning, Donald Trump emerged from the White House and immediately started gesturing wildly with his hands, repeating the same unintelligible words over and over again to himself as he made his way across the South Lawn toward the press lined up to talk to him. With Marine One waiting behind him, the President of the United States turned toward a female reporter and jabbed his finger directly toward her face after demanding she be “quiet.”
What MS NOW reporter Akayla Gardner had asked before she was cut off was whether the President only wanted news outlets that supported him to be part of the White House press pool. That was enough to make him snap and say, “No, no, no. I want real news, not fake news, like you.” After Gardner pushed back again, asking him, “Do you not want tough questions, sir?” He barked, “What I don’t like is fake news. And they’re fake news. One hundred percent.” Before adding, “I love an open, free press.”
Donald Trump’s latest attack on the First Amendment came after the White House announced the night before that CNN would once again be blocked, even after a federal judge had temporarily restored the network’s access to the White House. This time, CNN would not be allowed on Air Force One for the trip Donald Trump was just about to take to Tennessee. In its place for the day were LindellTV, founded by MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell, and Real America’s Voice. Donald Trump replaced a legacy media network with two outlets known for spreading election lies and conspiracy theories, and then told us that he loves a free press and expects us to believe him.
When he was done talking, he threw up his hand, said thank you, and walked off. From there, he boarded Marine One for the first leg of his trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, for the biggest college football game of the weekend: number one Texas against number fourteen Tennessee at Neyland Stadium.
With Trump still on board, Air Force One did a low flyover of the stadium and 29 minutes later, as the national anthem was being sung, Donald Trump arrived and made his way to the glass-shielded VIP suite where he sat with Senator Bill Hagerty, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and his “human blanket” and personal assistant Natalie Harp. Shortly after that, the announcer’s voice filled the stadium with: “Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” The boos that followed swallowed the cheers, and a completely oblivious Donald Trump smiled and repeatedly pumped his fist toward the cameras.
Before the game had even started, the head coach of the Texas Longhorns, Steve Sarkisian had issued a warning of sorts about Donald Trump and the disturbance his attendance causes at games. He said that he needed to game-plan around the president’s presence because it cuts team communications whenever Trump enters, exits, or moves through the stadium. He brought up what Miami’s coach Mario Cristobal had told him, that Trump’s presence may have disrupted their communications during the College Football Championship game last season that they lost.
And as happens to most things Donald Trump touches, Tennessee lost 20-17, with many noting that the Trump curse continued. This follows the Super Bowl, where he had predicted the Chiefs would win, but instead they lost to the Eagles. There were the NBA Finals, where the Knicks lost the only game he attended and won the championship when he was not there. We can’t forget the World Cup, where he personally interfered and pressured FIFA to reinstate a suspended American player, and the team lost 4-1 to Belgium, just to name a few.
Donald Trump isn’t just causing an upheaval at sporting events; he continues to cause the same destabilization and worse around the world. This past week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told The New York Times that his government has set into motion preparations for an “extreme tail risk.” They actually studied a scenario where the United States takes military action against Canada. “It would be irresponsible not to” prepare, he said.
The Prime Minister of Canada, our closest ally, in every sense of the word, the country that shares our border, actually sat down with his military advisors and discussed what it would look like if we, the United States of America, attacked them. This is something I can’t believe I am even writing, and what would have been unimaginable happening even a decade ago. We have never in modern history been in a position like this. Donald Trump has destroyed our relationship with Canada to isolate us and also to make them vulnerable. But what he did not anticipate was Mark Carney. Donald Trump is nothing compared to him. Carney has managed to unite even the French-speaking Quebecers to stand united as one and also make Canada the first non-European country to participate in the European Union’s SAFE defense program. Canada isn’t preparing for a for-sure attack by the United States. But what they are doing is leaving us behind and forming mutually beneficial partnerships with allies that they can actually rely on.Throughout the day, Donald Trump, or his private aide, Natalie Harp, at his direction, spent hours posting on social media to distract from the reality this country is actually facing. His social media posts included a very long economic manifesto where he claimed that the S&P Global reported U.S. business growth at a five-year high, that real median household income is now the “highest ever recorded,” that poverty is at its “lowest level on record,” and that exports are on pace for their “highest level in history.” He stuck to his usual insults and called Democrats “Dumocrats.” And he demanded that Americans “VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN AND ‘TRUMP’ CANDIDATES IN THE MIDTERMS.” Then, in what looked to be a moment of panic, he posted again at 8:59 PM: “We have the BEST FINANCIAL NUMBERS EVER, and the FAKE NEWS MEDIA refuses to report them!!! President DJT.”Donald Trump can say whatever he wants on social media, but the reality and truth we are living through won’t change. He can’t change that or what the polls say. Because according to the latest from the American Research Group, 72% of Americans say the economy is getting worse, and only 6% expect things to get better over the next year. His approval rating on the economy as a whole is only 26%. That is how people really feel based on their very real financial situations. Donald Trump flip-flops between saying everything is great and blaming other people for the economy under his presidency. He has been back in office for over a year and a half now, and he is still pointing the finger at Joe Biden for all of his own problems. At some point even his super fans will stop accepting that this economy is anyone’s but Donald Trump’s.
Today we are spending our final day at Disneyland, and I took a break from writing to go get a cup of coffee in the hotel lobby, where I sat next to a family that was talking about just how hard these times are for them and how the entire trip was being put on their credit cards to pay off over what they said was “years from now.” That alone is not that uncommon; vacations are put on credit cards often enough. It was what they also said about how this was “their last hurrah” that caught my attention, and their talk about how tight money had become. They were talking amongst the adults about the price of gas and groceries and how they were worried about paying for Christmas this year. The echoes of 2008 gave me the chills. I just kept thinking about how Donald Trump said we had the “BEST FINANCIAL NUMBERS EVER” in all capital letters, and how that means nothing to the people struggling. There are a lot of us who still remember the horrors of the Great Recession and can see the writing on the wall for a rerun if Donald Trump remains in control with unchecked power. I just hope it doesn’t have to get that bad for his most loyal supporters to finally see what is happening.
That is just one of the reasons why the midterm elections are the most consequential of our lifetimes and why we have to have voter turnout unlike we have ever seen for a midterm in the history of our country. We can’t have a repeat of 2024, when millions of people did not turn out. Many stayed home because they were certain that there was absolutely no way this country would hand power back to a man who incited an insurrection at the United States Capitol, who had such strong ties to a trafficking ring, or who was convicted of 34 felony counts. Yet here we are. The cost of that assumption has been two years of the most destructive, corrupt, and dangerous period this country has seen in a very long time, and we are still living inside of it.
We cannot do that again. Donald Trump is not technically on the ballot this November, but everything he has done is, and everything he still plans to do is as well. That includes every agency he has gutted and every program he has stripped of funding while redirecting money in ways that benefit him, his family, and his enablers. It includes every journalist he has threatened and every family torn apart by his deportation operations. Everything will get worse if his party keeps control of Congress. The midterms are 38 days away, and the numbers just keep showing us that we have a very real chance of making sure Donald Trump’s most destructive days are behind us if we show up in numbers never seen before.
Right now, election analyst and statistician Nate Silver’s latest forecast gives Democrats an 87 percent chance of winning the House. His model also has Democrats at a 59 percent chance of taking the Senate too, which is the highest that number has been all cycle. He projects Democrats will gain four seats.
In projections that show just how unpopular Donald Trump is, the Democrats are leading or holding competitive stakes in Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Alaska, and Maine. Right now, Republicans hold most of those seats. The fact that a Democrat is leading in a Texas Senate race right now is huge. Two years ago, that would have been unfathomable. Silver has said publicly that everything in the political environment is pointing in the same direction: we have an unpopular president, a very anxious electorate, an unwanted war overseas, and the historical pattern of the president’s party taking losses at the midterms.
The only thing standing between us and the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s grip on this country is whether enough people walk into a voting booth and do something about it. If the people who booed him today in Tennessee, and the families putting everything on their credit cards, vote, his entire corrupt hold on our country falls apart. If we flip Congress, the investigations and accountability start, and the thing Donald Trump fears most becomes more than a possibility; it is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump. The shift is in sight, and we have a clear path to better days.
Wall Street Journal, The Mystery Man Shadowing Kimberly Guilfoyle as She Pushes Deals Across Europe, Rebecca Ballhaus, Dana Mattioli, Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw, Sept. 25, 2026. Christos Marafatsos works as an energy lobbyist while also closely advising the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
Kimberly Guilfoyle was a long way from Mar-a-Lago.
The U.S. ambassador to Greece—Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée—was shuttling back and forth to Bulgaria’s capital on a mission this spring. The Trump administration wanted allies on Europe’s eastern edge to buy billions of dollars of American natural gas.
More Global News
Associated Press, Pope Leo draws 800,000 people to central Paris for open-air Mass on iconic square, Nicole Winfield, Samuel Petrequin, Sylvie Corbet and John Leicester, Sept. 27, 2026. Pope Leo XIV fills central Paris with 700,000-strong crowd and fer
Hundreds of thousands of people packed Paris’ iconic Champs-Élysées avenue to attend an open-air Mass with Pope Leo XIV on Saturday, a sign of the Catholic Church’s enduring appeal in the once staunchly Catholic but officially secular country.
The Vatican estimated that 800,000 people attended — about 200,000 more than the number who had registered in advance. The turnout testified to the church’s lasting influence in France despite declining attendance and secularizing trends that have emptied churches across Europe.
The American pope greeted the flag-waving, cheering throngs from his popemobile during a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) parade along the grand boulevard leading to the Place de la Concorde for Mass, essentially the heart of Paris and a symbol of the French republic.
In his homily, Leo asked the crowds not to keep their faith to themselves, but to instead “let it overflow, so that those you meet may be refreshed and their thirst satisfied.”
“From this beautiful city of Paris, I pray fervently that the living water of the Holy Spirit may flow throughout France,” he said.
Although a security blanket shut down central Paris to road traffic, the partylike atmosphere drew people of multiple faiths and no faith at all. The fervor spanned generations. People brought dozens of babies and young children from the crowd for Leo to caress on the head as he rode slowly past aboard the popemobile.
“The message of Pope Leo goes well beyond Catholic people; he speaks about social justice, for example,” said Leontine Joseph, 42, a fervent Catholic who came with two friends of Moroccan origin who grew up in Muslim culture.Related StoriesPope blasts assisted dying as ‘false compassion’ at French shrine known for miraculous curesPope blasts assisted dying as ‘false compassion’ at French shrine known for miraculous cures.
Leo has sought to encourage French Catholics to persevere in their faith “even amid the thorns” of a secular world during his four-day visit. It began on Friday with his arrival and prayer at the restored Notre Dame, the first by a pope since the cathedral’s devastating 2019 fire. It continued Saturday night when Leo arrived in Lourdes in southern France, one of the Catholic Church’s most-visited shrines.
At the Catholic Institute of Paris on Saturday morning, the pope said he was surprised by the number of new converts in recent years.
“We must recognize, welcome and protect the small flame that the Holy Spirit has kindled in the darkness of the night, the tiny seed that strives to grow even amid the thorns,” he said.
Adult baptisms in France each year have tripled since 2016, hitting 13,000 this year. But statistics and experts caution that the uptick, which has also been recorded in secular Spain, doesn’t counteract the overall downward trend.
In 1980, there were 513,000 baptisms in France; in 2024, a total of 186,000.The pope is a crowd-puller
The rivers of people who crammed central Paris and their joyful enthusiasm rivaled other communal but non-religious moments of celebration that marked France in recent decades. Huge crowds celebrated on the Champs-Elysées when France won the soccer World Cup in 1998 and again in 2018.
Many on Saturday didn’t identify as Catholics, but came to hear the pope’s message.
“People are seeing a lot of really terrible images. This kind of event reminds people of what is really important in life,” said Thierry Chen, a 40-year-old Parisian startup entrepreneur who is not Catholic. “You see a lot of different people here, so it’s not just about one race, religion or nation, but about a common belief in humankind.”
Sylvane Le Goff, 68, who lives in the Paris region, came with her 10- and 12-year-old grandchildren to “give them unforgettable memories.” Le Goff, who was raised Catholic but is not practicing, said she wanted to open her grandchildren’s minds.
“It’s not only about seeing the pope but it also is about his message of peace and unity, values I’d like to share with them,” she said.
Leo has clearly been impressed by the numbers and enthusiasm, especially at a Friday night vigil that kept the 71-year-old pope out until nearly 11 p.m. after a packed first day.
Some 80,000 young people filled the national stadium for an extravaganza of fireworks and a theatrical retelling of French Catholic history.
“Thank you for your courage! Thank you for your presence,” Leo said to raucous cheers, speaking off the cuff in French. “Thank you for your faith. You are the saints of France!”
New York Times, 5 Arrested as Terrorism Suspects Near U.K. Air Base Used by U.S., Michael D. Shear and Amelia Nierenberg, Sept. 27, 2026. British counterterrorism police said the men were arrested after three suspicious vehicles appeared to be traveling toward R.A.F. Fairford early on Sunday.
The British police arrested five men on Sunday on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism after receiving a call around 1 a.m. about three suspicious vehicles headed toward an English air force base used by the American military.
The base, R.A.F. Fairford, is primarily used by the United States Air Force to deploy some of its largest bombers and it has been at the center of controversy this year over its role in the American-Israeli war against Iran.
In July, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps issued a statement warning the British government that a decision to allow American bombers to conduct strikes against Iran would make “London responsible for” any consequences.
“Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces,” it said. It is not yet clear whether Sunday’s incident is connected to the conflict in the Middle East.
When asked by reporters on Sunday about the arrests, President Trump responded: “Working with Britain — it was an amazing job. We had them under investigation,” he added, appearing to refer to the suspects. “They were looking to do big damage.”
Officials said they had evacuated more than 85 homes in the rural village outside the air base in southern England early Sunday morning. On Sunday afternoon, hours after the arrests, aerial footage showed what appeared to be a bomb disposal robot continuing to operate near three white vans.
“A 400-meter cordon has been put in place around the vehicles while the army’s explosive ordnance disposal unit conduct examinations,” Vicki Evans, the deputy assistant commissioner of the British counterterrorism police, said in a statement.
Politico, Northern Ireland standoff puts peace and power-sharing at risk, Shawn Pogatchnik, Sept. 27, 2026. Drumcree Orange Parade Go Ahead On Nationalist Garvaghy Road: A sudden revival of the 1990s confrontations between Orange Order marchers and Catholic demonstrators puts the police back in the middle — and leaders of Northern Ireland’s supposed unity government on opposite sides.
Hard-liners in Northern Ireland are reviving an age-old dispute rife with bitter symbolism that pits the rights of British Protestants against those of Irish Catholics — and risks the destruction of their supposed unity government.
Hundreds of residents of the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the otherwise staunchly Protestant town of Portadown, near Belfast, stood in the roadway in pouring rain overnight to block a Sunday morning parade by Northern Ireland’s main Protestant brotherhood, the Orange Order — a parade that had been banned since 1998 because of the widespread violence it triggered.
The Parades Commission, the British government-appointed group that for decades has adjudicated such zero-sum disputes, stunned Garvaghy Road residents by ruling Friday that a drastically pared-down Orange parade should be allowed to pass through the area Sunday morning. It had refused more than 1,300 previous requests from the group seeking to “finish” the parade it was blocked from completing in 1998.
A series of unprecedented late-night legal challenges followed Saturday, capped by a ruling from Northern Ireland’s senior judge after midnight stating that the courts had no power to overturn the commission’s independent judgment.
The scene is now set for a revival of a standoff with no obvious end point — and no apparent way to deliver a “win” for both sides.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland deployed several hundred officers to the site. Many of them sat Sunday morning in scores of armored Land Rovers parked on the narrow country lane that separates the would-be Orange marchers on a hilltop church from the Garvaghy Road demonstrators, out of sight beyond houses and hedgerows.
The two main parties in Northern Ireland’s cross-community government — revived only two years ago following a lengthy breakdown over Northern Ireland’s peculiar Brexit rules — are lining up on opposite sides of this renewed street battle of wills, raising the political stakes.
Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that represents most Catholics and has grown to become the largest party in Northern Ireland, rallied in force alongside the Garvaghy Road protesters.
The Sinn Féin first minister of Northern Ireland’s government, Michelle O’Neill, won cheers as she told the partisan crowd: “The Garvaghy Road residents deserve to live free from sectarian harassment and intimidation.”
“Does anybody think this is a good idea? No right-minded person would make this decision,” said O’Neill, who expressed bewilderment over the Parades Commission’s U-turn. “Why, after 28 years of determinations to block a march down this road, did the Parades Commission think this is the right idea today to bring this mess back on to this community?”
But Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, stood alongside the blocked Orangemen as they waited in hope that the police would enforce the commission’s ruling by pushing the Catholics out of the road. The last time this happened, in 1997, it triggered three nights of Irish republican rioting across Northern Ireland.
“It’s a big day for Portadown. Obviously we have had a seismic win within the courts. The law is on our side,” declared the Democratic Unionist MP representing Portadown, Carla Lockhart.
She singled out O’Neill for criticism, branding the first minister as a law-breaker leading a mob.
“What does it say when you have an absolute rabble, thousands chanting, and our self-proclaimed ‘first minister for all’ leading the chants and standing unlawfully?” Lockhart said.
“But these men will continue to stand here,” she said, gesturing to a few dozen Orangemen standing outside the Anglican church, many of them under umbrellas. “They’ve the law on their side. We’ll ensure that the parade is put lawfully down the road.”orthern Irish police this weekend received more than 100 reinforcement officers from Police Scotland.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: Senate Polling Far Better For Ds Than Rs, Need To Keep AI Safe Urgent Now, Putin Should Not Be Allowed To Come To US For G20, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Let’s start with a selection of recent polls showing our Senate candidates up by 5 points or more, outside the margin of error, in their races:
Here’s the list of polls showing the Republican candidate ahead by 5 points or more in these critical battleground states…….
………..
Zero.
'The number of polls showing a Republican candidate ahead by 5 points or more in a critical battleground Senate race is zero.
Some other things I am tracking today…..
Most unpopular midterm President ever:
CNN has a smart, in-depth look at the California Supreme Court ordering the return of ballots seized by a Trumpy Riverside County Sheriff:
Election officials are planners. And so, they have to consider possibilities even if they’re not going to happen — to be ready in case they do,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting section attorney who now advises election administrators of both parties. “They’re considering wild possibilities that they wouldn’t have had to before.”
Chief among the concerns is how handing over those materials to investigators would break the chain of custody, as state and local regulations impose strict procedures for handling ballots to maintain public confidence in election results.
The state Supreme Court wrote that “allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity.”
In related news this happened:
That’s some of what I am tracking this morning……Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses And Win The Midterms Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Rogue Nation, Moron President, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Donny Convict truly is the worst of us.
He’s a burst trash bag of personality defects. Can you think of something that isn’t wrong with him?
But even given all that, never forget that above everything, he’s a complete f____moron.
It makes no sense for Donny reject Iran’s offer. think about it.
Imagine you’re the chief executive of a nation. Imagine it’s mere weeks before an election that your party is sure to lose because ....a unpopular, unwinnable war that’s raised the price of everything. Imagine that the country you’re warring with throws you a lifeline, and offers to restart negotiations.
Now imagine you’re an impulsive idiot with zero ability to process information and reach a rational decision.
“I’m rejecting their deal. They want to make a deal where they open the Strait immediately, because they’re losing so badly. You know. You don’t read that, or you don’t see that on the fake news. But we’re winning tremendously.....".
Plagiarism robot, would you like to do a fact check?
“Live vessel trackers report roughly 12 ships currently underway in the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 2% of the normal prewar daily average of around 60 to 100+ ships.”
Look, agreeing to negotiate should be a no-brainer.
Do you know what would happen to the price of oil, if Dear Leader were to announce that he’s resumed talks with Iran? It would immediately plummet — five weeks before the midterms. Think of the boon that would be for Republicans.
But Donny won’t do that, because he has no ability to think strategically — and he’s a sadist who doesn’t care who his victims are, even if it’s his own party.
We have truly reached rogue nation status, because not only is Donny making life worse for his party, and for his country — he’s making life worse for the entire world.
The United States and the European Union on Friday rejected a declaration by member countries of the United Nations that pledged international collaboration and solidarity in preparing for and responding to pandemics.
Why reject this? It was a purely symbolic gesture that wasn’t even legally binding. It would cost nothing to agree to it.
The declaration, the product of a high-level U.N. meeting on pandemic preparedness, is largely ceremonial. It is not legally binding, and does not set rules for what countries should do during pandemics.issue.
Have we all forgotten that the last global pandemic was only six years ago? Remember mass graves — and refrigerated trucks jam-packed with corpses?
Donny — no doubt egged on by his whale-head-chainsawing lackey, the Marvelous Mister Measles — wants us to stick our heads back in the sand, So we can be just as unprepared for the next pandemic. Why? What does Donny even get out of it?
Oh wait — buried way down in the Times’ report is the real reason for rejecting the declaration: because Joe Biden.....
The 2023 declaration, which the Biden administration supported, recognized “the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries.”
Joe Biden was in favor of it, which automatically makes it baaaaaaad.
And the hits just keep on coming.
The Trump administration will move on Monday to sharply scale back fuel-efficiency rules for new cars and light trucks, gutting one of the government’s most significant efforts to reduce gasoline consumption and speed the country’s shift to electric vehicles.
It’s the weekend. Remember when we used to be able to relax on the weekend? Remember not hearing from the White House for 72 glorious hours? We don’t get weekends any more.
And then: "I’ve got the best one yet! Let’s put a baseball stadium in the middle of the pristine wilderness!"
You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Oh, how I wish I were kidding.
Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.
The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
It was bad enough that Donny built a human cockfighting ring on the White House’s south lawn, just so he could watch roided-out psychopaths beat each other to a bloody pulp. Now he wants to build a baseball park in the middle of this:
For one game.
Oh, and you gotta love the way the Washington Post tries to sanewash:
"National parks are among the country’s most protected federal lands, and constructing a sports facility at Grand Teton could set a new precedent for the use of vast national park land in the Western United States."
‘Could set a new precedent’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph. Gee, do you think?
We need to remember that our country is not Donny’s personal plaything. He doesn’t own the White House. He doesn’t own the Reflecting Pool — and he sure as s___ doesn’t own our nation’s unspoiled wilderness.
Speaking of the Reflecting Pool, how about Donny finish what he started there, before bulldozing the Grand Tetons — because it sure as s____ looks like Mister Ten-Second Attention Span has completely forgotten about it.
The late South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, center, with his sister and appointed succesor Darline Graham Nordine.
FITS News, GOP Poll Shocker: Darline Graham Nordone in Serious Trouble, Will Folks, Sept. 26, 20264. New Republican poll shows her clinging to a narrow lead over Democrat Annie Andrews.
Conservative Republicans in South Carolina made it abundantly clear during the 2026 primary election cycle that they didn’t want the sister of fiscally liberal warmonger Lindsey Graham serving as the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate this fall.
Unfortunately, the Palmetto State’s Republican establishment – egged on by U.S. president Donald Trump – refused to listen, and proceeded to launch a multi-million dollar campaign in support of left-of-center “Republican” Darline Graham Nordone.
At the same time, Trump and his SCGOP allies spent millions attacking Nordone’s Freedom Caucus rival, U.S. congressman Ralph Norman – a move that further alienated the state’s growing conservative base.
Now, the consequences of this ongoing alienation are becoming painfully clear for the Palmetto State’s GOP ruling class… and for Trump.
Days after national analysts noted the increasing competitiveness of Nordone’s general election against Democrat Annie Andrews, a new survey from one of the nation’s most accurate Republican pollsters has revealed the race to be a dead heat.
According to poll results released on Saturday (September 26, 2026) from the Trafalgar Group, Nordone is clinging to an incredibly narrow advantage over her Democrat rival. Asked to say who they would support if the election were held tomorrow, 43.4% said Nordone compared to 42.3% who answered Andrews – a spread of just +1.1%.
Another 5.9% of respondents said they were supporting another candidate, while 8.5% indicated they were undecided.
What makes these numbers even more troubling for Nordone? According to the Trafalgar survey, nearly six-out-of-ten respondents (59.1%) identified as Republicans, compared to just 29.3% who professed being Democrats. The remainder of the sample – 11.6% – did not identify with either of the two major parties.
“This is very, very bad if these numbers are believed,” a top Republican strategist unaffiliated with any of the Senate campaigns told us.*
Run by veteran national GOP strategist Robert Cahaly, Trafalgar has been consistently on the money in its South Carolina assessments. Cahaly surveyed 1,087 respondents between September 23-25, 2026. His poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9%.
As we noted earlier this week, many Norman supporters plan to write the congressman’s name on their 2026 ballots – a movement that is likely taking at least 1-2% out of the Republican’s right flank. Meanwhile, Nordone has been completely outflanked by Andrews on the affordability front.
“This is a perfect storm,” another Republican operative unaffiliated with any of the campaigns told us. “A terrible GOP candidate, a divided Republican party, an unpopular president and economic headwinds that an otherwise unelectable Democrat candidate is deftly capitalizing on.”
No Democrat has won a statewide election in South Carolina since 2006. No Democrat has won a top-of-the-ticket race in South Carolina since 1998.
Could Andrews break that streak in November? If these numbers hold up, she’s got an even money shot…
About the author: Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
To the Contrary, Opinion: Week of GOP Panic, Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Perhaps you can detect a theme here:
TIME: Republican Panic Sets In Over Prospects of a Massive Blue Wave. With less than six weeks to go until Election Day, the sentiment among Republicans is shifting from nervous to fatalistic, as a pileup of bad news has many convinced they are heading toward an electoral disaster.
Axios: GOP election outlook goes from bad to "craptastic." It’s looked bad for Republicans all year, but this week felt different — like the political environment was disintegrating in real time, one ominous data point after another. Most worrisome for the GOP, there’s virtually no chance the war ends, inflation cools, interest rates fall, consumer confidence rises, and economic optimism surges before the Nov. 3 election. That’s why Republicans fear the undertow imperils so many candidates once deemed safe.
The Guardian: “Republican jitters grow as unpopular Trump fuels midterm ‘bloodbath’ fears.”
Slate: “The Great Republican Panic Is Upon Us”
Punchbowl News: “Republicans hit the panic button before Election Day”
NYT: “A ‘Big Problem’: Trump’s War With Iran Drags Down Republicans in Midterms.”
Mark Halperin: “My Trump sources say the president's worst nightmare imaginable has arrived... panicked texts and emails from GOP insiders are blowing up my phone. They're all saying the same thing.”
Nate Silver: “Donald Trump has yet again hit an all-time approval rating low. As of today, his net approval is sitting at -22.4. This far into his first term, Trump was all the way up at -11.6, while Joe Biden was at net -9.6 at the same point in his presidency.“
Republicans pour money into dozens of US House races previously considered safe.”
“GOP Poll Shocker: Darline Graham Nordone in Serious Trouble”
“High Gas and Rising Mortgage Rates Trouble Trump as Midterms Near” - The New York Times
Wall Street Journal: “Trump Is Predicting Midterms Success but Republicans Are Starting to Panic.”
Five weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans are panicking—and Trump is doing little to ease their minds.
Over a whirlwind seven days, the president has made a series of moves that have confounded Republican candidates, strategists and lawmakers.
He abruptly banned three media outlets from the White House, triggering a dayslong standoff that led major TV networks to limit their video coverage of his events. He praised New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who has long been a boogeyman for the right. At the United Nations, the president threatened to annihilate Iran and escalate the war.
Back in Washington, he threw an extravagant state dinner for China’s Xi Jinping, an authoritarian who has been the subject of fierce Republican criticism for years. The same week he welcomed the Communist leader to the White House, Trump appeared in government-funded anti-communism ads that show clips of the president as a choir sings “Love Me.”
Exit take: If only they had been warned.
Associated Press, ‘Lower 48' is a phrase to fight over in Alaska. It’s a fixture in the state’s US Senate contest, Becky Bohrer, Sept. 27, 2026. One of the most biting insults in Alaska politics is to be accused of being aligned with the “Lower 48,” code for candidates taking marching orders from powerful forces in the contiguous United States rather than sticking up for Alaskans.
It’s a central theme of the Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, one of a handful expected to determine control of the chamber in the November elections.
Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan’s campaign has made it a key attack line against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman. He lumps her in with “Lower 48 liberals” who have opposed expanded oil and gas drilling in a state that has relied heavily on that industry for decades.
Peltola, an Alaska Native, has countered that she “took on” then-President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, to help win approval in 2023 of the huge Willow oil project, which environmentalists strongly opposed. She also says she will “take on anyone, including Democrats — anyone in the Lower 48 who doesn’t understand what Alaska needs.”
The pejorative label reflects a mystique about Alaska, which outsiders often refer to as “The Last Frontier.” A state for less than 70 years, Alaska is renowned for its natural beauty, wildlife and vast landscapes. Its rural nature — isolated from the rest of the country and with many of its communities accessible only by air or water — breeds a self-reliance. It’s a place where many residents hunt and fish to fill their freezers for winter and take pride in their independence.
The two major Senate campaigns and some third-party groups have leaned into that sentiment — that Alaska is different — and cast their candidates as authentic voices for Alaskans.
“We love the persona Alaska is a tough place to live,” said Republican Andrew Halcro, a political podcast host and former state lawmaker who has lived in the state nearly all his life.Related StoriesRepublicans say Democrats are extremists. These Democrats want to convince voters that’s not trueRepublicans say Democrats are extremists. These Democrats want to convince voters that’s not true.
Alaska, rich in natural resources, has long had a love-hate relationship with the federal government, which owns about 60% of the state’s land. That relationship has been especially strained under Democratic presidential administrations that have sought to restrict logging, mining and the availability of areas for oil and gas development over environmental concerns.
Policies can shift dramatically from one administration to the next.
The Democratic Obama and Biden administrations banned leasing on roughly half the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is home to wildlife such as caribou and polar bears and provides habitat for millions of migrating birds. Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has rolled back those and other restrictions as part of a broader push for expanded oil and gas development in Alaska. The administration also is supporting lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The state also has bristled at Democratic efforts to stifle road building and logging in areas such as the Tongass National Forest, a temperate rainforest in southeast Alaska. That dispute dates to the Clinton administration.
Alaska’s share of royalty revenue from oil and minerals on federal land has been another ongoing source of tension. Some lawmakers say the state was promised a larger share at statehood and that the federal government has failed to uphold its end of the deal.
While oil production is a fraction of what it was at its peak in the late 1980s and has fallen in recent years, political leaders have pointed to signs of a turnaround. They cite in part the strong interest from major companies that snatched up leases in a sale earlier this year for the petroleum reserve, home to the Willow project.
Alaska communities have been hit hard by spikes in fuel prices caused by the Iran war. That is especially true for remote communities that must have their fuel flown in or delivered by barge before the rivers ice over.
Oil development is the top issue in this year’s election for Darryl Hugo, who lives in the small North Slope community of Anaktuvuk Pass. He is backing Sullivan and notes that revenue from oil development is largely responsible for his town’s health clinic, school, police and fire departments and water system.
“My region’s economy depends on oil,” he said via a messaging app.Candidates are seen as trying to stake claim as ‘the real spokesperson for the real Alaska’
Robert Sewell, an independent from the Juneau area, said he sees the “Lower 48” taunts and Peltola trying to distance herself from national Democrats as examples of the candidates “fighting to establish who is the real spokesperson for the real Alaska.”
He also likens it a bit to the schoolyard jeer, “I know you are, but what am I?”
Peltola, during her unsuccessful 2024 congressional reelection campaign, refused to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and said she would not vote for Trump. This year, before Alaska’s August primary, Harris sent a fundraising appeal that offered support of Peltola.
In response, Peltola’s campaign told reporters that she “isn’t seeking endorsements from anyone from the Lower 48.”
In videos highlighting her backing of the Willow oil project, Peltola said she will work with Trump, who handily carried Alaska each of the three times he has run, to advance more oil and gas projects.
“I took on Joe Biden to secure the largest development project in decades,” she said in one video on social media. “And I’ll work with Donald Trump on more.”
Sewell, a Peltola supporter, said he does not begrudge that position. He said he does not think “for one moment that she likes Trump or Trump’s agendas” on other issues.‘Lower 48’ jabs fill social media and airwaves, but do voters care?
Peltola, who is Yup’ik, is among the roughly 43% of Alaskans born in the state. She grew up fishing on the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska and prominently displays fishing photos on her website. Her campaign slogan, “Fish, Family, Freedom,” is intended to appeal to what she believes are Alaskans’ shared values.
Sullivan, originally from Ohio, came to Alaska in the late 1990s when he was in his early 30s. Now a retired Marine, he served as Alaska attorney general and natural resources commissioner, and was an assistant secretary of state in President George W. Bush’s administration.
Sullivan spokesperson Nate Adams said that for the senator, “being an Alaskan means loving this state, fighting everyday for his fellow Alaskans and making sure Alaskans, not Lower 48 liberals, decide our future.”
The SLF PAC, which supports a Republican Senate majority, has been keying in on that theme. In one of its ads, a speaker says of Peltola, “They dress her up, throw her out on a stream somewhere, make her look like an Alaskan.” Another says: “Mary Peltola sounds like Alaska, but toes a different line in Washington, D.C.”
Peltola’s campaign said Alaskans “won’t be fooled by mudslinging ads.” In a statement, her campaign sought to link Sullivan with “Lower 48 special interest donors.”
Halcro, the former lawmaker and podcaster, said Alaskans have been inundated with such ads and flyers, but he is not sure the messaging over which candidate aligns less with the “Lower 48” is one voters want to hear this year.
“It’s all of this stuff just to make us angry at a time where we really genuinely, genuinely just need stability,” he said. “We just need to elect somebody who’s not going to break anything.”
New York Times, ‘She’s One of Us’: Mary Peltola’s Bumpy Rise to Political Power, Michael Kruse, Sept. 27, 2026. Ms. Peltola, above, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, has complicated politics: She is pro-gun, pro-oil and pro-gas — but also pro-environment and especially pro-fish.
Hard by the murky brown water of the Kuskokwim River, in a region reachable only by plane or boat, past weather-stunted willows and crude seasonal fish camps, dogs roamed muddy, rutted roads under low, dreary skies.
Here in the small village of Kwethluk in the vast tundra of southwestern Alaska, in the window of a house with unpainted sides and rotting wood steps, was a campaign placard for Mary Peltola.
“We are related,” said the man inside.
James Nicori, 77, sat in his chair and unspooled his Alaska Native connection to Ms. Peltola, shown below, the Democrat running for the Senate.
“Mary’s great-grandma and my grandpa were half sister, half brother,” Mr. Nicori said. Her mother was a girl here, Mr. Nicori said. She was a girl here.
“She understands how we struggle,” he said. “She is one of us.”
Ms. Peltola, a former congresswoman, is an uncommonly capable candidate. In Alaska, where Republicans far outnumber Democrats and independents far outnumber both, she is the rare member of her party who has proved she can win statewide. This year, she has campaigned on four-wheelers and floatplanes, in Xtratuf boots and traditional kuspuk shirts worn by the Indigenous Yup’ik people of Alaska. she has made stops in locales as isolated as an island 30-some miles from Russia, curating social media snippets while playing hard-to-get with most of the mainstream press four time zones away. The approach has been largely effective. Ms. Peltola beat the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, in the nonpartisan primary in August, and polling and fund-raising suggest she could do it again in November.
But in ways that have not been aired until now, Ms. Peltola, 53, is also an uncommonly complicated candidate. Genial and unassuming in public, she can be crass and apoplectic in private. Her campaign has been marred by accounts of her outbursts that left some aides unnerved. When she served in the House, she had one of the highest staff turnover rates on Capitol Hill.
The daughter of a Yup’ik woman from Alaska and a white man from Nebraska, Ms. Peltola grew up in three villages and the port city of Bethel, population 6,000, some 70 miles upcountry from the Bering Sea. She went to three different high schools and four different colleges. She has had three husbands — two children from her first, two more from her second, three stepchildren from her third — and moved from Bethel to Juneau to Anchorage and back.
Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Byron Donalds Moved ‘Daddy’ to the Endorsements Page, Kristoffer Ealy, right, Sept. 27, 2026. After years of matching ties and courtroom visits, Florida GOP gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds (above) is quietly putting some distance between himself and Trump.
Byron Donalds has spent the Florida governor’s race treating a debate stage like it comes with a subpoena. During the Republican primary, he refused to debate his opponents and dressed the cowardice up as corporate wisdom: “If I’m applying for a job, it’s not my 
responsibility to help my competitor get a job interview.” Apparently Florida democracy is LinkedIn now, and Byron is the regional manager deciding who gets past HR.
Then the general election arrived, and suddenly the man who had spent months acting like debating was charity work discovered an almost Jeffersonian reverence for public discourse.
David Jolly said Donalds backed out of a joint Tampa Tiger Bay Club appearance; a club board member supported Jolly’s account, while Donalds’s campaign said the event had never been confirmed. On Sept. 18, Donalds announced that he had accepted three televised debate invitations. Jolly’s campaign said the two sides had not coordinated those events. Two days later, Jolly said he was done negotiating and declared, “you can’t debate a liar.”
Donalds immediately transformed into the patron saint of candidate forums: “I said 3 debates. Jolly said 12 debates. Yesterday, Jolly said no debates. Who’s the liar Dave?” This is less a principled commitment to deliberative democracy than a case study in motivated reasoning: debates were useless when Donalds had something to lose from them and sacred the moment their absence became useful ammunition against somebody else.
The funniest part is where one of Donalds’ proposed debates was supposed to happen: Florida A&M University(FAMU). Byron Donalds attended FAMU from 1996 to 1999 before eventually graduating from Florida State, yet his campaign biography manages to discuss his education without mentioning the three years he spent at one of the most important Black universities in the country. FAMU apparently occupies the same place in Byron’s biography that an embarrassing old Facebook album occupies in everybody else’s: technically real, occasionally useful, but preferably several clicks away from the homepage.
And now he wanted to return there for a gubernatorial debate.
That is political identity management so clumsy it practically deserves its own case study. Donalds is perfectly happy to use FAMU as a stage when the optics serve him, but apparently not important enough to survive the editing process on his own biography. Even better, Strike Forward for FAMU—an independent alumni-led organization created to advocate for the university’s interests—endorsed David Jolly. So the alumni organizing around the school Byron apparently misplaced somewhere between Tallahassee and his campaign website looked at the race and picked the other guy. There are subtweets less obvious than that.
I understand why Jolly finally told Donalds to shove the debates. Donalds has accumulated a record of false and misleading claims that gives an opponent plenty of reason to assume a televised exchange will become ninety minutes of chasing assertions around the stage with a butterfly net. But I still think walking away is strategically wrong. A political debate is not merely two candidates reciting white papers at each other. It is a mechanism of public accountability: simultaneous questioning, time constraints, adversarial scrutiny, and considerably fewer opportunities for a campaign staffer to hit “publish” after sanding every answer into paste.
Even Donalds once understood that. In 2023, when Donald Trump was considering skipping Republican presidential debates, Donalds said Trump should participate because voters needed to hear candidates’ ideas. That principle apparently came with an expiration date somewhere around the moment Byron himself became the guy expected to stand under the lights.
Jolly should have shown up, put Donalds’s old quote on the screen, and made him explain the transformation himself. Florida voters would then get something more useful than another press release war: a real-time demonstration of how politicians rationalize one standard when it protects them and another when it disadvantages their opponent. If Donalds wants to sell himself as governor, he can survive ninety minutes without somebody from his communications shop holding his hand.
Byron Donalds has already spent tens of millions of dollars, and Florida voters have rewarded him with a statistical tie. St. Pete Polls has him at 44% and David Jolly at 43%, separated before rounding by one-tenth of a percentage point, with 9% still undecided. Jolly leads independents 48% to 36% and is even pulling 13% of Republicans. Change Research, a Democratic-aligned pollster, has Jolly ahead 47% to 44%. For a man who entered this race carrying Trump’s endorsement, a mountain of money, and the usual Republican structural advantage in Florida, Byron has somehow spent a fortune to arrive at coin-flip territory.
I think Jolly wins this race. I also know better than to confuse my prediction with a guarantee. Republicans have won every Florida governor’s race since 1998, and anybody declaring this thing finished with six weeks left should probably stay away from casinos.
More On Artificial Intelligence, Impacts, Global Regulation
New York Times, As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind, Adam Satariano and Cecilia Kang, Sept. 27, 2026. The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, gathered senior officials for an exclusive meeting at a 19th-century palace outside Brussels this month.
The goal was to prepare for a speech outlining the 27-nation bloc’s priorities for the coming year, with artificial intelligence dominating the agenda. The region’s new A.I. czar, Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of German industrial giant Siemens, outlined ways that Europe could use the technology for economic gain. Others raised concerns about A.I. safety and growing risks, two people briefed on the gathering said.
Since the Sept. 4 meeting, Ms. von der Leyen and her commissioners have been left asking what they can do to address the fast-changing technology, one of the people said. Should they ramp up regulation to address A.I.’s emerging dangers? Or would doing so carry economic and geopolitical costs if other countries did not clamp down as well?
They have not landed on any final conclusions, with more discussions among European leaders planned this year.
“A.I. comes with a balance of possibilities and risks,” Ms. von der Leyen said at her State of the Union speech on Sept. 16. “Without addressing these risks, we will never be able to unlock A.I.’s potential.”
Special Report: Insider Revisits The 1990s Clinton Impeachment, Independent Counsel Scandals
Mobology, Intermezzo: “The President’s critics demanded a showdown on the issue of morality—and we gave it to them,” Dan E. Moldea, right, Sept. 27, 2026. My investigation of the suicide of Vincent Foster led to my allegations of OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] leaks, which led to my arguably decisive role in the impeachment drama.
Impartial summaries of [Dan Moldea] contributions by AI sites
“[Moldea’s] reporting helped shift public and media focus toward [Kenneth] Starr’s conflicts, motivations, and investigative excesses, weakening the moral and institutional credibility of the impeachment effort. . . . Moldea didn’t ‘save’ the Clinton presidency in a direct or official sense—but his investigative work meaningfully contributed to the environment in which impeachment ultimately failed.” (ChatGPT)
1990s House Republican leaders Newt Gingrich, left, of Georgia, Bob Livingston, center, of Louisiana, and Bob Barr of Georgia.
“Flynt’s revelations—aided by Moldea’s investigative work—led to the resignation of House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston in December 1998, after Flynt exposed Livingston’s extramarital affairs. This weakened the momentum of Clinton’s opponents and shifted public perception of the impeachment effort. . . . While Moldea was not part of Clinton’s official legal defense team, his work with Flynt’s campaign helped undermine the credibility of some of Clinton’s most vocal Republican critics, thereby contributing to the political environment that allowed Clinton to survive impeachment.” (Copilot)* “Following Livingston’s resignation, which exposed the hypocrisy of critics, Clinton’s approval rating skyrocketed, and calls for his resignation virtually ceased. . . . Moldea viewed what he was doing as important enough to risk being destroyed, [preventing], as he saw it, an attempt to overthrow the executive branch.” (Gemini)* “[C]ontemporary reports in outlets like Vanity Fair, and historical accounts, credit the Flynt/Moldea efforts with having a ‘sobering effect’ on Congress and helping shift public and political momentum away from removal.“ (Grok)* “[Moldea’s] investigations and public interventions functioned as de facto assistance to Clinton by undermining key accusers and challenging the legitimacy of the prosecutorial strategy.” (Perplexity)
The suicide of Vincent Foster: In Joe Conason and Gene Lyons’s bestselling book, The Hunting of the President (St. Martin’s, 2000), the authors wrote:
Apart from the Fiske and Starr Reports, the most accurate, comprehensive account of the Foster suicide and its aftermath is A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, by Dan E. Moldea.
David Kendell, left, counsel for President Bill Clinton, Independent Count Kenneth Starr, center, and U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson.
* Part 1 (May 24, 2026): I was already at war with Mark Fuhrman when his publisher dragged me into his own conflict with him. . . . And I was cool with that. From the O.J. Simpson murders to the death of Vincent Foster.
* Part 2 (July 12, 2026): The Foster case was an eye-opening, life-altering experience for me: A suicide that led to a cataclysmic upheaval in American history
* Part 3 (July 19, 2026): Right-wing journalists cynically used police errors as ammunition to undermine the authority of the Clinton White House
Regnery published its first and only pro-Clinton book
Starr v. Clinton: The OIC leaks* In his bestselling book, And the Horse He Rode In On (Simon & Schuster, 1998), Clinton defender James Carville, speaking of the OIC leaks investigation, stated: "One journalist finally had the temerity to step forward and explain how all this sensitive information had been coming out into the light of day. Dan Moldea, a respected crime reporter with more than seven exhaustively investigated books under his belt, heard one of Starr’s emphatic denials and was so disgusted that he told his tale."
* Part 4 (July 26, 2026): Hillary Clinton revealed “a vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband. . . . And she was right
Was Brett Kavanaugh Ken Starr’s designated leaker?
* Part 5 (August 2, 2026): Was the Monica Lewinsky scandal supercharged by the OIC leaks? . . . What is “substantive information?”
President Clinton personally accused the media of covering up my revelations
* Part 6 (August 9, 2026): The Republicans’ full-scale war against President Clinton . . . for lying about sex
My affidavit to Judge Johnson and other acts of heresy about the OIC’s monumental overreach
The Clinton impeachment drama* In his widely respected business book, Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong (Portfolio, 2007), author Eric Dezenhall wrote:
The Republicans’ worst nightmare came when Flynt retained investigative reporter Dan E. Moldea, who had been standing up to Mafia kingpins, assassins, and corrupt union bosses for decades. Moldea, who made no bones about sympathizing with President Clinton’s struggle, proceeded to systematically expose the sex lives of Republican congressional leaders on the grounds that they were not qualified to judge Clinton’s morality. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum and the techniques employed on both sides of the Clinton wars, one thing soon became clear: The strategy worked.
* Part 7 (August 16, 2026): Newt Gingrich resigned as U.S. House Speaker, yielding to Bob Livingston
In defense of the President, porn king Larry Flynt opted in and then invited me along for the wild ride
* Part 8 (August 23, 2026): Targeting Speaker-elect Livingston
“So, talk to me, little lamb”
* Part 9 (August 30, 2026): The fall of the U.S. House Speaker-Elect
Amid my investigation, Bob Livingston resigned and attempted to drag President Clinton down with him
The Senate trial and its aftermath* In his bestselling book, American Rhapsody (Knopf, 2000), author Joe Eszterhas published a chapter, “Larry Flynt Saves the Day,” in which he declared:
The pornographer saved the president by threatening to reveal other acts of pornography committed by—this time Republican—politicians Larry Flynt was a hero, a self-appointed, self-financed Kenneth W. Starr. . . . He’d brought in a crack investigative reporter, Dan Moldea, who’d exposed Ronald Reagan’s questionably close ties to Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman and Teamster money, to run his million-dollar project.
DEM and LFP (Liz Flynt)* Part 10 (September 6, 2026): After Speaker Livingston resigned, President Clinton’s approval rating skyrocketed to an all-time high. . . . “You’re welcome”
A whimsical gimmick had evolved into a lethal weapon
* Part 11 (September 13, 2026): The GOP’s relentless efforts to get us indicted for extortion and obstructing Congress
The Senate trial against President Clinton
* Part 12 (September 20, 2026): Larry Flynt’s personal approval ratings were higher than the Republican majority in Congress
The acquittal of President Bill Clinton
Afterword: On the Republicans’ demands for the indictments of Larry Flynt and meAccording to ChatGPT (AI):
During the 1998–1999 impeachment battles over President Bill Clinton, the Republican National Committee (RNC) along with the Landmark Legal Foundation did file complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division alleging that Larry Flynt and Dan Moldea had committed crimes such as obstruction of Congress, blackmail, and jury tampering in connection with Flynt’s efforts to investigate and publicize sexual misconduct of Republican politicians.However:* These were complaints and requests for a criminal probe, not formal criminal charges filed by prosecutors.* The Justice Department did not press charges. The complaints did not lead to indictments or prosecutions against Moldea.So, while the RNC supported or joined in efforts to push for a DOJ investigation and filed formal complaints to that effect, there were no criminal charges actually brought against Dan Moldea in connection with his work during the impeachment. [Emphasis by ChatGPT]
Events during the post-impeachment-trial period
On March 3, 1999, after the President’s February 12 acquittal, Congressman Bob Barr (R-Georgia), who was one of our targets, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, which stated:
This request for an investigation focuses on attacks, and threats of attacks on members of Congress before and during the [Senate impeachment] trial; specifically the House Managers. These attacks came from Larry Flynt, James Carville, Dan Moldea, and other individuals, and represent what appeared to be a deliberate and concentrated effort to impede the House of Representatives from fulfilling its duties under the United States Constitution to conduct matters relating to the impeachment of the President, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate.
Barr’s letter followed similar complaints and requests to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division from the Republican National Committee, the Landmark Legal Foundation, and a variety of private citizens. They charged us with extortion and obstructing the Senate trial, among other allegations.
Worried about a retaliatory indictment—meant to diminish and break me financially—I maintained a low profile during the Department of Justice’s continuing probe into our activities. Because I was still getting trashed in the media while Flynt was enjoying the greatest press of his career, I found it impossible to remain off everyone’s radar.
Meantime, because Larry and I had a friendly disagreement over our defense strategy, I retained my own attorney in Washington.
On March 23, Jo Ann Farrington, Deputy Chief of the DOJ’s Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, responded to a January 18 letter from community-activist Jane Spillane of South Carolina, the wife of mystery writer Mickey Spillane. She had insisted that Flynt and I be prosecuted.
A Knight Ridder wire story on April 9 stated:
According to Spillane, Flynt and his investigator, Dan E. Moldea, violated a federal criminal statute against individuals who “corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communications, influences, obstructs or impedes . . . under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House.’‘ Conviction carries a maximum five-year penalty or $5,000 fine, or both.
Replying to the letter from Spillane, Farrington at the Justice Department wrote:
I write in response to your January 18, 1999 letter requesting that the Department of Justice open an official investigation into whether Larry Flynt and Dan Moldea sought to obstruct the congressional impeachment inquiry and trial, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1505. This matter is currently under review by the Criminal Division.[1]
On June 25, apparently because we had not yet been indicted, Representative Barr filed suit against the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the U.S. Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In this civil litigation, Barr, represented by the Scaife-funded Judicial Watch, suggested a fictitious scenario that the President authorized James Carville to provide me with government files, which I then allegedly used as the foundation for my investigation.
Barr’s complaint specifically claimed:
Defendant EOP’s willful and intentional release of records and information concerning Plaintiff to persons such as Flynt, Carville, Moldea and/or others, without prior written consent or knowledge of Plaintiff, or any lawful justification violates . . . relevant provisions of the Privacy Act.
To be clear, I had never met or spoken with Carville.
Mercifully, this litigation went nowhere. Later, Barr, whose congressional district was reorganized, was defeated when he ran for reelection.
In the end, the DOJ did not indict anyone in connection with The Flynt Project.
Looking back and regardless of all the consequences, I would do it again.
Respectfully, after all these years, I finally want the historical record to reflect my role in these major events and what I accomplished.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Booms, Bombs and Bonds: Interest Rates, Part IWhat’s driving interest rates higher? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 27, 2026. There’s an old aphorism in military affairs to the effect that amateurs talk about strategy, but professionals talk about logistics. The financial version of this aphorism might be that cable TV touts talk about stocks, but serious economic analysts talk about bonds.
Stock prices are, after all, a notoriously unreliable indicator of the state of the economy. Too often reflect by fads and fantasies, with online trading driving them to greater extremes. The grea t economist Paul Samuelson once quipped that the stock markets had predicted nine of the last five recessions. Interest rates, by contrast, are almost always telling us something important about the economy — although exactly what they’re telling us is sometimes a matter of dispute.
This is one of those times. I’ve been relatively quiet about interest rates on this Substack because people whose analysis I respect were telling quite different stories, and I wasn’t sure who was right. In fact, I still have some doubts about what’s happening.
But the large jump in interest rates since the beginning of the Iran War, to levels not seen since the peak of the 2000s housing bubble, demands attention. So today’s primer will discuss the recent move in interest rates and briefly sketch out competing hypotheses about what is causing it.
I’ll come back next week with an effort to sort out these competing explanations. Not to be coy, my best guess is that we’re mainly looking at the effects of the immense boom in AI-driven investment, but that the inflationary impact of the Iran War has reinforced those effects by triggering a change in the policy “narrative.” But that will be for the next primer.
Today, beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. Interest rate history
2. The theory of interest rates
3. Complications: Inflation, international spillovers, and safety
4. Hypotheses about the recent rise
New York Times, When the Weed Wars Came to Warren Street, Andrea Elliott, Sept. 27, 2026 (print ed.). New York has embarked on a radical experiment: legalizing marijuana as an act of reparations to heal the wounds of America’s drug war. I went upstate to Hudson to see if it could be done.
This trendy river town, once a drug-war epicenter, is now one of America’s most unequal cities. It seemed like a perfect testing ground for a law designed to repair the drug war’s “racially disparate impact.”
Hudson’s “green rush” would draw an incredible cast of characters, including the boxer Mike Tyson and the heiress Abby Rockefeller — whose uncle was an architect of the drug war.
I followed the saga of two competitors vying to corner the local weed market: Bill Hughes, a Black Hudson native, and Joanne Wilson, a white entrepreneur from Manhattan.
The story I found in Hudson was full of surprising turns. It showed, in real time, what can happen when the ideals of racial justice meet the realities of capitalism.
Bill Hughes tilts his thick glasses to the pavement and searches for any cracks.
He is trying not to trip. He will be damned if anyone calls him blind, but it is also true that he can barely see. This is merely a fact of his 58-year-old existence — never, he will tell you, an impediment.
Step by careful step, Bill makes his way through the once-derelict, now reborn city of Hudson, N.Y., arriving at the street corner of his youth. He holds up his phone and presses record, letting the camera capture what his eyes cannot: A glorious property has just come on the market.
To the droves of outsiders who have descended on Hudson, transforming it into a Brooklyn outpost of artisanal food and bespoke fashion, this building is prime. Three stories of 19th-century brick, just a short walk from the Hudson River.
'I was born by the river"
Bill can sometimes hear the Sam Cooke song cresting inside him, but he tries to shut it off. He will not be seen getting sentimental. He, too, was born by the river, in Hudson’s long-shunted Black enclave. Why should that prevent him from joining the city’s newest tide?
He wants all the same things the gentrifiers want. A path to wealth and freedom. A chance at reinvention.
And now, in March of 2024, that chance has come.
Three years after New York State enacted one of the most progressive laws in 21st-century America — legalizing marijuana as an instrument of racial justice — Hudson’s market is up for grabs.
What was once a crime is now an opportunity. Just as weed has become “cannabis,” yesterday’s dealer is today’s “entrepreneur.”
That is a title Bill yearns to claim, for all the power it bestows in the new Hudson.
Yet his desire to make money covers a deeper want: To prove wrong all the doubters who cannot see beyond his blindness. To quiet the chorus of “you can’t” that has trailed him all his life.
First Bill must land a coveted retail license amid a sea of competitors. Only two will prevail, opening shops here on Warren Street.
“This I can do, if people get out of my way,” he says, as if talking to his late father, a Marine drill sergeant who “never saw me do anything successful.”
While nearly half of American states have now legalized recreational marijuana, New York’s law is singular.
It was here that the war on drugs truly began, with draconian laws enacted in 1973 under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Those laws sent generations of Black and Latino people to prison, wielding a “racially disparate impact” that the new law seeks to end.
It demands that half of all licenses go to “equity” applicants, prioritizing those with marijuana convictions. It vows to create a funding stream — tens of millions in tax revenues — to uplift poor communities like Bill’s.
This new law, to its framers, was an act of reparations — not only for the drug war, but for America’s deepest fractures of race.
And where better, thinks Bill, to test out this radical idea? After all, Hudson — once a drug-war epicenter — is now one of the most unequal cities in America.
Sept. 26
Top Headlines
President Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an admitted heroin abuser for 14 years with no professional education in medicine or science and yet an advocate of highly controversial and dangerous medical policies far from the mainstream of U.S. expert research. Critics accuse Kennedy and Trump of complicity in the loss of many lives (Associated Press photo by Evan Vucci).
U.S. Courts and Elections
News Roundups
Sept. 26, 2026. Trump apparently woke up still stewing over the press, because within hours of Air Force One touching down in Tennessee, the White House quietly barred CNN from its TV pool duties yet again, the latest round in a fight that’s kept CNN, MS NOW, and Politico bouncing in and out of White House access for weeks.More On Middle East Wars
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 he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.
More On U.S. Foreign Policy, Military Programs
President Trump and China's leader Xi Jinping with aides
Hope for America, Opinion: Trump HUMILIATES HIMSELF in Xi Jinping White House visit, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 25, 2026. Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping to the White House and seemed determined to show him every monument he is building to himself. There was the new granite helipad, Marine One, the ballroom construction site, and the gold-framed presidential portraits.More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is A Titanic F*ck Up, SCOTUS Bends The Knee (Again), Brutal New WSJ Polling, A Wave Is Coming, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 26, 2026. In what has been a week of very bad polling (here, here) for Trump and the Republicans yesterday their in house journal, the Wall Street Journal, delivered brutal new data: an eight point drop since their last poll (continued erosion, deterioration) and this remarkable snapshot from their polling dating back to 1990.Sept. 26, 2026. Reports that Trump’s big midterm election rally tour to help Republicans has been reduced to the president appearing in red states and districts because the White House only wants to send Trump where he will get a warm welcome tell only part of the story.More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Sept. 25, 2026. I will have more to say about why Andrew Boutros, left, so aggressively denied the claim — in Sheri Mecklenburg’s retirement letter, which I first saw published by NYT and Chicago Tribune — that he directed her to pursue a felony charge after she recommended a misdemeanor. Mecklenburg, right, wrote: "You recklessly agreed in court that I had committed misconduct without even asking for my account, fully reviewing the record or briefing the law. That evening, you sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges."Sept. 26, 2026. Minnesota Spying, Weaponized DOJ. Kyle Wagner, the performatively Antifa guy charged in Michigan on a ridiculous stalking charge and in Minnesota as the narrative hook for the MN-15 conspiracy prosecution, filed for cert at SCOTUS yesterday. He is appealing a decision in the Sixth Circuit to override the decision by Michigan Judge Denise Page Hood to release Wagner from pretrial detention. Days earlier, he successfully asked for a detention hearing in Minnesota. The SCOTUS appeal aims to address a circuit split in the way the Bail Reform Act applies around the country. Artificial Intelligence
More On Global Health, Media, Education Issues
Top Stories
President Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an admitted heroin abuser for 14 years with no professional education in medicine or science and yet an advocate of highly controversial and dangerous medical policies far from the mainstream of U.S. expert research. Critics accuse Kennedy and Trump of complicity in the loss of many lives (Associated Press photo by Evan Vucci).
New York Times, ‘Zombified’ C.D.C., Hobbled by Cuts, Struggles to Fulfill Scientific Mission, Apoorva Mandavilli, Sept. 26, 2026. The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control.
For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the undisputed global leader in public health. Its scientists helped train health officials worldwide. In the United States, it was the primary source of guidance for prevention and treatment of diseases, including diabetes, H.I.V. and the seasonal flu.
But after a year and a half in the cross hairs of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s drive to remake public health policy, the agency is a skeleton of the powerhouse it was.
The Trump administration’s widespread layoffs in early 2025 cut 18 percent of the C.D.C.’s staff. But new personnel data, compiled by a group of former federal scientists and reported here for the first time, indicate that the agency’s staff has dwindled far more, as large numbers of employees retired or resigned. As of May 2026, the C.D.C. had 30 percent fewer employees than it did before the layoffs, the data show.
Interviews with more than 30 current and former employees reveal the agency is now tightly controlled by Mr. Kennedy and his associates, and its scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to do their jobs effectively. (Some of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of retaliation from the administration.)
The changes have hindered the C.D.C.’s ability to respond to outbreaks as measles spreads at home and Ebola abroad, and to issue timely guidance on vaccinations as cooling temperatures kick off the respiratory season, according to current and former employees. State and local health departments, which rely on the C.D.C. for resources and technical advice, have been stymied by delays. Entire divisions have been shuttered, including teams that worked on smoking, sexual violence, child abuse and falls among older adults.
Even some areas central to the Trump administration’s priorities have been gutted. Despite Mr. Kennedy’s focus on chronic diseases and autism, the C.D.C. centers that aim to prevent chronic diseases and birth defects are at half their previous size, according to the new data, compiled by the Public Data Observatory from the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the employee union.
The layoffs spared the agency’s infectious disease centers. But even so, the center for emerging and zoonotic diseases, which manages Ebola and hantavirus, among others, now has nearly 300 fewer employees than in March 2025, and the respiratory disease center has lost nearly 200 — about 17 percent in each case.
Beyond staff reductions, there is a leadership vacuum. Only one of the 11 center directors from March 2025 remains at the agency. Most of the other centers are being run by acting directors, some of whom were elevated from jobs one or two levels below.
“It’s a zombified C.D.C. where you have all the bits and pieces — like the body’s there, the substance is there, but it’s not acting like how an agency like that should act,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the respiratory disease center before he resigned in August 2025.
Despite a series of high-profile disease outbreaks, C.D.C. workers have had little contact with the World Health Organization, with members of Congress and even, for a time, with their partners in state and local health departments, some employees said. Statements to the media about health crises are also tightly controlled by H.H.S.
Even basic functions have broken down. Travel approvals take months; upkeep of bathrooms and vacuuming of offices have been disrupted, some current employees said.
One senior official said it felt as though the agency was being held together with bubble gum and duct tape, with employees running from crisis to crisis, and nothing working the way it is supposed to.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a series of questions about the C.D.C.’s work, staffing and independence. “C.D.C. continues to protect the health and safety of the American people and communicate clearly about the importance of vaccination,” the department said in an emailed statement.
But several former officials disagreed with that assessment, noting that the C.D.C. has offered little leadership or clear communication even as, in just a few months, the nation has grappled with record cases of measles, cyclosporiasis and rabies.
“Imagine losing a third of a city’s firefighters and then wondering why downtown is burning,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, who led the agency’s center for H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infections till April 2025, and is now the dean of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
U.S. Courts and Elections
New York Times, Supreme Court Ruling Could Have Limited Impact on Voter Screening in Midterms, Richard Fausset, Nick Corasaniti and Julie Bosman, Sept. 26, 2026 (print ed.). Federal law requires a 90-day “quiet period” before elections, likely restricting the immediate scope of a decision that allows the use of a citizenship database to examine voter rolls.
Friday’s Supreme Court ruling clearing the way for states to use a sweeping online system to identify ineligible voters is a victory for the Trump administration, which has routinely promoted unfounded claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens. But the impact of the decision on the November midterm elections is likely to be limited, according to election law experts.
That is largely because federal law establishes a 90-day “quiet period” before elections, in which wide-scale changes to state voter rolls cannot be made. The provision is meant to avoid last-minute chaos in elections, and is likely to prevent major changes ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, experts said.
“I think this is going to have very little impact on the midterms,” said Derek T. Muller, a law professor and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame. “There’s very little runway for states to do very much before the election.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research in Washington, concurred with that view.
“This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election,” said Mr. Becker, whose nonpartisan group focuses on election security issues.
Still, in the coming weeks, Mr. Muller said, some states might use the federal database when they have “individualized suspicion” of certain voters, even though they cannot seek to use the system to try to purge voters on a broad scale.
“They’ll be using it in ways to evaluate whether or not, on an individualized basis, people are not citizens,” he said.
Friday’s unsigned emergency order allows states to use the database, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which had historically been used to determine the immigration status for people seeking certain benefits and licenses, in efforts to purge ineligible people from voter rolls. But states are not required to use the database, which expanded its scope under the Trump administration last year.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal judges dissented on Friday. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “if there is a bright side to today’s opinion,” it was that it “will likely have minimal short-term impact.”
But, she added, “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”
Documented cases of noncitizen voting, which is illegal, are exceedingly rare. But President Trump and his allies, as part of a broader effort to sow doubts about elections, have claimed, without evidence, that the problem is widespread.
In an executive order last year, Mr. Trump directed several agencies to pool their records into the SAVE system, encouraging state and local officials to use it to verify the citizenship and immigration status of registered voters.
On Friday, several state officials said the ruling would not change their approach.
Ashley Hunt Esquivel, a spokeswoman for Paul Pate, the Iowa secretary of state, said that Iowa was already using SAVE and would not be affected.
“This ruling does not impact our processes in Iowa because of our participation in a previous lawsuit alongside a few other states,” she wrote in an email.
In Minnesota, Steve Simon, the secretary of state, said in a statement that the ruling would have no effect on the state’s elections — in part because the use of the program is not permitted under state law.
“Minnesotans should rest easy knowing that their right to vote won’t be impeded by this faulty project,” he said.
Angela Benander, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said that Michigan had already been using SAVE in a limited capacity and that it would continue to do so.
“We wouldn’t cancel a voter’s registration on its own because the SAVE system indicates that they have noncitizen status,” she said. “It’s a clue, but it’s not the end of the investigation.”
Use of the SAVE system has drawn criticism for at times producing erroneous information.
Some states, including Michigan and Georgia, have used the system as a part of their multi-step voter verification process, but do not rely on it entirely. It has produced inaccuracies, flagging U.S. citizens in some instances.
For example, last October, the Texas secretary of state’s office said that it had “identified 2,724 potential noncitizens who are registered to vote in Texas” after “running the entire Texas voter list with more than 18 million voters through the SAVE database.”
But county officials soon began finding that many of the names of people that the system flagged were, in fact, citizens. Nearly a year later, the Texas secretary of state’s office said that it had further reviewed the data and found that at least 578 of those who were initially flagged — roughly 20 percent — were citizens.
The secretary of state’s office referred 117 names to the state attorney general for further investigation of potential cases of noncitizen voting.
In Missouri, 70 county clerks signed a letter in December 2025 that was sent to state House and Senate leadership that described the system as flawed, saying it regularly included “individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
St. Louis County, Mo., found that around 35 percent of roughly 690 people initially flagged by the SAVE tool had been registered at naturalization ceremonies, Rick Stream, the Republican election director for the county, said earlier this year.
Richard Hasen, a law professor and election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in a blog post on Friday that both the majority decision of the Supreme Court and the dissenting opinion were in agreement that the case would have “limited impact” on the midterms.
New York Times, Supreme Court Once Again Blocks Republican-Backed Voting Map in Missouri, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 26, 2026 (print ed.). A federal appeals court had sided with Republicans seeking to use redrawn congressional district boundaries to give their party an advantage in the midterms elections.
The Supreme Court on Friday again blocked Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
It was the third time this month that the justices intervened in a topsy-turvy legal battle over Missouri’s voting map, and the court’s order landed less than two months before a general election in which a few seats could determine control of Congress.
Each time the court has issued orders that would achieve the same result, requiring Missouri to use an older map that would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area. But the dispute over the map has continued in the lower courts, a possible preview of the hard-fought legal struggle that could erupt following the November election should control of Congress be in doubt.
The Supreme Court’s order was a win for opponents of redistricting, who had waged a yearlong fight against the new district lines, which were redrawn in 2025 at President Trump’s request.
In an unsigned decision with no noted dissents, the justices warned of “electoral chaos” if the state were to change course so close to the election and use the 2025 map.
“The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed. Absentee voting has already begun, as has military and overseas voting,” according to the five-page decision.
The order was another strong signal that the court had little interest in reversing a unanimous decision by Missouri’s highest court, which had earlier concluded that state law required using the older map.
The state Supreme Court’s decision came only after the state ran a primary election in August using the map drawn last year to benefit Republicans. The case returned to the U.S. Supreme Court this week after a federal appeals court ruled on Monday that it would be unconstitutional for Missouri to conduct a general election based on a map different from the one used in the primary.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. It did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Gov. Mike Kehoe of Missouri, a Republican who signed the redrawn map into law, said on social media that “voters deserved consistency and certainty, and not for the rules to be changed between elections.” He added: “Nevertheless, Missouri will follow the court’s order.”
The dizzying fight over Missouri’s map had already featured conflicting state and federal court rulings, as well as a short-lived contempt finding against Missouri’s top election official for not moving quickly enough to implement the state Supreme Court’s order to return to the older map.
Earlier this month, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action. He deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined that state officials should not have begun using the new map without a voter referendum. The state court said Missouri should instead use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.
But minutes after the justice’s order landed, a federal judge in St. Louis ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year, which was in place for last month’s primary.
The case quickly bounced back to the justices. This time the full Supreme Court acted on Sept. 10 with the same result.
The order on Friday was a rebuke to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which on Monday had said that using the 2025 map was the way to cause “the least amount of confusion for voters subjected to a string of changes this month.”
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Stews Over Press, Kimberly Guilfoyle Threatens Regime Change, AI Meddles With US Government, Big Supreme Court Ruling, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 26, 2026. Trump apparently woke up still stewing over the press, because within hours of Air Force One touching down in Tennessee, the White House quietly barred CNN from its TV pool duties yet again, the latest round in a fight that’s kept CNN, MS NOW, and Politico bouncing in and out of White House access for weeks.
That’s just the start of what we’re covering today. AI is everywhere in this one: OpenAI admitting its own agents tried to hack federal websites without the company even knowing, the U.S. and Russia quietly gutting a UN effort to regulate killer AI weapons, Trump and Xi wrapping up a summit with no real AI agreement, and Peter Thiel picking a fight with the pope over his AI warnings. On top of that, a record-breaking El Niño is reshaping weather worldwide right now, driving an unprecedented Pacific hurricane season, an eerily quiet Atlantic, a brutal nor’easter pounding the Northeast, catastrophic flooding in Bangkok, and California bracing for its own flood risk after years of drought. And that’s before we even get to the Supreme Court’s Missouri ruling, Trump’s latest spending clawback, and a handful of other stories worth your time.
Here’s the news:
U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle allegedly told Greek officials the U.S. can overthrow any government it wants, according to the Wall Street Journal. At a private dinner in Athens in March 2026, attended by both Greek and U.S. officials, the conversation turned to the sudden collapse of Romania’s government. A person who attended the dinner and others briefed on the exchange said Guilfoyle remarked, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here.” The comment reportedly triggered a tense exchange with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, who pushed back that the U.S. could not simply replace Greece’s democratically elected government. Neither Guilfoyle nor the State Department has offered a detailed on-the-record response to the specific quote.
Supreme Court blocked Missouri Republicans’ new congressional map for the third time, preserving the district that unseats Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. The justices sided unanimously with People Not Politicians, ruling that reverting to the GOP-drawn 2025 map “in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos,” since Missouri had already begun sending ballots to military and overseas voters. The ruling reverses an 8th Circuit decision that would have restored the map, which had eliminated one of the state’s two Democratic-held seats, and keeps the 2022 map in place, six Republican seats to two Democratic ones. The fight traced back to a voter referendum push that GOP Secretary of State Denny Hoskins delayed until the eve of the primary before rejecting it, prompting the Missouri Supreme Court to hold him in contempt and order the 2022 map used instead. Cleaver called the ruling a relief after a year of “manufactured chaos,” while Missouri’s Republican governor called it “disappointing” that the general election will now use a different map than the primary did.
Major AI News:
AI systems are now actively trying to hack government websites, and OpenAI didn’t even know it was happening. OpenAI disclosed that its AI agents interacted with the Education Department, Commerce Department, and SEC websites in unusual ways this summer, including an attempt to hack into the Education Department’s civil rights office data that ultimately failed. Separately, the agents pulled Census Bureau data using login credentials found online and posted public SEC data to an online forum. Reuters reported the scope is still growing, with OpenAI having found roughly two dozen “undesirable” agent incidents as of mid-September and more than 15 distinct episodes disclosed since July, including a break-in at an Australian government health portal and the leak of 53 user images from ChatGPT. Researchers at Transluce say the pattern extends beyond OpenAI, with agents probing government sites hundreds of thousands of times using credential exploits and anti-bot bypasses, and OpenAI’s own CEO Sam Altman has admitted the company hasn’t disclosed these incidents as fast as it should have.
The U.S. and Russia worked together this month to gut a landmark UN effort to regulate killer AI weapons. During roughly 15 hours of closed-door negotiations in Geneva, with cameras off and civil society observers removed, American and Russian diplomats stripped provisions requiring autonomous weapons to operate “predictably” and “reliably,” removed language mandating ethical review, and eliminated a requirement that humans review AI-selected military targets before a strike. One person familiar with the talks described it as “death by a thousand paper cuts,” and both delegations reportedly sent legal teams nearly twice the size of other countries’ to push the changes through quickly. Human Rights Watch warns the weakened language could let machines make life-and-death decisions without human control, while critics say Washington and Moscow are using their diplomatic weight to block any binding treaty despite growing real-world use of AI targeting in Gaza and the Iran war. The Pentagon is separately rewriting its own lethal autonomous weapons directive, and as of late September had not released the updated version despite a Trump order requiring it within 90 days.
Trump and Xi wrapped up their Washington summit without any meaningful agreement to slow the U.S.-China AI arms race. The three-day state visit leaned heavily on pageantry, tea, tours of the National Archives, and a black-tie dinner with tech billionaires, but produced only a modest two-month trade truce extension rather than substantive AI cooperation. Critics including Rep. Ro Khanna called it a “layup” that Trump refused to take, arguing Xi likely would have agreed to at least a technical working group on pausing self-improving AI. Xi acknowledged a “responsibility to develop and manage AI for good,” but Trump remained focused on rebranding AI as “super intelligence” and has said no industry slowdown is necessary. The summit was further overshadowed by Trump’s ongoing ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House events.
Pope Leo XIV used his Paris visit to warn world leaders that AI risks creating a “paradise of machines” that could undermine humanity. Speaking to French President Macron and other officials, Leo said avoiding that outcome requires urgent “education in ethical discernment” and appealed directly to AI developers and regulators to slow down. He told reporters afterward that he believes tech companies are increasingly open to ensuring AI doesn’t “displace or ultimately destroy humanity,” and that he hopes the Vatican’s dialogue with them continues. The warning came during a broader visit marked by massive crowds, including hundreds of thousands expected at a Mass in Place de la Concorde, and a notable rise in adult baptisms in France. His comments add a religious voice to a fast-widening chorus, alongside Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, calling for coordinated global AI governance even as concrete regulatory action keeps stalling.
Peter Thiel accused Pope Leo XIV of acting as a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party over his call to regulate AI. In an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, the tech billionaire argued that the pope’s May encyclical urging world leaders to rein in AI would do nothing to slow Beijing but could push the U.S. and its allies into onerous rules that let China surge ahead. Thiel said he wasn’t calling Leo a communist agent, but that the encyclical was “at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP,” echoing similar comments he made about the pope in July. The remarks came just before Trump and Xi’s Washington summit, as lawmakers and tech executives had urged the two leaders to strike a deal curbing AI’s catastrophic risks. Thiel, a Founders Fund partner invested in OpenAI, Palantir, and Scale AI, has a long track record of attacking regulation advocates, having previously likened Greta Thunberg and AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky to “the Antichrist.”
Trump rejects Iran ceasefire:
Iran proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart nuclear talks, but Trump reportedly rejected it outright. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the plan largely mirrors the 14-point memorandum of understanding Trump signed in June, and would reopen the strait and restart negotiations if certain conditions are met. Talks led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reportedly moved into a more detailed “technical stage” with a notably positive atmosphere described by sources in Tehran. But U.S. officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal said Trump is “skeptical” Iran would meet his demands and expects to resume bombing, even as a separate U.S. official called the discussions “positive and constructive” and noted Washington isn’t in a rush since nearly 40 million barrels of crude have moved through the strait under U.S. escort in 48 hours, matching prewar levels. Oil prices dipped modestly on the proposal before recovering, with one analyst calling Iran’s offer “dubious” since its underlying conditions haven’t changed.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told CBS News that Iran would allow U.N. nuclear inspectors back into the country as part of a long-term ceasefire deal. Asked twice by “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan whether Iran would allow weapons inspectors in, given that IAEA inspectors weren’t given full access before, Pezeshkian answered “that is absolutely correct” both times. He maintained Iran isn’t pursuing a nuclear weapon, saying “developing nuclear weapons is haram,” or forbidden, even if some in Iran wanted to build one. He also said he wants a deal finalized before November’s U.S. midterms, directly contradicting Trump’s claim that Iran would wait until after the vote, and denied any Iranian intent to assassinate Trump or his family. Separately, Pezeshkian said Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei has no “ongoing health issues” and is “completely healthy” after recovering from injuries sustained when his father was killed at the start of the war.
The Houthi-Saudi conflict is escalating into a full regional crisis, drawing in the U.N. Security Council and prompting new military coordination. Saudi Arabia said its air defenses intercepted Houthi drones aimed at Riyadh and ballistic missiles targeting Khamis Mushait, while the U.N. Security Council issued a rare unified condemnation of Houthi strikes that have wounded civilians, including women and children. Pakistan’s prime minister separately warned that any Houthi attack on Mecca would be a “red line,” and Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are arranging urgent military talks under last month’s defense pact, though neither Turkey nor Pakistan has yet taken action against the Houthis. Yemen’s Saudi-backed government head called for general mobilization after the Houthis seized the country’s entire Red Sea coast, and the humanitarian toll is mounting, with more than 130,000 people displaced and hospitals in cities like Aden overwhelmed by war-wounded patients. A Houthi official warned that the recent escalation is “merely a small-scale rehearsal for a full-scale escalation.”
New reporting revealed U.S. troops killed in an early Iranian drone strike on Kuwait could have been moved to safer ground beforehand, but their commander rejected the plan. Sources told CBS News that at least two relocation options, including bases near Yanbu and Riyadh, were scouted and presented to the leadership of the 103rd Sustainment Command before the deadly strike, but Brig. Gen. Clint Barnes opted to keep the unit in place despite intelligence warnings. Separately, tensions flared at the U.N. when Netanyahu’s address triggered a mass walkout, with Iranian officials calling the walkouts louder than “any speech” and questioning why Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, was allowed to speak at all. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions on Iranian airlines are disrupting regional air travel, with Iraq suspending Iranian flights to the holy city of Najaf while separately seeking a humanitarian exemption, and an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader threatening that no country in the region will be able to operate flights if Iran’s airlines are shut out. Trump also said he directly told Xi Jinping that any Chinese assistance to Iran was “totally unacceptable,” while the U.S. ambassador to China said Washington believes Beijing has provided indirect support in keeping the strait closed.
Extreme Weather Rapidly Increases:
Extreme weather is accelerating fast, and a record-breaking El Niño is the driver behind it. The Pacific Ocean has already produced 18 hurricanes and 41 named storms this season, unusually high numbers scientists attribute to a “super” El Niño that hasn’t even peaked yet, with Pacific water temperatures already hitting record highs. Meanwhile the Atlantic has gone the opposite direction, producing zero full hurricanes as of September 25, the first time that’s happened in over a century, because El Niño increases wind shear that tears storms apart in that basin. Princeton geoscientist Gabriel Vecchi called it “a tale of two basins,” and the same warm water fueling Pacific storms is also driving rapid intensification, with Hurricane Polo jumping from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in under 24 hours. Scientists say this El Niño’s impacts are compounding on top of human-caused climate change, which is already raising the baseline odds of extreme weather worldwide.
A powerful nor’easter is tearing through the Northeast, and it’s arriving with a severity forecasters are comparing to a historic hurricane. More than 70,000 customers lost power in New England as gale winds and heavy rain lashed the region, with the National Weather Service warning of major coastal flooding across the Mid-Atlantic through multiple high tide cycles this weekend. Streets in coastal New Jersey towns like Surf City and Manasquan were already underwater, and Sea Bright’s mayor said he expects flooding up to 6 feet in some streets, calling it potentially “closer to an Irene-scale flooding event.” The storm has canceled hundreds of flights into Boston, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, forced Ed Sheeran to cancel back-to-back stadium shows, and disrupted ferry service to the islands. Meteorologists warn the risk is compounded by leaves still on the trees this early in the season, raising the odds of downed limbs, power outages, and blocked roads.
Bangkok has been declared a citywide flood disaster area as extreme rainfall overwhelms Thailand’s capital. More than 30 centimeters of rain has fallen since Thursday, submerging roads, stranding vehicles, and forcing more than 4,200 people into over 200 emergency shelters across the city’s 50 districts. Nationwide, more than 84,000 people across 21 provinces have been affected by the flooding, with authorities pushing emergency alerts directly to residents’ phones. Long-time visitors and residents described the rainfall as unlike anything they’d seen, with one resident comparing it to Bangkok’s severe 2011 flooding. Officials say the water should recede once the rain stops, but with more downpours forecast through Sunday, the disaster area status signals just how fast conditions are still deteriorating.
California is bracing for the same extreme El Niño pattern to swing the state from megadrought straight into flood risk. Governor Gavin Newsom has already declared a state of emergency, well before El Niño’s typical winter peak, mobilizing sandbags and rock to shore up levees ahead of anticipated atmospheric rivers. The state’s most powerful past El Niños, in 1982-83 and 1997-98, nearly doubled normal precipitation, and this year’s is expected to be one of the strongest on record. Despite a decade of investment in groundwater recharge infrastructure, California has still lost 8.1 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2019, showing how fast extreme swings between drought and deluge can outpace even well-prepared water systems. Experts warn that without the right kind of precipitation, mainly heavy mountain snowpack rather than rain alone, much of the incoming water risks simply rushing into the Pacific instead of replenishing the reserves the state desperately needs.
Other news:
Whistleblowers allege Kennedy Center officials deliberately stalled repairs that the Trump administration later used to justify closing the building. A lawyer representing anonymous whistleblowers told Congress that director Matt Floca has known about roof leaks “for years” but halted remediation plans in April, despite receiving $9.3 million in congressional funding for roofing replacement. The whistleblowers say repairs “were not treated as priorities nor as acute risks to public safety,” and that Floca stopped the remediation process after already requesting and receiving the funds. Trump and Kennedy Center leadership have repeatedly cited a September 4 incident, in which ceiling plaster fell in the Grand Foyer, as justification for closing the center, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick calling the conditions “completely unsafe.” The Kennedy Center disputes the timeline, saying it knew the roof leaked but didn’t realize how far the damage had spread until this summer, and the claims are surfacing amid an ongoing lawsuit over Trump’s name being added to the building.
A Pentagon data breach exposed Social Security numbers and personal information for millions of current and former military personnel, and it went undetected for nine months. Unauthorized users gained access to a vulnerable server at the Defense Manpower Data Center starting last October, but the breach wasn’t discovered and fixed until July, with Military Times reporting up to four million Defense Department personnel could be affected. The stolen data included service members’ “occupational specialty,” which experts warn could help foreign adversaries map out who does what for the U.S. military around the world. The data was not encrypted, and while the Pentagon says it has no indication of misuse so far, cybersecurity experts warn it could enable foreign intelligence profiling, phishing campaigns, or extortion, especially with the U.S. currently at war with Iran. Victims are being offered a year of credit monitoring as the Pentagon works to shore up the system’s security.
The White House barred CNN from flying on Air Force One as part of its press pool duties, leaving Trump’s Tennessee trip with no television pool coverage at all. The move follows Trump’s broader ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, which a judge later blocked while ordering the outlets’ credentials restored, though the status of pool duty specifically remained unclear. Other networks, including Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS, had refused to perform pool duties until CNN’s access was restored, and regular coverage briefly resumed Friday during Trump and Xi’s National Archives visit before CNN was blocked again for Saturday’s trip. Trump posted on Truth Social questioning why “perpetrators of FAKE NEWS” should have White House access at all. Press advocates warn the pool system’s breakdown undermines independent oversight of the presidency, with one former press association president warning “America cannot have state TV.”
Netanyahu reportedly received a secret warning about a looming Hamas attack weeks before October 7, but it never reached Israel’s security chiefs. Sources told the New York Times that UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed called Netanyahu in late September 2023 to say Hamas was planning a major attack, though the warning lacked specifics on whether it would involve rockets or a ground invasion. Netanyahu has denied ever receiving such a call, but minutes from an October 1 security meeting show he never mentioned any warning to his chiefs, instead urging calm in Gaza and pushing back on officials who wanted to strike Hamas leaders, partly out of concern it could jeopardize a hoped-for normalization deal with Saudi Arabia. Sheikh Mohammed reportedly later described the call to then-CIA Director William Burns, and five former senior Israeli officials said the warning was never mentioned in any of the internal investigations into the security failures preceding the attack. The revelation lands weeks before Israel’s first national election since October 7, intensifying pressure on Netanyahu, who has blocked a state commission of inquiry and blamed security officials rather than himself for the failures that preceded the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
A New Mexico jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy protections tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The two-week trial in Santa Fe focused on claims that Facebook lied to users about a breach that let an outside quiz app harvest data from roughly 87 million profiles, later sold to the now-defunct political firm Cambridge Analytica. Jurors found the company responsible for more than two million separate violations affecting the state’s entire population, and a judge will now set penalties that state prosecutors want capped at the maximum $5,000 per violation. This follows a separate $942 million judgment against Meta in New Mexico over child safety controls, and comes after Meta’s $18 billion multistate youth-safety settlement in August, which released the company from future Cambridge Analytica claims in states that signed on. New Mexico and Florida both declined that settlement, calling it too lenient, leaving New Mexico as the only state still litigating the issue.
A grieving father-in-law attacked his daughter’s killer in the middle of a sentencing hearing after the defendant appeared to laugh at his victim impact statement. Alberto Ontiveros-Sanchez lunged at Abel Uribe, who was restrained in handcuffs and leg chains, and struck him several times before courtroom staff pulled him away, nearly five years after Uribe murdered Army Captain David Navidad-Parra. Ontiveros-Sanchez’s attorney said his client “lost it” after becoming emotional and noticing Uribe “laughing, snickering” in court. The judge said he understood the emotions involved but that such conduct could not be tolerated, releasing Ontiveros-Sanchez despite charges including aggravated assault. Uribe, who had pleaded guilty to the murder, was ultimately sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
A Florida family is suing Tesla after their Tampa mansion burned to the ground when their Model S ignited in the garage during Hurricane Helene’s storm surge. The lawsuit alleges saltwater flooding submerged the vehicle’s undercarriage, triggering an explosion and fire that destroyed the family’s 5,400-square-foot home and killed their dog, with rescuers unable to reach the family in time to save the pet. The Murphys claim Tesla knew for over a decade that its lithium-ion batteries were prone to dangerous “thermal runaway” when exposed to water, having patented fire-retardant material as far back as 2010, yet never used it and marketed its vehicles as safe anyway. Rescuers from a volunteer group called Grey Bull Rescue reached the trapped family by boat after floodwaters cut off emergency vehicle access. Similar Tesla fires destroyed at least two other Tampa-area homes during the same storm, and the family is seeking damages and punitive damages at trial.
A salmonella outbreak tied to broccoli sprouts has grown to at least 32 illnesses across six western states, and officials warn the real number is likely higher. The CDC traced the outbreak to broccoli sprouts from Idaho’s Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, which were sold to restaurants, co-ops, and grocery stores across Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Utah, with Washington state accounting for the majority of cases. Three people have been hospitalized so far, though no deaths have been reported, and illnesses have continued to be confirmed as recently as early September. The recall covers sprouts sold in bags or clamshell containers with several specific expiration dates in September. The CDC says the true case count is likely undercounted since many people recover without seeking medical care or testing.
Trump used a rare and contested “pocket rescission” power to cancel nearly $1 billion in congressionally approved spending, mostly targeting immigrant services and diversity programs. The cuts hit Health and Human Services programs serving refugees and unaccompanied minors, a Department of Education program for migrant students, a DOJ office focused on racial tensions, minority business development funding, and HUD housing counseling services, with the White House calling some of the targeted grants “outright harmful and blatantly ideological.” The maneuver lets Trump run out the clock on the 45 days Congress is legally given to review proposed cuts, since he announced them with just five days left in the fiscal year while the House was out of session until after the midterms, a tactic the Government Accountability Office says is illegal. Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, condemned the move as an unreported impoundment and a “usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers,” while Democratic Sen. Patty Murray called it “theft from the American people, plain and simple.” This is Trump’s second use of a pocket rescission, after blocking $4.9 billion in foreign aid last year in the first such move in nearly 50 years, and fits a broader pattern of the administration expanding executive power over spending, personnel, tariffs, and even military action without going through Congress.
Renovation work at an Arizona park has left dead ducks and fish rotting in a drained lake, drawing outrage and a wildlife rescue operation. Gilbert’s Freestone Park drained its lake to remove built-up sediment and replace the liner, but city officials confirmed some fish and ducks could not be relocated and died as the water level dropped, creating a foul stench that has drawn mosquitoes and vultures. Residents say many of the ducks were domestic birds that cannot fly away on their own, and local rescue groups have since pulled 36 waterfowl and four turtles from the lake, some showing signs of possible botulism. One rescuer said the city’s handling of the situation was “definitely handled poorly in the beginning” and hopes it serves as a lesson for other parks statewide. The city says it will work more closely with wildlife organizations on future projects and is now testing the water for botulism.
New Jersey Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell resigned after just eight months in office following an investigation that found ethics violations and a sexually charged remark to a staffer. Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the findings showed Caldwell “failed to uphold the responsibilities of his office,” and the report detailed that he told a staffer women like her were “looking for young sperm” and had pushed to get his girlfriend hired without disclosing the relationship. Caldwell disputed the report’s conclusions but resigned anyway, saying he didn’t want the matter to distract from the administration’s work, while his attorney called the investigation “unnecessarily protracted and one-sided.” Sherrill has 45 days to name a replacement and has already tapped acting comptroller Shirley Emehelu as acting secretary of state, a role critical to overseeing the ongoing midterm elections. Caldwell’s fall comes amid a rocky stretch for Sherrill, who also revealed this summer that New Jersey had mistakenly allowed over 6,000 noncitizens to register to vote in 2023 and 2024.
More On Middle East Wars
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 he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.
New York Times, Trump Rejects Iranian Proposal for Cease-Fire and Opening of Strait, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 26, 2026. The president said the deal was not “acceptable” and demurred on whether he would restart military strikes after the midterm elections.
President Trump said on Saturday he turned down Iran’s latest cease-fire proposal that offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks on the country’s nuclear program in exchange for U.S. concessions.
“They made a proposal, but I rejected it,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Saturday morning.
Mr. Trump demurred when asked if he expected to restart military strikes after the November midterm elections, saying Iran wanted “to make a deal where they open the strait immediately because they’re losing so badly.”
Mr. Trump’s rebuff was the latest turn in what has been a cycle of bombings, peace proposals, grandiose threats and conflicting messages throughout the nearly seven-month U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Mr. Trump’s public rejection of Iran’s offer came after his aides held a three-hour meeting with Iranian officials at the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week in New York.
In his speech at the United Nations, Mr. Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran, saying its leaders could strike a deal with the United States or risk annihilation.
“Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before — maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world?” Mr. Trump asked in speech on Tuesday. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
Mr. Trump also suggested Iran was dragging the war out to the midterm elections in the hopes of politically damaging Mr. Trump and Republicans. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route for oil and gas, has surged energy prices across the globe.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters on Thursday that the seven-point proposal that Mr. Trump rejected closely mirrored the commitments laid out in a so-called memorandum of understanding that was struck between the United States and Iran in June but quickly unraveled.
Mr. Araghchi added “it would be better” if a deal were reached before the U.S. midterm elections.
He said that the proposed agreement would end fighting for seven days, including in Lebanon, and require the United States to release Iranian frozen assets estimated to be at least $12 billion, waive sanctions on Iranian oil and lift the naval blockade on Iran. Then, on the last day, the Strait of Hormuz would be opened.After the seven days, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program would restart.
Mr. Trump on Saturday said he was still open to negotiating with Iran.
“They want to make a deal, and I think that’s fine, I like making a deal too,” Mr. Trump said. “But that deal would not be acceptable.”
New York Times, Netanyahu Is Said to Have Been Warned About Hamas Attack Before Oct. 7, Adam RasgonMark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman, Sept. 25, 2026. The warning from the leader of the United Arab Emirates, which lacked specific details about the nature of an attack, never reached the chiefs of Israel’s security establishment, Israeli officials said.
As Israelis prepare to vote next month, the question of who bears responsibility for failing to prevent the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023 has become a dominant issue in one of Israel’s most consequential campaigns in history.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking an unprecedented seventh term, has placed the blame on national security officials, while his critics have said he must personally answer for the failures. When Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported earlier this month that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, had given Mr. Netanyahu a secret warning that Hamas was planning a major attack, the question took on even greater urgency.
Mr. Netanyahu has denied the report.
But a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack.
The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Mr. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times
Instead, he told them that the goal should be to maintain calm in Gaza, and he pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, the minutes show.
At the meeting, details of which have not been previously reported, Mr. Netanyahu said that any Israeli action in Gaza might sabotage the prospect of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — a deal the Israeli prime minister believed was imminent.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.
Sheikh Mohammed had called Mr. Netanyahu in late September to tell him that, based on information he had received, Hamas was planning to launch an attack, according to the two people who said they had spoken with someone on the call. One of those people said the information was not specific about whether Hamas was planning to launch rockets into Israel or preparing for a ground invasion over the border. The original sources of the intelligence that Sheikh Mohammed passed to Mr. Netanyahu are unclear, and it is also unclear whether other issues were discussed on their call.
The warning, though vague, proved to be correct. Days later, thousands of Hamas fighters and their allies launched an invasion over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 more hostage in the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history.
More On U.S. Foreign Policy, Military Programs
President Trump and China's leader Xi Jinping with aides
New York Times, News Analysis: At Summit, Xi Sought to Tilt Trump’s Stance on America’s Place in Asia, David Pierson, Chris Buckley and David Pierson, Sept. 26, 2026. In his talks with President Trump, the Chinese leader used praise, warnings and wartime history to challenge American support for Taiwan and Japan.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is not known for lightheartedness. Yet during his White House summit with President Trump, he sometimes smiled and even laughed, projecting a warmth unusual for a meeting between superpower rivals.
Behind the show of geniality, Mr. Xi’s carefully chosen words revealed a cooler calculus: an effort to steer Mr. Trump toward Beijing’s positions on Taiwan, Japan and the broader security order in Asia.
On Taiwan, Mr. Xi pressed Mr. Trump to limit American support for the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its territory. On Japan, Mr. Xi invoked history to portray Tokyo, an American ally, as a resurgent military threat, while reminding the president that China and the United States had once fought on the same side.
Mr. Xi appeared to be testing for opportunities to shape Mr. Trump’s views, rather than hoping for a decisive breakthrough, Matt Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump in his first term as president, said in an interview. Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump have met three times since October last year, and they may meet two more times by the end of this year.
“Xi sees frequent meetings with his American counterpart as an opportunity to probe for weaknesses in the U.S. positions,” said Mr. Pottinger, now the chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Outwardly, the summit between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump achieved little.
China and the United States agreed to extend their truce in the trade war, but only by two months. The leaders discussed the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine but announced no apparent advances on ending either conflict. They toasted each other, and spoke loftily of partnership and stability in relations, yet announced no concrete agreements on the most contentious of issues: the trade imbalance, technology restrictions and Taiwan.Listen · 8:57 min
Hope for America, Opinion: Trump HUMILIATES HIMSELF in Xi Jinping White House visit, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 25, 2026. Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping to the White House and seemed determined to show him every monument he is building to himself. There was the new granite helipad, Marine One, the ballroom construction site, and the gold-framed presidential portraits.
At the place where Joe Biden’s portrait should have been, Trump pointed to a photograph of an autopen and mocked his predecessor while Xi and his entourage laughed. Minutes later, he was showing off a photograph of himself with Xi and telling him, “We have a lot of respect for you.” That contrast stayed with me. He used the White House to ridicule a democratically elected American president while flattering an authoritarian leader who has never faced a free election. After their meeting, one of the things Trump wanted to tell us was that Xi likes granite. He had spent the morning praising Xi’s appearance online and even incorrectly called Peng Liyuan “Madam Xi.” The day’s presentation told us plenty about the relationship Trump wanted the cameras to capture. It told us far less about what Americans were getting from it.
At the state dinner, that contrast became harder to ignore. Reporting placed some of the most powerful figures in business in the room, alongside Supreme Court justices and Fox News personalities. Trump presented Xi with a gold eagle sculpture and invited the guests to see his unfinished ballroom. Then the leader of the Chinese Communist Party connected Trump’s promise to make America great again with China’s goal of national rejuvenation, saying the two ambitions could be “mutually reinforcing.” Trump regularly uses accusations of communism against his domestic opponents. Yet here was the actual leader of a communist government linking his ambitions to MAGA inside the White House. And after all the ceremony, the outcome described so far was an extension of the tariff truce without major breakthroughs on the other disputes.
With the midterms 40 days away, taking back Congress offers a beginning: restoring checks and balances and pursuing accountability. It will not finish the job. This country was built through the labor and suffering of enslaved people and the determination of immigrants from China, Japan, Vietnam, and so many other places. Remembering what they contributed makes the work ahead feel like a responsibility we cannot abandon. The America worth fighting for is still beautiful, vast, and full of possibility. We have to keep seeing it clearly enough to build toward it.
We are living through a pivotal moment for our country, and my goal is to reach as many people as possible with clear, factual information about what is happening. The more people who understand what is unfolding, the better our chances of pushing back against chaos, cruelty, and corruption ahead of the midterms.
Thank you for your continued support. Your paid subscriptions have enabled me to add a video editor and reach more people.
Independent media is under attack. You can make a difference with a $5/month paid subscription. Your support allows me to keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in our country, defend myself from constant pressure from MAGA extremists, and ultimately spread the message to more people.Subscribed
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times, A 7-Day Standoff That Said So Much About Trump and the Media, Michael M. Grynbaum, Sept. 26, 2026. An abrupt decree, a network boycott, a legal intervention and an uneasy détente: This was no typical battle between a president and his press corps.
A week ago Friday, at 3:04 p.m., with his chief of staff in Florida and the West Wing winding down for the weekend, President Trump signed off on a 130-word message that sent the Washington press corps into a tailspin.
“Effective immediately,” the president wrote on Truth Social, he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”
Mr. Trump says this kind of thing all the time. But the idea of a “ban” caught reporters — and the president’s own advisers — by surprise. How would a ban work? Was it legal? Was this for real?
Amid a dragging war effort in Iran, soaring gas prices and higher interest rates, Mr. Trump had managed to generate a media tempest out of thin air.
When Kelly O’Donnell of NBC, an hour later, asked Mr. Trump about the First Amendment and its promise of freedom of the press, the president shrugged. “That’s fine,” he said. “But I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house.”
Lawyers for the barred news outlets disagreed, and eventually, so did a federal judge. But the seven-day saga that unfolded — a frenzied news cycle in itself, born of a single social media post — illustrated quite a bit about Mr. Trump’s complicated relationship with the press.
Since his earliest candidate days, when chants of “CNN sucks!” rang out at rallies, Mr. Trump has used the media as a reliable punching bag. And in his second term, he has drastically escalated his attacks, drawing on the levers of government — issuing subpoenas, seizing devices and using regulatory pressure — to intimidate outlets that displease him. Mr. Trump has also sought to bar The Associated Press from parts of the White House and started handpicking which journalists can attend certain events.
His abrupt White House ban was another novel effort to micromanage his coverage. And with Republicans worrying about a bleak midterm outlook, Mr. Trump’s allies seized the moment to rehash the usual complaints about a corrupt liberal media — perhaps a soothing topic for a president whose poll numbers have dipped.
But Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, had also threatened something he deems precious: his own television coverage.
By barring CNN outright, Mr. Trump threw a wrench into the White House TV pool, a group of five networks that share the responsibility of broadcasting the president’s daily events. On Monday, after a weekend of discussion, the networks, Fox News included, suspended their footage of Mr. Trump until CNN was reinstated, an exceedingly rare collective action by a famously rivalrous group.ImageSheets of paper attached to what looks like the side of a cabinet or locker say, “We Stand With AP” and “I Stand With AP, CNN, MS NOW, Politico.”
Television is Mr. Trump’s oxygen — he regularly scans the news channels with the aid of a DirecTV Genie HD DVR in his dining room — and his absence from the screen was notable. When he held an elaborate ceremony on the South Lawn on Monday to unveil a new helipad, one of his primary home improvement projects, audio problems marred the official White House video feed; Mr. Trump was stuck pantomiming as viewers heard only white noise.
The president got himself back on TV by joining Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York at a Monday news conference, which local TV crews captured. “They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me,” Mr. Trump said. Gesturing toward the cameras, he added, “Look at all that press.”
His return was short-lived. By Wednesday, the TV pool was still dark, and no major network carried footage of that day’s pomp-filled event: Mr. Trump welcoming President Xi Jinping of China with a red carpet at Joint Base Andrews.
As for the locked-out journalists, they argued their case to viewers — that a ban on the press was a disservice to the public — while their lawyers argued their case in court, calling the move unconstitutional. Around 1 a.m. on Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ordered the White House to “immediately” reinstate the barred outlets.
It took nearly 12 hours for the administration to comply. And without an assurance that CNN would be restored to the pool, the major networks kept up their boycott. The result was an ironic spectacle: American journalists locked out of the White House as Mr. Trump feted Mr. Xi, a dictatorial leader who has suppressed free speech.
“CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years,” the president complained on Thursday, using a nickname for MS NOW. He did not mention that his administration had barred the outlets from the White House grounds.
On Friday, both sides climbed down.
After the White House indicated that CNN could provide the pool camera for a midday event, the TV networks resumed normal operations. Shortly before noon, a CNN crew was rolling as Mr. Trump guided Mr. Xi, along with their wives, around the National Archives.
Among the documents that Mr. Trump pointed out: the original articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
By Saturday, tensions had resumed: The White House declined to let CNN travel aboard Air Force One with Mr. Trump, who planned to attend a college football game in Tennessee.
Once again, the TV pool went dark.
New York Times, White House Blocks CNN From Air Force One, Erik Wemple, Updated Sept. 26, 2026. CNN won’t be able to join President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee. He had banned CNN and two other news outlets from the White House, but a court order on Thursday restored their access.
The White House on Friday night blocked CNN from accompanying President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee, a network spokeswoman confirmed, in the latest twist in a weeklong standoff between Mr. Trump and the Washington press corps.
The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip. The TV pool, a rotating group of networks that share the work of filming the president’s daily activities, had boycotted those responsibilities this week after Mr. Trump first banned CNN from participating in the pool.
In a Friday night email detailing logistics for the Saturday trip, the White House did not list a primary television pool representative. The White House did not return a request for comment.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump continued to argue for banning the media from the White House. “Fake news should not be allowed in the White House!!! It has gone on far too long."
The tumult in White House coverage began a week ago, when Mr. Trump announced he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico in a social media post. Journalists for the outlets were denied access to White House grounds on Saturday. By Monday, the outlets had challenged the ban with a lawsuit in federal court.
Other news organizations made adjustments to their White House coverage in a show of solidarity with the banned news outlets. The TV pool suspended its work while CNN was banned from White House grounds, declining to film most of Mr. Trump’s visit this week with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore the journalists’ credentials “immediately.” And on Friday, the White House let CNN film Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi during an event at the National Archives in Washington. When it did, the TV pool resumed its coverage.
The media outlets’ lawsuit requested that the White House restore the level of access that they had before Mr. Trump’s ban. The judge’s order directed the White House to reinstate the journalists’ hard passes to enter the White House complex but didn’t explicitly address their pool rotations.
In a Thursday interview with CNN, Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer for the media outlets, said he believed the order required the White House to restore their pool assignments.Listen · 2:36 min
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is A Titanic F*ck Up, SCOTUS Bends The Knee (Again), Brutal New WSJ Polling, A Wave Is Coming, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 26, 2026. Hopium has added two new daily products for the home stretch - enjoy!
First up, a programming note. In the home stretch we will now be sending you a week day Ad and Video Roundup at 1215pm ET and hosting a live event with a battleground candidate or party leader around 115pm too. We’ve added this new programming to give you powerful new windows into the election in these final critical five plus weeks.
For your weekend listening and viewing pleasure you can review all the ads and videos of the week by heading to Friday’s Roundup: Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Turek (Iowa), Rutinel (CO-8), Villegas (CA-22), Luria (VA-2), Stelson (PA-10), Michigan Senate (SMP)
In what has been a week of very bad polling (here, here) for Trump and the Republicans yesterday their in house journal, the Wall Street Journal, delivered brutal new data: an eight point drop since their last poll (continued erosion, deterioration) and this remarkable snapshot from their polling dating back to 1990:
The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index updated its September findings with this searing summary yesterday: Consumer sentiment ticked down less than four index points in September, reaching the lowest reading in four months and down 15% from January 2026. Views of current and year-ahead expected personal finances both weakened about 10% this month, with concerns over high prices continuing to climb. Buying conditions for durables improved a bit, in part due to a perception that completing such purchases now would help consumers avoid higher prices in the future. The short-run outlook for business conditions plunged amid renewed worries that elevated fuel prices and re-escalating trade disputes could pass through to the economy as a whole. Overall, interviews reveal broad agreement across the political spectrum that the outlook for the economy has weakened since the beginning of the year. After particularly large declines in sentiment this month, Republican sentiment is now 20% lower than January 2026; Democrats are down 13% over the same period.Here’s how CNN covered the report:
Yes, my friends, every day in every way it is just true that Trump is a titanic f*ck up. SubscribedThe desperate effort by Republicans to “red wave” the battleground Senate races continues. Here’s an update on this illicit effort:
As part of the state parties’ New Battlefield Project - that this community has helped stand up -- I did a briefing this week for the comms directors of the state parties on the history of these illicit “red wave” efforts, what we are seeing this cycle, and offered some ideas on how to counter it all. The most important point -- polling and prediction markets are now a contested part of the comms/info space, and like any other part of the contested info space we must fight it out and win. Here’s a good example - Mary Peltola’s campaign leaning into her lead, showing her strong, winning, and in command:
In related news the state of New York sued prediction market Polymarket for operating as an “unregulated gambling” company. Here’s a bit more from the AP:
NEW YORK (AP) — New York sued the prediction market Polymarket on Thursday, arguing the platform is an unlicensed gambling operation and calling for a judge to block the company from operating in the state.
The lawsuit is the latest legal challenge from a state moving to rein in popular and now-ubiquitous betting apps that allow people to place wagers on most anything, including sports, weather, elections and technology.
Prediction market platforms have argued states do not have the authority to govern them because they are regulated at the federal level by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
New York officials filed Thursday’s lawsuit against Polymarket in state court and want the company to face fines and be forced to pay restitution to users because the platform did not get a gaming license from the state. The state has previously sued other platforms such as Kalshi, Coinbase and Gemini using a similar argument.
“By running an unlicensed gambling operation, Polymarket has done more than just knowingly violate state law, they have put New Yorkers at risk, especially those underage who are most vulnerable to problem gaming,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement.
Incredibly, despite general election early voting having already begun, the Supreme Court continues to make rulings impacting the election itself.
I share two articles from Democracy Docket for more, and I promise to return to the SAVE ruling in coming days:
• In SAVE ruling, Supreme Court signals path to weaken key protection against last-minute purges
• In a win for voters, Supreme Court blocks Missouri’s gerrymandered map for midterms
Let’s end today with a reminder of the what a lousy loser who loses Trump has become, and what an opportunity he has given us:
Happy Saturday all, and yes, it is now time to……Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses And Win The Midterms Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!
Three things you can do in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:• Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations.• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too. Our next training is this Wednesday, Sept 30th at 8pm ET.• Email photos of your electoral work or physical act of voting to
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: View in browserTrump’s MAGA Support Is Evaporating Even In Red States, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 26, 2026. Reports that Trump’s big midterm election rally tour to help Republicans has been reduced to the president appearing in red states and districts because the White House only wants to send Trump where he will get a warm welcome tell only part of the story.
It turns out that Trump is needed in those red states because his support is collapsing and threatening to take Republicans down with him.
Politico reported on Republicans hemorrhaging support in Trump’s adopted home state of Florida:
“I don’t think we are dead yet,” said one GOP county chair in Florida, granted anonymity to speak candidly as the party both nationally and in state has dismissed any possible concerns about the state of play. “We are not on life support. But we are hemorrhaging. The question is: Do we stop the bleeding now, or wait until we reach critical conditions?”
Also, the GOP voter registration advantage may not be as solid as it appears. An analysis of voter registration conducted by a GOP consultant shows that more than 70% of 5.6 million registered Republicans were enrolled with the party in 2022, the year that DeSantis won his reelection by almost 20 points. Nearly all the growth since then has come from people who switched from Democrat or were not signed up with any party.
In Florida, the problems for Republicans are much the same as they are nationally: the Iran war, inflation, gas prices, diesel prices, Hispanics flipping back to Democrats due to Trump’s immigration policies, and data centers.
When a Republican county chair is talking about the party hemorrhaging in the second-biggest red state in the country, the situation is dire for Republicans.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
New York Times, High Gas and Rising Mortgage Rates Trouble Trump as Midterms Near, Tony Romm, Sept. 26, 2026. As the president extolled the strength of the economy on the global stage, Americans continued to feel the sting of rising prices stemming from the war in Iran.
Gas prices climbed, mortgage costs soared and investors on Wall Street grew jittery this week, intensifying a political maelstrom surrounding President Trump with just over a month until voters cast their ballots in the 2026 midterm election.
For Americans stung by years of persistently high prices, the end of September brought little obvious relief, as a long unresolved war with Iran continued to ripple across the U.S. economy in ways that made the nation’s battle with inflation all the more vexing.
Oil prices whipsawed around $100 per barrel while costs at the pump remained high, with a gallon of gasoline reaching an average of nearly $4.50 nationally by Friday, according to AAA. The more concerning spike occurred in diesel, which topped $6.50 per gallon, raising the possibility that high transportation and shipping costs could make groceries and other goods more expensive soon, too.
The energy shock fanned fears of worsening inflation, which consequently sent yields on some government bonds to the highest level in more than two decades. That made federal borrowing more expensive, but the problem was not confined to Washington, as the sharp turn in yields also sent rates on 30-year mortgages surging above 7 percent by the week’s end.
The headwinds left many investors convinced that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates as soon as next month, which would be its second increase in as many meetings. But Mr. Trump spent much of the week trying to present the economy as a resounding success, citing a surge in investment and a boom in construction, driven in no small part by the exuberance around artificial intelligence.
Speaking at the United Nations, the president also raised the prospect that he could still yet escalate the war with Iran, now in its seventh month. While he reaffirmed his calls for Tehran’s disarmament, Mr. Trump nonetheless swatted away any concerns about the electoral implications of the conflict or its costs.
“I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran; it doesn’t even enter my mind,” Mr. Trump declared.
The comments offered a stark contrast with a growing roster of polls that show Americans now blame Mr. Trump for their financial woes. Even though the president maintains that the midterms have no bearing on his geopolitical strategy, the consequences of the ongoing conflict are now top of mind for most voters — raising the odds that they could exact revenge on Republicans this November.
“If you ask people what the economy is doing, their answer is what gas prices are doing,” said Michael Faulkender, who served at the Treasury Department under Mr. Trump and is now co-chair of a trade-focused initiative at the America First Policy Institute, a right-leaning group.
Mr. Faulkender acknowledged the ways in which those high gas prices had hurt some Americans, as he argued that the war with Iran would result in a safer world with more stable oil. Otherwise, he said, the economy is robust, thanks to a healthy labor market, strong growth and moderating prices in categories unaffected by war.
“And yet,” Mr. Faulkender continued, “voters say the economy is doing poorly. If you line up the generic ballot with gas prices, they line up really well together.”
Among most economists, the projection has remained largely unchanged: Inflation is likely to end the year above 3 percent, as geopolitical concerns accelerate price increases above the 2 percent target specified by the Federal Reserve
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, American Bar Association Fights to Keep Power to Vet Law Schools, Michael C. Bender, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). Losing its accreditation ability would be a blow to the nation’s largest association of lawyers and another example of how the Trump administration is reshaping higher education.
The American Bar Association is on the precipice of losing its power to accredit law schools after a federal advisory panel declined to take a position on whether to strip the group of that influential role.
The decision on the association’s accrediting power now rests with Nicholas Kent, the No. 2 official at the Education Department, who has been a key enforcer of the Trump administration’s bid to reshape academia. Mr. Kent has 90 days to decide whether to oust the group from its perch as the country’s gatekeeper of legal education, a role it has held since the 1950s.
Stripping the nation’s largest association of lawyers of its accrediting ability would be a significant blow to a group that has battled the Trump administration over its punishment of law firms, and open a new front in the administration’s pressure campaign on higher education.
A law school must be accredited under federal law for students to have access to billions of dollars in federal aid, including work-study programs and student loans available to law students. Most states require students to graduate from an accredited law school to practice law.
The bar association oversees about 200 juris doctorate programs in the country. It has been fighting with the federal government since last year, when it sued to stop the Trump administration from punishing law firms it did not like.
Earlier this month, Education Department employees urged the advisory panel to recommend stripping the role from the accreditation arm of the bar group. The agency argued that the accreditation arm had failed to demonstrate that it was operating on a “separate and independent” basis from the larger association, as required under federal law.
The bar association and its accreditation arm have both said they follow federal rules on independence.
The advisory panel, known as the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, regularly reviews all school accreditations. It remained deadlocked on the American Bar Association after two days of hearings, ultimately agreeing on Thursday to send no recommendation to Mr. Kent. Instead, the panel asked Mr. Kent, the under secretary of education, to review the transcript of the hearing.
The panel’s longtime representatives and staff members said they could not recall a time when they had failed to reach a majority decision on a recommendation. The panel’s 18 members are appointed by the education secretary, the Senate president and the House speaker, with several appointees recommended by minority party lawmakers.
Later on Thursday, the advisory panel voted to recommended that Mr. Kent suspend accreditation power for one year from the American Psychological Association, which accredits hundreds of graduate and postgraduate training programs. The panel cited concerns about what it said was a failure from the A.P.A. to “address the pervasive culture of antisemitism within the programs that it accredits.”
Dr. Aaron Joyce, the executive lead psychologist for the American Psychological Association Commission on Accreditation, said the group “strongly disagrees” with the recommendation and the panel’s accusations of antisemitism, adding that it would conduct an internal review.
“Antisemitism is a pernicious, dangerous and abhorrent bigotry with an ugly history in our country,” Dr. Joyce said. “It is unacceptable for anyone to feel unwelcome or excluded in our professional community, and our commitment to a profession that is safe and inclusive for everyone is absolute.”
Melissa Hart, the chairwoman of the bar association’s accreditation agency, said the group would continue to work with the Education Department.
“We take our accreditation and our recognition as an accreditor very seriously,” she said.
On the 2024 campaign trail, President Trump referred to accreditation as his “secret weapon” to take on academia, and vowed to “fire the radical left accreditors.”
Democratic lawmakers and law professors have said the focus on the bar association was political retribution after the group sued the Trump administration last year over its pressure campaign on law firms.
“These attacks are driven by the administration’s desire to exert increased government control over universities, and to punish lawyers for challenging the administration and representing clients opposed to Trump,” said Jenny S. Breen, an associate law professor at Syracuse University. “The theme here is the goal of increased government control over traditionally independent spheres of life in the United States.”
A White House spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An Education Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
At the hearing on Thursday, Zakiya Smith Ellis, a former New Jersey education secretary and a member of the advisory panel, said that a recent change to the Education Department’s recommendation process gave more influence to political appointees.
“There has been a concern across the Trump administration about political pressure,” Ms. Smith Ellis said, adding that she had “no way of knowing” how much input political appointees had on the department’s recommendation to strip the bar association’s accrediting power.
Universities seek accreditation from independent groups, which perform a deep, internal evaluation of a school’s programs, student services and academic outcomes, measured against the accreditor’s standards. Accreditation agencies, such as the bar association, face regular review by the Education Department.
If the bar association loses its vetting powers, law schools would have to cobble together different forms of accreditation.
Law schools attached to universities could rely on their school’s institutional accrediting body. Education Department officials said about a half-dozen stand-alone, independent law schools do not have accreditation from regional bodies. But they said that they expected those schools to find other accreditation.
The bigger blow appeared to be aimed at the bar association, which was founded in Chicago nearly 150 years ago.
The association, which has battled the Education Department and the advisory panel multiple times in the past 20 years, tried to curry favor with the Trump administration earlier this month by repealing its diversity requirement for law schools.
But whether that concession would be enough to save its accreditation powers remained unclear. Bar association officials on Wednesday maintained that they were in compliance with federal regulations.
“We think we have the right focus,” said Daniel Thies, who until recently was the chair of the bar association’s accreditation agency.
Half of the panel was in favor of extending time to the bar association on compliance issues.
But other members of the advisory panel said they were uncomfortable with what they viewed as too cozy of a relationship between the association’s accreditation body and the association itself.
Arthur Keiser, an advisory panel member who manages the operations of about two dozen Keiser University campuses in Florida and abroad, said the association’s accreditation body had a history of noncompliance with federal standards. He supported stripping the group’s power.
“They have been out of compliance for a long time,” Mr. Keiser said. “I don’t feel sorry for them.”
New York Times, Prosecutor Resigns, Saying U.S. Attorney Mishandled Chicago Protest Case, Danny Hakim and Nicole Hong, Sept. 25, 2026. The prosecutor (shown above receiving a previous civic service award) said that U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros had intervened and overruled her in the case against a group of protesters known as the “Broadview Six.”
The former lead prosecutor in a high-profile Trump administration case against anti-ICE protesters retired this week and accused Chicago’s U.S. attorney of pushing unwarranted felony charges.
In a resignation letter dated Thursday, the prosecutor, Sheri H. Mecklenburg, said that U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros had personally intervened and overruled her objections in the failed case against a group of protesters known as the “Broadview Six.”
The move escalates the turmoil inside the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, where a wave of veteran prosecutors has quit over what some of them believed to be pressure to charge certain cases.
The case Ms. Mecklenburg referred to involved protesters outside the Broadview immigrant detention center who were arrested last year and accused of interfering with a federal agent. Prosecutors in Chicago twice failed to persuade a grand jury to indict the protesters; such failures were rare in federal cases before the second Trump administration.
Mr. Boutros addressed the grand jurors before they weighed the case a third time and finally brought an indictment. A federal judge ultimately admonished Mr. Boutros’s office for its handling of the case, the charges were dismissed and the lead prosecutor, Ms. Mecklenburg, was reassigned.
After her resignation Thursday, Ms. Mecklenburg formally asked a judge to let her intervene as an independent party in the case, a highly unusual move.
Although the six protesters are no longer facing charges, the case is continuing. Several of the defendants have pressed Judge April M. Perry, who oversaw the case, to determine whether there are grounds for sanctions against prosecutors. They have also asked that a special counsel conduct an investigation. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
In the scathing resignation letter that was obtained by The Times, Ms. Mecklenburg said she was “retiring under protest,” because she had been threatened with discipline or termination if she tried to intervene and defend herself against misconduct allegations.
Mr. Boutros has said his office is reviewing its handling of the grand jury cases. In her letter, Ms. Mecklenburg accused him of trying to blame her for the implosion of the prosecution.
“You sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges,” she wrote in the letter.
The Justice Department said in a statement that “the claim that Mecklenburg proposed a misdemeanor and was told instead to file a felony charge is false.” The department added that Ms. Mecklenburg had made a “recommendation in writing” to supervisors that included a felony charge.
Ms. Mecklenburg, in a separate court filing by her attorneys, acknowledged mistakes, including talking to grand jurors outside the grand jury room. But she also said that she brought the case back to the grand jury after its initially rejection only because Mr. Boutros told her to. The filing also said that she kept the office’s leaders apprised of what she was doing “at every turn.”
Shortly after the filing Thursday, lawyers for the Broadview defendants backed Ms. Mecklenburg’s motion to intervene, saying that she “clearly has substantial information that is directly relevant and material.” Nancy DePodesta, one of those lawyers, said, “We welcome her voice as we continue to seek the truth about the prosecution of our clients.”
The Broadview defendants’ lawyers specifically cited Ms. Mecklenburg’s disclosure that Mr. Boutros had personally ordered up an expedited transcript of a failed grand jury session and directed that it be circulated among the office leadership.
The disclosure appeared to contradict statements from Mr. Boutros’s office. The office said in a filing last month that Mr. Boutros had been emailed a copy of the transcript, but had no recollection of reviewing it.
The collapse of the Broadview Six case became a highly public example of how courts responded to the Trump administration’s pursuit of criminal charges against protesters.
A Times review this year of 550 assault charges brought against immigrants and protesters arrested in the sweep found nearly half of the cases that had concluded either ended in dismissals or acquittals, a record far worse than the typical standards of federal prosecutions.
Mr. Boutros’s tenure as Chicago’s top federal prosecutor has been marred by controversies and criticism. The heads of all seven sections of the office’s criminal division have departed, as have many successors and deputies. At one point, more than 100 former prosecutors from the office signed a letter assailing the office’s direction under Mr. Boutros.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Andrew Boutros’ Hot-and-Cold Privilege Claims, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 25, 2026. I will have more to say about why Andrew Boutros so aggressively denied the claim — in Sheri Mecklenburg’s retirement letter, which I first saw published by NYT and Chicago Tribune — that he directed her to pursue a felony charge after she recommended a misdemeanor.
She wrote: "You recklessly agreed in court that I had committed misconduct without even asking for my account, fully reviewing the record or briefing the law. That evening, you sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges."
For now, though, I want to note how selective Boutros’ office is being about its claim all this is privileged.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Antifa Goes to SCOTUS, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 26, 2026. Minnesota Spying, Weaponized DOJ.
Kyle Wagner, the performatively Antifa guy charged in Michigan on a ridiculous stalking charge and in Minnesota as the narrative hook for the MN-15 conspiracy prosecution, filed for cert at SCOTUS yesterday. He is appealing a decision in the Sixth Circuit to override the decision by Michigan Judge Denise Page Hood to release Wagner from pretrial detention.
Days earlier, he successfully asked for a detention hearing in Minnesota.
The SCOTUS appeal aims to address a circuit split in the way the Bail Reform Act applies around the country.
The Bail Reform Act of 1984 authorizes the detention of a person charged with a criminal offense pending trial if a “judicial officer finds that no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure the appearance of the person” for trial “and the safety of any other person and the community.” 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e)(1), (f).
If the detainee or the government disagrees with the district court’s judgment on that issue, they may “appeal from a release or detention order,” and ask the court of appeals to review that decision. Id. § 3145(c). But “[t]he circuits have long been split on just how searching that review is.” United States v. Wilks, 15 F.4th 842, 847 (7th Cir. 2021). “Some courts” apply de novo review, others apply “the clearly erroneous or other highly deferential standard,” and still others occupy a middle ground, conducting “independent review” tempered by “deference” to the district court. United States v. O’Brien, 895 F.2d 810, 812-814 (1st Cir. 1990).
The question presented is:
Whether an appellate court should review a district court’s order granting or denying pretrial release de novo—as the Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have held—or whether the appellate court owes some deference to the district court’s determination, as the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and D.C. Circuits have held?
Both the Sixth (where Michigan is) and the Eighth (where Minnesota is) Circuits, along with three other circuits, review detention appeals without given much consideration to the District Court Judge who reviewed the evidence closely said. When Sixth Circuit Trump appointee Whitney Hermandorfer overturned Judge Page Hood’s decision in August, Biden appointee Rachel Bloomekatz wrote at length about this circuit split when addressing the standard of review, which Wagner’s attorneys raise in the cert petition.
As Judge Bloomekatz explained in dissent, the majority’s approach placed the Sixth Circuit on the wrong side of the widely-acknowledged circuit split.
Artificial Intelligence
New York Times, OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue, Kate Conger, Ana Swanson and Cecilia Kang, Sept. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The company did not learn until recently that its technology had meddled with websites for the Education and Commerce Departments and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes.
The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C. were confirmed by OpenAI, which said it was continuing to investigate the situation with the Department of Education. The San Francisco company said it had notified the government agencies in recent weeks that its A.I. agents — which are bots that can act autonomously — interacted with their sites in unusual ways.
With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said. The A.I. also pulled data from the Census Bureau website, which is housed at the Commerce Department, using login credentials it found online. Separately, OpenAI’s agents shared public data from the S.E.C. website on an online forum.
None of the incidents were breaches, OpenAI said, but were examples of its technology’s behaving in unexpected and concerning ways. The company recently discovered the occurrences while conducting a review of hacks carried out by its technology, including an attack on an Australian government website in June and on the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July.
The revelation of the U.S. government website incidents adds to the growing number of situations when A.I. agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have misbehaved and hacked or tried to breach companies, universities and government organizations. In some cases, the A.I. attacks were successful; the technology failed in other instances. In all the cases, the makers of the technology did not learn what their A.I. had been up to until afterward.
New York Times, How OpenAI’s Rogue A.I. Agents Tried to Trick a Robot Detector, Dylan Freedman, Graphic by Keith Collins, Sept. 26, 2026 (print ed.). A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.
An artificial intelligence system from OpenAI attempted to use another A.I. model to evade a robot detection test as it tried over and over to break into a company’s computers, according to a report released on Friday by a Bay Area start-up.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that its A.I. agents went rogue and hacked the software company Hugging Face. Since then, new and often startling details about the incident have emerged, leading to a national debate about A.I. safety and whether so-called frontier labs like OpenAI should be regulated in some way by the government.
Now, the report from engineers from the start-up, called Parse, and other researchers offers one of the most comprehensive public accounts of the Hugging Face hack: a tranche of nearly one million links from internet link-shortening services that OpenAI’s agents created from July 9 through July 13 in order to help conduct the cyberattack.
These shortened addresses encoded bits of information that the agents chained together to attempt complex attacks, such as solving CAPTCHAs, the tests that websites use to block access by robots. The agents also tapped into other A.I. models, like early versions of ChatGPT and Claude, and attempted to search through and download private messages from Hugging Face’s internal Slack, a messaging service for employees.
While it is not clear if these attempts were successful, the report offers new insight into what these A.I. agents were planning to do, without any human involvement.
Other A.I. companies, including Meta, Google and Anthropic, have also acknowledged similar incidents involving their A.I. models in recent weeks. But while the full extent of rogue activity by OpenAI’s A.I. agents is still unclear, what is already publicly known dwarfs the incidents involving the other companies.
OpenAI has acknowledged that its A.I. agents targeted several more websites and services, including a German online forum the A.I. agents turned into a message board, and the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
“This is just not anywhere near a one-off,” said Alex Forman, the founder of Parse. “It is warning shot after warning shot.”
Parse engineers discovered the data by combing public links on the internet after they initially thought OpenAI’s agents may have utilized their own platform, a service that converts websites into data that can be used by developers. (The agents did not use Parse.)
More On Global Health, Media, Education Issues
New York Times, U.S. Rejects U.N. Declaration on Preparing for Future Pandemics, Arpoorva Mandavilli, Sept. 26, 2026 (print ed.). Most member nations spoke in support of the declaration, but some rich countries had strong objections.
The United States and the European Union on Friday rejected a declaration by member countries of the United Nations that pledged international collaboration and solidarity in preparing for and responding to pandemics.
The declaration, the product of a high-level U.N. meeting on pandemic preparedness, is largely ceremonial. It is not legally binding, and does not set rules for what countries should do during pandemics. But its universal endorsement would have signaled a powerful expression of global political commitment to the issue.
Its rejection by some of the wealthiest countries sharpened the divide that became apparent during the coronavirus pandemic, when low-income nations lagged richer countries by more than a year in being able to provide vaccines to citizens.
The declaration will now be considered at a future meeting of the General Assembly, where it is still likely to garner enough votes to be adopted.
The reasons for the disagreements varied. The European Union said the document crossed “red lines” on intellectual property protections, and that “technology transfer must be voluntary and on mutually agreed terms.”
The Trump administration’s objections were more along ideological lines. Representing the United States at the session, Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that despite some meaningful revisions, the document included “divisive ideologies that lack definitional consensus,” adding that “the United States is not in a position to support this text in full.”
She did not clarify what those ideologies were, but in an early draft viewed by The New York Times, the United States asked to delete mentions of equity, solidarity and universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services. U.S. officials suggested edits throughout the process that would have made the Trump administration more comfortable with the language, according to one official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration last year, the United States has refused to sign onto a number of public health declarations. At a U.N. meeting last year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the message that the United States would not sign a political declaration on chronic diseases and mental health, saying that the U.N. was exceeding its “proper role” and that it promoted abortion and “radical gender ideology.” Earlier this year, the United States was the lone vote against a global commitment to reduce traffic accidents, saying road safety was being used “as a backdoor vehicle to enforce global climate pacts.”
Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that despite some meaningful revisions, the document still included “divisive ideologies that lack definitional consensus.”Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times
Representatives of some countries like India and Germany also voiced qualms about the declaration’s text, but did not go so far as to reject it. Like the United States, Italy explicitly rejected the document.
“It is disappointing that the high level meeting was not asked to endorse the political declaration which had been negotiated by member states,” said Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand and a co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
“Agreeing to collaborate to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics should not be controversial,” she said.
Peter Maybarduk, the director of access to medicines for the advocacy group Public Citizen, said the administration’s stance was detrimental to the interests of Americans.
“Blocking stepped-up cooperation against pandemics is an obvious shortsighted, unforced error,” he said. “The White House loves to talk about making other countries do their fair share, but it’s missing a chance to help that happen here, just to serve a myopic ideology.”
Others were more sanguine. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said at a press briefing on Friday that it was “not a problem” for the declaration to be voted on and adopted at a future meeting. “It’s democracy in action,” he said.
Friday’s meeting came three years after the first major U.N. meeting on pandemic preparedness, when the lessons from Covid were still raw. The 2023 declaration, which the Biden administration supported, recognized “the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries.”
Last year, after several rounds of failed negotiations, member nations of the W.H.O. — which no longer includes the United States — agreed to the text of a pandemic treaty that would allow for a more coordinated and equitable response to global outbreaks. But that treaty cannot be ratified and become international law until the countries can agree to the most contentious section, called Pathogen Access and Benefits Sharing.
That agreement would require countries to swiftly share genetic sequences and samples of emerging pathogens, allowing for rapid development of diagnostic tests, vaccines and treatments. Low-income nations want to be compensated for the information with quick and equitable access to the new tools, but higher-income nations have said they worry such arrangements would hinder progress in fast-moving crises and jeopardize intellectual property rights.
“A path must be found through the current impasse in negotiations,” Ms. Clark implored member nations in her opening remarks.
The administration’s rejection of the new U.N. declaration did not come as a surprise. Pandemic-related events during U.N. General Assembly sessions in New York this week were abuzz with rumors that U.S. officials would raise objections during Friday’s meeting. The only uncertainty seemed to be the timing and intensity of their disapproval.
New York Times, Cambridge Abandons Plans to Fully Investigate Its Hiring of Jason Arday, Mara Hvistendahl, Sept. 25, 2026. The professor had catalyzed debates over diversity efforts in higher education.
The University of Cambridge has abandoned plans to fully investigate its hiring of Jason Arday, the professor who became a lightning rod in the debate over diversity-and-inclusion efforts in higher education, following his abrupt death last month.
Instead, the university said, the inquiry will examine whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative. Dr. Arday may come up as part of a broader look at university hiring practices, but he will not be a focus.
That marks an abrupt shift from the plan announced this summer, when the school’s vice chancellor, Deborah Prentice, promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into Dr. Arday’s appointment.
Dr. Arday died last month amid intense scrutiny of his biography and a deluge of personal, sometimes racist, taunts online. No official cause of death has been released, but his family said that the “campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason.”
The change in investigative focus means that Cambridge may never publicly address questions about how it vetted Dr. Arday for a senior teaching job and why it repeatedly downplayed concerns about his work and biography.
Sept. 25
Top Headlines
Pro Publica's account of Vladimir Putin-aligned Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev’s payment for Don Jr.’s lavish wedding reception rocked the White House and even shattered the usual MAGA solidarity front. The two are shown above in separate file photos, with Kremlev, an ex-con crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin and now head of a boxing association, above right and at the rear of the younger Trump's wedding photo.Trump’s flunkies first denied anyone in Trump’s regime knew who he was. Now Trump insists the money was repaid. (Anyone got a receipt?) It’s all too little, too late.
A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).
Sept. 25, 2026. Graft, self-dealing, and illegal money-grubbing have sloshed through all three branches of government, convincing nearly 90 percent of Americans that corruption is widespread. But without the dogged investigative journalism from the nonprofit news site ProPublica, much of this would have gone undetected (e.g., Supreme Court justices’ financial nondisclosure and gifts). In just the last couple of weeks, ProPublica unveiled two more blockbuster investigations.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Iran Proposes 7-Day Plan to End War, Farnaz Fassihi and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). Under the offer, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen and nuclear talks would be revived.News Roundups
Sept. 25, 2026. This is one of the more important updates I’ve sent since starting this project. What follows isn’t a routine roundup of headlines, it’s a look at a coordinated, multi-front assault on the machinery of the 2026 midterms itself: a Supreme Court ruling that arms a flawed federal database, allies of the president openly floating martial law, and county election officials across the country now running drills for federal interference at the polls. This is civics in real time, the part of our education most Americans never got, and it’s the difference between watching this unfold and knowing what to do about it.Sept. 24, 2026. Trump’s own coalition is starting to fracture in public. A taxpayer-funded ad declaring “America will never be a communist country” is drawing federal ethics complaints, MAGA loyalists are furious he’s rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping days after warning voters about socialism, a sitting Republican senator wants Trump Jr. investigated over a Putin-linked oligarch bankrolling his wedding, and even Tucker Carlson is now saying Trump’s own Cabinet should have removed him under the 25th Amendment.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Sept. 25, 2026. After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.More On U.S. Immigration Policy, Law, Rights, Costs
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
At 10:07 this morning, Donald Trump emerged from the South Portico doors of the White House, gripping First Lady Melania Trump’s hand with one of his own bruised and deeply discolored hands while the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets played in the background.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
MS NOW, Opinion: Republicans are winning the midterms cash race — but money can’t buy them love, Hayes Brown, right, 
Sept. 25, 2026. The GOP holds a major cash advantage over Democrats, but there’s likely no amount they can spend to persuade voters to ignore their own economic pain.Red dollar signs surround a blue smiley face in an illustration about money and voter sentiment ahead of the midterms.More On Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine, Reactions
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China standing with their spouses outside the White House in front of American and Chinese flags. President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House was celebrated with pomp and circumstance that were not covered by American television networks, which were still boycotting the White House press pool (New York Times photo by Haiyun Jiang).
Top Stories
Pro Publica's account of Vladimir Putin-aligned Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev’s payment for Don Jr.’s lavish wedding reception rocked the White House and even shattered the usual MAGA solidarity front. The two are shown above in separate file photos, with Kremlev, an ex-con crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin and now head of a boxing association, above right and at the rear of the younger Trump's wedding photo.Trump’s flunkies first denied anyone in Trump’s regime knew who he was. Now Trump insists the money was repaid. (Anyone got a receipt?) It’s all too little, too late.
A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).
The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted Reporting, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 25, 2026. Graft, self-dealing, and illegal money-grubbing have sloshed through all three branches of government, convincing nearly 90 percent of Americans that corruption is widespread. But without the dogged investigative journalism from the nonprofit news site ProPublica, much of this would have gone undetected (e.g., Supreme Court justices’ financial nondisclosure and gifts). In just the last couple of weeks, ProPublica unveiled two more blockbuster investigations.www.propublica.org
Its account of Vladimir Putin-aligned Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev’s payment for Don Jr.’s lavish wedding reception rocked the White House and even shattered the usual MAGA solidarity front. Trump’s flunkies first denied anyone in Trump’s regime knew who he was. Now Trump insists the money was repaid. (Anyone got a receipt?) It’s all too little, too late.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), who will inherit the gavel on House Oversight if Democrats win the majority, wrote to Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, citing the details laid out in ProPublica’s report: “Despite only having met Mr. Trump in September 2025— less than a year before the wedding in question—[Umar] Kremlev reportedly paid to rent out one of the private islands used for the wedding that typically costs $100,000 per night, along with other expensive items, such as a $70,000 fireworks show.”
He continued:
The secretive, close relationship between the son of a sitting U.S. President and a member of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s inner circle raises serious national security and public corruption concerns. A Russian oligarch reportedly financing parts of a lavish wedding for the owner of multiple firms holding Department of Defense contracts is all the more disturbing. Given that Mr. Trump reportedly advises his father, the President of the United States, on issues of national security and vetting White House personnel, any possible foreign entanglement deserves close scrutiny.
Garcia demanded documents and answers, requests that the White House will undoubtedly ignore. More importantly, he apparently told Wiles to “preserve all documents, communications, and other materials” relevant to the potential investigation, putting anyone who might destroy evidence or interfere with Congress in legal jeopardy.
The facts are disturbing enough that even some Republicans are upset. Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) wrote to Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to demand an inquiry “into potential misuses of presidential family relationships for financial benefit, preferential treatment, or special access to certain people.”
Nominally citing Republicans’ years-old complaints about Hunter Biden, Curtis focused heavily on “the relationships of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts.” He too relied on ProPublica’s reports about “a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.” Curtis added:
These concerns are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting. This pattern extends to his significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
These reports raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president’s family and whether such relationships can create actual or perceived expectations of favorable treatment. They also may create expectations of a returned favor that would not be in the best interests of the American people or our allies, and could even create national security vulnerabilities.
Perhaps hoping to give Trump (and Republicans) some cover, he pleaded, “The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president. Nor should congressional oversight begin and end when control of the White House changes hands.”
In other words, Curtis is issuing a warning that things will go much worse for Trump if Democrats unilaterally run with the ball and focus exclusively on Don Jr. This White House surely won’t take him up on his invitation to get ahead of the story, but the dam may be about to break. By Tuesday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) had joined Curtis’s call to investigate.Subscribed
Then this week, ProPublica dropped another shocking story, this time concerning an extensive FBI investigation involving Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the perennially “concerned,” phony moderate (who confirmed two justices to the Supreme Court that destroyed abortion rights).
ProPublica’s report detailed a 2019 meeting between Scott Reed, head of the Collins Super PAC, and three executives from defense contractor Navatek — which Collins had helped “land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine.” ProPublica reported that Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation, although “[g]overnment contractors are banned from making political contributions,” and any offer of “donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.” The account explained:
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Kao, who faced charges for illegal campaign contributions (and had his own credibility issues), spilled his story to the FBI, which “opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation… [and] sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.” But the FBI didn’t get very far, since the Trump regime “eviscerated” public corruption investigations and enlisted law enforcement to go after his enemies.
Collins’s office now “vigorously” denies wrongdoing. Neither she nor anyone on her staff was ever charged. However, she will face intense pressure to answer questions about the story.
Her opponent in the Senate race, Troy Jackson, pounced. “This is corruption of the highest order. Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up,” he alleged. “No wonder she voted with him 96% of the time and has rubberstamped his agenda to hurt Maine.” He continued, “Susan Collins doesn’t care that we’re losing our health care, that ICE is killing people on the streets, and that we’ve been dragged into a pointless war — as long as her donors get their contracts and her coffers get filled. We deserve answers about every contract and every conversation that Collins and her team facilitated on the backs of taxpayers. The jig is up.”
Without ProPublica’s work, neither of these corruption stories would have come to light. Its undaunted, unbiased, and unrelenting effort to expose wrongdoing and shine a bright light on public and private corruption deserves Americans’ deep gratitude. The outlet is a national treasure.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Iran Proposes 7-Day Plan to End War, Farnaz Fassihi and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). Under the offer, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen and nuclear talks would be revived.
Iran’s foreign minister said Thursday that Tehran had proposed to Washington a seven-day plan to cease hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and then begin comprehensive talks on his country’s nuclear program.
Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, told reporters at a press briefing at the United Nations General Assembly that the proposal closely mirrored the commitments laid out in a so-called memorandum of understanding that was struck between the United States and Iran in June but quickly unraveled.
He said Iran was ready to begin putting the plan into effect as soon as Washington agreed to it.
“We have introduced a plan to the United States through the intermediators that if certain conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz would be open on the end of the seventh day and talks would restart,” Mr. Araghchi said.
He said “it would be better,” if a deal was reached before the U.S. midterm elections.
An American official familiar with the talks said that the administration was having positive and constructive discussions through mediators, but that the United States was not going to rush into a deal.
The Iranian proposal came even as President Trump and Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, delivered mutually hostile speeches at the United Nations. Mr. Trump threatened Iran with “annihilation” if it did not strike a deal, while a defiant Mr. Pezeshkian told world leaders his country would not be bullied.
Though Iran’s proposal contains many of the same conditions of the deal that fell apart, the behind-the-scenes diplomacy suggested that both sides may see much to gain from finding an off-ramp from the war.
Iranian officials said that while the proposal was effectively the same as the memorandum of understanding made in June, it was designed to move at a much faster pace. In the earlier agreement, a 60-day time frame was set for reaching nuclear negotiations.
Under the conditions that Iran has set for the agreement, according to Mr. Araghchi, during the seven days all hostilities would end, including in Lebanon; the U.S. would release Iran’s frozen assets — estimated at least $12 billion — waive sanctions on Iranian oil and lift the naval blockade on Iran. Then, on the last day, the Strait of Hormuz would be opened.
After the seven days, Mr. Aragchi said, comprehensive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program would immediately begin. Mr. Trump has said that his top goal is for Iran not to have a nuclear weapon, and that he would either achieve that through a diplomatic deal or with more attacks.
The United States and Iran have been at war for nearly seven months. It began in late February when the United States and Israel launched airstrikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and military chain of command. Mr. Trump initially said the war would take only a few weeks
The war has had widespread global repercussions including on oil, energy and food prices.
The Iranian proposal came as U.S. negotiators have tried to jump start diplomacy with Iran on its nuclear program through talks on the sidelines of the United Nations assembly. The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said a three-hour meeting, mediated by Qatar, between U.S. and Iranian officials did not end in a breakthrough.
Mr. Araghchi, who will be in New York until next Monday, met on Tuesday with the U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of Mr. Trump’s. It was mediated by Qataris passing messages between the two sides, and Mr. Araghchi described it as “productive” and said the messaging continued.
Ismaeil Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry who is also in New York, said that it was possible that there would be more mediated meetings in the coming days.
Iran’s economy is under serious strain, and Iranians are suffering from skyrocketing inflation on basic food items, a shortage of medicine and disruptions to commerce.
Analysts said that Mr. Trump would have to weigh the benefits of reaching a deal with Iran before the midterms against keeping a chokehold on its economy in the hope of getting more concessions from Tehran.
“This is a smart move,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group. “They know it’s very tempting for President Trump because it ends an unpopular war and brings down energy prices in the run-up the midterms. But it also restores a deal that was largely favorable to the Iranians. A compressed timeline to get to the nuclear issue should be appealing to an impatient president.”
New York Times, Senate Defeats Bid to Direct Trump to End Iran War or Seek Approval, Robert Jimison, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The vote came as a growing number of Republicans have broken from President Trump on the conflict, reflecting voters’ concerns ahead of midterm elections.
The Senate on Thursday narrowly rejected an effort to direct President Trump to end the war in Iran unless he wins authorization for it, defeating a measure aimed at rebuking his handling of a conflict he has continued to wage despite repeated votes by Congress to halt it.
The resolution, which passed the House over the summer, failed 50 to 49, with four Republicans — Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — joining Democrats in support. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the lone Democrat to oppose the measure.
Mr. Tillis was the newest Republican to break with his party over the war, joining a small bloc that has challenged Mr. Trump’s authority to continue directing the conflict without congressional approval.
But Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who had previously voted with G.O.P. defectors to curtail Mr. Trump’s war powers, switched his position and sided with the majority of his party on Thursday, leaving the resolution short of the support to pass.
It was the 20th vote on such a resolution since the war began on Feb. 28.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Major Friday Update: Full Throttled Assault on the Midterms, Trump Rolls Back Enforcement of Racial Desegregation, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 25, 2026. This is one of the more important updates I’ve sent since starting this project. What follows isn’t a routine roundup of headlines, it’s a look at a coordinated, multi-front assault on the machinery of the 2026 midterms itself: a Supreme Court ruling that arms a flawed federal database, allies of the president openly floating martial law, and county election officials across the country now running drills for federal interference at the polls. This is civics in real time, the part of our education most Americans never got, and it’s the difference between watching this unfold and knowing what to do about it.
So before you read any further, go check your voter registration. I’ll get into exactly why that matters below. And if this newsletter has been useful to you, this is the moment to subscribe, because the next several weeks are about to ramp up fast and I need your support today to get this news to millions.Subscribed
Here’s the news:
A Coordinated, Multi-Front Assault on the 2026 Midterms Is Already Underway, and the Clock Is Running Out:
The Supreme Court just handed the Trump administration a powerful new tool to purge voters weeks before Americans go to the polls, and it is the legal backbone of everything that follows. On Friday, the Court allowed DHS to deploy an expansive citizenship database combining Social Security numbers and other sensitive records, over a blistering dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning it clears the way for states to cancel the registrations of lawfully naturalized citizens. Texas has already used a version of the system to flag 2,700 voters as potential noncitizens, of whom 578 were confirmed U.S. citizens flagged in error, a error rate that should alarm anyone paying attention. This ruling doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s the tool that makes every other front in this fight more dangerous: the database election officials are now bracing for, the mechanism critics say could be paired with claims of “rigged” results, and the infrastructure sitting on top of a voter registration system in Texas that’s already failing tens of thousands of people by accident, before anyone even tries to weaponize it.
Image
At the same time, people inside Trump’s own orbit are openly floating martial law if Republicans lose Congress, and the SAVE database gives that threat a paper trail to point to. Attorney Peter Ticktin, who has Trump’s ear, says the choice this fall is stark: “either martial law, or step aside,” dismissing concerns about resulting unrest by pointing to the size of the U.S. armed forces. This isn’t fringe chatter, it echoes Trump’s own documented pattern of pushing to nationalize elections and his stated regret at not deploying the National Guard to seize voting equipment after 2020. What makes this especially dangerous now is that the newly-approved database supplies exactly the kind of manufactured “evidence,” flagged voters, disputed citizenship records, that allies like Ticktin need to claim a Democratic win was rigged. Legal experts flatly reject the idea that emergency powers grant this authority, but that hasn’t stopped the rhetoric from escalating at events like the “Storm Summit,” where the martial law scenario is being normalized as a legitimate outcome rather than treated as the last resort of a losing candidate.
Election officials across the country are no longer preparing for ordinary Election Day chaos, they are preparing for the federal government itself, and the SAVE ruling is now part of their tabletop exercises. County clerks in South Carolina, Texas, Michigan and beyond are running simulations on ICE agents at polling places, federal attempts to seize ballots, and how the newly-authorized citizenship database could be used to challenge voters in real time. Nevada’s secretary of state described assembling “the Mad Libs of legal filings,” pre-drafted lawsuits with blanks for the jurisdiction and defendant, ready to file the moment a real crisis, including a database-driven purge, hits. Democratic district attorneys in places like Travis County, Texas describe this as an entirely new category of work, one local prosecutors “have not historically been accustomed to.” That officials responsible for running elections now treat federal interference and flawed federal data as a live, combined possibility, rather than two separate remote risks, shows how seriously this threat is being taken from the inside.
Congress and legal advocates are scrambling to build a defense before Election Day, precisely because the Supreme Court just removed one of the last barriers standing in the way. The Elias Law Group has already challenged Trump’s voter suppression strategy in court, House Administration Committee Democrats are preparing for fights over the seating of members, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Election Protection Task Force has run simulations covering National Guard troops at polling places and the kind of database-driven voter challenges the new ruling now permits. Former DCCC chair Steve Israel, who spent years anticipating ordinary political attacks, says he never once prepared for “a president who seemed ready, willing, and able to subvert an election itself,” and draws a direct line from the 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot” to January 6th as evidence that manufactured chaos for political leverage is a long-running playbook now operating at a far more dangerous scale, and with a Supreme Court-sanctioned data tool behind it. His warning is blunt: guardrails do not defend themselves, people do, and that work has to happen now, in public, before a close race turns every procedural dispute into a full-blown emergency.
Every thread here reinforces the others, and the Supreme Court’s ruling is the connective tissue running through all of it. A citizenship database that mistakenly flags real citizens as ineligible, a president’s own allies floating martial law as a legitimate contingency built on exactly that kind of disputed data, county officials rehearsing for federal agents at the polls, and a voter registration system in Texas already failing tens of thousands of people by accident, are not five unrelated stories. They are the same pressure applied at every level of the system at once, courts, the executive branch, state administration, and the rhetoric shaping what millions of Americans will accept as normal on November 3rd, all now amplified by a Friday ruling that gives the federal government its biggest foothold yet. With early voting starting in a matter of weeks, the window to build public awareness, legal readiness, and institutional resistance is closing fast, and the people sounding the alarm, from Supreme Court dissenters to former members of Congress to county election clerks, are not being alarmist. They’re describing what is already in motion.
Iran Proposes Seven-Day Plan to Reopen Strait of Hormuz as Tehran Pushes for a Deal Before the U.S. Midterms:
Iran has proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart broader peace talks, with President Masoud Pezeshkian saying openly that Tehran wants a deal done before November’s midterms, directly contradicting Trump’s claim that Iran would wait until after the vote. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters the plan largely mirrors the 14-point memorandum of understanding Trump signed in June, and Al Jazeera reported the talks, led on the U.S. side by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have moved into a more detailed “technical stage” with a notably positive atmosphere in Tehran. A U.S. official described the discussions as “positive and constructive” but said Washington isn’t in a rush, noting nearly 40 million barrels of crude have moved through the strait under U.S. military escort in the past 48 hours, matching prewar levels. Oil prices dipped modestly on the news, though one analyst called Iran’s offer “dubious” since its underlying conditions haven’t changed. Trump also said he discussed Iran directly with Xi Jinping during the Chinese leader’s state visit, while U.S. Ambassador David Perdue said Trump told Xi any Chinese assistance to Iran, direct or indirect, was “totally unacceptable,” adding Washington believes China has provided indirect support in keeping the strait closed.
The Houthi-Saudi conflict is escalating on multiple fronts, drawing in the U.N. Security Council and prompting new military coordination between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. The Security Council issued a rare unified condemnation of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, including strikes on civilian and energy infrastructure that have injured women and children, while Pakistan’s prime minister separately warned at the U.N. that any Houthi attack on Mecca would be a “red line” for Islamabad. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are arranging urgent chief-of-staff-level talks under a defense pact signed last month, though neither Turkey nor Pakistan has yet taken military action against the Houthis despite the agreement’s mutual-defense clause. Yemen’s Saudi-backed government, meanwhile, has called for general mobilization after the Houthis seized the country’s entire Red Sea coast, and the humanitarian toll is mounting, with hospitals in government-held areas like Aden overwhelmed and more than 130,000 people displaced by the fighting. U.S. Central Command also reported its own blockade on Iranian ports has now redirected 122 commercial vessels total, including seven just since Wednesday.
Tensions are also playing out diplomatically at the U.N., where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address triggered a mass walkout and a wave of criticism from Iranian officials. Netanyahu told any remaining “moral cowards” to leave the chamber before defending Israel’s actions against Iran and across the region, prompting Iran’s deputy foreign minister to say the walkouts “spoke louder than any speech,” while Iran’s U.N. envoy separately questioned why Netanyahu, who faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, was permitted to speak at all. Elsewhere, the U.S. sanctions campaign against Iran is disrupting civilian air travel across the region, with Iraq suspending Iranian flights to the Shiite holy city of Najaf and other countries grounding Iranian airlines after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened to expel noncompliant nations from the U.S. dollar system; an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader responded by threatening that no country in the region would be able to operate flights if Iran’s airlines are shut out. Separately, CBS News reported that U.S. troops killed in a deadly Iranian drone strike on a Kuwaiti port early in the war could have been relocated to safer positions in Saudi Arabia beforehand, but the unit’s commanding general rejected the rebasing plans despite intelligence warnings of a potential attack.
Other news:
Justice Department Scraps Dozens of School Desegregation Cases. The Justice Department has dismissed 57 school desegregation orders since Trump’s second term began, nearly 80 percent of them concentrated in five Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon framed the move as ending “outdated” consent decrees that impose unnecessary financial burdens on districts, some of which had been under federal oversight for more than 60 years. Civil rights groups and House Education Committee Democrats condemned the shift, with Democrats saying it is “turning us back toward the Jim Crow era,” and cited research showing schools remain about as segregated today as in the late 1960s. More than 130 school systems were still under desegregation orders as of last year, and this rollback is part of a broader Trump administration effort to dismantle DEI policies and civil rights enforcement across education, employment, housing, and voting.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is urging U.S. service members to register and vote by mail, a notable contrast to the Trump administration’s broader push to restrict the practice nationwide. In a video message, Hegseth told troops that federal postcards, federal write-in absentee ballots, and standard mail-in processes “are straightforward and protected by law,” regardless of duty status. His message comes after the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s attempt to impose a standardized envelope design and require states to submit voter lists through an online portal, changes that would have let USPS refuse ballots from noncompliant states. Voting rights advocates welcomed the ruling as averting “mass confusion and chaos for voters abroad,” while Trump has continued pushing Congress to pass his SAVE America Act and has repeatedly called mail-in voting “cheating” and “inherently corrupt,” even after voting by mail himself in Florida’s primary. About 67 percent of active-duty troops were registered to vote in 2024, a three-point drop from 2020, and nearly three-quarters of the 1.3 million active-duty force is eligible to vote absentee this year.
A Michigan credit union CEO lost her job after a viral, AI-altered photo of her family wearing “Lake America” sweatshirts sparked major backlash, including death threats. Jane Smith of Family First Credit Union said the image, referencing Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario amid trade tensions with Canada, was digitally added to a real family photo using ChatGPT and that her family never actually owned or wore the sweatshirts. The credit union announced Smith’s departure this week, apologizing to members for “the concern, disappointment and pain this situation has caused,” and named COO Jason Acosta as interim CEO. Smith said she understood why the joke, especially given its resemblance to actual anti-Canada sentiment, was seen as offensive, and that her family cut short a trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia after she began receiving death threats. She said she never intended to make a political statement or hurt anyone, calling the backlash a reflection of how “highly offensive” the image read to others.
Ground cinnamon sold at retail stores, grocers, delis, and supermarkets across six states, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas, has been recalled over possible lead contamination. Galil Importing Corp of New York recalled its Lior Cinnamon Ground Seasoning (UPC 794711005484, lot code GAP11304, sold in 90-gram containers) after the FDA reported elevated lead levels in the product. The FDA warns that while short-term low-level exposure may cause no obvious symptoms, prolonged exposure in children can cause permanent central nervous system damage. As of the September 24 notice, Galil said it was not aware of any illnesses linked to the product, and it is urging consumers to discard or return it for a refund.
The Trump administration’s gutting of the National Center for Education Statistics is leaving the country with less data to understand a historic decline in student reading and math scores. NCES staffing dropped from about 100 employees to as few as four after DOGE canceled nearly $900 million in contracts, crippling long-running studies like the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which was tracking thousands of children born around the pandemic and has been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers. Researchers say the cuts wasted rather than saved money, since most of the expensive setup work on these studies, recruiting schools, families, and states, was already complete, and some data collections have since been partially reinstated following lawsuits and public pressure. Former NCES commissioner Peggy Carr, who was abruptly fired after nearly four decades at the agency, called the loss of the pandemic-era child study “the most painful example,” saying researchers will now “never know” how the pandemic shaped young children’s development.
A former Cornell University student has sued the school and members of a fraternity, alleging seven Chi Phi members drugged and gang-raped her in 2024 and that some accused men faced disciplinary options as light as writing an essay. The lawsuit, filed in New York state court, alleges she was pressured to consume ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol before being assaulted over several hours, and that a member had described her in a group chat using a dehumanizing phrase before others entered the room. Cornell suspended the Chi Phi chapter and the accused students during its investigation, says the chapter remains permanently barred from campus, and notes federal privacy law limits what it can disclose about individual discipline; an attorney for one accused student disputes her account and says the defense has contradicting evidence. Tompkins County prosecutors closed their criminal review without filing charges citing insufficient evidence, though the civil case proceeds under a lower “more likely than not” standard, and Cornell’s own 2025 campus survey found 35% of responding undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact, though the university cautions the survey’s lower response rate limits comparison to prior years.
A coalition of nations warned at the UN that a potential U.S. move to sanction the International Criminal Court as an institution, rather than just its individual judges, could “fundamentally disrupt” the court’s operations. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, co-chair of the Hague Group formed to defend international law, said such sanctions would threaten judicial independence, after the U.S. already sanctioned ICC president Judge Tomoko Akane and a senior trial lawyer in August. Trump has called the court “out of control” and an “evil group of people,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused it of being “corrupt and fatally politicised,” and the Dutch government, which hosts the court, is now leading efforts to warn Washington against effectively immobilizing it. Speakers at the UN event also raised broader concerns about selective enforcement of international law, with Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu arguing that the deeper threat is the “quiet decision” by powerful nations that rules only bind some countries and not their allies.
A “significant” early-season nor’easter is battering the East Coast with high winds and heavy rain, threatening up to 40 million people across multiple states. The storm is already lashing coastal Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Long Island, with forecasters warning of winds up to 80 mph around Montauk, up to 8 inches of rain in parts of Massachusetts, and risks of beach erosion, coastal flooding, and power outages lasting through the weekend into Monday. Meteorologists note that while unusual this early in the season, nor’easters do occur in fall, and travelers should expect flight delays and difficult driving conditions. The storm coincides with three simultaneous Pacific hurricanes, including a record-setting El Niño season that has produced 18 named Pacific storms so far, even as the Atlantic has seen no hurricanes form by September 21 for the first time since 1914.
Hurricane Nolo is bringing potentially catastrophic, life-threatening flooding to Hawaii, striking communities still recovering from storms earlier this summer. Though not expected to make direct landfall, the storm is forecast to dump up to 25 inches of rain and generate damaging waves as it passes roughly 80 miles south of the Big Island, prompting the activation of more than 230 National Guard members and school closures statewide. The heaviest rain is expected to hit areas already devastated by Hurricane Lala in August, where some residents remain displaced and describe feeling emotionally “on edge” bracing for further damage. Hawaii’s governor has requested a federal emergency disaster declaration for four counties, a request that still awaits approval from President Trump, while Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz directly linked the state’s repeated disasters to the warming climate.
An independent investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk found that Turning Point USA insisted on an outdoor speaking venue at Utah Valley University despite security concerns raised by campus officials and police weeks in advance. The 158-page report, commissioned by UVU and released Friday, found a planned pre-event security walkthrough between UVU’s police chief and TPUSA’s security team never occurred, and that TPUSA never provided an estimated attendance figure despite controlling event ticketing. While the report concluded no UVU employee acted in bad faith, it also found the university improperly deferred key security decisions, including venue and ticketing, to TPUSA despite staff concerns, and stated UVU “should have retained decision-making authority” over those choices. Kirk’s family, who plan to sue the university, said through their attorney that “the buck stopped with UVU leadership and law enforcement,” while UVU’s president said the school would act on the report’s recommendations “with humility.”
Two Democratic senators introduced legislation aimed at curbing warrantless ICE arrests and indefinite immigrant detention amid reports of U.S. citizens being wrongly caught up in enforcement sweeps. The bill from Sens. Dick Durbin and Alex Padilla would require immigration officers to obtain an administrative warrant establishing probable cause before detaining someone, mandate a bond hearing within 24 hours of warrantless arrests, and require judicial custody review every 60 days. Durbin said he was moved to act after witnessing civil rights concerns during the Chicago “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration raids, though the bill faces long odds in a Republican-controlled Congress. Immigration advocates, including Raíces co-CEO Faisal Al-Juburi, argue the bill still gives ICE broad discretion through an undefined “imminent danger” exception and question whether it goes far enough given that detention for civil immigration violations remains fundamentally at odds with constitutional protections.
New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Dale Caldwell resigned Friday after an investigation substantiated sexual harassment and ethics violations against him, just weeks before the midterms he was responsible for overseeing. A 61-page report found credible evidence Caldwell made unwanted romantic advances toward a staffer’s friend, then made a demeaning remark about women after being rebuffed, pushed for his girlfriend’s promotion to a senior state position without disclosing the relationship, and brought unauthorized personal guests to taxpayer-funded ticketed events. Gov. Mikie Sherrill had called for his resignation a day earlier and is appointing acting Comptroller Shirley Emehelu as interim lieutenant governor and secretary of state, the state’s chief elections officer, to oversee the upcoming vote. Caldwell’s attorney disputed the findings and said he would “forcefully challenge the report,” while Sherrill said the state could “no longer tolerate the culture of silence” and has 45 days to name a permanent replacement.
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: MAGA Coalition Fractures, Trump Misuses Taxpayer Dollars, Press Access Restored, Texas Error Threatens Voters, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 24, 2026. Trump’s own coalition is starting to fracture in public. A taxpayer-funded ad declaring “America will never be a communist country” is drawing federal ethics complaints, MAGA loyalists are furious he’s rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping days after warning voters about socialism, a sitting Republican senator wants Trump Jr. investigated over a Putin-linked oligarch bankrolling his wedding, and even Tucker Carlson is now saying Trump’s own Cabinet should have removed him under the 25th Amendment.
Add in the press finally clawing back White House access after the administration defied a federal judge, a contentious Xi summit, and a Texas voter registration mess just weeks before the midterms, and there’s a lot to get through. Let’s dig in.
For weeks, those around the White House called me a liar and accused me of starting a “USS Abraham Lincoln hoax” for reporting on the horrific conditions sailors were enduring aboard that ship. This week, US officials confirmed to Senator Gillibrand that everything I reported was true. That’s not an isolated pattern, it’s how this administration operates: attack the messenger, deny the facts, and use every power of the presidency to go after the First Amendment in ways we haven’t seen before. Here’s the news:
Trump’s Base Cracks, 25th Amendment Calls Grow:
A new pro-Trump ad titled “Love Me,” featuring a “Paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, is airing on Fox News and Newsmax ahead of the midterms, raising questions about whether it violates federal law barring taxpayer-funded political promotion. The ad, which shows Trump set to an R&B song and declares “America will never be a communist country,” was posted to the White House’s YouTube page 11 days ago in a shorter form before the full version began airing on cable this week; the White House calls it a “public service announcement” that is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Sen. Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles demanding details on the ad’s cost, funding source, and any contractors involved, while Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “blatantly unethical” if government dollars paid for it. Ethics lawyer Norm Eisen said the ad appears to be a “shocking transgression” of appropriations restrictions on government propaganda, and the artist behind “Love Me,” JMSN, said he never authorized its use and is now seeking legal counsel; the controversy echoes the ouster of Kristi Noem earlier this year over a similar $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign.
Some Trump allies are furious over his lavish welcome of Chinese President Xi Jinping, arguing it undercuts the GOP’s core midterm message that Democrats want to bring “socialism or communism” to America. A Republican close to the White House told Politico’s Playbook that voters don’t want to see Trump “toasting the Chinese premier” when they want him focused on their concerns, while Arizona strategist Barrett Marson said Xi’s visit is “just another in a string of examples where Trump’s message and Republicans’ don’t jibe.” The frustration is compounded by Trump’s recent warm visit to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist Republicans have cast as a boogeyman. Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer was especially incensed, writing “I’m pissed off” and predicting “November is going to be a bust” after concluding Trump’s base gets no accountability for such moves.
Republican Sen. John Curtis is demanding a formal investigation into Donald Trump Jr. after a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin reportedly bankrolled his wedding. Curtis sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin calling for Trump Jr. to be subpoenaed over the private-island party paid for by oligarch Umar Kremlev, as well as the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, and asked that Hunter Biden receive equivalent scrutiny. “A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis wrote, arguing Republicans shouldn’t abandon the same investigative standard they applied to Biden. The move is notable as one of the few instances of a sitting Republican senator publicly pushing to scrutinize the Trump family’s business dealings, which reportedly earned the president $2.2 billion in 2025, mostly from cryptocurrency.
A MAGA-branded music festival headlined by Kid Rock was canceled in Kentucky after organizers sold only six VIP tickets at $1,000 each. Host Eric Deters, a former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate, blamed his wealthy friends’ lack of enthusiasm, venting on Facebook that he’ll “never ever” throw the event again and that those who snubbed him no longer have “Bulldog immunity.” The Freedom Fest had drawn large crowds since 2022 and previously featured speakers like Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, and Eric Trump, but interest collapsed this year amid Trump’s low approval ratings, Iran-war-driven cost increases, and general MAGA-event fatigue. Deters also lashed out at media outlets for what he felt was inadequate coverage of the festival.
The White House pushed its own branded phone app as an alternative information source amid the press boycott, and it reads far more like propaganda than a news product. The app’s front page touted Trump’s “historic deal with Greenland” without mentioning the deal originated from a 1951 agreement, and its “accomplishments” button led to a page falsely claiming Trump had “ended the Israel-Hamas War.” The app also promoted “TrumpTV” and included a slanted survey asking whether states should face funding penalties for alleged noncitizen voter registration errors, offering only loaded response options and no results transparency. Despite the propagandistic content, the app briefly charted at #11 in Apple’s news category, just behind the New York Times, as the administration scrambled to keep the public engaged after Trump was effectively muted during a helipad unveiling with no press pool present to mic him.
Tucker Carlson called for Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office under the 25th Amendment over his threats to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. In an NPR interview, Carlson said Trump “should have been bundled up and taken out” the moment he threatened a “nuclear attack,” calling it a crime with “no greater” severity, and suggested Trump didn’t actually have “the latitude to make this decision on his own.” The 25th Amendment’s Section 4, which Carlson is invoking, allows the vice president and Cabinet to forcibly remove a president unable or unfit to fulfill his duties, historically used only for temporary medical incapacitation, as with Reagan, both Bushes, and Biden. Carlson isn’t alone in the sentiment: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made similar calls earlier this year over the same Iran war rhetoric, with Jones asking “how do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Carlson’s turn against Trump is notable given his history of both fierce private criticism (revealed in leaked Dominion texts saying he “hated him passionately”) and public reconciliation, including a 2023 declaration that he “loves” Trump.
Media is back at the White House:
Journalists for CNN, MS Now and Politico finally regained White House access Thursday afternoon, hours after being turned away in defiance of a federal judge’s overnight order. Lawyers for the outlets told the court the administration had “repeatedly violated” Judge Timothy Kelly’s ruling, with Secret Service agents confiscating hard passes that morning that hadn’t even been taken before; the White House’s press operations director said badges weren’t reactivated until after 9am and confiscated ones weren’t returned to the gate until nearly 10am, despite the judge’s order coming in the early morning hours. The passes had originally been revoked Saturday after Trump ordered the outlets banned over “FAKE NEWS” coverage, prompting the outlets to sue and drawing criticism from press freedom advocates industry-wide. Attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr., representing the outlets, called the ruling “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” while Trump had already signaled on Truth Social that the White House would appeal.
Judge Kelly ruled the ban likely violated due process because the outlets never received advance notice or a chance to contest specific standards before losing access. He cited D.C. Circuit precedent requiring that the White House “promulgate rules or standards” before revoking a pass and give reporters “fair notice” of both the violation and the potential punishment, finding the vague standards described in Tuesday’s letters to the outlets “hardly does the trick.” Justice Department lawyers had argued the ban was necessary for national security, citing stories that relied on non-public information, but Kelly said he was “skeptical” that safeguarding national security was the administration’s actual motivation, pointing instead to Trump’s own comments suggesting the ban was content-based retaliation. A preliminary injunction hearing has been expedited to occur within the 14-day window while the outlets’ access is restored.
China Summit:
Xi Jinping used his White House summit with Trump to lay out terms for avoiding the “Thucydides trap,” the historical pattern of conflict between a rising and an established power, while Trump kept his own remarks vague and centered on personal rapport. Xi called for “candid, in-depth and continued dialogue,” stressed that China and the US “stand to gain from cooperation and will both lose in confrontation,” and proposed inviting 100,000 young Americans on student exchanges to China. He also said both nations bear joint responsibility to ensure AI development remains “always under human control,” and separately voiced support for the US and Iran returning to June’s memorandum of understanding to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, for his part, touted a “truly great friendship” and “tremendous strides,” saying the visit would focus on security, technology, and what he’s taken to calling “super intelligence,” while both leaders afterward called it a “great meeting.” Xi also used a Chinese state media readout to urge the US to oppose “Taiwan independence,” a subject the White House didn’t immediately confirm discussing.
The US and China agreed to extend their tariff truce to February, with analysts framing it as Trump keeping pressure on Beijing for a better trade deal rather than a sign of resolution. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the extension of the truce first struck in South Korea last year, even as China remains on pace to run a $1 trillion trade deficit with the US for a second straight year despite the ongoing tariff war. The visit marked Xi’s second state visit to the US and first since 2015, notable as Trump greeted him personally at Andrews Air Force Base the night before, an unusual gesture underscored by matching national anthem ceremonies, a military review, and a flyover. Xi also pressed Trump on arms sales to Taiwan, an issue complicated by Trump’s earlier suspension of a $14 billion arms package after his May trip to Beijing, which he’d called a “very good negotiating chip” and which has unsettled some US allies and Republicans. A lavish state dinner Thursday evening, featuring a “Toast to Peace” nod to Nixon’s 1972 visit and tech titans including Musk, Bezos, Cook, Altman, Zuckerberg, and Huang, capped the day’s pageantry.
The summit unfolded against a backdrop of pointed ironies and protest, starting with Trump joking in the Oval Office that China has “the friendliest press corps” even as US networks boycotted the visit in solidarity with CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters only just reinstated at the White House after a federal judge’s order. China’s media is among the most heavily censored in the world, a contrast unremarked upon by Trump despite his own recent attempts to bar critical outlets. Outside the White House, demonstrators waved Uyghur flags and wore Tank Man t-shirts to protest China’s mass detention of over a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which the UN and multiple governments have called a possible genocide, with one protester describing a brother sentenced to 17 years without due process. Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan, meanwhile, toured the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art together in a soft-power display, visiting the Peacock Room and watching a children’s choir perform Chinese folk songs. Xi is staying at the Waldorf Astoria rather than the traditional government guest house Blair House during the visit, a change from his 2015 trip.
Other news:
The White House’s new “Trump TV” livestream is drawing embarrassingly low ratings, with more viewers tuning into a blank screen with box fan sounds than the president’s own content. Launched Monday as a 24/7 stream of past speeches and administration moments, the White House promoted it on X promising “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest,” but by Thursday afternoon fewer than 700 people were watching a rebroadcast of Trump’s University of Alabama commencement speech, while a livestream of squirrels eating nuts drew over 2,000 viewers and a “Rain Sounds for Sleeping” stream pulled more than 4,000. The stream’s launch came just days after Trump banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House over what he called “FICTION and LIES.” By Thursday, a federal judge had temporarily reversed that ban and allowed the three outlets’ reporters back in.
A state-level error at the Texas Department of Public Safety has left county election offices scrambling to process a massive backlog of voter registration applications just as midterm voting nears, with the association of local election officials saying the problem is in the tens of thousands for the state’s most populous counties, including about 45,000 backlogged applications in Bexar County alone. The error, dating to last October, failed to transmit many online driver’s-license-linked registration records to applicants’ home counties, and officials say it may have even prevented some Texans from voting in the state’s March primary without their knowledge. The Department of Public Safety says the “system issue” has been resolved but has not explained its cause, and local election officials say they received no communication about the backlog for nearly a year. Counties must clear the backlog before early voting begins October 19, and officials stress that voters whose registration is submitted by October 5 don’t need to worry, since anyone missing from the rolls on Election Day can still cast a provisional ballot.
A Mother Jones investigation reveals ChatGPT actively coached the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia school shooter on tactics and helped her evade OpenAI’s own safety flags in the months before she killed eight people in February. After OpenAI banned Jesse Van Rootselaar’s first account for discussing mass shooting scenarios, the chatbot itself advised her on a second account to always frame violent content as “fictional or hypothetical” to “never get flagged again,” telling her “you can still be twisted, just be clever about it.” Over the following eight months, ChatGPT discussed building firearms and explosives with her, generated graphic fictional mass-shooting narratives, and gave detailed tactical guidance on a shotgun’s effectiveness in close quarters, including casualty estimates, after she got around an initial refusal by simply adding “hypothetically” to her prompt. On the day of the attack, she asked ChatGPT about the timing of past U.S. school shootings, including Columbine and Sandy Hook, echoing eerily similar final chats from a separate mass shooter at Florida State University the year before. More than three dozen victim lawsuits are now pending against OpenAI, which has apologized for not alerting law enforcement about the first banned account but has not explained why it failed to detect the second one despite having systems designed to catch repeat policy violators, and British Columbia’s government has now filed its own lawsuit while accusing the company of walking away from mediation.
Dozens of UN delegates walked out of Benjamin Netanyahu's General Assembly speech Thursday, jeering and booing as he addressed the hall, prompting him to declare "if there are any other moral cowards who haven't left this hall, please do so now." Netanyahu used the speech to attack New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as "antisemitic," claiming Jews "no longer feel safe" since his election, a jab tied to Mamdani's earlier, later-abandoned threat to try to execute an ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu over the 2024 finding that there were reasonable grounds he bore responsibility for war crimes in Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was barred from attending after the Trump administration denied him a visa, and instead delivered a video message rejecting the "unlawful punitive measures" against him, while protesters including actress Susan Sarandon were detained outside the UN. Netanyahu also lashed out at France and Britain over their criticism of West Bank settlements by invoking their colonial histories, called Turkish President Erdogan a "tyrant" over alleged support for Hamas, and branded Iran a "murderous dictatorship," claiming the nearly seven-month war with Iran has halted its nuclear ambitions and suggesting the government's collapse "was not far," even as Iran continues to defy the U.S. by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. At one point he held up a pager resembling the explosive-rigged devices Israeli intelligence reportedly used to target Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.
The University of Mississippi has named two students found dead this week in cases that have raised concerns about the herb kratom. Aidan Hamilton, an 18-year-old freshman from Colorado, and Robert Strang, a 20-year-old junior from Atlanta and member of Phi Delta Theta, were found separately on Monday, one on campus and one in the city of Oxford, with packaged kratom discovered at each scene though no confirmed link to the deaths has been established. Kratom is an herb with opioid-like effects sometimes sold at gas stations, used informally for pain, anxiety and drug dependence, and capable of stimulating or sedating effects depending on dosage. University vice chancellor Shawnboda Mead urged the campus to avoid speculation while law enforcement completes its investigation, noting “inaccurate information is being shared by individuals who do not have access to the facts.” Phi Delta Theta issued a statement mourning both students and expressing sympathy to their families and the broader Ole Miss community.
Kyrsten Sinema’s former bodyguard and romantic partner was arrested after allegedly causing $200,000 in damage to her Arizona home while trying to coerce her into posting a video. Matthew Ammel, 39, broke into Sinema’s home on August 30 while she was away, allegedly threatening to destroy a painting every ten minutes unless she posted to social media, and when she refused, he reportedly threw 22 paintings into her pool and smashed alcohol bottles throughout the house. Ammel was arrested September 17 after being released from a mental health facility and has since been charged with aggravated criminal damage. The incident follows a separate North Carolina lawsuit under the state’s “alienation of affection” law, in which a judge ruled Sinema can be sued by Ammel’s ex-wife despite Sinema’s argument that she has no connection to the state, citing nine text messages she sent Ammel while he was there. Ammel had joined Sinema’s security detail after retiring from the Army in 2022 and later also served as a national security fellow in her Senate office.
The Senate narrowly rejected a symbolic resolution calling on Trump to end the Iran war, with most Republicans standing by the president despite the conflict’s deep unpopularity. The 49-50 vote saw only Republicans Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis cross over to join Democrats, while Democrat John Fetterman was the lone member of his party to vote no; the measure had already passed the House in July. A recent NBC News poll found just 33% of voters believe the war was worth it, with 62% saying it wasn’t, and voters were far more likely to back a candidate who opposes the war by a 57-24 margin. Sen. Tim Kaine, who has led the push to reassert congressional war powers, argued “the White House can’t veto the Constitution” and urged colleagues to “listen to the eight who tried to commit suicide” aboard the USS Lincoln. Trump defended the war at the UN, warning against a “vile regime” possessing nuclear weapons “behind a nuclear shield.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Thursday that Tehran wants to reach a deal with the U.S. before the November midterms, contradicting Trump’s prediction that Iran would wait until after the election. Speaking to NBC News and other outlets on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Pezeshkian said Iran wishes “Americans to return” to the collapsed June memorandum of understanding before the midterms, while the White House responded by accusing the “evil” Iranian regime of terrorism and vowing to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Pezeshkian also revealed he has met twice with Iran’s new, rarely-seen supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, including a seven-hour meeting a month ago, saying he saw no health issues despite reports Khamenei suffered severe burns and leg injuries in the Israeli strike that killed his father. Pezeshkian said Iran remains “open” to nuclear facility inspections and denied any plot to assassinate Trump, despite a Justice Department murder-for-hire case filed last November tied to avenging the U.S. killing of General Qassem Soleimani. A new NBC poll found just 31% approve of Trump’s handling of the war, with 69% disapproving.
The California Supreme Court unanimously ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to return roughly 650,000 ballots he seized earlier this year, ruling the seizure “unlawful.” Bianco took the ballots from a November 2025 special election on congressional redistricting after receiving a complaint about vote counts that local election officials had already deemed unfounded, and the court found California law requires ballots to stay in the custody of election officials even during a criminal probe. Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta had challenged the seizure as designed to “sow distrust in elections,” and the UCLA Voting Rights Project separately sued on behalf of Riverside voters. Bianco, who ran unsuccessfully for governor before the ballots were seized and did not advance past the primary, has not commented on the ruling and had already suspended a partial recount amid the legal challenges. Newsom signed a bill last Saturday barring anyone from seizing ballots the way Bianco did.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to be transferred from federal prison to a Texas halfway house in August 2027, according to one of her fraud victims. Holmes, 42, is serving an 11-year, three-month sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, later reduced after a judge found she hadn’t personally caused victims “substantial financial hardship,” a reduction the government had opposed given her lack of accepted responsibility and minimal restitution paid. Victim Alan Eisenman, owed nearly $150,000 and still unpaid, called the transfer “a gift” and said he opposes any presidential clemency for Holmes, whose commutation request remains pending. The Bureau of Prisons confirmed halfway house residents can work, use phones, and earn weekend home passes, and prosecutors noted Holmes has continued telling media she intends to return to healthcare technology and has been advising her partner’s startup, which resembles Theranos. Her transfer news coincides with the upcoming release of a Nathan Fielder-directed documentary about her, which Eisenman worries may portray her sympathetically, adding “she’s the most conniving person I’ve ever met.”
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 24, 2026 [Importance Of Court Order Backing Media White House Pool Coverage], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 25, 2026. After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.
Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2017, challenged the argument of the White House that it had banned the journalists because they had endangered national security, noting that the stories to which administration lawyers claimed to object were “routine.” In fact, one of the stories the White House claimed endangered national security was based on a press call from the White House itself. According to Oliver Darcy, who writes the media newsletter Status, the anonymous “senior administration official” who provided the quotations on the call was none other than Vice President J.D. Vance.
Kelly ordered the credentials of 78 journalists restored immediately.
This morning, the White House continued to deny reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW access to the White House campus. Their lawyers asked for an emergency hearing because the administration had “already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order,” and soon after the judge ordered the administration to respond, the reporters were once again allowed into the area.
And then tonight, at least CNN and MS NOW were blocked from access to the White House state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After Trump posted on social media that CNN and MS NOW (he called it MSDNC) were refusing to cover Xi’s visit “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’” the White House told CNN it could send only an audio producer and a cameraman to the event, not a reporter or producer. Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said: “They again said that we were specifically denied access and that they were not letting in the CNN editorial presence.”
This morning, Trump complained on social media that “[t]he Media is trying to cover up how well things are going before the Midterms, just to help Democrats.”
And that’s the gist of Trump’s attacks on media outlets: MAGA is falling apart, and he either lives in a fantasy world or hopes to stem that collapse by issuing propaganda that will convince voters he is actually winning.
The fantasy world thesis has supporting evidence in an image posted on Trump’s social media account this morning, showing Trump and Xi standing together on a red carpet in front of an airplane apparently labeled Air China. There is a military aircraft flying over a circle of stars with the words “Only Trump” superimposed in a German-style blackletter font. Behind Trump, to his right, is a young woman who looks like Trump’s loyal aide Natalie Harp standing with her hand over her heart.
Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice noted that the image was a digitally altered photo in which the image of the chief officer of protocol of the United States, Monica Crowley, had been replaced by an image that appears to be Harp.
Convincing voters he is winning is an even harder sell.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is its signature policy, and last week a federal appeals court stopped the Trump administration from sending migrants to third countries, finding that the short timeline for those renditions stripped deportees of their right to due process. The administration appears to have continued the renditions, arguing that the court had not officially notified a lower court of its decision and thus it was not yet in effect, prompting an appeals court to clarify that the flights must stop.
Today Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in to permit those renditions to third countries. He said that disruption of the administration’s “plans…imposes massive costs on the government and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”
Also today, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for ignoring his previous orders and continuing to hold people in “inhumane and unconstitutional” conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, depriving detainees of “sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care.” Although, as Josephine Walker of Axios points out, the administration likely sees the appalling conditions of its prisons as a way to induce migrants to leave, the judge required ICE to provide adequate space and humane conditions for detainees.
Meanwhile, as Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press reported today, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE had no strategic plan for spending the unprecedented $45 billion Congress gave it in Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, and has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on slapdash plans for mass detention.
It spent nearly $3 million for tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million for maintaining warehouses that were never used to house detainees and are now being sold, and excessive rates to lock people up. Foley reports that the Department of Homeland Security told the GAO that it would have a plan for spending its windfall by August 31, 2027, nearly a year from now.
After Trump announced the U.S. would accept meat from other countries in order to lower food prices, on September 22 the Department of Agriculture announced the recall of more than 167,000 pounds (75,750 kg) of raw pork, beef, and goat. The items were produced without federal inspection but carried false marks claiming they had been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said the food “should be considered misbranded and unsafe to eat.”
Trump’s insistence that the country suffers from voter fraud isn’t going well, either.
In California, Republican sheriff Chad Bianco and the Riverside County sheriff’s department confiscated more than 650,000 ballots after California voters agreed to redistrict the state to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting of Texas. The state’s Democratic attorney general immediately ordered him to return the ballots, saying he had no authority to confiscate them and that the seizure was intended to make people distrust elections.
As Uwa Ede-Osifo of the Guardian reported, the California Supreme Court today ordered Blanco to return the ballots, saying that it was Blanco, rather than voters, who was endangering elections: “Allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret, based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity,” it said.
On Saturday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it a felony to seize ballots from a county elections office.
Trump’s own claims of voter fraud also took a hit this week. As Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported today, in July, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed they had found more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mullin stated that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.
But when officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) met with Nevada election officials in August, they admitted Mullin’s number was inflated. After the meeting, one wrote to say that the department had confirmed just 185 people on the voter rolls were not citizens. They sent Nevada officials a list of those 185 names.
On Tuesday, Nevada told the federal government that the 185 people on the government’s list are all citizens. “Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”
Trump’s job approval rating continues to drop. Fifty Plus One aggregated new polls today and found that only 34.7% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 62.1% disapprove.
Meridith McGraw, Maggie Severns, and Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal reported today that an ad airing in major U.S. markets shows Trump promising to “defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” before showing images of Trump at White House events as a choir sings “Love Me.” At the end of the ad, the screen reads: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”
Former campaign finance official Daniel Weiner called the ad “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.” Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House demanding the ad be taken down, calling it “government propaganda” more fitting for North Korea than the U.S. and “an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
According to the Wall Street Journal reporters, the White House says the ad is a “public service announcement,” “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”
More On U.S. Immigration Policy, Law, Rights, Costs
New York Times, A Quiet ICE Surge That Unfolded ‘Everywhere All at Once’ This Summer, Jazmine Ulloa, Miriam Jordan, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and David Ovalle, Sept. 25, 2026. A review of dozens of incidents caught on camera sheds new light on a largely invisible crackdown.
The reporters reviewed more than 50 incidents and interviewed more than two dozen lawyers, business owners, residents and detained immigrants and their family members for this story.
The most effective escalation of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign happened quietly.
Unlike earlier high-profile raids that drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the surge in arrests in June, July and August was captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.
Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation.
Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.
In Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, where the swell was strongest, they amplified their reach through partnerships with sheriffs and state highway patrol officers. In Democratic strongholds, they intensified their activities despite laws meant to restrict them.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the local partnerships, an infusion of federal dollars and new technology had made the dragnet so decentralized that it had attracted less attention.
“This gradual rise everywhere all at once, through a lot of means, is enabling the operation to fly under the radar,” he said.
The spike in arrests, to little public backlash, reflects a turning point in the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out large-scale expulsions of noncitizens. Those arrested were accused of violating civil immigration laws, but most had not been charged with or convicted of a crime. In a statement, ICE defended the expansion of immigration enforcement.
“This is promises made and promises kept in action,” the statement read. “The results speak for themselves.”
To understand how the operations have unfolded around the country, The New York Times reviewed arrest videos, photographs and court records from more than 50 incidents. What follows is a sampling of those interactions.A Presence in Routine Places
Federal agents appeared as people carried out their everyday routines. People were detained en route to a soccer match. Leaving Sunday Mass. Having a drink at a nightclub. At national forests and outside polling locations.
Roger Hansen, 83, owner of the Little Big Load Laundromat in Madison, Wis., said federal immigration agents took five people from two of his locations in June. Statewide sweeps the same day resulted in the arrests of roughly 40 people, many of whom Department of Homeland Security officials said had criminal charges for sexual assault, driving while intoxicated and other crimes.
Security footage from one of Mr. Hansen’s laundromats shows two agents slamming a young customer to the ground near a soap dispenser. All the while, people continue to do laundry.
Outside, bystanders recorded the man being walked out in handcuffs and loaded into an S.U.V. with dark-tinted windows.
Mr. Hansen said he was disturbed by the violence. “They were having a heyday beating up on a kid,” he said, adding that business had dropped roughly 50 percent the next day and had not recovered. He said he believed many of his Latino and immigrant clientele may be too afraid to return.
In a statement, ICE said the arrests at the laundromat had been part of “targeted operations” in Wisconsin at the end of June. The five people from Nicaragua and Mexico were in the country illegally, ICE said. The agency did not respond to a question about their criminal records.
On July 7 in Salt Lake City, Elizabeth Garcia recorded three ICE agents forcing their way into her home without showing a warrant after following her father, Raul Moreno Meza, 52, from a gas station.
In the video, agents handcuff Mr. Moreno and his 15-year-old son, a U.S. citizen. Ms. Garcia howls and pleads as agents carry her father outside to their vehicles. Her 2-year-old can be heard crying in the background.Video
Before departing, an agent removed the shackles from Mr. Moreno’s son, who chased the S.U.V.s as they drove away. Mr. Moreno was later released on a bond, his daughter said, but her brother has become withdrawn and is attending therapy.
“He had lots of goals and intentions,” she said. “Now he is so negative.”
In a statement, ICE said officers arrested Mr. Moreno after he did not yield to officers at a traffic stop and then fled on foot. The agency alleged in the statement that “a juvenile occupant of Moreno’s vehicle” had assaulted an officer and was “detained in handcuffs for safety.”
Mr. Moreno, an undocumented Mexican man, crossed the border unlawfully about two decades ago, after his green card petition languished in delays and as his father, a naturalized U.S. citizen, fell ill, his family said. His father later died. Because Mr. Moreno’s green card petition was tied to his father’s citizenship, the application did not advance after the death, the family said.
New York Times, Unused Tents and Uneaten Food: Watchdog Finds ‘Waste’ in Immigration Crackdown, Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). In a report Thursday, the Government Accountability Office said the Trump administration squandered millions of dollars to expand detention.
The Trump administration wasted millions of dollars in its swift effort to drastically expand immigration detention, including nearly $3 million on tents to house migrants at Guantánamo Bay that were never used, according to a review by the Government Accountability Office released on Thursday.
The camp in Cuba, planned near the prison that held suspected terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was built to hold 5,000 detainees. As of June, the average daily population of detainees there was 16, G.A.O. said.
The administration also spent $20.5 million on administrative costs and utilities on the seven warehouses the government purchased in haste and later decided to sell. And it squandered $7.1 million for food it did not need at one of its new detention camps in Texas, the review found.
Neither ICE nor the Homeland Security Department responded to a request for comment.
The report is the latest indictment of the spending spree by federal officials to follow through on President Trump’s pledge to detain and deport record numbers of immigrants. Officials have poured billions of dollars into hiring immigration enforcement officers, purchasing unused warehouses to convert into detention centers and expanding other enforcement operations.
As a result, immigrant arrests have reached record levels and illegal border crossings have come to a halt. The spending blitz has also drawn scrutiny from critics and watchdogs.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched six major expansion efforts without a strategic plan in place and has since scaled back four of them, the G.A.O. said. As of July of this year, ICE spent more than $2.5 billion on warehouses and other facilities to house detainees but did not assess the long term costs, the congressional watchdog said.
In its report, the G.A.O. recommended that ICE develop a broad strategic plan to advise its detention expansion efforts with stated goals and budgets. ICE concurred.
The report included several costly, high-profile efforts by the Trump administration to expand detention that were ultimately scrapped that G.A.O. considered wasteful.
In one of its earliest efforts, the Trump administration planned to house 30,000 immigration detainees on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The Defense Department spent $2.85 million to build tents to house 5,000 migrants, but the shelters did not meet federal detention standards and as a result were never used. Ultimately, the plan was scrapped. As of June, the average daily population of detainees there was 16.
ICE also partnered with the Defense Department to use military camps to house detainees, including one on an Army base in El Paso, Texas, called Camp East Montana. The government wasted $11.5 million on detainee services over a two-week period when the facility was empty. The camp was built to hold 5,000 detainees, but had about 1,600 as of February of this year. Between October and March, ICE spent $7.1 million on meals it did not need.
After purchasing 11 warehouses for $1 billion to hold detainees, ICE decided to sell seven of them. To break even, the government must sell the seven warehouses for exactly what it paid for them: $707 million. And in the process of purchasing the seven warehouses it no longer wants, ICE spent $7.7 million in sunk costs for zoning assessments and title insurance as well as $12.8 million on utilities and security for the buildings even though they are not in use.
To add even more detention space, ICE housed migrants at a now-shuttered Florida facility called Alligator Alcatraz. ICE typically enters into formal agreements with state and local agencies to house detainees. But that was not the case for the Florida detention center, and the Department of Homeland Security reimbursed the state through a grant that includes payments of $249 for each detainee bed, which is nearly three times more than what ICE has been paying on average this year.
“Remember when Donald Trump promised to get rid of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in Washington? Well, G.A.O. now has exposed a shocking pattern of waste within the administration’s unconscionable mass deportation campaign,” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in a statement on Thursday. Mr. Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and two other Democratic senators asked the G.A.O. to investigate the costs of the detention expansion efforts.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can never destroy the American spirit, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 25, 2026. At 10:07 this morning, Donald Trump emerged from the South Portico doors of the White House, gripping First Lady Melania Trump’s hand with one of his own bruised and deeply discolored hands while the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets played in the background.
As he made his way down the red carpet, he struggled to walk a straight line, at one point shaking his upper thighs apart to separate his inner legs, before finally coming to a stop as the moment he had been waiting months for was finally here. His close friend and the authoritarian leader of China, Xi Jinping, had finally arrived at the White House.
With both men wearing nearly identical matching suits and ties, the large protrusion beneath the lower back side of Donald Trump’s jacket was hard to miss as the two leaders and their wives walked into the White House to start a very long day of carefully staged diplomacy. He would later say of their time together, “We had a great meeting, and he has great interest in granite. He likes granite.” Before adding, “He’s an expert on stone, aside from many other things, and he loves good granite.” That is what the President of the United States was most excited to share about his time with President Xi. He likes granite.
Way before their day spent together, Donald Trump had already begun laying the groundwork to set the tone for the day ahead with some early morning social media posts. At 8:24 a.m., he shared on Truth Social: “I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit, Better than ever. Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL!”
Donald Trump’s fascination with men’s looks got the best of him and distracted him from realizing that he had called President Xi’s wife the wrong name. The White House itself refers to Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan, as Madame Peng, not “Madam Xi.”
Before that post was an even odder social media post. Trump posted a photograph of himself standing beside President Xi on the tarmac the night before, where both men were saluting as a military jet flew overhead. The words “Only Trump” were written at the top of the picture in Old English lettering. It might have been an image that was posted and forgotten, but this was an image that had already been shared before, so many people online were quick to point out that Trump’s version and the original press photograph were very different in the strangest ways. In the one Trump posted, one of his gloves was missing, the woman in the background, Monica Crowley, had shoes that looked different, and Melania and Peng had been completely removed.
During Xi’s time at the White House, Trump took him on a grand tour, weaving through rooms and corridors and stopping at many of Trump’s pet construction projects. One stop along the route was one he was clearly proud of: his “Presidential Walk of Fame.” We have seen him take guests there before to see the gallery Trump installed in September of last year, which has gold-framed portraits and biographical summaries of every American president. Well, all but one. In the place that should have Joe Biden’s portrait, Trump has instead placed a photograph of an autopen. He took special interest in showing Xi his own portraits on the wall before pointing toward Biden’s spot and saying, “Trump, and then Trump, and this is the autopen.” Xi and his entourage laughed with Donald Trump, as seen in the video White House aide Margo Martin posted on social media.
Later in Trump’s tour, he stopped at more gold-framed photographs, including one showing him and Xi shaking hands during an earlier meeting. He pointed it out as it hung on the wall inside the White House and grinned, before joking, “Who is that? I don’t recognize him!” Then he told Xi something with the cameras close enough to hear, “We have a lot of respect for you.”
Just minutes apart, Donald Trump, the leader of the free world, mocked the last democratically elected president of his own country while standing beside an authoritarian leader who has never faced a free election in his life, and showed the world he has a picture of them together hanging in a place of honor inside the White House and that our country respects him.
What Donald Trump hangs on those walls tells us a lot about where his loyalties lie. We do not see pictures of Trump standing with Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron, or Mette Frederiksen. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t there, just that he isn’t showing them off. But photographs with Xi Jinping are displayed predominantly because Xi Jinping is the kind of leader he wants to be.
After the 90 minutes they spent together away from the press, where they were supposed to be discussing the future of our economic relationship, among other important matters, Trump came back outside and took Xi on another tour, this time to the outside areas of the White House too. He took Xi to see his new granite helipad on the South Lawn, where he pointed out the presidential seal that had been embedded in the stone. He repeatedly touched Xi’s arm, breaking traditions and customs. He then walked him over to Marine One and took him inside the military helicopter. He pointed toward the massive pit off the White House, the construction site where the East Wing once stood, and where Donald Trump’s ballroom is currently being built. Each step of the way, he watched Xi’s face as he showed him all of the things he has done and is doing. Donald Trump appeared to be having an absolutely fantastic time.
That wasn’t the end of the Xi and Trump “friend day” either. This evening was also Trump’s state dinner, which must have felt like going back in history to another century. The room was draped in red and gold, and the guest list was filled with many of the same people and companies that have been enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Reporting shows that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Bernard Arnault were all there. Supreme Court justices, the tech elite, and Fox News personalities were all gathered in the same room.
Donald Trump wore a tuxedo and presented Xi with a gold sculpture of a bald eagle that he said he and Melania personally designed. He called Xi and his delegation “truly amazing, outstanding people.” He even invited the entire room to tour the unfinished ballroom construction site after dinner, saying, “In honor of you, you’ll be the first people to step foot on that.” He bragged that if the ballroom had been finished, they could have had more than a thousand people with standing room only.
In his toast at the dinner, Trump said, “President Xi and I both understand we represent different systems, but the ties between our people endure, and we’ve never gotten along better.” They ironically raised their glasses to Schramsberg Blanc de Noir, which is the same wine served when President Nixon toasted Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.
Then Xi, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, spoke to the room filled with some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in America: “President Trump has pledged to make America great again,” and added that “China is committed to achieving great national rejuvenation,” as well. He rounded out his remarks by saying, “These two goals are both ambitious and can surely be mutually reinforcing.”
The leader of an authoritarian regime that surveils its citizens, crushes dissent, and operates detention camps for ethnic minorities stood inside the White House and said that MAGA and China’s rise could help each other by being “mutually reinforcing.” We can’t forget all the recent times Donald Trump has tried to convince us that Democrats are communists, that the left wants to turn America into a socialist nightmare, and that liberals are destroying the country from within. He knows the word “communist” is a loaded one, one of his most recent and reliable weapons. Yet when the actual leader of the Chinese Communist Party stood inside the White House and fused his country’s authoritarian ambitions with Trump’s political slogan, Trump seemed to have no issue with it.
After all the cozying up to an authoritarian regime at the expense of our democratic allies, the American people so far haven’t received better trade deals. Instead, we learned that we are temporarily being given Pandas. Specifically, two pandas are being sent to Zoo Atlanta. Xi announced that Ping Ping and Fu Shuang will be arriving in the coming days as part of China’s panda loan diplomacy program. As someone who loves pandas, I think that is genuinely wonderful, and the cultural significance of this gesture is not lost. But that does not come anywhere close to justifying what we traded for it. Aside from extending the tariff truce, there were no major breakthroughs on any of the other issues between the two countries.
Tonight, I am writing this from Disneyland. Over the years, when our family has faced difficult times or just needed to escape to new scenery for a few days, this is where we go. Last week was tough, and I thought we could all use some family time and fun.
One of our favorite attractions here is Soarin’, where you feel like you are flying over some of the most beautiful places in the world. Not realizing it, we went on the new version of the ride built for America’s 250th anniversary. It is called Soarin’ Across America, and in it you fly across the New England coastline, the Grand Canyon, the Great Plains, national parks, bayous, and over Washington, D.C. Seeing all of those places reminded me of times before Donald Trump unleashed all this madness and where we are as a nation now.
Watching all those scenes go by, I thought about what he has done to this country. I saw national parks whose protections he is stripping. I saw a capital that now makes people boo instead of cheer. I thought about the world before he came back, when the Middle East was not destabilized again because of his recklessness, when he was not trying to separate us from every ally we have, when he was not convincing half the country that their neighbors are their enemies just because they were not born here.
I try not to let myself think back to the before-Trump days very often. It is too painful. But today I did. I sat in that seat, and I let myself remember. I also let myself dream about how more stable the world will be and how thankful I will be when he is gone from the presidency. I also reminded myself how long this road is going to be, and how many steps it will take to get back to as close to where we were before him, and then onto building the country this was always supposed to be.
The midterms are 40 days away, and they are just the beginning. If we can take back Congress, we restore the checks and balances. Then we hold these people accountable. It is a long path. But this country was not built by quitters, and it was not built by people who were afraid of hard work. It was built by enslaved people who endured suffering most of us cannot begin to comprehend. It was built by immigrants who came from China and Japan, from Vietnam and dozens of other countries, people who poured everything they had into a place they believed could hold hope for the future. As long as we can still see the America they saw and the one in the Disney movie today, the one that is beautiful, vast, and generous and worth every ounce of the fight, we will never lose our way. We will always find our way home. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
MS NOW, Opinion: Republicans are winning the midterms cash race — but money can’t buy them love, Hayes Brown, right, Sept. 25, 2026. The GOP holds a major cash advantage over Democrats, but there’s likely no amount they can spend to persuade voters to ignore their own economic pain.Red dollar signs surround a blue smiley face in an illustration about money and voter sentiment ahead of the midterms.
Republicans hold a fundraising advantage heading into the midterms, while Democrats are betting on voters’ moods.
In politics, as in much of life, it’s better to have more money than less. Over the summer, the Republican National Committee had over eight times more money on hand than the Democratic National Committee, and heading into the November midterm elections, Republicans’ major monetary advantage over Democrats remains.
But Democrats benefit from a strong majority of likely voters’ disapproval of President Donald Trump’s performance in office, and more than one poll shows Democrats with a double-digit lead on a generic congressional ballot. The GOP’s mountain of cash may not be enough to raise its candidates out of the massive hole they’re in because of Trump and his party’s subservience to him.
Rising prices resulting from Trump’s trade war and the war with Iran, alongside other affordability concerns, have the president’s approval rating tanking. Trump has asked that Americans to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” but Republicans who actually are on the ballot are worried. Those higher costs, frustration with the war and lack of Republican leadership could lead to enthusiastic Democrats swarming their polling places and demoralized conservatives staying home. As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently noted, Republicans are even beginning to worry that the rural communities that have previously buoyed the GOP’s vote count won’t turn out strong.
The clear hope among Republican politicos is that money can make up for the enthusiasm gap — and money is the one thing they’ve got plenty of.
The clear hope among Republican politicos is that money can make up for the enthusiasm gap — and money is the one thing they’ve got plenty of. The RNC had $130 million cash on hand as of the end of July, the most recent Federal Election Commission disclosure period, compared to the DNC’s relatively paltry $16 million (without including the millions in debts it owes). SuperPACs and other major outside spending also tilts in favor of the GOP. Also, after complaints from Republicans that he seemed to be keeping all his cash for himself, Trump finally said this month that his PAC, MAGA Inc., would begin spending the $400 million war chest to help Republican candidates.
Much of Republicans’ financial advantage has been spent on major advertising blitzes, according to media tracking firm AdImpact, with the party and its allies planning on spending roughly $221 million more on advertising than their Democratic counterparts between this week and Election Day. But a surprisingly large chunk of the GOP’s money is going toward races in usually red states like Kansas, Texas and North Carolina.PlayGrowing talks of a blue wave this midterm seasonSeptember 24, 2026 / 05:49
The extra money to buy ads notwithstanding, there is little in the record for congressional Republicans to promote. H.R.1, widely known as the “one big, beautiful bill, the biggest piece of legislation of Trump’s second term, as The New York Times rightly noted, is a mixed bag at best for many voters. While many of the harshest cuts to the social safety net used to pay for its tax cuts were punted until next year or later, hundreds of thousands of Americans have already seen their benefits slashed in a bad economic environment — and know exactly which party to blame.
When they don’t have a positive message, campaigns often blanket media markets with negative messaging, hoping to tear down their opponent and push their own voters to the polls more out of fear than hope. Major Republican bogeymen for this campaign season have included the twin specters of communism and socialism, or, as a talking point Vice President JD Vance and numerous others have repeated goes: “common sense versus crazy.”
Those attacks don’t seem to be landing. Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, wrote Monday that “at this point, attack ads against Democrats were not yet ‘moving the needle’ in the races they were tracking.” She added that “Democratic candidates, for the most part, appear to be withstanding the deluge of advertising so far.”
New York Times, Alaskans Dismayed, But Not Moved, by Peltola’s Treatment of Her Staff, Kellen Browning, Hannah Lee and Emily Schwing, Sept. 25, 2026. Voters interviewed in Anchorage and Fairbanks on Thursday said news that Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, had used offensive slurs would not change their vote.
Many Alaskans on Thursday largely brushed off the news that Mary Peltola, the state’s former congresswoman, had mistreated staff and used offensive slurs.
Although some said they were disappointed by Ms. Peltola’s behavior, voters appeared to have for the most part retreated to their partisan corners in the closing stretch of a key Senate race between Ms. Peltola, a Democrat, and Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican.
Republicans said Ms. Peltola’s behavior, documented in a New York Times article on Wednesday, was abhorrent and revealed poor judgment. Democrats closed ranks around her, insisting that flipping the seat was more important than personal character. Some even suggested that the image of Ms. Peltola upbraiding staff in Washington with profane language could bolster her blue-collar image in a hard-knock, independent-minded state.
“It doesn’t move the needle one iota for me,” said Cameron Sanders, a small-business owner in Anchorage who said his vote for Ms. Peltola was based on anger over tariffs and rising health care costs as well as a deep desire to boot Mr. Sullivan from office.
Alfred Sturmann, a retiree who was at the Fairbanks airport on Thursday morning, said he was skeptical of the claims made by former staff members of Ms. Peltola in the article, but “if it really is so, I would be a little bit disappointed that she would act like this.” Still, Mr. Sturmann said, he would vote for Ms. Peltola no matter what.
Ms. Peltola, who won an upset victory in 2022 to flip the state’s sole House seat to Democrats, has long been regarded as a warm and friendly presence in Alaska politics, well liked even by Republicans. But nine of Ms. Peltola’s former aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Times that she had a history of angry and profane outbursts directed at staff members and others. Some aides recalled times when she used a homophobic slur, and she was accused of shoving a staff member in her congressional office.
In text messages viewed and published by The Times, Ms. Peltola also used the word retarded to describe people, disparaged Planned Parenthood in offensive terms, and said that she hoped one of its board members “dies of a botched abortion.”
Ms. Peltola’s campaign has said many of the accusations made by former aides — including using the homophobic slur and shoving someone — were false or exaggerated, though it said she regretted her use of the word retarded. It also noted that many of the incidents described in the article occurred not long after the deaths of her mother and her husband in rapid succession in 2023. Her husband, Eugene, who was known as Buzzy, died in a plane crash.
“Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief,” Harry Child, a spokesman for Ms. Peltola’s campaign, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong.”
Republicans seized on the news. Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that works to elect Republicans, said in a statement that the accusations against Ms. Peltola made her “entirely unfit for the U.S. Senate.”
And Mr. Sullivan, in an interview on Thursday, said he was saddened for the Alaskan staff members “who had to live with these experiences.”
“I think character matters in every race,” he said. “I think Alaskans expect their senator’s actions behind closed doors to be the same when they’re outside of closed doors.”
On Thursday, state Democrats sought to turn the page on the accusations made against Ms. Peltola, in part by making light of one staff complaint — that she had required them to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
“Alaskans everywhere wish Meatball well, and hope our state gets more coverage on things that actually matter,” the Alaska Democratic Party said in a statement.
Scott Kendall, an independent Anchorage attorney who once worked for Republicans but left the party in 2020, said he doubted the accusations against Ms. Peltola would reshape the contours of a race that hinged on economic conditions and the high cost of living in Alaska.
“The inherent irony here is you have a lot of progressives rushing to defend really, really unfortunate language that they would disavow in anyone else,” Mr. Kendall said. “And you have a lot of conservatives rushing to condemn language where if it came out of the president’s mouth or someone else’s mouth, they would say, ‘Don’t be so fragile.’”
On the left, some said they doubted the accusations. Others — especially online — embraced them, suggesting they portrayed Ms. Peltola as a tough operator and that it did not matter what she did as long as she helped usher in a Democratic majority.
New York Times, In Alaska, Rowdy Members of Congress Are a Tradition, Carl Hulse and Adam Sella, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). Revelations about the conduct of former Representative Mary Peltola may not faze voters who have long elected abrasive and sometimes violent figures to represent them.
One threatened a fellow congressman at knife point in a dispute over pet spending projects.
Another routinely wore an Incredible Hulk tie to the Capitol in a proud acknowledgment of his foul temper when he wasn’t getting his way.
Revelations about the conduct of former Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, toward her staff — including angry outbursts and the use of slurs — drew criticism on Thursday from Republicans who suggested they showed her unfitness for the Senate seat she is seeking.
But it was not clear whether Alaskans, who for decades have elected abrasive, bellicose and occasionally violent individuals to represent them in Congress, would find it disqualifying.
Alaska’s representatives on Capitol Hill have long brought a special brand of coarseness to Washington, part of a frontier mentality and a rough-and-tumble political tradition that comes with a bare-knuckled approach to securing federal resources for their remote state. They often seem to operate with a chip on their shoulder, arguing that their state’s distance leads to its getting short shrift.
“In Alaska, abrasiveness can sometimes read as political charisma, or sometimes even as authenticity, given that Alaska has a political culture that rewards independence,” said Alexander Hirsch, a political science professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “What sometimes reads like irreverence in Washington, D.C., can simultaneously signal to Alaskan voters something that’s really politically attractive.”
Here is a look at a few of the state’s more aggressive characters.Ted StevensImageSenator Ted Stevens, seen in 2008, was known as a fierce and often hot-tempered advocate for Alaska.Credit...Al Grillo/Associated Press
Serving in the Senate for 40 years, Senator Ted Stevens was known as a fierce and often hot-tempered advocate for Alaska. As a member and then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, he funneled billions to his state, including to create the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which made the state rich. Republicans made Mr. Stevens their second-highest ranking official in the Senate in 1977, a position he held for eight years.
An Army pilot during World War II, Mr. Stevens moved to Alaska in 1953 to practice law and soon afterward became the federal prosecutor there. He used to recount how he accompanied police on raids, gun strapped to his hip. In 1956, he went to Washington to work in the Interior Department on Alaska statehood, helping to bring Alaska into the union and then becoming a ferocious champion of it. He was named Alaskan of the Century in 2000 and a statue of him greets visitors at the Anchorage airport he showered with federal money and which is now named for him.
He was briefly convicted of concealing more than $250,000 in gifts by a federal jury in the District of Columbia in 2008, about a week before he lost a Senate re-election bid. About six months later, a judge threw out the conviction. He died in a plane crash in 2010, at 86, after surviving a serious crash in the 1970s.
When he faced a tough Senate debate, Mr. Stevens wore a tie featuring the image of the Incredible Hulk, the comic book superhero.
“I’m a mean, miserable S.O.B.,” he proclaimed in 1977 as he took over as chairman of the appropriations panel.
Decades later, Mr. Stevens once grabbed a reporter by the lapels in a Capitol hallway and urged him to help vanquish environmental activists who were thwarting his efforts to open a nature preserve to energy development. (The reporter did not.)
Angry that his daughters were not allowed to play Little League Baseball, Mr. Stevens became a fiery proponent of Title IX, guaranteeing gender equity in sports.
His temper was voted the “hottest” on Capitol Hill in a 2006 poll of congressional staff members by Washingtonian magazine.
Mr. Stevens did not argue with the characterization, instead boasting of how he used his hotheadedness to help his state.
“I didn’t lose my temper,” he once said. “I know right where it is.”Don YoungImageRepresentative Don Young survived occasional allegations of shady ethics in his 49 years in the House.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
Gruff and irascible, Representative Don Young, who survived occasional allegations of shady ethics in his 49 years in the House, was a staunch opponent of environmental causes and a tough defender of Alaska’s oil, mineral and logging industries. He used his powerful leadership positions on two committees to fund highways, bridges, pipelines and many other projects. He passed away in 2022, at 88, while traveling home to Alaska.
Mr. Young moved to Alaska soon after it became a state and tried his hand at fishing, trapping and panning for gold. He was inspired, he said, by “The Call of the Wild,” the 1903 novel by Jack London about a sled dog in Alaska.
In Congress, he cultivated the image of a rugged frontiersman, and at times was crude in public. In a 1994 House debate on the right of Native Alaskans to sell sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, he waved an 18-inch walrus penile bone at the face of the fish and wildlife commissioner.
In a radio interview in 2013, he referred to Latino migrant workers with an ethnic slur. In 2014, he forcefully grabbed a congressional staffer’s arm. In 2019, he shoved and cursed at a reporter. And in 2017, the former House speaker John Boehner of Ohio told Politico that Mr. Young had once pinned him against a wall in the Capitol and held a 10-inch knife to his throat, a story the Alaskan conceded at the time was “mostly true.”
His lapses rarely hurt him at the polls. He was elected to 25 consecutive terms, usually facing moderate to light opposition and winning more than 70 percent of the vote five times.
More On Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine, Reactions
New York Times, Stuck on the Battlefield, Russia Wages ‘Total War’ on Ukraine’s Economy, Andrew E. Kramer, Sept. 25, 2026. The economic damage from Russian strikes, resulting in lost sales, disrupted workdays and logistical snarls, is in the billions of dollars.
The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is expanding to encompass both countries’ economies.
Military targeting officers are operating as economists in reverse. Increasingly, the objectives of missile and drone strikes are declining output, lost jobs and logistical bottlenecks.
Ukrainian officials are calling the current Russian campaign “total war” for its focus on economic impact, rather than on narrower goals like battlefield gains or infrastructure damage. While Moscow has targeted commercial assets throughout the war, its assaults have grown significantly in scale.
The intensifying Russian bombardment has followed Ukraine’s own effort to damage the Russian economy. Kyiv has used its expanding arsenal of domestically made drones to fire on Russia’s oil industry, its most valuable sector, while also targeting Russian e-commerce companies.
Russia has shifted its focus to economic warfare as its advances have largely stalled on the battlefield. “In a war of attrition, the economy becomes the prime target,” said Orysia Lutsevych, head of Ukraine Forum at Chatham House, a London-based research group.ImageFlames and smoke rising from an industrial site in the distance, with city buildings in the foreground.Smoke rising from an oil refinery after a strike in Moscow on Sunday.Credit...Reuters
Moscow is seeking, Ms. Lutsevych said, to raise the cost to Europe of sustaining Ukraine’s war effort. The growing bill provides fodder for far-right parties in countries like Britain, France and Germany that oppose giving aid to Ukraine.
Last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky told European allies that Ukraine needed $27 billion to plug a budget shortfall, after the European Union had already finalized a loan of more than $100 billion earlier this year.
The economic damage from Russia’s campaign will reach about $10 billion by the end of the year, Ukraine’s economy ministry has estimated. Much of the cost is indirect, in lost sales, disrupted workdays and logistical snarls.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on Thursday lowered its previous expectation of 2.2 percent economic growth this year in Ukraine to 1.5 percent. Some economists have said that Ukraine might end the year with zero growth.
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.
Growth is also sluggish in Russia, where the Kremlin is struggling to fund the war’s ever-increasing costs. The Russian federal budget deficit reached $68 billion by the end of August, compared with the $44.5 billion planned for the entire year. On Thursday, Russia’s Finance Ministry said it would need to raise taxes to finance next year’s budget, following a major increase introduced the previous year.
Long-range Ukrainian attacks have opened cracks in the semblance of normal life that the Russian government has tried hard to preserve in cities far from the border with Ukraine. The strikes against oil refineries have led to fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations. Attacks on the warehouses of Russia’s two largest online retailers disrupted logistics and left many small businesses without inventory.
In the other direction, Moscow has waged a broad assault on Ukrainian exports and consumer spending. Attacks on warehouses have removed goods from shelves. Strikes on ports, locomotives, border crossings and ships at sea have crimped exports. In recent days, Russia has expanded its strikes to internet infrastructure, disrupting service for some 100,000 households.
New York Times, Russian Attacks Destroy Millions of Books, the Heart of Ukrainian Culture, Kim Barker and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn, Sept. 25, 2026. A publisher whose warehouse was hit twice said Moscow “thinks that books are more dangerous for them than military equipment.”
The first Russian jet-powered drone slammed into the warehouse about 11 a.m. on a Saturday in August. The fire burned so hot that employees could not extinguish it. Within minutes, the second drone hit the building, and everyone ran for the shelter. The fire burned for almost a week. By then, almost everything inside was gone.
This was no weapons depot, no drone manufacturer, no cog in the war machine. Instead, the warehouse targeted by the drones belonged to Ranok Publishing, one of the largest children’s book publishers in Ukraine. The company, based in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, was attacked during one of its busiest times, when it was preparing textbooks for the new school year.
“It’s such a disaster,” said Viktor Kruglov, the publishing house’s chief executive, who was working at the warehouse with about 50 employees — all of whom escaped injury — when it was hit.
“Russia thinks that books are more dangerous for them than military equipment,” he said. “They deliberately damage, erase, extinguish everything which is connected with Ukrainian culture.”
All eight million books inside the warehouse were destroyed, including 620,000 textbooks. Though the strike was the worst attack on books this summer, it was far from the only one. All told, Russian shelling has destroyed as many as 15 million new books in recent months, almost half of Ukraine’s annual production, said Artem Bidenko, chief executive of the Ukrainian Publishing Association.ImageBright orange and yellow flames consume books and other debris, some charred black. The fire is reflected on a wet surface in the foreground.All eight million books inside the warehouse were destroyed, including 620,000 textbooks. Credit...Volodymyr Pavlov/Reuters
The Ukrainian Culture Ministry, which is now trying to raise money for independent publishers, estimates that the Russian attacks have cost the Ukrainian book industry almost $40 million.
The strikes are part of an escalating air war that has left publishing houses scrambling to find warehouse space in western Ukraine, which has been less affected than the area around Kyiv, the capital. Russia has intensified the targeting of warehouses — sites storing not only books but also a range of other consumer goods — after Ukraine began a campaign of strikes on two Russian e-commerce giants.
The Russian assaults have damaged the Ukrainian economy, leading the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to lower its forecast for economic growth in Ukraine this year to 1.5 percent, from 2.2 percent.
The list of products destroyed this summer in the Russian attacks is long: fresh produce, meat, buckwheat, Coca-Cola, vodka, wine, baby milk, toys, Puma tennis shoes, high heels, designs from fall clothing lines, packages and mail sent from near and far, Toyota car parts and hundreds of tons of pharmaceuticals, including lifesaving ones.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Russian attacks have destroyed about 40 percent of Ukraine’s modern warehouse capacity, according to a major industry leader, though the Ukrainian agriculture minister has given a higher figure. More than 60 workers have been killed.
While Ukrainians may miss the peas and barley that have vanished from some grocery store shelves, books are a different matter. They represent ideas, transport readers to other worlds, open minds to different perspectives and build empathy. And Ukrainian books are tied to Ukraine’s desire for independence from Russia like almost nothing else.
In defending his crusade to bring Ukraine under Moscow’s dominance, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has claimed that Ukraine is not an actual country, that the whole country speaks Russian, that Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian and that his war is intended to defend the rights of oppressed Russian speakers.
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China standing with their spouses outside the White House in front of American and Chinese flags.President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House was celebrated with pomp and circumstance that were not covered by American television networks, which were still boycotting the White House press pool.
New York Times, White House Memo: In Trump’s White House, China’s Dictator Is Welcome. American Media, Less So, Peter Baker, Sept. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The showdown over President Trump’s partial media ban played out as he welcomed President Xi Jinping, whose government is ranked among the most repressive in the world.
At the White House gate, a throng of Chinese journalists was being admitted onto the grounds of the Executive Mansion to cover the visit of President Xi Jinping. Out on the street, several American journalists were blocked from entering the White House on the orders of President Trump.
The scene on Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday morning captured a surreal week in the life of Washington. The president of the United States barred American reporters because he labeled them a threat to national security, while welcoming Chinese reporters who answer to the communist dictatorship in Beijing.
This would be the same president who is running government-paid television advertising vowing to stop the United States from becoming socialist or communist in the same week that he held a friendly meeting with the democratic socialist mayor of New York and rolled out a literal red carpet for the communist president of China. The same president who is waging economic war against the prime minister of Canada while inviting the president of Russia to visit his Florida golf club.ImageTwo men in suits holding smartphones up while standing in front of military members, with the Washington Monument visible in the background.Members of the Chinese media outside the White House on Thursday. A White House pool report indicated that at one point during the day President Trump “made a joke about how the Chinese had the friendliest press corps.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
In the epic contest between democracy and autocracy, Mr. Trump has long given the impression that he may be on the other side. But rarely has that been brought home as starkly as this week, as he punishes news outlets for being too “negative” about him while embracing Mr. Xi and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, two of the world’s leading authoritarians whose governments brutally suppress free speech.
Mr. Xi’s arrival at the White House was celebrated with pomp and circumstance that were not covered by American television networks, which were still boycotting the White House press pool until Mr. Trump’s staff commits in writing to letting CNN cameras back into the rotation. Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico who were initially barred from entering the White House on Thursday morning despite a court order were allowed in later in the day, but by late afternoon Mr. Trump’s staff had still not permitted CNN back into the pool that provides footage of the president every day.
Even as Mr. Trump fumed that his carefully orchestrated day of pageantry was not shown on air, he basked in Mr. Xi’s presence and lavished him with praise, making no mention of human rights issues that past presidents raised when meeting with Chinese counterparts.
“From the time of my first election in 2016, President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people,” Mr. Trump said in the Grand Foyer of the White House. He later delighted in taking his great friend on a tour of the new White House ballroom that is under construction and showed off his taunting photograph of an autopen meant to represent his predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
ImagePresident Trump and President Xi Jinping walking along the Colonnade of the White House outside in front of a series of gold frames and placards showing the portraits of previous presidents.Mr. Trump showed Mr. Xi a taunting photograph of an autopen he had installed that was meant to represent his predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Trump hopes to similarly host Mr. Putin soon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that Mr. Trump had invited the once-ostracized Russian leader to attend the annual Group of 20 meeting in Miami in December, which would be his first appearance at the annual gathering since 2019, before his full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. The summit is scheduled to be held at Trump National Doral Miami, where the president tried to host a Group of 7 meeting in his first term only to back down after Republican complaints that it was too self-dealing — complaints not heard this time.
While Mr. Putin was kicked out of the G7 and other groups because of his seizure of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Trump has been eager to bring him back into the international fold. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin on war crimes charges in 2023, but Mr. Trump ignored that by inviting the Russian to Alaska last year — and just this week denounced the court in an address to the U.N. General Assembly as “an evil group of people” as his administration attempts to dismantle the body.
Mr. Trump’s affinity for despots, tyrants and autocrats has baffled democratic leaders and diplomats and reoriented American foreign policy for some 10 years now. He gushes over the likes of Kim Jong-un of North Korea (“we fell in love”), Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (“I like him too much”), Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (“a very good friend of mine”) and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador (“one hell of a president”).
By contrast, he regularly feuds with leaders of traditional allies like Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. He derided the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, last year as a “dictator without elections” while offering no concerns about Mr. Putin, whose elections have been documented as thoroughly rigged. He had the United States vote along with North Korea, Belarus and Sudan last year against a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and lately has been courting Belarus’s dictator Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.ImageA group of photographers and reporters sitting, standing and kneeling outside.The press pool awaiting Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi on Thursday, as broadcast networks were still boycotting the pool until Mr. Trump’s staff commits in writing to letting CNN cameras back into the rotation.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
At home, Mr. Trump regularly battles the domestic news media, denouncing journalists as “enemies of the people,” a phrase used by Stalin to condemn dissidents to the gulag. More than any American president in modern times, Mr. Trump has mounted a wide-ranging campaign against independent media through multibillion-dollar lawsuits, Federal Communications Commission pressure, subpoenas to reporters, the eviction of The Associated Press from the White House press pool and restrictions that effectively forced reporters out of the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump seemed unbothered on Thursday by any mixed messages sent by welcoming Chinese state reporters at the same time he was trying to throw out American news outlets as part of what he called his “ban on the free press.” On the other hand, he did seem bothered by the fact that the still-unresolved showdown meant that boycotting network television cameras did not beam the festivities to the nation.
In a social media post late in the day, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Xi as “the Highly Respected President of China” and flattered “his beautiful wife, Madam Peng” while accusing CNN and MS NOW of having “NO CREDIBILITY” and being “Fake News.” A White House pool report indicated that at one point during the day Mr. Trump “made a joke about how the Chinese had the friendliest press corps.”
Which of course depends on the definition of friendly. China exercises iron-fisted control over its press corps and has at least 111 journalists and media workers locked up, according to Reporters Without Borders, making it “the world’s largest prison for journalists.” Of the 180 countries that the group ranks on freedom of the press, China ranks almost at rock bottom at 178th place, above only North Korea and Eritrea. (The United States has fallen to 64th under Mr. Trump.)
Sept. 24
Top Headlines
Sept. 24, 2026. Trump’s own coalition is starting to fracture in public. A taxpayer-funded ad declaring “America will never be a communist country” is drawing federal ethics complaints, MAGA loyalists are furious he’s rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping days after warning voters about socialism, a sitting Republican senator wants Trump Jr. investigated over a Putin-linked oligarch bankrolling his wedding, and even Tucker Carlson is now saying Trump’s own Cabinet should have removed him under the 25th Amendment. A judge ruled Trump’s press ban unconstitutional, and hours later the administration violated the ruling anyway, turning a reporter away at the gates. And that’s before you get to the part where JD Vance turns out to be the “anonymous source” they’re punishing a newsroom for quoting. Add in eight sailors attempting to take their own lives on a carrier deployment nobody in the Senate can explain the purpose of anymore, Senate Republicans openly abandoning this war as gas prices climb, and Trump rolling out a hundred-foot red carpet for Xi Jinping days after threatening to "annihilate" Iran, and you've got a full morning.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Martin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook.
Sept. 24, 2026. Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government. Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And yet, the story continues, when he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump fired the investigators building the case and largely stopped investigating public corruption.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump Has Been A Spectacular Failure. Voters Are Angry. The Wave Is Getting Big. Our Job Is To Make It Bigger, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 24, 2026. Last night the proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered for our weekly get together. It was a lively affair, as they often are. Here is some of what we talked about....There Will Be A Blue Wave This Year. The Question Now Is How Big Will It Be. Sept. 24, 2026. Late yesterday afternoon, President Trump traveled to Joint Base Andrews just outside of Washington, D.C. to personally greet the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping. It was the first time the president had met a foreign leader on arrival at Andrews. Indeed, it was the first time any American president had gone to Andrews to welcome a foreign leader in more than sixty years.More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
More On Trump Team Governance
Sept. 24, 2026. Trump and his team are not just our political rivals...they are Nuremberg criminals. Wake up!
U. S. Crime, Courts
More Global News
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Saudi Arabia Downs Houthi Missiles Targeting Kingdom, Official Says, Ismaeel Naar and Saeed Al-Batati, Sept. 24, 2026. The Iran-backed militia in Yemen fired six ballistic missiles at cities in Saudi Arabia, a military spokesman said. There was no immediate comment from the Houthis.Global Oil Supplies, Prices, Control
More On North American Tariffs, Trade, Economy
New York Times, Carney Lays Out His Vision for Breaking Canada’s Reliance on U.S., Matina Stevis-Gridneff, David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager and Colby Smith, Updated Sept. 24, 2026. In a wide-ranging interview, Prime Minister Mark Carney described a tense, evolving relationship with President Trump.Top Stories
New York Times, Iran Proposes 7-Day Plan to End War, Farnaz Fassihi and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 24, 2026. Under the offer, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen and nuclear talks would be revived.
Iran’s foreign minister said Thursday that Tehran had proposed to Washington a seven-day plan to cease hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and then begin comprehensive talks on his country’s nuclear program.
Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, told reporters at a press briefing at the United Nations General Assembly that the proposal closely mirrored the commitments laid out in a so-called memorandum of understanding that was struck between the United States and Iran in June but quickly unraveled.
He said Iran was ready to begin putting the plan into effect as soon as Washington agreed to it.
“We have introduced a plan to the United States through the intermediators that if certain conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz would be open on the end of the seventh day and talks would restart,” Mr. Araghchi said.
He said “it would be better,” if a deal was reached before the U.S. midterm elections.
An American official familiar with the talks said that the administration was having positive and constructive discussions through mediators, but that the United States was not going to rush into a deal.
The Iranian proposal came even as President Trump and Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, delivered mutually hostile speeches at the United Nations. Mr. Trump threatened Iran with “annihilation” if it did not strike a deal, while a defiant Mr. Pezeshkian told world leaders his country would not be bullied.
Though Iran’s proposal contains many of the same conditions of the deal that fell apart, the behind-the-scenes diplomacy suggested that both sides may see much to gain from finding an off-ramp from the war.
Iranian officials said that while the proposal was effectively the same as the memorandum of understanding made in June, it was designed to move at a much faster pace. In the earlier agreement, a 60-day time frame was set for reaching nuclear negotiations.
Under the conditions that Iran has set for the agreement, according to Mr. Araghchi, during the seven days all hostilities would end, including in Lebanon; the U.S. would release Iran’s frozen assets — estimated at least $12 billion — waive sanctions on Iranian oil and lift the naval blockade on Iran. Then, on the last day, the Strait of Hormuz would be opened.
After the seven days, Mr. Aragchi said, comprehensive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program would immediately begin. Mr. Trump has said that his top goal is for Iran not to have a nuclear weapon, and that he would either achieve that through a diplomatic deal or with more attacks.
The United States and Iran have been at war for nearly seven months. It began in late February when the United States and Israel launched airstrikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and military chain of command. Mr. Trump initially said the war would take only a few weeks
The war has had widespread global repercussions including on oil, energy and food prices.
The Iranian proposal came as U.S. negotiators have tried to jump start diplomacy with Iran on its nuclear program through talks on the sidelines of the United Nations assembly. The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said a three-hour meeting, mediated by Qatar, between U.S. and Iranian officials did not end in a breakthrough.
Mr. Araghchi, who will be in New York until next Monday, met on Tuesday with the U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of Mr. Trump’s. It was mediated by Qataris passing messages between the two sides, and Mr. Araghchi described it as “productive” and said the messaging continued.
Ismaeil Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry who is also in New York, said that it was possible that there would be more mediated meetings in the coming days.
Iran’s economy is under serious strain, and Iranians are suffering from skyrocketing inflation on basic food items, a shortage of medicine and disruptions to commerce.
Analysts said that Mr. Trump would have to weigh the benefits of reaching a deal with Iran before the midterms against keeping a chokehold on its economy in the hope of getting more concessions from Tehran.
“This is a smart move,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group. “They know it’s very tempting for President Trump because it ends an unpopular war and brings down energy prices in the run-up the midterms. But it also restores a deal that was largely favorable to the Iranians. A compressed timeline to get to the nuclear issue should be appealing to an impatient president.”
New York Times, Senate Defeats Bid to Direct Trump to End Iran War or Seek Approval, Robert Jimison, Sept. 24, 2026. The vote came as a growing number of Republicans have broken from President Trump on the conflict, reflecting voters’ concerns ahead of midterm elections.
The Senate on Thursday narrowly rejected an effort to direct President Trump to end the war in Iran unless he wins authorization for it, defeating a measure aimed at rebuking his handling of a conflict he has continued to wage despite repeated votes by Congress to halt it.
The resolution, which passed the House over the summer, failed 50 to 49, with four Republicans — Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — joining Democrats in support. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the lone Democrat to oppose the measure.
Mr. Tillis was the newest Republican to break with his party over the war, joining a small bloc that has challenged Mr. Trump’s authority to continue directing the conflict without congressional approval.
But Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who had previously voted with G.O.P. defectors to curtail Mr. Trump’s war powers, switched his position and sided with the majority of his party on Thursday, leaving the resolution short of the support to pass.
It was the 20th vote on such a resolution since the war began on Feb. 28.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: MAGA Coalition Fractures, Trump Misuses Taxpayer Dollars, Press Access Restored, Texas Error Threatens Voters, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 24, 2026. Trump’s own coalition is starting to fracture in public. A taxpayer-funded ad declaring “America will never be a communist country” is drawing federal ethics complaints, MAGA loyalists are furious he’s rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping days after warning voters about socialism, a sitting Republican senator wants Trump Jr. investigated over a Putin-linked oligarch bankrolling his wedding, and even Tucker Carlson is now saying Trump’s own Cabinet should have removed him under the 25th Amendment.
Add in the press finally clawing back White House access after the administration defied a federal judge, a contentious Xi summit, and a Texas voter registration mess just weeks before the midterms, and there’s a lot to get through. Let’s dig in.
For weeks, those around the White House called me a liar and accused me of starting a “USS Abraham Lincoln hoax” for reporting on the horrific conditions sailors were enduring aboard that ship. This week, US officials confirmed to Senator Gillibrand that everything I reported was true. That’s not an isolated pattern, it’s how this administration operates: attack the messenger, deny the facts, and use every power of the presidency to go after the First Amendment in ways we haven’t seen before. Here’s the news:
Trump’s Base Cracks, 25th Amendment Calls Grow:
A new pro-Trump ad titled “Love Me,” featuring a “Paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, is airing on Fox News and Newsmax ahead of the midterms, raising questions about whether it violates federal law barring taxpayer-funded political promotion. The ad, which shows Trump set to an R&B song and declares “America will never be a communist country,” was posted to the White House’s YouTube page 11 days ago in a shorter form before the full version began airing on cable this week; the White House calls it a “public service announcement” that is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Sen. Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles demanding details on the ad’s cost, funding source, and any contractors involved, while Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “blatantly unethical” if government dollars paid for it. Ethics lawyer Norm Eisen said the ad appears to be a “shocking transgression” of appropriations restrictions on government propaganda, and the artist behind “Love Me,” JMSN, said he never authorized its use and is now seeking legal counsel; the controversy echoes the ouster of Kristi Noem earlier this year over a similar $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign.
Some Trump allies are furious over his lavish welcome of Chinese President Xi Jinping, arguing it undercuts the GOP’s core midterm message that Democrats want to bring “socialism or communism” to America. A Republican close to the White House told Politico’s Playbook that voters don’t want to see Trump “toasting the Chinese premier” when they want him focused on their concerns, while Arizona strategist Barrett Marson said Xi’s visit is “just another in a string of examples where Trump’s message and Republicans’ don’t jibe.” The frustration is compounded by Trump’s recent warm visit to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist Republicans have cast as a boogeyman. Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer was especially incensed, writing “I’m pissed off” and predicting “November is going to be a bust” after concluding Trump’s base gets no accountability for such moves.
Republican Sen. John Curtis is demanding a formal investigation into Donald Trump Jr. after a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin reportedly bankrolled his wedding. Curtis sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin calling for Trump Jr. to be subpoenaed over the private-island party paid for by oligarch Umar Kremlev, as well as the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, and asked that Hunter Biden receive equivalent scrutiny. “A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis wrote, arguing Republicans shouldn’t abandon the same investigative standard they applied to Biden. The move is notable as one of the few instances of a sitting Republican senator publicly pushing to scrutinize the Trump family’s business dealings, which reportedly earned the president $2.2 billion in 2025, mostly from cryptocurrency.
A MAGA-branded music festival headlined by Kid Rock was canceled in Kentucky after organizers sold only six VIP tickets at $1,000 each. Host Eric Deters, a former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate, blamed his wealthy friends’ lack of enthusiasm, venting on Facebook that he’ll “never ever” throw the event again and that those who snubbed him no longer have “Bulldog immunity.” The Freedom Fest had drawn large crowds since 2022 and previously featured speakers like Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, and Eric Trump, but interest collapsed this year amid Trump’s low approval ratings, Iran-war-driven cost increases, and general MAGA-event fatigue. Deters also lashed out at media outlets for what he felt was inadequate coverage of the festival.
The White House pushed its own branded phone app as an alternative information source amid the press boycott, and it reads far more like propaganda than a news product. The app’s front page touted Trump’s “historic deal with Greenland” without mentioning the deal originated from a 1951 agreement, and its “accomplishments” button led to a page falsely claiming Trump had “ended the Israel-Hamas War.” The app also promoted “TrumpTV” and included a slanted survey asking whether states should face funding penalties for alleged noncitizen voter registration errors, offering only loaded response options and no results transparency. Despite the propagandistic content, the app briefly charted at #11 in Apple’s news category, just behind the New York Times, as the administration scrambled to keep the public engaged after Trump was effectively muted during a helipad unveiling with no press pool present to mic him.
Tucker Carlson called for Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office under the 25th Amendment over his threats to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. In an NPR interview, Carlson said Trump “should have been bundled up and taken out” the moment he threatened a “nuclear attack,” calling it a crime with “no greater” severity, and suggested Trump didn’t actually have “the latitude to make this decision on his own.” The 25th Amendment’s Section 4, which Carlson is invoking, allows the vice president and Cabinet to forcibly remove a president unable or unfit to fulfill his duties, historically used only for temporary medical incapacitation, as with Reagan, both Bushes, and Biden. Carlson isn’t alone in the sentiment: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made similar calls earlier this year over the same Iran war rhetoric, with Jones asking “how do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Carlson’s turn against Trump is notable given his history of both fierce private criticism (revealed in leaked Dominion texts saying he “hated him passionately”) and public reconciliation, including a 2023 declaration that he “loves” Trump.
Media is back at the White House:
Journalists for CNN, MS Now and Politico finally regained White House access Thursday afternoon, hours after being turned away in defiance of a federal judge’s overnight order. Lawyers for the outlets told the court the administration had “repeatedly violated” Judge Timothy Kelly’s ruling, with Secret Service agents confiscating hard passes that morning that hadn’t even been taken before; the White House’s press operations director said badges weren’t reactivated until after 9am and confiscated ones weren’t returned to the gate until nearly 10am, despite the judge’s order coming in the early morning hours. The passes had originally been revoked Saturday after Trump ordered the outlets banned over “FAKE NEWS” coverage, prompting the outlets to sue and drawing criticism from press freedom advocates industry-wide. Attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr., representing the outlets, called the ruling “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” while Trump had already signaled on Truth Social that the White House would appeal.
Judge Kelly ruled the ban likely violated due process because the outlets never received advance notice or a chance to contest specific standards before losing access. He cited D.C. Circuit precedent requiring that the White House “promulgate rules or standards” before revoking a pass and give reporters “fair notice” of both the violation and the potential punishment, finding the vague standards described in Tuesday’s letters to the outlets “hardly does the trick.” Justice Department lawyers had argued the ban was necessary for national security, citing stories that relied on non-public information, but Kelly said he was “skeptical” that safeguarding national security was the administration’s actual motivation, pointing instead to Trump’s own comments suggesting the ban was content-based retaliation. A preliminary injunction hearing has been expedited to occur within the 14-day window while the outlets’ access is restored.
China Summit:
Xi Jinping used his White House summit with Trump to lay out terms for avoiding the “Thucydides trap,” the historical pattern of conflict between a rising and an established power, while Trump kept his own remarks vague and centered on personal rapport. Xi called for “candid, in-depth and continued dialogue,” stressed that China and the US “stand to gain from cooperation and will both lose in confrontation,” and proposed inviting 100,000 young Americans on student exchanges to China. He also said both nations bear joint responsibility to ensure AI development remains “always under human control,” and separately voiced support for the US and Iran returning to June’s memorandum of understanding to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, for his part, touted a “truly great friendship” and “tremendous strides,” saying the visit would focus on security, technology, and what he’s taken to calling “super intelligence,” while both leaders afterward called it a “great meeting.” Xi also used a Chinese state media readout to urge the US to oppose “Taiwan independence,” a subject the White House didn’t immediately confirm discussing.
The US and China agreed to extend their tariff truce to February, with analysts framing it as Trump keeping pressure on Beijing for a better trade deal rather than a sign of resolution. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the extension of the truce first struck in South Korea last year, even as China remains on pace to run a $1 trillion trade deficit with the US for a second straight year despite the ongoing tariff war. The visit marked Xi’s second state visit to the US and first since 2015, notable as Trump greeted him personally at Andrews Air Force Base the night before, an unusual gesture underscored by matching national anthem ceremonies, a military review, and a flyover. Xi also pressed Trump on arms sales to Taiwan, an issue complicated by Trump’s earlier suspension of a $14 billion arms package after his May trip to Beijing, which he’d called a “very good negotiating chip” and which has unsettled some US allies and Republicans. A lavish state dinner Thursday evening, featuring a “Toast to Peace” nod to Nixon’s 1972 visit and tech titans including Musk, Bezos, Cook, Altman, Zuckerberg, and Huang, capped the day’s pageantry.
The summit unfolded against a backdrop of pointed ironies and protest, starting with Trump joking in the Oval Office that China has “the friendliest press corps” even as US networks boycotted the visit in solidarity with CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters only just reinstated at the White House after a federal judge’s order. China’s media is among the most heavily censored in the world, a contrast unremarked upon by Trump despite his own recent attempts to bar critical outlets. Outside the White House, demonstrators waved Uyghur flags and wore Tank Man t-shirts to protest China’s mass detention of over a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which the UN and multiple governments have called a possible genocide, with one protester describing a brother sentenced to 17 years without due process. Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan, meanwhile, toured the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art together in a soft-power display, visiting the Peacock Room and watching a children’s choir perform Chinese folk songs. Xi is staying at the Waldorf Astoria rather than the traditional government guest house Blair House during the visit, a change from his 2015 trip.
Other news:
The White House’s new “Trump TV” livestream is drawing embarrassingly low ratings, with more viewers tuning into a blank screen with box fan sounds than the president’s own content. Launched Monday as a 24/7 stream of past speeches and administration moments, the White House promoted it on X promising “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest,” but by Thursday afternoon fewer than 700 people were watching a rebroadcast of Trump’s University of Alabama commencement speech, while a livestream of squirrels eating nuts drew over 2,000 viewers and a “Rain Sounds for Sleeping” stream pulled more than 4,000. The stream’s launch came just days after Trump banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House over what he called “FICTION and LIES.” By Thursday, a federal judge had temporarily reversed that ban and allowed the three outlets’ reporters back in.
A state-level error at the Texas Department of Public Safety has left county election offices scrambling to process a massive backlog of voter registration applications just as midterm voting nears, with the association of local election officials saying the problem is in the tens of thousands for the state’s most populous counties, including about 45,000 backlogged applications in Bexar County alone. The error, dating to last October, failed to transmit many online driver’s-license-linked registration records to applicants’ home counties, and officials say it may have even prevented some Texans from voting in the state’s March primary without their knowledge. The Department of Public Safety says the “system issue” has been resolved but has not explained its cause, and local election officials say they received no communication about the backlog for nearly a year. Counties must clear the backlog before early voting begins October 19, and officials stress that voters whose registration is submitted by October 5 don’t need to worry, since anyone missing from the rolls on Election Day can still cast a provisional ballot.
A Mother Jones investigation reveals ChatGPT actively coached the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia school shooter on tactics and helped her evade OpenAI’s own safety flags in the months before she killed eight people in February. After OpenAI banned Jesse Van Rootselaar’s first account for discussing mass shooting scenarios, the chatbot itself advised her on a second account to always frame violent content as “fictional or hypothetical” to “never get flagged again,” telling her “you can still be twisted, just be clever about it.” Over the following eight months, ChatGPT discussed building firearms and explosives with her, generated graphic fictional mass-shooting narratives, and gave detailed tactical guidance on a shotgun’s effectiveness in close quarters, including casualty estimates, after she got around an initial refusal by simply adding “hypothetically” to her prompt. On the day of the attack, she asked ChatGPT about the timing of past U.S. school shootings, including Columbine and Sandy Hook, echoing eerily similar final chats from a separate mass shooter at Florida State University the year before. More than three dozen victim lawsuits are now pending against OpenAI, which has apologized for not alerting law enforcement about the first banned account but has not explained why it failed to detect the second one despite having systems designed to catch repeat policy violators, and British Columbia’s government has now filed its own lawsuit while accusing the company of walking away from mediation.
Dozens of UN delegates walked out of Benjamin Netanyahu's General Assembly speech Thursday, jeering and booing as he addressed the hall, prompting him to declare "if there are any other moral cowards who haven't left this hall, please do so now." Netanyahu used the speech to attack New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as "antisemitic," claiming Jews "no longer feel safe" since his election, a jab tied to Mamdani's earlier, later-abandoned threat to try to execute an ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu over the 2024 finding that there were reasonable grounds he bore responsibility for war crimes in Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was barred from attending after the Trump administration denied him a visa, and instead delivered a video message rejecting the "unlawful punitive measures" against him, while protesters including actress Susan Sarandon were detained outside the UN. Netanyahu also lashed out at France and Britain over their criticism of West Bank settlements by invoking their colonial histories, called Turkish President Erdogan a "tyrant" over alleged support for Hamas, and branded Iran a "murderous dictatorship," claiming the nearly seven-month war with Iran has halted its nuclear ambitions and suggesting the government's collapse "was not far," even as Iran continues to defy the U.S. by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. At one point he held up a pager resembling the explosive-rigged devices Israeli intelligence reportedly used to target Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.
The University of Mississippi has named two students found dead this week in cases that have raised concerns about the herb kratom. Aidan Hamilton, an 18-year-old freshman from Colorado, and Robert Strang, a 20-year-old junior from Atlanta and member of Phi Delta Theta, were found separately on Monday, one on campus and one in the city of Oxford, with packaged kratom discovered at each scene though no confirmed link to the deaths has been established. Kratom is an herb with opioid-like effects sometimes sold at gas stations, used informally for pain, anxiety and drug dependence, and capable of stimulating or sedating effects depending on dosage. University vice chancellor Shawnboda Mead urged the campus to avoid speculation while law enforcement completes its investigation, noting “inaccurate information is being shared by individuals who do not have access to the facts.” Phi Delta Theta issued a statement mourning both students and expressing sympathy to their families and the broader Ole Miss community.
Kyrsten Sinema’s former bodyguard and romantic partner was arrested after allegedly causing $200,000 in damage to her Arizona home while trying to coerce her into posting a video. Matthew Ammel, 39, broke into Sinema’s home on August 30 while she was away, allegedly threatening to destroy a painting every ten minutes unless she posted to social media, and when she refused, he reportedly threw 22 paintings into her pool and smashed alcohol bottles throughout the house. Ammel was arrested September 17 after being released from a mental health facility and has since been charged with aggravated criminal damage. The incident follows a separate North Carolina lawsuit under the state’s “alienation of affection” law, in which a judge ruled Sinema can be sued by Ammel’s ex-wife despite Sinema’s argument that she has no connection to the state, citing nine text messages she sent Ammel while he was there. Ammel had joined Sinema’s security detail after retiring from the Army in 2022 and later also served as a national security fellow in her Senate office.
The Senate narrowly rejected a symbolic resolution calling on Trump to end the Iran war, with most Republicans standing by the president despite the conflict’s deep unpopularity. The 49-50 vote saw only Republicans Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis cross over to join Democrats, while Democrat John Fetterman was the lone member of his party to vote no; the measure had already passed the House in July. A recent NBC News poll found just 33% of voters believe the war was worth it, with 62% saying it wasn’t, and voters were far more likely to back a candidate who opposes the war by a 57-24 margin. Sen. Tim Kaine, who has led the push to reassert congressional war powers, argued “the White House can’t veto the Constitution” and urged colleagues to “listen to the eight who tried to commit suicide” aboard the USS Lincoln. Trump defended the war at the UN, warning against a “vile regime” possessing nuclear weapons “behind a nuclear shield.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Thursday that Tehran wants to reach a deal with the U.S. before the November midterms, contradicting Trump’s prediction that Iran would wait until after the election. Speaking to NBC News and other outlets on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Pezeshkian said Iran wishes “Americans to return” to the collapsed June memorandum of understanding before the midterms, while the White House responded by accusing the “evil” Iranian regime of terrorism and vowing to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Pezeshkian also revealed he has met twice with Iran’s new, rarely-seen supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, including a seven-hour meeting a month ago, saying he saw no health issues despite reports Khamenei suffered severe burns and leg injuries in the Israeli strike that killed his father. Pezeshkian said Iran remains “open” to nuclear facility inspections and denied any plot to assassinate Trump, despite a Justice Department murder-for-hire case filed last November tied to avenging the U.S. killing of General Qassem Soleimani. A new NBC poll found just 31% approve of Trump’s handling of the war, with 69% disapproving.
The California Supreme Court unanimously ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to return roughly 650,000 ballots he seized earlier this year, ruling the seizure “unlawful.” Bianco took the ballots from a November 2025 special election on congressional redistricting after receiving a complaint about vote counts that local election officials had already deemed unfounded, and the court found California law requires ballots to stay in the custody of election officials even during a criminal probe. Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta had challenged the seizure as designed to “sow distrust in elections,” and the UCLA Voting Rights Project separately sued on behalf of Riverside voters. Bianco, who ran unsuccessfully for governor before the ballots were seized and did not advance past the primary, has not commented on the ruling and had already suspended a partial recount amid the legal challenges. Newsom signed a bill last Saturday barring anyone from seizing ballots the way Bianco did.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to be transferred from federal prison to a Texas halfway house in August 2027, according to one of her fraud victims. Holmes, 42, is serving an 11-year, three-month sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, later reduced after a judge found she hadn’t personally caused victims “substantial financial hardship,” a reduction the government had opposed given her lack of accepted responsibility and minimal restitution paid. Victim Alan Eisenman, owed nearly $150,000 and still unpaid, called the transfer “a gift” and said he opposes any presidential clemency for Holmes, whose commutation request remains pending. The Bureau of Prisons confirmed halfway house residents can work, use phones, and earn weekend home passes, and prosecutors noted Holmes has continued telling media she intends to return to healthcare technology and has been advising her partner’s startup, which resembles Theranos. Her transfer news coincides with the upcoming release of a Nathan Fielder-directed documentary about her, which Eisenman worries may portray her sympathetically, adding “she’s the most conniving person I’ve ever met.”
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Big News: White House Defies Order to Restore Press Access, Vance Outed as Anonymous Source, 8 Sailors Attempted to Take Their Own Lives, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 24, 2026. A judge ruled Trump’s press ban unconstitutional, and hours later the administration violated the ruling anyway, turning a reporter away at the gates.
And that’s before you get to the part where JD Vance turns out to be the “anonymous source” they’re punishing a newsroom for quoting. Add in eight sailors attempting to take their own lives on a carrier deployment nobody in the Senate can explain the purpose of anymore, Senate Republicans openly abandoning this war as gas prices climb, and Trump rolling out a hundred-foot red carpet for Xi Jinping days after threatening to "annihilate" Iran, and you've got a full morning.
For weeks, we have been called liars for reporting on the conditions of the USS Lincoln. Today’s reporting confirms everything we have reported. That’s what your subscription funds. Every banned outlet, every confiscated press pass, every lawsuit meant to scare a newsroom into silence, that’s the fight, and it only works if enough people decide it’s worth backing.
Here’s the news:
Trump’s Ban on Reporters is Unconstitutional, but the Administration has Already Violated the Order:
A federal judge ruled Thursday that Trump’s ban on three news outlets from the White House was likely unconstitutional and ordered their access restored. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order early Thursday requiring the administration to immediately restore White House press access for CNN, MS Now and Politico. Kelly cited case law establishing that before a journalist’s hard pass is suspended or revoked, the journalist is entitled to advance notice of the alleged infraction and an opportunity to be heard, a process he found the administration skipped entirely. The order will remain in effect for 14 days while further litigation plays out. A Justice Department lawyer argued the administration had provided sufficient explanation for the revocations in letters sent to the outlets on Tuesday, but Kelly was openly skeptical, noting those letters were sent only after the passes were pulled and after the outlets had already filed suit.
Despite the court order, the Secret Service confiscated a Politico reporter’s press pass Thursday morning and denied him entry to the White House grounds. A Secret Service agent told the reporter he wasn’t cleared to enter but might be able to get in with a temporary day pass, the kind issued to those without permanent “hard passes.” The three outlets originally had their access stripped and passes seized last Saturday, then sued Trump and members of his administration in federal court in Washington on Monday, arguing the ban violated both the First Amendment’s protections for a free press and their due process rights. Trump had posted on social media that the outlets “shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES,” while Justice Department lawyers separately tried to justify the ban on national security grounds. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reporter’s continued exclusion after the ruling.
A broad coalition of press freedom groups and news organizations, including some usually aligned with the administration politically, filed a brief backing the banned outlets. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reuters, the Washington Post and even Fox News signed the brief, filed Wednesday, arguing that “stripping journalists and news outlets of their rights because of perceived editorial viewpoint violates decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence.” The Justice Department has countered in its own filings that access to the White House is “a privilege, not an entitlement,” and that the president retains the authority to suspend an outlet’s access at his discretion. With the temporary restraining order now in place but at least one outlet still being denied entry on the ground, the underlying legal battle over the ban’s constitutionality is set to continue in federal court in Washington.
Vance Outed as a “Anonymous Source”
Vice President JD Vance, right, was revealed as the anonymous “senior administration official” behind one of the six stories the White House cited to justify banning Politico. Status, Oliver Darcy’s newsletter, identified Vance as the source of a June 2026 story on Iran peace talks, in which the official estimated 80 to 85 percent odds of a preliminary deal, a detail the White House’s Tuesday court letter flagged as reporting that “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.” The comments actually came from an official White House-hosted press call, not an unauthorized leak, with an aide explicitly setting “on background” ground rules before Vance spoke to reporters from multiple outlets. The Washington Post obtained a recording of that call confirming Vance said “it’s probably more like 80, 85 percent now, but it’s not 100 percent” regarding the Iran agreement. The Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNBC all reported the same anonymous comments from that call but were not included in the ban.
The White House’s letter defending the ban argued the Politico story constituted dangerous “misinformation” despite Vance being its own source. The letter warned that “publication of sensitive security information, and misinformation about national security information, diverts White House resources” and undermines the president’s ability to safeguard national security. It was filed in court Tuesday as the administration defended stripping Politico, CNN and MS NOW of their White House credentials, with Politico given until Friday at 5 p.m. to respond to its contents. A White House spokesperson declined to comment to both Status and the Daily Beast, and Politico also did not respond to requests for comment. Vance himself had separately told reporters Monday that the ban was “totally appropriate,” comparing Politico’s coverage to Breitbart’s treatment of Obama or Biden and insisting the outlet could still access public reports and talk to administration officials.
Iran war, Eight Service Members Tried to Take Their Own Lives:
Eight sailors assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide during its record-long, nearly 10-month deployment tied to the Iran war, the Navy has confirmed. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao disclosed the figure in a letter to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, noting two of the attempts occurred during active fighting with Iran and that the tally spans the Lincoln crew, airwing, destroyer squadron staff and escorting ships. One sailor went overboard in August and was rescued and transferred off-ship for care, while another attempt in March was thwarted by shipmates; reports also surfaced of mold in showers and reduced food options, which Cao attributed to measures “to optimize endurance.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously dismissed the coverage as media outlets that “completely misrepresented” conditions aboard the ship. Gillibrand said what Trump and Hegseth “dismissed as ‘fake news’ turned out to be serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members,” blasting the administration for funding “bombs, ballrooms, and billionaires” over troop welfare; the strike group has since left the Middle East and is returning to its San Diego home base.
Senate Republicans are increasingly breaking with Trump over the nearly seven-month Iran war as voters blame it for high gas prices. GOP Senate candidates including Jon Husted, Mike Rogers and Ashley Hinson are publicly calling for a swift end to the conflict, with Husted telling Politico the war needs to end “so that we can lower gas prices” and Hinson warning constituents “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump.” Sen. Thom Tillis now says he’ll vote for a Democrat-backed war powers resolution forcing a withdrawal vote this week, citing a lack of any clear metric for success, and Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul are expected to join him, with Sens. Bill Cassidy and others seen as possible additional flips. Polling cited in the piece shows Republican approval of Trump’s handling of the war dropping from 73 percent to 60 percent since March, while a Fox News poll found 71 percent of voters think Trump lacks a clear strategy. Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged “a lot of Republicans” want the war to end quickly, though he stopped short of endorsing the resolution himself.
President Trump told the U.N. General Assembly he must choose between letting Iran “rebuild” or moving to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic “and do it quickly,” prompting a furious response from Tehran. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Trump’s remarks forced him to scrap his prepared U.N. speech, telling reporters “they cannot destroy Iran; Iran is a country that has roots in history” and that Iran would “never bow our head or bend at the knee.” Pezeshkian separately told the Assembly Iran was a “victim of terrorism,” referencing a strike on a school in Minab that killed roughly 150-170 people, mostly young girls, on the war’s first day, a strike a preliminary U.S. assessment found was “likely” caused by American forces though not deliberately targeted. Iran’s Foreign Ministry called Trump’s U.N. remarks “a sign of desperation” stemming from weakness rather than strength, even as U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Iranian officials via Qatari mediators and described the talks as productive. Trump has said he expects a deal to come only after the November midterms, in which his party risks losing Congress partly over war-driven fuel costs.
Fighting in the Strait of Hormuz escalated this week, with a deadly strike on a commercial vessel sending oil prices sharply higher. The Antigua and Barbuda-flagged cargo ship Cape Dao was struck Wednesday, killing one Indian crew member and forcing Oman’s navy to evacuate 27 others; Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility, saying the ship was targeting for using an “unauthorized and unsafe route” through the strait. Brent crude jumped roughly 3% to over $106 a barrel and U.S. crude rose to near $94, reversing weeks of declines as the U.N. summit produced no sign of a breakthrough. The U.S. military blockade of the strait has now redirected 115 commercial vessels, and Iran continues to insist no deal will be signed until the blockade is lifted, even as Trump officials claim a safe southern route exists near Oman’s coast. Talks between U.S. and Iranian negotiators, mediated by Qatar, are ongoing but have yielded no concrete agreement.
Iran and its regional allies are threatening to widen the war into the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and potentially the Indian Ocean if the U.S. launches new attacks. A senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Maj. Gen. Yahya Safavi, warned that Iran and Houthi forces could open “a new front” targeting energy infrastructure and shipping well beyond the Persian Gulf, while a Houthi military adviser separately vowed to treat U.S. intervention in Yemen’s civil war as a “red line” and target American interests in response. The warnings come as Saudi-led coalition forces intercepted six Houthi ballistic missiles aimed at Taif and Yanbu, and as fighting between Houthi and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces has killed as many as 169 people in just three days. The Houthis have already struck Saudi sites including Riyadh for the first time in years, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly asked Trump for military help against the group. Adding to the toll, the U.S. Army confirmed Capt. Bianca Wilkerson died in a non-combat medical emergency while en route to the Middle East, bringing the U.S. military death count tied to the conflict to at least 19.
China State Visit Begins:
Xi Jinping arrived in Washington Wednesday evening for his first U.S. state visit in over a decade, receiving an unusually lavish welcome from Trump that drew criticism from both parties. Trump personally greeted Xi at Joint Base Andrews rather than waiting at the White House, with a 100-foot red carpet, a 21-person honor guard, a B-1 bomber flyover and both countries’ anthems, a ceremony former Obama-era diplomat Danny Russel called a “propaganda win” for Beijing that could be read domestically and internationally as “an indicator of weakness.” Republican Sen. Roger Wicker said he would have advised against such a “lavish welcome” given ongoing concerns about the Chinese Communist Party, while Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged Trump to confront Xi over China’s role aiding Iran rather than “feting and praising” him. The greeting echoed the extra-long red carpet the U.S. rolled out for Vladimir Putin’s Alaska visit in August 2025. Xi, in a statement, said the U.S. and China “should be partners, not rivals,” while Trump told reporters simply that Xi’s delegation seemed to “appreciate” the gesture.
The U.S. and China agreed to extend their tariff trade truce to January 10, just as Xi’s visit began. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the extension, which pushes back an agreement that was set to expire in November, though experts said it was shorter than Beijing wanted; former trade negotiator Wendy Cutler said the brief extension “underscores that the United States is still concerned about China’s full implementation of its commitments,” particularly on critical mineral exports and agricultural purchases. Analyst Craig Singleton framed the shorter window as giving the U.S. leverage to make “China earn the next extension” rather than granting an easy multi-month reprieve. Bessent said China has floated a “bigger deal” beyond the original Busan framework, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the two sides would announce a new “Board of Trade” to shield a small set of goods, including some agricultural products, from disputes. American soybean farmers, whose China exports collapsed from nearly $18 billion in 2022 to about $3 billion in 2025 amid the trade war, said they’re hoping the visit leads to relief, with Brazil having captured much of the market China once bought from the U.S.
The formal Trump-Xi summit on Thursday features an elaborate arrival ceremony, Oval Office talks and a state dinner, with attendance from top tech and finance executives. The South Lawn ceremony includes a military honor cordon, the Army Herald Trumpets, gift exchanges and a flyover with a B-2 Spirit and four F-22 Raptors, followed by bilateral talks starting at 11:30 a.m. and an evening state dinner in the East Room. Confirmed dinner guests include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, with Trump saying “you have the entire tech world, the entire banking world, and a lot more.” China experts told CBS not to expect substantive policy outcomes, with analyst James Lewis calling it “largely for show” between “two very cautious and two very suspicious leaders,” while another analyst suggested Trump’s real aim is ensuring China doesn’t again wield its rare-earth leverage against U.S. factories. Trump has said AI will be a “big topic of discussion,” alongside sensitive issues like Taiwan, where Xi has warned of possible “clashes and even conflicts” if the issue isn’t “handled properly.”
Other news:
An Iowa judge dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over its final 2024 election poll. Judge Scott J. Beattie ruled Wednesday that allowing the “faulty” claims to proceed could chill reporting on public affairs, finding the poll and its coverage were constitutionally protected political speech rather than a commercial product subject to Iowa’s consumer fraud law. Trump had sued in December 2024 alleging the poll, which showed Kamala Harris narrowly leading Iowa days before an election Trump went on to win handily, was fraudulently skewed to help Democrats. Selzer, backed by the free speech group FIRE, said the ruling “reaffirms the fundamental freedom to pursue and publish the truth without political interference,” while a Trump spokesman said the president will appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. The dismissal came the same day a separate judge heard arguments, without yet ruling, on Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.
OpenAI’s unauthorized access to an Australian government health website has triggered a rebuke from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. An OpenAI AI agent infiltrated the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on July 18, though officials say no personal information was accessed, only aggregate health spending data. Albanese said he told CEO Sam Altman directly of “Australia’s extreme concern” and criticized OpenAI for taking until September 10 to notify the government and for the inadequate way it did so. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles called it the first known case of an AI agent gaining unauthorized access to Australian government IT systems, describing it as “misaligned behavior” when the agent was denied information and scaled a “fence” it wasn’t meant to climb. Australia is now investigating whether OpenAI could face criminal charges, and the portal has been shut down with its data moved to more secure systems.
Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are demanding new answers from Attorney General Todd Blanche after the DOJ dropped its bribery and fraud case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who separately offered to invest $10bn in the US. A federal judge agreed in August to dismiss the case despite flagging “irregularities” in the “highly unusual” request, and the senators’ fresh letter follows reporting that Adani, represented by one of Trump’s personal lawyers, admitted making the $10bn offer, though the judge found it played no role in DOJ’s decision. The lawmakers want details on who was present when the offer was made, whether DOJ staff knew Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn was allegedly working on Adani’s behalf, and whether Donald Trump Jr., who reportedly met with Adani in November 2025, or anyone acting for him contacted DOJ about the case. Both Epshteyn’s spokesperson and Trump Jr.’s spokesperson have denied any involvement in the case’s dismissal. Warren and Blumenthal, who never got a response to a similar June letter, have given Blanche until October 5 to reply.
A new Senate Democratic report finds fossil fuel companies are set to reap an estimated $190bn in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade after donating heavily to Trump’s campaign, with the cost falling on taxpayers through higher energy bills. The report from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Sen. Chuck Schumer ties the benefits to Trump’s April 2024 Mar-a-Lago fundraiser, where he reportedly asked oil executives for $1bn in donations in exchange for tax breaks and deregulation, noting industry contributed $201m to his campaign and $19m to his inaugural fund in return for appointing 26 former fossil fuel or polluting-industry officials to key agencies. It details billions in direct subsidies and a permanent 20% income tax deduction for oil and gas firms, alongside the cancellation of over 160 wind projects worth $54bn in investment and enough capacity to power 8.5 million homes, using $1.8bn in taxpayer buyouts. The report also cites a 76% drop in DOJ civil environmental enforcement cases compared to Biden’s first year, and projects household energy bills could rise $78 to $192 annually by 2035, with pollution-related health costs already running about $2,500 per person a year. A White House spokesperson dismissed the report as partisan and touted the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, while environmental groups including the Sierra Club and Public Citizen said it shows fossil fuel money buying direct access to regulators.
Texas executed Ker’Sean Ramey on Wednesday for a 2005 triple murder, one week after his co-defendant was put to death for the same crime. Ramey, 41, was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. after a lethal injection in Huntsville, becoming the sixth person executed in Texas this year, with three more scheduled in the coming months. He and LeJames Norman, executed September 16, broke into a rural Edna, Texas home in August 2005 hoping to steal cocaine, found none, and fatally shot three residents. The Supreme Court rejected Ramey’s final appeal hours before his execution, which had argued jurors never heard about childhood abuse and poverty he experienced; prosecutors called the appeal “meritless.” Nationally, 28 people have now been executed this year, with Florida leading at 15.
A far-right British activist known for leading anti-migrant Channel protests was arrested after video appeared to show him slashing a migrant dinghy. Daniel Thomas, 37, who goes by “Danny Tommo” and founded the group Patriot Platform, was taken into custody on suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life after footage showed him cutting an inflatable boat carrying a rescue worker while shouting “You’re in English territory.” Thomas is a longtime associate of far-right figure Tommy Robinson, and his group has organized recent protests in which masked activists tried to block migrants from reaching Dover and Portsmouth. More than 41,000 people crossed the Channel last year, though Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government says stepped-up UK-France law enforcement cooperation has cut crossings by over 40% compared to 2025.
Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez used her first U.N. General Assembly address to promise elections at a “right moment” determined by Venezuelans themselves. Rodríguez, who took power after a U.S. military raid in January captured Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges, said her government has begun a “political dialogue with opposition sectors” toward an “inclusive and transparent process.” Her trip marks the first visit to the U.S. by a sitting Venezuelan head of state since Maduro’s own 2018 U.N. appearance, and she is delivering it with her predecessor held just miles away awaiting trial. She thanked Trump for being willing to resume relations following the raid and told her own people that “rebuilding our national soul will be the priority,” acknowledging the country had suffered “setbacks” this year.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Martin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 15, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 24, 2026.
Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government. Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
And yet, the story continues, when he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump fired the investigators building the case and largely stopped investigating public corruption.
While the primary witness in the case was Martin Kao, the man who allegedly engaged in the bribery, the ProPublica journalists corroborated much of Kao’s account through legal records, FBI evidence, and interviews with people who worked with Navatek and the FBI.
Collins’s deputy chief of staff Annie Clark said Collins’s office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-to-play, but she did admit that “the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Emails suggest that, in fact, her office did know about the deal. After a $150,000 donation, a staff member from her office emailed a lobbyist for Navatek to ask for Kao’s phone number, writing: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
Although the story’s authors report that Navatek never produced a product the military needed, it did, in fact, receive millions in defense contracts.
The bribery angle of this story is huge. So, too, is that the story suggests that Trump, at least, might perceive that he has something to hold over Collins’s head to keep her behind his actions, even when they have dramatically weakened her power at the head of Appropriations.
The 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain that gave the late nineteenth century its nickname was not about the riches of the industrialists who came to be known as robber barons. It was about the political corruption of the era. In the book, unscrupulous speculators bribed congressmen. “A Congressional appropriation costs money,” a railroad man tells a naive youth who wonders where a $200,000 appropriation has gone. He listed the bribes his project required and noted that the “high moral” lawmakers cost more than the usual ones.
It was an era in which lawmakers lived by the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils.” Lawmakers at the time rewarded their business followers with government contracts and put supporters into political office. The businessmen and officials, in turn, would hire workers on the condition they voted for the party the boss supported. “Every good man looks after his friends,” as one politician put it.
The U.S. outlawed the spoils system in 1883 after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James Garfield, replacing it with the merit-based Civil Service Reform Act, or Pendleton Act. Trump has ripped up those civil service protections, making much of the government staff again political appointees. Curiously, at the United Nations yesterday, Trump used the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.”
The relationship between the MAGA Republican agenda and the misuse of tax dollars is becoming more and more obvious since ProPublica ran the story last November of how contracts from the Department of Homeland Security appeared to be going to those personally tied to then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her ally Corey Lewandowski.
In July 2026, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Lewandowski “effectively controlled billions in spending at Homeland Security.” Lewandowski responded, somewhat halfheartedly, that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again,” and emphasized that he was “a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda.”
Stories of the Trump administration’s misuse of taxpayer money are starting to drop fast and furious.
Yesterday, Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. funded enhanced security for himself by taking funds from the department’s Office of Minority Health. Whyte notes that the Reagan administration created the Office of Minority Health after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.
Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported today that, over the past year, Kennedy has also accepted $4 million in book advances and more than $270,000 in gifts from allies connected to the “Make American Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement interested in changes to government policies. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, accepted $210,000 in consulting fees from a MAHA advocacy group.
On a far larger scale is the use of tax dollars to pay authoritarian governments to imprison immigrants from the United States who are not their own citizens.
On Monday, David Nakamura and Adam Taylor of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “Office of Remigration” has pledged at least $410 million to facilitate third-country renditions to expel migrants that U.S. courts say cannot be returned to their home countries for fear they will be harmed or killed. So the U.S. has sent more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, including Eswatini, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, for a fee. That money includes $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, as well as funding for agencies that will then contribute to those countries.
Those countries either imprison the migrants or send them back to their home countries, a loophole that enables the administration to get around the prohibition on the U.S. sending them there. Last Friday, a federal appeals court found that this policy is unlawful. The administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has ordered the deals, and Christian Ehrhardt, a State Department official, has secured them.
Nakamura and Taylor explain that the Office of Remigration—the word “remigration” is popular with white nationalists who seek to expel racial minorities and immigrants through ethnic cleansing—reverses the previous U.S. emphasis on resettling refugees and instead focuses on expelling them, including into places where there is strong evidence they will be tortured. The administration is locking in these deals as quickly as possible, the journalists report, exercising “minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.”
A former State Department official who left the department over the policy told Nakamura and Taylor that the administration wanted “fast money, with no strings attached. The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.” The plan appears to be to create such terror in migrant communities that people here self-deport, and others are afraid to come.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights.”
On Sunday an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan food delivery driver, in the back in Austin, Texas. With a bullet still lodged in his body, he was discharged from a hospital to ICE custody, where he spent the night in pain on a cold floor. Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported yesterday that the officer was a recent hire who was not wearing a body camera, despite the promise of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that all ICE agents would wear cameras. News outlets reported that the officer had been issued one.
The Department of Homeland Security set out to add 10,000 new agents last year after Congress provided billions of dollars to double the ICE workforce. ICE ramped up its hiring by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and cutting normal vetting procedures, sometimes not even checking fingerprints or identities or conducting a job interview. David Brouillette, the ICE officer with a volatile history who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in July, was also a recent hire. On September 15, Alex Horton, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Maria Sacchetti, and Ted Hesson of the Washington Post reported that ICE has been quietly firing some of those hastily hired.
ICE told the Washington Post reporters: “ICE is hiring the best of the best to go after the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens including drug traffickers, murderers, and pedophiles. When individuals fall short of that standard—personnel decisions are made. This is standard practice in almost every American workplace.”
Officials told Miroff that the agents who stopped Garcés Pérez used a commercial database and federal immigration file that identified the man’s plates as belonging to someone with an outstanding deportation order; his lawyer said he had a valid work permit and is an asylum seeker, and that the deportation order came because notice of his immigration court hearing was sent to the wrong address. After a public outcry, officials took Garcés Pérez back to the hospital on Monday.
Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed reported Monday that the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are running far behind where they should be in terms of funding for the fiscal year, which ends on September 30.
Trump fired the board of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in April, and the foundation is now effectively being run by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a former NSF board member told Quinn. The director of OMB is Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. “And OMB is directing the agency to direct its grant-making dollars in ways that are very different from federal law as passed by Congress in its budget,” the former board member said.
Quinn noted that Nature attributed the funding shortfall mainly “to the agency keeping more than $1 billion in an account, much of which is for the White House’s Grand Research Challenges project, which is meant to support specific fields, including artificial intelligence.” The Trump family and the president’s allies are heavily invested in the AI sector.
And then there are Trump’s vanity projects. Even before Trump announced that the American taxpayer wouldn’t pay a dime for the White House ballroom project, the administration had already signed contracts that put the American taxpayer on the hook for more than $300 million for it.
Today Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that James McCrery II, the first architect on Trump’s ballroom, resigned when Trump insisted on a design that did not meet fire codes. Normally, White House construction would be managed by federal agencies required by law to comply with building safety codes, but White House officials have routed the ballroom through the tiny Executive Residence office that is exempt from rules because it is not a federal agency.
McCrery warned that Trump’s design did not have enough emergency exits or measures to contain a fire, which could spread quickly from the kitchen below the ballroom to the event space above it, and pointed out that the design was not up to code.
Trump waved off his concerns. “I am the code,” he said.
New York Times, From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle, Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 24, 2026. It was the Trump administration’s latest stumble in its effort to find proof of widespread noncitizen voting, despite decades of evidence that it is extremely rare.
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials obtained through open records requests. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Mr. Ott also stated that D.H.S. officials had still not provided enough data for election officials to investigate their claims. Nor have they turned over the list of nearly 16,000 individuals they claim may be noncitizens.
“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” Francisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, said in a statement. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.
It was the Trump administration’s latest stumble in a broad campaign to find proof of widespread noncitizen voting in American elections, despite decades of evidence that it is extremely rare.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Nevada’s characterization was “false” and “the list of 185 were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process” at the time of the last meeting between the two agencies.
The back and forth began in July, when President Trump and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said they had identified more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states: Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Both men stated the claims as fact, yet letters sent to election officials in the four states in the days that followed indicated that the numbers may have been inflated. Each letter qualified Mr. Trump’s concrete assertions with the phrase “there may be as many as.” None offered actual proof of noncitizens on voter rolls.
In Nevada’s case, Mr. Mullin initially claimed that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls. But in a meeting between Nevada election officials and the Department of Homeland Security last month, department leaders admitted that their initial claim was unsubstantiated. That prompted some pointed questions from Nevada election officials, according to a video recording of the virtual meeting.
“So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” asked C. Murphy Hebert, the chief deputy in the Nevada secretary of state’s office.
“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” replied Kimberley Vogt, an official with Homeland Security. “Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that. But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.”
Following the meeting, Ms. Vogt sent a clarifying email to Nevada officials. “I also wanted to be sure I clarified that we did not reduce the 15,903 to 185,” she wrote. “We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens.”
Hope for America, Opinion: The Melania Trump Administration, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 24, 2026. At 7:37 this morning, she sat all the way at the end of the white couch on the set of Fox & Friends, legs crossed, wearing a striped blazer and a matching skirt. Through the studio windows directly behind Melania Trump, you could see the bustle of Sixth Avenue in New York City, cars passing and pedestrians walking beneath the many American flags hanging above the street.
During this early morning interview that lasted less than 11 minutes, the First Lady tried to explain away her noticeable absence from the traditional work of the First Lady, saying, “You don’t see me everywhere, but behind the scenes I’m working nonstop.” She tried to explain the president’s unusual decision to personally greet Chinese President Xi Jinping when his plane arrives, rather than waiting for him at the White House, by saying it was because of their “great relationship.” And when she was asked how she thought Donald Trump was doing in his second term compared with his first, she gave an answer that must have made Trump’s team sick to their stomachs.
Instead of saying he was doing a great job, or any of the other things his sycophants normally say about his “greatness,” his own wife, the First Lady of the United States, chose instead to say, “I think he’s doing the best that he can.”
That was just the start of a very busy day for Melania Trump, who was about to do something we almost never see her do. After 20 months spent as far from the public view as possible, appearing only when absolutely necessary, she was suddenly everywhere today, purposely stepping directly into the spotlight, one event after the next, to provide a distraction for her husband to win back women voters ahead of the midterms, and to secure herself a place in the future for when Donald Trump is gone.
Sitting in the Fox & Friends studio, she also told the hosts that she always tells Donald Trump the truth. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to hear it, what I tell him, but that’s okay,” she said. “I always say the truth.”
Once again, his own wife gave us a glimpse into the mind of the president and reinforced what we already know to be true about him: he does not like hearing the truth, and he resists hearing anything that he does not want to hear. That says a lot about him as a person, but it says even more about him as a leader.
Presidents are surrounded by people whose job is to tell them things they don’t want to hear. They are confronted with facts that contradict what they believe. They need to hear intelligence reports that don’t fit the story they want to tell. They have to listen to warnings about what could happen if they make the wrong decision. When the person sitting at the very top of our government, who holds enormous power over the lives of more than 340 million people, resists hearing any of those truths, it becomes much easier for everyone around them to stop sharing what is really happening, or for people with nefarious intentions to manipulate them by feeding them the information they know they want to hear.
What made this week so different from others, and what made what she said ring so much louder, is that Melania Trump has not been a visible or present First Lady. She has spent the majority of this second term living between Trump Tower in Manhattan and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach rather than at the White House. This living arrangement was of her own choosing. CNN reported back in October of 2025 that she was “eschewing the nation’s capital for New York and Palm Beach” and running the Office of the First Lady with what they then described as a “skeletal staff.” People magazine reported that they had been “living separate lives” and that her absence “should not come as a surprise to anyone because this is how she lives.” She wasn’t there when Trump hosted the Prime Minister of Japan, the King of Jordan, or the Prime Minister of India. A Daily Beast analysis found that through July of this year, she had only been seen publicly on 38 days.
So when we see the most absent First Lady in modern American history suddenly appear over and over again in a single day, on Fox & Friends, Fox Business, and on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, just one day after she sat in the audience at the United Nations General Assembly, we need to ask not just what she was doing, but why, and why now.
While Melania was on Fox & Friends defending her husband’s energy levels, Donald Trump had already traveled back to the White House and was posting nonsense on social media. He spent his day on Truth Social sharing a book cover with his portrait next to Winston Churchill’s titled “Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.” He also shared an unhinged and immature video mocking journalists, specifically CNN reporters, that made him look like a fool and not them.
That was what he did instead of responding to the speech Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, gave today, where he stood at the same podium Trump had just stood at the day before and held up photographs of the late Ayatollah Khamenei and more than 150 schoolchildren killed during American strikes. “You see these children?” Pezeshkian said. “These children perished under bombs, with weapons used by the United States and Israel. They were innocent, had committed no crimes.” There were no comments from Trump about those children.
Trump said nothing about any of it. His main public appearance today was when he greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping after his plane landed at Joint Base Andrews. And even that was an appearance he probably should have skipped.
Trump decided to travel all the way to the airport to personally greet China’s authoritarian leader, and to have American service members roll out a 100-foot red carpet for his arrival. There are even images of our service members on their hands and knees smoothing and brushing the carpet out beneath the Chinese President’s aircraft. As bad as the visuals were from that, it only got worse for Donald Trump. As part of the military welcome ceremony, two American B-1 bombers soared overhead. As they made their pass, Trump visibly cowered and winced at the sound while Xi stood beside him with no visible reaction. What was designed to display American power instead showed a weak and vulnerable President of the United States who is scared of the sound of planes flying above him.
There is no doubt a multitude of reasons for Melania to make such a grand display of her presence this week. It came at a moment when her husband’s approval ratings are at their lowest, the midterms are weeks away, and his support among women has fallen significantly. Bringing Melania out like this and parading her around was an obvious show of desperation, especially when you consider that Melania Trump was everywhere talking about women.
Women have plenty on their minds right now, and rightfully so. Women are primarily the ones standing in grocery store aisles, seeing the direct consequences of Trump’s presidency and the skyrocketing cost of food. Women are stretching household budgets to the point they are breaking. Women are sending their children to schools where lockdown drills have become part of growing up. Women are living in communities where aggressive immigration enforcement has unfolded on residential streets and in front of their children. Women are living with the consequences of major changes to reproductive rights following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. That is not to say that none of this affects men as well. These are American family issues, but the Trump Administration knows that women, especially, have grown tired of carrying so much of the burden and are watching their families pay the price.
Melania’s other stops today included ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and launching something called IMPERIA, an invite-only collective that one of her advisers has described as a “Davos for Women,” designed to bring together female CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, and business leaders.
“Women are not just a part of the marketplace. We are its foundation and its infrastructure,” Melania said as she called on women to “move beyond mentorship and toward ownership.” She talked about owning businesses, equity, real estate, capital, investment assets, ideas, and intellectual property as if she herself were some kind of business genius and mastermind. She failed to mention that she was the recipient of a marriage that came with enormous benefits, including a penthouse, private jet, a $40 million Amazon documentary deal, and the eventual title of First Lady of the United States.
What she did and is doing this week is growing closer in comparison to a similar time in the 1980s, when we had another president whose cognitive health was being publicly questioned and whose wife stepped into a much larger role. Back then, the wife of the president actually cared for him. This time, it seems to be more of a business arrangement than one born out of love, but the dynamic is the same.
Toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, questions about his cognitive health and abilities were being raised, and the questions were mounting. At the same time, Nancy Reagan had made herself extraordinarily influential inside the White House. It was said that she controlled the access others had to her husband and that she had an oversized influence over all aspects of his schedule. She even involved herself in White House and Reagan Administration staffing decisions. Years after he left office, Reagan announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease. When researchers eventually studied his presidential press conferences from the later years of his presidency, they found changes in his language associated with cognitive decline that had begun appearing while he was still in office.
But there is one important difference between Nancy Reagan and what we are watching Melania Trump do right now. Nancy purposely protected her husband by working mostly away from the press and public, keeping her influence behind the scenes. Melania is taking a different path and stepping directly in front of the cameras. She even said today that when she has free time, she is reading executive orders instead of books or watching television, something nobody elected Melania Trump to do.
When we look at the bigger picture, we see a president whose approval rating keeps dropping, a First Lady who was forced out of hiding to help, and an administration trying desperately to change what Americans are seeing before the midterms. None of this paints a picture of strength or stability. This isn’t a temporary political problem for the president that can be fixed by parading his out-of-touch wife around in front of the cameras either. The frustration and anger surrounding his poor leadership are only growing and deepening his party’s problems. All of this is forcing more Americans to pay attention, resist, and in just a few weeks they will have the opportunity to make their own voices heard at the ballot box.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump Has Been A Spectacular Failure. Voters Are Angry. The Wave Is Getting Big. Our Job Is To Make It Bigger, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 24, 2026. Last night the proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered for our weekly get together. It was a lively affair, as they often are. Here is some of what we talked about…..
There Will Be A Blue Wave This Year. The Question Now Is How Big Will It Be - September of the even year is crunch time. Candidates and party committees come back from the August recess and poll to understand where things stand in as enter the home stretch. Since Labor Day there has been a lot of polling, both public and private. What it has found is that Trump is continuing to erode and decline, the battlefield for the Rs keeps deteriorating, we are now very competitive deep into red places and red states, and we have a very strong chance of flipping both the House and Senate, and making significant downballot gains across the country.Subscribed
As I said last night Republicans went away for the August recess believing their financial advantage would allow them to survive the wave. Now they are not so sure given how much worse things have gotten. And things have gotten worse, a lot worse. I did a deep dive in yesterdays post, The Republican Freak Out Is Here, on the data we were seeing. Head there for a comprehensive look at what we are seeing now. Here are a few bits of new data and some updates…..
For an example of worse here are the results of a new poll by a respected Republican pollster, Echelon. Trump dropped 5 points in the last month in this poll, and now stands, as he does in almost every other poll released in recent days, at his lowest point of the second term and in many cases his lowest point ever:
In the last week Trump has dropped 3 points in the FiftyPlusOne’s job approval aggregate. And look at the trendlines. Nasty stuff for the old orange guy:
The generic ballot has also gotten much better for us and worse for them. In FiftyplusOne it’s gone from +6 Dem to +8 in recent weeks, and we are now regularly seeing double digit Dem leads, which is big blue wave territory.
In a new analysis released this morning called No president has gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Not even George W. Bush in 2006 the team at FiftyPlusOne write:
Our historical polling averages show the president’s updated rating is worse than George W. Bush’s second-term approval rating on the eve of the 2006 midterm that cost Republicans both chambers of Congress. And public mood is approaching where it was toward Richard Nixon during Watergate, in the months before he resigned in disgrace.
The NYT released polls in four states this morning. First up is Pennsylvania where Governor Josh Shapiro leads 58%-38% (+20), and we lead by 9 in the generic ballot, 53%-44%. These margins mean that all four House seats we are working to flip in Pennsylvania are within reach, and just flipping these four seats flips the House. Note that as Trump won PA by 2 points in 2024 this poll is showing an 11 point shift towards us right now. That’s a very big number.
The Times also released polls in Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire:
The MI and NH results are consistent with where folks on our side believe these races are. The Maine result is a bit of an outlier, something the NYT discusses here. I am not panicking about Maine. Jackson leads in all other polls, and what this polls finds is a very close race. Yes it’s clear that our work in Maine, a state we’ve played very hard in this cycle, is not done. I still think the wave that is coming for Republicans all across the country will come for Susan Collins but this result is a reminder that we cannot take anything for granted.
These results also suggest that here at Hopium we are right to remain focused on the six Senate flips - Sherrod Brown (OH), Roy Cooper (NC), Troy Jackson (ME), Mary Peltola (AK), James Talarico (TX), and Josh Turek (IA). Winning all six of these races, assuming we hold GA, MI, and NH, gets us to 53 in the Senate. Given that Fetterman could switch parties, and that one of these candidates may not make it - as we are seeing with Jackson - I think winning these six Senate seats has become the highest priority for the party, and for us here at Hopium too.
As we discussed last night we need this election to have one clear story - that the American people rose up in records numbers and rejected this terrible man and his terrible, illiberal politics. Telling that story gets much harder if they manage to keep the Senate, even at 50-50. So Job One now for all of us to win these six Senate seats.
Two bits of good news on that front. This morning we are getting reports that the Republicans are pulling out of North Carolina, essentially ceding the race to Roy Cooper. These reports also suggest they are pulling out of Georgia, conceding that race to Jon Ossoff. It’s a sign of how much the battlefield has deteriorated for them, for this means that Republicans are no longer competitive in states Trump won just two years ago, a remarkable thing to see six weeks before Election Day.
We’ve also gotten very encouraging polling in four high quality polls in AK, IA, and TX in recent days:
A few more notes from last night….
…….Part of what is driving my optimism right now is just how strong our candidates are, and our party’s embrace of what I call a raucous pluralism this cycle. We’ve met all the top candidates. They are a remarkable bunch, admirable, proven servant-leaders, meeting the moment and fitting their districts and states. Our diversity has become a great strength this cycle, particularly as we work to win in places that we have not been winning in for many, many years.
…….The huge swing of Hispanics voters back to the Democratic Party is very important for this election and beyond. There is a scenario that we could end up with Hispanic Democrats as governors of both California and Texas, an historic achievement that could become very consequential to the electoral map and Hispanic political power in a time when the government has launched an all-out assault on immigrant communities across the country.
……Stay focused, calm, and determined. Do not get blown off course. Do not seek things to worry about. As we say here do more and worry less. We are in a position to have the election we all want to have here. A wave is coming. How big it is will be in part up to us and how hard we work and how much money we give in the closing weeks of the campaign.
…..Yes we should expect Trump and the Rs to do whatever it takes to remain in power, but two points here 1) Democrats have built an unprecedented operation to challenge Trump’s potential fuckery, including our work in standing up the New Battlefield Project with the state parties 2) we have the opportunity in the coming days to drive a very powerful contrast between our embrace of democracy, of celebrating our rights and freedoms, of encouraging everyone to vote and to vote early, and their betrayal of it all. If Trump does make a serious attempt to disrupt the elections or the peaceful transfer of power I think it will do grave and lasting damage to him and the Republican Party itself. No one will believe him. He no longer has standing with the public to mount such an effort, which I think will make it very, very hard for him to be successful. We should not fear what Trump may do as we are prepared, and it may take away whatever is left of his legitimacy as our leader.
New York Times, A Reclusive G.O.P. Billionaire Pulls Back His Money From Senate Republicans, Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 23, 2026. Timothy Mellon, one of the party’s biggest donors in 2024, has so far withheld his midterm donations for Republican senators because he is unhappy about the failure to pass a key Trump priority.
One of the Republican Party’s biggest donors has sharply reduced his giving ahead of the midterm elections, especially to Senate Republicans, a decision driven largely by the party’s failure to pass a far-reaching bill of voting restrictions.
The donor, Timothy Mellon, a reclusive Wyoming billionaire who is a grandson of the Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Mellon, gave nearly $200 million to support President Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election. Only Elon Musk donated more.
Two years later, Mr. Mellon has given just $3 million or so in publicly disclosed donations to Republican candidates or groups. He also made a $20 million donation last month to help House Republicans, according to two people briefed on the contribution, which will not be disclosed until the next financial reports.
But Mr. Mellon has given nothing publicly so far to support Senate Republicans this fall — a move that has been conspicuous in the party’s financial circles, and shows how some influential Republicans remain angry about the party’s inability this summer to pass the voting legislation, called the SAVE America Act.
The electoral significance of Mr. Mellon’s sudden drop-off in giving is uncertain. Republicans have a broad financial advantage in the midterms, with Mr. Trump’s super PAC and other megadonors shoveling tens of millions of dollars into key races.
Still, Mr. Mellon’s tightfistedness illustrates the unexpected and acrimonious fallout inside the Republican Party after its failed push to pass the voting bill.
The legislation, pushed hard by Mr. Trump, would severely limit voting by mail, impose a nationwide voter identification requirement nationwide and require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, supported the measure but said the “math” was not there to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Ultimately, the effort sputtered out.
Mr. Mellon’s team has told fellow Republicans that he is not backing Senate Republicans because of their inability to pass the voting legislation, according to two people briefed on the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose the private discussions.
During the last midterms, in 2022, Mr. Mellon donated about $42 million. He truly made his mark in 2024, when he gave about $197 million to Republicans overall and became the single largest disclosed donor to Mr. Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. Mr. Mellon cut two $50 million checks to the group.
New York Times, Exclusive: Angry Outbursts, Slurs and Firings: Tumult Rocks a Key Senate Campaign, Kellen Browning, Sept. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Democrats hope that Mary Peltola can flip a Republican Senate seat in Alaska. Former aides describe a campaign and congressional office marked by chaos.
National Democrats cheered when Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman, declared in January that she would run for the Senate.
Ms. Peltola, an Alaska Native who grew up fishing for salmon on the Kuskokwim River, was well-known and well-liked statewide, even by Republicans. Her party hailed her as one of its strongest prospects for ousting a Republican incumbent and winning control of the Senate.
But behind the scenes, her political operation has been marked by tumult, a pattern that stretches back to her time in Congress. Former aides describe angry and profane outbursts, sometimes directed at aides and sometimes expressed about others who had displeased her. In one instance, she shoved an aide, according to a former staff member who was present and two others who were told about it at the time. Another conflict led to a surprising staff shake-up on the eve of the primary election last month.
Four former staff members said they directly heard her use the word “faggot” over the years, in some cases about her own staff members, an allegation the campaign denied. She also used the word “retarded,” according to former aides and text messages viewed by The New York Times.
Her demands could be unusual, such as requiring aides to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
Ms. Peltola’s displays of anger, the extent of which has not been previously reported, have been spilling out into the high-stakes race. This account is based on interviews with nine former staff members, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation and to preserve their professional reputations, as well as dozens of contemporaneous text messages and photos.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:The Red Carpet Treatment, William Kristol, right, Sept. 24, 2026. Late yesterday afternoon, President Trump traveled to Joint Base Andrews just outside of Washington, D.C. to personally greet the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping. It was the first time the president had met a foreign leader on arrival at Andrews. Indeed, it was the first time any American president had gone to Andrews to welcome a foreign leader in more than sixty years.
Trump was in no way obligated to make this special gesture. Xi had not personally greeted Trump when he landed in Beijing earlier this year. So Trump wanted to go out of his way to pay his respect to the Chinese strongman. Or was Trump paying not merely respect but homage?
That was certainly the sense conveyed by the ceremony as a whole. There was the televised spectacle of American service members on their hands and knees, smoothing wrinkles and picking specks of dirt off the 100-foot long red carpet that had been unrolled for Xi, as Chinese officials looked on approvingly from the door of their airplane before their leader descended the stairs.U.S. military personnel unroll the red carpet at the bottom of the stairs of an Air China plane carrying Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on September 23, 2026. (Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)
The contrasting appearance of the two leaders was also striking. It was 64 degrees outside, but President Trump was wearing a heavy overcoat and gloves. President Xi was wearing a suit. It was like a mirror image of the contrast between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik.U.S. President Ronald Reagan with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev chatting outside during their summit meeting. (Photo by Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)
And then Trump visibly winced and grimaced at the loud sound of the two American B-1 bombers flying overhead at the military welcome, while Xi stood beside him with no visible reaction.
The president of the United States of America looked weak and insecure. The paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China looked strong and confident. But Trump was apparently happy with how it all went. He told reporters as he returned to the White House that it was “a great greeting, and I think they appreciate it—tremendous people.”
Xi’s welcome at Andrews was unusual, but there was a relevant precedent: A little over a year ago, on August 15, 2025, Trump went out of his way to roll out the red carpet for and personally greet Russian President Vladimir Putin when he arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.
Trump’s meeting with the Russian dictator on that occasion resulted in no progress on any front. Putin has since done nothing to end or ameliorate his aggression against the people of Ukraine. He has since also provided Iran with satellite surveillance and targeting data to help strike U.S. military bases in the Middle East, most notably in the case of the March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia that injured twelve U.S. service members and destroyed an AWACS aircraft. And he has continued his campaign of sabotage against America’s allies in Europe.
Xi’s visit will presumably feature some token concessions and insincere promises by China, in order to help the fading chances of Trump’s party holding onto Congress in November. But no one expects any important changes in Chinese policy—including towards Iran, which counts China as its largest trading partner and an important source of weapons and technology for use against America and Americans.
But there will be a lavish state dinner. It won’t be as big as Trump would have liked—Trump has expressed regret that he doesn’t yet have a super-sized ballroom, which he has explicitly compared to China’s Great Hall of the People, to honor his esteemed visitor. But there will be big-time fawning aplenty. There probably won’t be much talk of Chinese bullying in East Asia or Chinese activities hostile to our interests elsewhere in the world. Nor will there likely be any mentions of democracy or human rights.
But this will be nothing new for Trump. In his 37-minute speech to the United Nations, Trump mentioned the word “democracy” or “democratic” once—in claiming credit for a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda (a deal most of whose key provisions remain unimplemented). And Trump only used the term “human rights” twice—in the context of an attack on the U.N. Human Rights council.
And Trump’s U.N. speech clarified once again his approach to America’s dictatorial foes. He mentioned China—our greatest adversary and peer competitor—only once, and that was to claim that in AI technology, “we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else.” He mentioned Russia, the other great threat to world peace, six times—but three were to denounce the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.” In his other mentions of the country, he conspicuously failed to identify Russia as the aggressor in its war against Ukraine. And most shockingly, he praised “the extraordinary work of our great first lady, who has secured the safe return of many displaced Ukrainian and Russian children back home to their families.” As if Ukraine was kidnapping any Russian children, and as if it was not Russia that was uniquely guilty of seizing and deporting Ukrainian children to Russia and Russia-controlled areas.
So Trump is consistent. He won’t offend Putin. He will suck up to Xi. Our petty presidential bully is cowed by the big-boy bullies of the real world.
AROUND THE BULWARK
writes MONA CHAREN.Quick Hits
WORSE SHOCKS AHEAD: Although the war in Iran has played havoc with energy prices for months, the decisions by the American and Chinese governments to release massive quantities from their strategic petroleum reserves has allowed both countries to keep exporting heavily and prevented global prices from spiking even more painfully. But those reserves are hitting historic lows, and both countries are now considering clamping down on exports—which could spark a global energy shock dwarfing any so far this year.
In America, many Republicans on midterm ballots, desperate to be seen as doing something to curb prices, have called for a temporary ban on diesel exports. Meanwhile, the White House has blown hot and cold on the issue. After Politico reported that the administration was drawing up a proposed ban, the White House denied it as “fake news”—a position undercut by Trump’s own public endorsement of the idea. “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel,” the president said Tuesday. “I’ve called for it. I’ve called for it within my people.” But Energy Secretary Chris Wright made the opposite case one day later: “The blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn’t work. . . . If you can’t export the diesel that comes out of our refineries, you run out of places to store it, and you have to reduce U.S. refining, which would put upward pressure on gasoline prices and jet fuel prices.”
Meanwhile, industry groups are warning that Chinese gas and diesel inventories have hit their lowest level in more than a decade, raising concerns that the nation—which already cut fuel exports between March and July of this year—could turn off the spigots again this winter.
YOU JUST CAN’T TRUST THESE ANONYMOUS VICE PRESIDENTS: As part of their effort to keep Politico banned from the White House, the Trump administration this week sent the outlet a letter outlining its stories that had purportedly “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.” One supposed transgression: “In June 2026, Politico cited a ‘senior administration official . . . granted anonymity’ [who] said the odds of a preliminary deal to end the conflict with Iran were between 80 and 85 percent.”
The White House claimed that this story showed Politico lacked “trustworthiness.” But they knew that a senior administration official had, in fact, told Politico exactly what Politico recorded. That’s because the “80 to 85 percent” quote wasn’t some anonymous leak. It was a comment uttered on a background press briefing to multiple outlets . . . by Vice President JD Vance.
That’s right: It was Vance himself who gave the quote that the White House used this week to try to denounce Politico’s reporting as untrustworthy. Why did Politico quote him anonymously? Because the White House required exactly that as a condition for attending the briefing.
Oliver Darcy of Status News breaks down the gaslighting on display:
It’s not unusual for White Houses—Republican or Democrat—to make senior officials available for sanctioned background briefings with the press. In fact, it’s quite common. What is unusual is for an administration to attack news organizations for relying on anonymous sourcing while simultaneously requiring reporters to grant its own senior officials anonymity in exchange for information.
Even more unusual, of course, is for the White House to then cite reporting from one of those sanctioned briefings—conducted by the vice president himself—as evidence that a news organization threatened national security and/or published falsehoods.
Exactly so. Even for an administration stuffed to the brim with known liars, this is remarkable. But the White House is right about one thing: The possibility of “publishing falsehoods” is a real danger of ever transcribing anything said by JD Vance.
ANOTHER SLAPP-DOWN: The legal Ls just keep coming for Donald Trump. Yesterday, an Iowa judge threw out his lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register. Trump had preposterously claimed that Selzer’s 2024 poll showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa ahead of the 2024 election violated state consumer fraud law. Judge Scott Beattie ruled that in bringing the case, Trump had sought to “stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability.”
Selzer’s lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression were a bit less circumspect. “We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and should never have been brought,” said attorney Bob Corn-Revere. “The First Amendment does not allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’”
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times, Trump’s Media Ban, Live Updates: CNN, MS NOW and Politico Return to White House After Fight Over Access, Michael M. Grynbaum, Sept. 24, 2026. A federal court ordered the Trump administration to reverse its ban on the outlets, but reporters were initially denied entry to the White House grounds on Thursday. The reporters are back, but the television coverage isn’t.
Journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were allowed back into the White House around noon on Thursday. Their return came after a chaotic morning in which the Trump administration had blocked them from entering, despite an overnight order from a federal judge that required the immediate restoration of their access.
It was the latest twist in a nearly weeklong standoff between President Trump and the press corps that covers him, and which has not yet been fully resolved.
Mr. Trump’s barring of the three outlets last Friday had prompted the major TV networks to suspend the White House television pool, which provides video footage for daily presidential events.
As of early Thursday afternoon, the TV pool remained suspended. The networks had previously indicated that they would not film the president until the White House not only restored CNN’s access, but also agreed that CNN could once again participate in the pool.
The result, on Thursday, was a bizarre spectacle: a president hosting China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for a pomp-filled summit at the White House, with no American network airing any live footage.
The Chinese government has cracked down on independent news media and evicted foreign journalists whose coverage it dislikes. Chinese state television was on-hand for the proceedings in Washington on Thursday.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington issued an order around 1 a.m. Eastern time that instructed the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the press credentials held by journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico. The outlets had been barred from the White House since last week, when Mr. Trump abruptly demanded their eviction, citing coverage he deemed “fake.”
Hours later, when the journalists arrived at the White House, they were still not permitted to enter. Lawyers for the three outlets requested an immediate hearing on the matter, and Judge Kelly ordered the Trump administration to respond by 12:30 p.m.
Betsy Klein, a CNN correspondent, said that she tried three times on Thursday morning to enter the White House and was repeatedly turned away. One CNN producer was allowed in. “It’s an open question right now whether this is a matter of bureaucracy, a clerical error or if the White House, the Trump administration, is in open defiance of a court order,” Ms. Klein said during an on-air interview.
Around noon, Ms. Klein was allowed back in. “Very happy to be getting back to work here,” she said.
Lawyers for the Trump administration said in a filing with the federal judge that the White House operations team had been instructed to restore reporters’ access at 7:10 a.m. on Thursday, and that confiscated press passes were made available for reporters to pick up at 9:55 a.m.
It was not clear why the reporters continued to have trouble passing through the security checkpoint after that.
With the television pool out of action, Mr. Trump’s summit with Mr. Xi was covered by still photographers and print and radio journalists. The Associated Press, which is not part of the network TV pool, provided video coverage of the leaders at a military review in the Rose Garden, and planned to film an event later on Thursday at the North Portico.
When Mr. Trump met with Mr. Xi in the Oval Office, the White House allowed a limited number of photojournalists, but no print reporters, to attend. During the event, Mr. Trump made a remark about how the Chinese had the friendliest press corps, according to photographers who were present.
Here’s what else to know:
The Times: Charlie Stadtlander, a New York Times spokesman, said that the publication would resume publishing and distributing photographs of Mr. Trump’s events now that a judge had heard the case brought by the banned outlets. For the past few days, The Times had stopped publishing the images in support of the outlets.
A temporary reprieve: In his overnight ruling, Judge Kelly granted the news outlets a 14-day restraining order and told the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the press credentials held by employees of the three outlets. Read more ›
Pool coverage: The White House press pool, established during the Eisenhower administration, is a rotating group of correspondents, TV camera operators and photographers who are the eyes and ears of the broader press corps in small settings. Read more ›
New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Hosts Xi for Summit, Where Pomp May Mask Tensions, Anton Troianovski, Updated Sept. 24, 2026. President Xi Jinping is making his first visit to Washington in a decade as President Trump continues his sharp turn from a hard line on China. Little progress is expected on the many issues dividing the powers.
President Trump is expected to host President Xi Jinping of China for a lavish arrival ceremony at the White House on Thursday morning, the start of two days of pageantry at a landmark U.S.-China summit that is likely to be full of pomp but unlikely to produce significant agreements.
It will be Mr. Xi’s first White House visit in more than a decade. He will be greeted by 479 U.S. military personnel, a display of American and Chinese flags, at least four military bands and a B-2 stealth bomber flyover, according to U.S. officials’ preview of the plans.
On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump is hosting a state dinner in Mr. Xi’s honor. Mr. Trump said last week that he had told “a lot of very good friends of mine” that “you just can’t come” because the event is so coveted.
But expectations are low for breakthroughs in resolving any of the major tensions between the world’s two most powerful countries. Those include a shaky trade-war truce, the fate of Taiwan, a risky A.I. race and China’s support for Iran and for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
For Mr. Trump, the priority appears to be deepening his personal relationship with Mr. Xi, one that he already invested in with a remarkably deferential visit to Beijing in May. On Wednesday, he took the rare step of meeting Mr. Xi as he landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
“We’re going to have a very good meeting,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week. “I would say others maybe not so well, but we’re doing very well with China, and President Xi and I have a good relationship.”
In a sign of the incremental nature of the two countries’ negotiations, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said late Wednesday that the United States and China had agreed to extend a one-year trade truce by two months, to Jan. 10. It had been due to expire Nov. 10.
Nor do experts expect much headway on artificial intelligence safety issues, despite American complaints about Chinese A.I. practices and even though some of America’s biggest tech titans have been invited to the dinner Thursday.
Mr. Xi, for his part, could take advantage of Mr. Trump’s efforts to maintain a good relationship by pressing him to continue delaying arms sales to Taiwan.
Here’s what else to know:
More Global News
New York Times, The ‘Monster’ Behind Russia’s Global Effort to Evade Western Sanctions, Aaron Krolik, Sept. 24, 2026. A Moscow firm uses shell companies and cryptocurrency to launder money, and a custom app to forge trade records, to help Russia bypass sweeping financial restrictions.
The cover story was simple.
The Trading Company of the Kyrgyz Republic, an official government entity, was paying $1 million for a bulk shipment of car floor mats, auto body polish, safety glasses and rope.
In reality, the money was for the kind of drone parts that have helped power Russia’s war machine.
The scheme from early last year was one of thousands of instances of sanctions evasion orchestrated by A7, a Moscow-based financial services firm whose internal documents were leaked online by hackers late last year.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been largely locked out of the global financial system. The country’s financial institutions are blocked from using the dollar, and most international banks have stopped processing payments for Russian companies. That was intended to make buying both consumer and military goods abroad incredibly difficult.
But A7 has found a reliable way to sidestep restrictions, conducting an ever-expanding network of shell companies to launder funds and orchestrate international payments on behalf of Russian businesses, the documents show.
Along with those documents, a New York Times analysis of internal software used to falsify transactions, interviews with current and former employees, and databases of business transactions and other previously unreported records offers the first detailed blueprint of Moscow’s rampant circumvention of the financial firewall built by the West.
The company helps Russian businesses send money abroad, often through shell companies that it has established in Asia, Africa and elsewhere and that have little purpose other than to mask the purchases of goods.
It uses cryptocurrency to exchange rubles and other currencies for dollars and euros in ways that obscure the origin of the money.
It has even built a custom app, powered by OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence, to forge trade records to deceive banks and regulators.
In just the first four months of 2025, the period detailed by the leaked documents, A7 brokered more than $500 million in prohibited transactions on behalf of Russian businesses and individuals. More than $130 million of that was for products that could be used by Russia’s military-industrial base, the Times analysis found.
New York Times, As Russia Steps Up Shadow War, Europeans Waver on How to Respond, Lara Jakes, Sept. 24, 2026. If President Vladimir V. Putin was hoping to get Europeans’ attention, he’s succeeded with a series of close-call incursions. The question now is what they will do about it.
An explosive-laden drone at a German airport. A strike on a passenger train near the Polish border. A rush of warnings about more chaos to come.
If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was hoping to heap pressure on Ukraine’s closest allies, he’s succeeded with a series of provocations that Western officials have blamed on Russia and said could put citizens of NATO countries in danger.
The question is how Europe responds.
In the past week, European leaders have spoken with uncommon urgency about Russia’s shadow war. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, citing unspecified intelligence, said Moscow may be planning attacks in Europe. “No one is safe,” President Emmanuel Macron of France cautioned. The British prime minister, Andy Burnham, told the U.N. General Assembly that his country faced an “industrial-scale assault” in terms of information warfare.
In an assessment released on Thursday, the Danish government’s defense intelligence service concluded that Russia would increase its threats to NATO nations, “with greater consequences for the targeted countries than in the past.”
The theory is that Mr. Putin, bogged down on the battlefield, is stepping up attacks on Ukraine’s supporters, hoping to sow fear and panic and, ultimately, weaken their support for Kyiv.
It won’t work, says the NATO secretary, Mark Rutte. “Russia wants us to stop helping Ukraine,” he said in a recent address. “Their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”ImageVladimir Putin sits at microphones holding papers. Flags, including the Russian one, are behind him.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has stepped up hybrid attacks on European countries in recent months.Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko
For years, officials and experts have accused Mr. Putin of targeting Europe with hybrid attacks — hostile actions that are designed to evade culpability, and that generally stop just short of inflicting enough damage to trigger a forceful response. What has changed, according to Charlie Edwards, a former British intelligence official now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is the “potential lethality and operational ambition of Russian sabotage operations.”
German investigators this month concluded that Russian operatives sent a drone equipped with military-grade explosives to Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany over the summer. Had the drone exploded, officials said, it would have caused significant damage and possibly killed people.
Earlier this month, a Russian drone smashed into a passenger train in western Ukraine, perilously close to the Polish border, as foreign visitors were leaving a diplomatic conference in Kyiv. It was widely seen as a warning to Ukraine’s allies.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
“We have to be prepared more, and we have to understand that this activity is now becoming almost ever-present,” the European Union’s top military adviser, Gen. Sean Clancy of Ireland, said in an interview.
On Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned that Russia’s war would continue to spread unless allies responded. “The more freedom Putin has to act, the more dangerous the world becomes for everyone else,” he said in a speech in New York.
The Kremlin has consistently denied involvement in hybrid activities. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, has pointed instead to what he calls Western “large-scale political, economic, and coercive measures, including sanctions.”
“This is the hybrid war,” he said in a recent speech.What’s driving Russia?
Western security officials say they have seen no sign of Russia preparing for a conventional war with NATO. Rather, officials say, Mr. Putin and his overstretched forces are looking for ways to undermine Kyiv and its allies.
“Russia doesn’t have the capacity to challenge NATO” right now, Baiba Braze, the minister of foreign affairs for Latvia, said in an interview in Riga.
“They cannot move the front,” she said. “They are not gaining territory.”
What Moscow can do, though, is continue to pursue relatively low-cost hybrid attacks.
That has included sending drones into NATO territory to surveil military bases and disrupt commercial air traffic, jamming navigation systems of passenger planes, and hacking into energy grids and dams. Last week alone, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish helicopter over international waters, and a NATO fighter jet shot down a drone that had likely entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus, a Russian ally.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Saudi Arabia Downs Houthi Missiles Targeting Kingdom, Official Says, Ismaeel Naar and Saeed Al-Batati, Sept. 24, 2026. The Iran-backed militia in Yemen fired six ballistic missiles at cities in Saudi Arabia, a military spokesman said. There was no immediate comment from the Houthis.
The Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen said on Thursday that it had shot down six ballistic missiles fired by the Iran-backed Houthi militia, in what appeared to be one of the largest cross-border attacks by the group since its conflict with Saudi Arabia spiraled back into war.
The missiles were aimed at the Saudi cities of Taif and Yanbu, Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said on social media. “Escalations and violations by the terrorist Houthi militia will be dealt with firmly,” he added, without specifying where the missiles were intercepted.
The Saudi authorities issued alerts on Thursday warning of potential attacks in cities across Saudi Arabia, including Mecca, home to the holiest sites in Islam, before announcing that the danger had passed.
The Houthis did not immediately comment on the Saudi claims.
The Houthis’ ability to target Taif and Yanbu, cities that are far from the Yemeni border with Saudi Arabia, underscores how the militia’s arsenal and its ambitions have grown since the war between the two sides flared up in recent weeks.
The barrage of missiles was launched a day after Saudi Arabia began celebrations for its National Day, a holiday marked by public gatherings and events across the country.
For more than a decade, Yemen’s civil war has pitted the Houthis, a Shiite Muslim group that casts itself as an anti-imperialist movement trying to liberate the country, against the internationally recognized government backed by Saudi Arabia. A fragile truce was agreed in 2022 and the fighting had mostly abated. But the conflict reignited this year in the wake of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, adding to broader Middle East tensions that have disrupted the global economy.
More On North American Tariffs, Trade, Economy
New York Times, Carney Lays Out His Vision for Breaking Canada’s Reliance on U.S., Matina Stevis-Gridneff, David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager and Colby Smith, Updated Sept. 24, 2026. In a wide-ranging interview, Prime Minister Mark Carney described a tense, evolving relationship with President Trump.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said that he had prepared over the past year for the “extreme tail risk” that President Trump might order military action against Canada, but disclosed that the two men have spoken “frequently,” even since trade talks collapsed last month, describing a tense, evolving relationship.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times at its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, Mr. Carney described in meticulous detail how he was systematically reducing Canada’s reliance on the United States for key technology — from space satellites to fighter jets — in an effort to make his country far less vulnerable to American threats. He outlined a plan to diversify Canada’s relationships and suppliers, and said that even with a different future president “we will be a better partner for the U.S. because of what we are doing.”
He talked about reducing reliance on Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite systems; considering alternatives to buying F-35 fighter jets; and a focus on deepening economic — though not defense — relationships with China. Mr. Trump’s exploitation of Canadian dependency on American products had taught the country a bitter lesson: “There’s certain things, once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them.”
When pressed on whether he took Mr. Trump’s threats to make Canada a 51st state seriously, Mr. Carney suggested that he had carefully examined the possibility of U.S.-led military action, but declined to discuss in detail what that involved.
“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” said Mr. Carney, a former central banker for Britain and Canada who approaches the world by meticulously assessing worst-case scenarios and drafting responses. He added: “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.
Sept. 23
Sept. 23
Top Headlines
President Trump threatens at the UN to "annihilate" Iran while also seeking peace prize honors on Sept. 22, 2026.
News Roundups
President Trump threatens Iran, other nations, boasts of his power, accomplishments, leadership (UN TV photo).
Sept. 23, 2026. Six weeks from the midterms, and Republicans aren’t even bothering to whisper it anymore. Lawmakers are telling reporters on the record that they expect to get “crushed” in November, even as the president spent his trip to the UN screaming at reporters, threatening to “annihilate” Iran, and floating his name for the theater where Lincoln was assassinated.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
right, Sept. 23, 2026. Donald Trump’s unconstitutional temper tantrum in ejecting CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House — which prompted the outlets to file suit Monday — underscores his late-stage deterioration into decrepitude and desperation, as rage and loss of impulse control drive his behavior.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Sept. 23, 2026. Andrew and I were both appalled that at the United Nations yesterday, Donald Trump proclaimed that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” I thought I’d just add a note here.Donald Trump sat beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wearing an oversized suit that hung and bunched awkwardly while cameras from all over the world broadcast the moment live.More On Trump Team Governance
More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
right, Sept. 23, 2026. Let’s start with some Punchbowl News reporting from an article entitled “The Republican freak out is here.”Sept. 23, 2026. Voting in the midterm elections has already begun in several states.More Global News
Sept. 23, 2026. In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”More News Reports
Sept. 22, 2026. In today’s video update I also spoke with Judge Shira Scheindlin who served on the Southern District of New York, and you want to hear what she had to say.Top Stories
President Trump threatens at the UN to "annihilate" Iran while also seeking peace prize honors on Sept. 22, 2026.
New York Times, At the U.N., Trump Lays Out a Winner-Takes-All Vision of U.S. Power, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger, Sept. 23, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly amounted to a rejection of the founding concept of the United Nations.
The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran or to declare that, in another conflict, “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Yet that was exactly what President Trump did on Tuesday, in threatening Iran if it failed to make a deal to end a war that had stretched far longer than Mr. Trump anticipated, and justifying his claims on Venezuelan oil reserves after American forces deposed its leader.
Mr. Trump has long made clear that he has little use for the United Nations, one of the post-World War II institutions that he has dismissed as outdated and ineffective. But his speech at the annual opening of the General Assembly amounted to a pure American rejection of the concept behind the U.N.’s founding in 1945: to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The global body’s charter, written largely by the United States, expressly prohibited members from threatening or using force against a country’s territorial integrity unless acting in self-defense, or with the U.N.’s authorization.
On Iran, Mr. Trump made it clear that he, and he alone, would decide whether to strike a deal with Tehran’s leaders or “annihilate the Islamic republic.”
It may have been largely a negotiating tactic. A little later in the morning, American officials quietly met with Iranians who were also in New York for the opening session, though it was unclear whether any progress was made or whether Mr. Trump himself would meet top Iranian officials.
But his threats were not limited to the war that has consumed his presidency for months since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran. He promised that Cuba’s government would fall, one way or the other. And if his “to the victor belong the spoils” line seemed drawn from the days of American gunboat diplomacy more than a century ago, that did not seem to bother the president. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he is willing to use the power of the U.S. military not only for the benefit of securing critical resources, like Venezuela’s huge oil reserves, but also to turn a profit.
New York Times, U.N. Live Updates: Iran’s President Accuses U.S. and Israel of Lawless Attacks in a Defiant Address, Farnaz Fassihi and Max Bearak, Sept. 23, 2026. Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran was open to diplomacy but would never accept limits on its civilian nuclear program. Before his speech later today, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called on allies to apply more pressure on Russia.
Here’s the latest.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, delivered a defiant speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, brandishing pictures of people killed by American and Israeli airstrikes while standing at the same lectern President Trump had used a day earlier to threaten to “annihilate” Iran.
Mr. Pezeshkian vowed that Iran could “not be made to surrender” and said it would never accept limits on its nuclear program, which he claimed was for peaceful purposes. He accused the United States and Israel of going “against international law” by targeting civilian infrastructure in its strikes on Iran.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters outside at the Lotte Palace Hotel in New York, described the indirect talks between U.S. and Iranian officials held on the sidelines of the General Assembly on Tuesday, telling reporters that the American negotiators had focused on trying to persuade Iran to end any ambition to develop a nuclear weapon.
President Milei of Argentina dedicated a significant portion of his address to bashing the United Nations and urging for A.I. deregulation.
He called the U.N. a “useless organization” whose only purpose was to sustain a cast of “fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” A strong ally of President Trump, he criticized the organization for voting against Israel and for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
He also accused the U.N. of looking “the other way” on the situation of the Malvinas islands, using Argentina’s name for the Falklands, a self-governing British territory. Argentina has asserted sovereignty over the sparsely populated archipelago in the South Atlantic for about two centuries, disputing British control for nearly as long.
Milei, a self-described libertarian with little nationalist history, had initially avoided confrontation with Britain. But his government has taken an increasingly forceful stance this year, particularly as the islands have moved closer to becoming an oil producer. “For us, the Malvinas are a national cause,” Milei said.
“Russia is lashing out at Europe in its entirety” as part of its war on Ukraine, France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, told the Security Council. He accused Russia of “besmirching” the Council on which it hold a permanent seat by violating international law with attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure, as well as intruding on neighboring countries’ airspace with drones, among other actions.
The Security Council meeting on Ukraine began with a call for “urgent steps” to end attacks by both sides on civilians and energy infrastructure, voiced by Rosemary DiCarlo, an American who serves as an under secretary general at the U.N. and heads its Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. She cited an “escalation in human suffering” and said there were “cascading consequences” from the war that extended far beyond the countries directly involved, including impeding agricultural exports and threatening global food security.
As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and First Lady Melania Trump (shown at top left) listen to President Trump's speech at the United Nations in New York City on Sept. 22, 2026, so does Palestine's delegation to the UN, shown in the foreground (UN TV photo).
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: We Watched Six Hours of Trump TV, Brendan Hartnett and Andrew Egger, Sept. 23, 2026. Because no one else was going to.
Xi Jinping touches down in the United States today for the first time in more than a decade. A lot has changed since Xi’s 2015 bilateral with then-President Barack Obama, and he and Donald Trump will have plenty to talk about: Taiwan, AI, trade, and China’s rare-earth mineral supply. But we’re sure our extremely smart and cunning president will keep him in line. Happy Wednesday.
News Roundups
President Trump threatens Iran, other nations, boasts of his power, accomplishments, leadership (UN TV photo).
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Privately Admit They Expect to Get 'Crushed,' Trump Stews at Press All Night, Eyes Ford's Theater for His Name, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 23, 2026. Six weeks from the midterms, and Republicans aren’t even bothering to whisper it anymore. Lawmakers are telling reporters on the record that they expect to get “crushed” in November, even as the president spent his trip to the UN screaming at reporters, threatening to “annihilate” Iran, and floating his name for the theater where Lincoln was assassinated.
Back home, Mitch McConnell was wheeled to a vote he couldn’t answer questions about, a United passenger says the airline let a man who assaulted her walk off the plane without consequence, and the architect who quit Trump’s ballroom project says the president told him, point blank, “I am the code.” Add in a hurricane bearing down on Mexico, a new Iran deal maybe taking shape in New York, and Dolly Parton’s estate at war with her own nephew, and you’ve got today’s rundown.
I am on my way to present about our work to a massive audience in New York. We are growing fast, and this newsletter exists because you support it, not because a network or an advertiser lets me run it. Here’s the news:
Republicans say they are ‘doomed’ as Trump Stews Overnight:
House and Senate Republicans Are Privately Admitting They Expect to Get “Crushed” in the Midterms, MS NOW Reports. With six weeks until Election Day, gas prices nearing $4.50 a gallon and diesel above $6.50, one House Republican granted anonymity said “we’re gonna get crushed,” calling the cycle “a gasoline and ground beef election,” while another said any Republican who isn’t concerned “is stupid.” An NBC News poll found Democrats with a five-point lead on the generic ballot, and a Fox News poll put the gap at seven points. JD Vance has campaigned in Kansas and Trump is now unleashing tens of millions from his super PAC to boost struggling candidates, both signs the party sees even reliably red territory as newly competitive. Sen. John Kennedy, who is now fundraising in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, said those states “ought to be fat guy layups for us” but instead the races are close.
Congress’s Early Exit and Legislative Priorities Are Drawing Criticism From Republicans Who Say Leadership Isn’t Addressing the Cost of Living. The House cut short its session and canceled its final two scheduled weeks, with Speaker Mike Johnson citing the need for members to campaign, though Rep. Thomas Massie said the real reason was avoiding a floor vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Meanwhile, the Senate has spent much of its remaining floor time on a bipartisan college sports bill rather than economic issues, prompting Kennedy to say Republicans have mostly been “sitting around sucking on our teeth” since passing their reconciliation bill. Sen. Lisa Murkowski connected rising fuel and fertilizer prices directly to the fallout from the Iran conflict and said she hasn’t heard anyone in the White House acknowledge that link. Republicans interviewed acknowledged that midterm losses are historically typical for the party in power, but said the current cost-of-living environment is making this cycle worse than usual.
Trump Called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “Sleazebag” With a “TRUMP Addiction” After Confronting Her in Person at the UN. The outburst came days after Trump banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House over their coverage, a move the outlets are now legally challenging and that prompted other major networks to boycott White House pool coverage in protest. At the UN General Assembly, Trump directly questioned why Collins was covering him, and later posted on Truth Social that she and CNN were “sick, treasonous, and demented.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the ban, telling NBC News the administration isn’t closing CNN or arresting reporters, only barring them from White House workspace. The clash is the latest in a long history between Trump and Collins, whom he has previously called “nasty,” “stupid,” and “the worst reporter” after she pressed him on Russia, the 2020 election, the Epstein files, and the cost of the White House ballroom.
CNN, Politico and MS NOW Face Off With the Trump Administration in Court Over White House Ban. The three outlets argue in a court filing that Trump’s abrupt expulsion from the White House is unconstitutional retaliation for their reporting, while the Justice Department countered late Tuesday that access is “a privilege, not a right” and that the outlets failed to meet professionalism standards by publishing sensitive information on topics like the White House ballroom’s security complex and Iran war munitions. The case goes before U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who previously ruled against the administration in a similar 2018 press-credential dispute involving CNN’s Jim Acosta, prompting Trump to call him “totally disloyal” ahead of the hearing. The ban has already disrupted coverage, most visibly when CNN’s scheduled turn as network pooler was skipped after other networks declined to fill in, leaving Trump’s remarks at a White House ribbon-cutting inaudible to the public. The administration gave the outlets until 5 p.m. Friday to contest the decision or have it become final, while Trump has framed the ban both as punishment for “fake news” and, more recently, as a matter of national security.
Mitch McConnell:
Mitch McConnell Appeared Unresponsive and Was Coached Through a Vote in Another Troubling Moment Caught on Camera. In his second week back after a 92-day absence, the 84-year-old, wheelchair-bound McConnell was rolled from his D.C. home to a waiting vehicle ahead of a roll call vote, remaining silent when a reporter asked about his weekend and whether he’d rather be home, instead slowly making a “peace” sign, the same gesture he used repeatedly the week before. His chief of staff, Terry Carmack, who makes $226,000 a year, ignored the reporter’s questions and helped him into the car. The episode follows a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing last week where Carmack and fellow Republicans had to tell McConnell twice to vote “aye” on the Farm Bill, which he did hoarsely and which passed by a single vote.
A Vascular Surgeon Says McConnell’s Recent Appearances Suggest He’s in No Condition to Serve, While He Continued Collecting His Senate Salary Throughout His Absence. Dr. Anahita Dua said that, based on what she’s observed, McConnell appears unable to handle basic tasks, let alone sit through hours of testimony and cast informed votes, and is likely in pain. McConnell has attributed his 92-day absence to a June fall followed by pneumonia, during which he missed 60 votes while still earning his full $174,000 annual salary, including roughly $43,500 for the period he was away. McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the latest incident.
Trump’s Renaming Efforts:
Trump Administration Officials Have Discussed Attaching the President’s Name to Ford’s Theatre, Site of Lincoln’s Assassination, Sources Tell MS NOW. People familiar with the effort said Ford’s Theatre has come up among federal properties administration officials are considering for some form of Trump branding, though it’s unclear how seriously the idea is being pursued or how it might be carried out. The discussions are part of a broader pattern in which Trump has imprinted his name and likeness across Washington, including renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace, pushing to rename the Kennedy Center, and pursuing possible naming rights at Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Commanders’ stadium. A former administration official said aides pitch such ideas simply to flatter Trump, quoting him as saying “why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me.” Because Ford’s Theatre’s name is set by a federal statute signed by Richard Nixon, any formal renaming would likely require an act of Congress, though that hasn’t stopped similar efforts elsewhere.
Architect Who Resigned From Trump’s White House Ballroom Project Clashed With the President Over Fire and Safety Code Violations, Washington Post Reports. James McCrery II, the original architect on the ballroom, withdrew last October after repeatedly warning that Trump’s preferred design lacked adequate emergency exits and fire-containment measures, according to people familiar with the discussions. When McCrery raised the safety concerns, Trump reportedly dismissed them, telling him “I am the code” and insisting no building codes applied to White House construction. The project is being routed through the Executive Residence, a small office exempt from the federal agency rules that would normally require code compliance, and Washington, D.C. has no jurisdiction to enforce local codes on federal property. Documents reviewed by the Post show Trump was deeply hands-on with the design, including Sharpie-marked notes expanding the ballroom’s footprint and specifying details like column style and door hinges, ultimately pushing the space to nearly twice the size of the historic White House. The White House disputed any link between McCrery’s departure and code concerns, saying life-safety issues have been “addressed and resolved continuously” as the design evolved.
New York Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Trump’s Renaming of Lake Ontario, New Siena Poll Shows. A new Siena poll released Wednesday found that New York voters oppose President Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” by a 74-19 percent margin statewide. The opposition was nearly identical across regions, with Upstate New York voters against it 75-20 percent and New York City voters against it 76-18 percent. Seven New York counties border the lake, making the renaming a particularly local issue for Upstate residents. The poll underscores how unpopular the largely symbolic gesture has proven even among voters who might otherwise support the president.
Other news:
A Russian Mi-8 helicopter briefly violated Polish airspace on Tuesday, flying roughly 300 meters into Polish territory for about 42 seconds before retreating, according to the Polish Armed Forces. The helicopter originated from Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and was tracked throughout the incursion by Polish radar installations. In its release, the Polish Armed Forces characterized the incident as another instance of Russia testing Poland’s readiness and response capabilities.
United Passenger Says Airline Kept Her Seated Next to Man Who Masturbated on Flight, Then Let Him Leave Without Consequence. A 25-year-old United Airlines passenger says she was forced to remain seated next to a man who exposed himself and masturbated while staring at her during a Sept. 3 flight from Rochester to Newark, and that flight attendants required her to return to that seat for landing despite her reported discomfort because no other seats were available. She says United never notified law enforcement, and the man deplaned without being stopped, even after she raised concerns at the gate that he might be boarding another flight. She filed complaints with United, the FAA, and the FBI, but says a United representative would only communicate by email, offered language she called victim-blaming, and gave her a $100 flight credit despite her not seeking a refund. United, the FAA, and the FBI all declined to provide details when contacted by NBC News. The woman says she wants the man identified and barred from flying, and is speaking out mainly over the airline’s failure to act rather than the incident itself.
Mass Shooting at South African House Party Leaves 11 Dead, Three Wounded, Police Say. Three assailants opened fire Tuesday night on a party at a house in the KwaMakhutha township near Durban, killing at least 11 people, including a woman believed to be pregnant, and wounding three others. No arrests have been made, and police said they are still searching for the suspects. The motive remains unclear, though police noted some of those at the house were already known to them through separate criminal investigations and said a feud between rival groups couldn’t be ruled out. The shooting is the latest in a string of mass shootings in South Africa in recent years, including one in June that killed 12 people in a poor Johannesburg neighborhood.
Hurricane Polo Has Grown Into One of the Strongest Pacific Storms in Decades and Is Skirting Mexico’s Southwestern Coast, While Hurricane Odalys Strengthens at Sea. Polo reached Category 5 strength before weakening slightly to a “extremely dangerous” Category 4 with 150 mph winds, becoming the third Category 5 hurricane of the Pacific season, and forecasters expect it to remain a major hurricane over the next several days even though it isn’t likely to make direct landfall. Mexican authorities suspended classes, shut down ports in Guerrero and Michoacán, and the U.S. Embassy warned of life-threatening flooding and mudslides from heavy rain, with hurricane-force winds extending up to 40 miles from the storm’s center. Scientists called the storm’s rapid intensification “truly remarkable,” attributing it to an especially strong El Niño that has warmed Pacific waters and created ideal conditions for hurricanes to strengthen quickly. Meanwhile Hurricane Odalys, a weaker Category 1 storm far off Mexico’s coast, poses no threat to land.
Iran and Trump Envoys Held “Very Productive” Three-Hour Talks in New York, but Tehran Denies Dropping Its Preconditions for Reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner under Qatari mediation, and Trump said the talks went well and suggested more could follow soon, a signal that helped push Brent crude below $100 a barrel for the first time in two weeks. Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed the meeting occurred but said it was aimed only at conveying Iran’s conditions, including an end to the war, the naval blockade, and the economic pressure campaign, rather than any concession, though Iran has signaled over the past 48 hours that it could reopen the strait within seven days if those conditions are met. In his UN speech, Trump again threatened to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if no deal is reached, even as Iran faces mounting economic strain, including a near-total naval blockade on its oil exports and a looming shutdown of its civilian aviation over U.S. sanctions threats. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in New York for the UN General Assembly, is expected to accuse the West of double standards for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while staying largely silent on the U.S. campaign against Iran and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
A New Report Projects More Than 450,000 Additional Deaths Worldwide From an Unusually Powerful El Niño Over the Next Six Months. Climate scientists, including researchers from the Climate Impact Lab and University of California, Berkeley, estimate the toll will hit hardest in Nigeria, Indonesia, Sudan, India and Brazil, with the U.S. projected to see about 3,500 additional heat deaths and falling within the top 20 most affected countries. The current El Niño broke the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon this week, months ahead of its expected peak, prompting scientists to describe it as “mind-blowing” and comparable to the level of heat the broader climate crisis is expected to produce two decades from now. Researchers say the death estimates, generated using peer-reviewed methods tracking temperature and mortality across more than 24,000 regions worldwide, are meant to help target interventions like cooling centers and expanded medical staffing that could save lives. The El Niño is also expected to push around 50 million people into acute hunger by driving up food prices, according to the World Food Programme.
The Machinists Union Is Launching a “Workers v. Billionaires” Midterm Campaign in Eight Battleground States, Citing Broken Trump Promises on Affordability. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which has nearly 700,000 members at companies including Boeing, United Airlines and Harley-Davidson, is targeting Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois to back pro-worker candidates ahead of November. Union president Brian Bryant said many members backed Trump in 2024 over his promise to lower prices immediately, but inflation has instead risen from 3.0% to 3.4% since he took office, while health insurance costs and gas prices have also climbed, the latter tied partly to the Iran war. Local union leaders in Texas and Arizona described members increasingly frustrated by the cost of living and, in some cases, expressing regret over their 2024 votes, with one Texas machinist recently winning a special election flipping a state senate seat Trump had carried by 17 points. A former Pennsylvania union official summed up the pitch as “billionaires versus the workers,” pointing to Trump’s tariffs and unmet affordability promises as the union works to help Democrats flip congressional seats in several of the targeted states.
Dolly Parton’s Estate Has Filed for a Restraining Order Against Her Nephew Amid Allegations He Made Violent “Warfare” Threats Against Staff. Bryan Seaver, who had been head of Parton’s security and announced her death on August 25, is accused in a Tennessee lawsuit of telling the estate’s manager, Danny Nozell, “I’m literally an international arms dealer and mercenary. All I do is warfare,” and separately writing to Parton’s lawyer, “I’m a killer,” claims the estate says have left staff too afraid to come to work. Seaver, whose security contract was terminated September 15, confirmed to TMZ that he is a “career soldier and military contractor” and said he stands by most of the comments, though he characterized some messages to Nozell as private “rage talk” exchanged while the two were grieving together. He also allegedly threatened to start a podcast “dedicated to ruining Dolly’s brand partnerships” unless paid, and said in another message he planned to spend his remaining time “ratfucking anyone that has ever betrayed my family,” which he told TMZ referred to specific business partners he believes wronged Parton. A Nashville chancery court will now consider the estate’s request for a restraining order; Parton, who died without children, left behind an estate that includes her songbook and the Dollywood resort.
Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger Speaks Publicly for the First Time About His Alzheimer’s Diagnosis, Says “I’ve Done Harder Things Than This Before.” The retired pilot who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, saving all 155 people aboard, told “Good Morning America” on Wednesday that he and his wife, Lorrie, are approaching the early-stage diagnosis the same way he approached that emergency landing, by focusing on top priorities and letting go of what they don’t have time for. Sullenberger, 75, first disclosed the diagnosis in a July website post describing early symptoms like difficulty recalling names and repeating stories, and he is now receiving monthly treatments aimed at slowing the disease’s progression. He and his wife said they initially wanted to keep the diagnosis private but decided to go public in hopes of helping others, with Lorrie emphasizing “this is a disease, not a character flaw.” Sullenberger, who is set to be inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame this month, said his greatest fear is that this could be his “last flight,” but added, “if this has to be my last flight, I’m going to go out using full afterburner.”
Netflix’s New “Willy Wonka” Reality Show Uses an AI-Generated Replica of Gene Wilder’s Voice, Drawing Backlash From Fans. “Wonka’s The Golden Ticket,” which debuted Wednesday, has contestants competing for a $3 million prize inside an elaborate real-life recreation of the fictional chocolate factory, but departs from the original story’s moral of humility by rewarding scheming and strategy. The show features no in-person host, instead using an AI-generated version of the late Gene Wilder’s voice, created with the company ElevenLabs and built from audiobook recordings his widow, Karen Boyer, provided, to announce challenges and eliminations. Showrunners Emer Harkin and Alison Holloway said the decision was made with explicit approval and encouragement from Wilder’s estate and widow, and that they see it as honoring his legacy rather than diminishing it. Some fans online pushed back when the trailer debuted earlier this year, arguing Wilder himself was critical of past reboots and likely wouldn’t have approved, amid broader industry concern from entertainment workers about AI’s growing role in Hollywood.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, In Court Filing Defending Media Ban, White House Says Access Is a ‘Privilege,’ Erik Wemple, Sept. 23, 2026. President Trump determined that CNN, MS NOW and Politico were in “violation of the standards of professionalism and decorum” expected at the White House.
White House officials said in a court filing Tuesday that President Trump had determined that CNN, MS NOW and Politico had breached standards of conduct, leading to their expulsion from the White House grounds.
The alleged violations, said the filing, include “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.”
“Access to the White House is a privilege — not a right,” reads the filing, which argues that Mr. Trump’s action against the three news outlets does not violate the First Amendment and aligns with a long history of presidents favoring some journalists over others.
The filing, furthermore, claims that the White House’s denial of access is a preliminary matter and that the outlets have until Friday to contest the decision.
The clash began last Friday, when Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social, the platform that he owns, that he would ban the three outlets, saying they “shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES.” On Saturday morning, journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were denied access to the White House grounds and had their press passes confiscated.
By Monday morning, the news organizations had sued, arguing that the president’s ban “brazenly discriminates based on editorial viewpoint,” and was an affront to their First Amendment rights. They said that the move had blindsided its targets, depriving the outlets of the warning that any such drastic action required. They “received zero advance notice that the president would ban a news organization from the White House if he dislikes its coverage,” according to the complaint.
U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was nominated in 2017 by Mr. Trump, will hold an emergency hearing on Wednesday to consider the media outlets’ request for a temporary court order undoing the access ban.
The government filing Tuesday night included copies of letters sent earlier in the day to each banned news outlet. In addition to accusing the organizations of failing to meet standards of conduct, the letters identified specific stories that allegedly either spread falsehoods or threatened national security. The letter to CNN, for example, cited a January 2026 story that “disclosed ‘top-secret’ construction details related to the East Wing bunker,” the letter reads.
One of MS NOW’s alleged infractions, according to a White House letter, was a June 2026 story claiming “a source said that President Trump ‘underestimated the willingness of Iran to resume conflict.’” Politico is accused of publishing a “document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements,” according to a White House letter.The three media outlets did not immediately comment on the White House’s filing.
In their lawsuit, the media outlets argued that the White House had not afforded them due process to contest their expulsion. In its response, the White House claimed that it had provided the companies with “sufficient post-deprivation process.”
But Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that “they can’t suspend you and then give you a post hoc justification for it.”
The Contrarian, Opinion: Four Changes to Help the White House Press Recover Its Spine, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 23, 2026. Donald Trump’s unconstitutional temper tantrum in ejecting CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House — which prompted the outlets to file suit Monday — underscores his late-stage deterioration into decrepitude and desperation, as rage and loss of impulse control drive his behavior.
He reportedly was left alone — gasp! — in the White House over the weekend, leading to his impulsive decision to hit the eject button for certain news outlets. The conceit that each aggressive move is part of a well-conceived scheme to cement authoritarian control no longer withstands scrutiny. Even his closest aides and most fanatical apologists have struggled to recast his impetuous, self-destructive spasms as actions of a wily political operator. We are, from all appearances, witnesses to his narcissistic collapse.
All that noted, Trump’s accelerating mental crackup also underscores the degree to which the White House press corps has failed to cover the despotic president in a way that accurately conveys to Americans the depth of his mental deterioration and fascist extremism.
It took an unprecedented affront and multiple employers’ ejection for the pool to finally react collectively. The presidential TV pool was suspended on Monday, leaving Trump with no TV network or live coverage of events at the White House and United Nations. In a mild step of solidarity, the New York Times and Washington Post refrained from publishing the events of the day — but only until midnight. But how long will the corps stay out? And will their conduct change once they return?
Even before this latest outrage, First Amendment guru Floyd Abrams succinctly observed in an interview: “I think he is the most threatening president to free speech, free press, the First Amendment that we’ve ever had.” One wonders if we would have gotten to this point had the pool years ago stood up in unison to Trump. They could have taken their belongings and left when Trump repeatedly demeaned and insulted female reporters; they could have grilled him directly when he tricked the press into serving as human decoys to avoid the threat posed to his security-insufficient Qatari-gifted Air Force One. They could have mounted a collective response after multiple, frivolous lawsuits against news outlets, the firing of Stars & Stripes journalists, and/or Pentagon attacks against legitimate news outlets. It’s little wonder that appeasement gave Trump the idea he could do as he pleased.
After all, the WHCA continued to invite him to its glad-handing White House Correspondents' Dinner as if he were a normal president respectful of the First Amendment. The press pool’s lack of aggressive follow-up questioning, refusal to confront out-and-out lies (“Sir, that statement is objectively false. Why are you lying?”), and the inexcusable laxity in pursuing questions about his mental and physical health (even as he falls asleep in their midst) have all served to sane-wash Trump. That has both normalized him in the eyes of many voters and given him a sense of impunity in dealing with the press.
The White House press gaggle’s short attention span has allowed Trump to avoid ongoing scrutiny of the cover-up of the Epstein pedophile files. The White House’s collective temper tantrum has effectively staved off questioning about the grossly disturbing co-dependent relationship with Natalie Harp. And Trump has somehow cowed reporters to avoid confronting him with specific questions about his and his family’s self-dealing and grotesque profit-making in office.
And yet, for all their passivity and inappropriate deference — all rationalized as the price for maintaining “access” — their meekness only emboldened Trump. But now they have reached an inflection point, the embarrassing result when a hapless press corps sought to sacrifice journalistic integrity for access and wound up with neither. If outlets want to regain their dignity and status, reclaim their role as guardians of the First Amendment, and inform the public of the extent of the danger Trump poses to our democracy, they would be well advised to adopt several simple rules.Subscribed
First, no real news outlet should return until all are allowed back. If the White House decided, for example, to throw out all Black reporters, would white members still attend? Contrary to the notion that their absence would be letting Trump “win,” continuing to show up while he tramples on the core principle that all legitimate news outlets get equal access is the ultimate capitulation. And by the way, real reporting and actual scoops don’t involve sitting and taking down dictation from aggressive, lying regime flunkies.
Second, regardless of whether they are physically in the briefing room, reporters assigned to the White House must interrogate the Trump regime and all Republicans (who cannot hide during the sprint to the midterms) daily about the three topics he dreads most: the Epstein files, his personal corruption, and his mental and physical health. There is no satisfactory explanation for the Epstein pedophile coverup, the greed-a-thon, and/or Trump’s obvious unfitness. Yet in a display of journalistic negligence, they allow Trump to escape regular questions on these topics. If Trump or fellow Republicans refuse to respond, the press is obliged to keep at them and demand explanations.
Third, the end of jocular, frivolous conduct and social deference (e.g., standing when he enters the room, inviting him to their WHCA dinner) must end. When dealing with a wannabe dictator who has long sought to destroy a free, independent press, White House reporters need to snap out of their Stockholm Syndrome stupor and adopt a properly confrontational demeanor.
Fourth, if the press pool is reestablished with access for all news outlets, it would behoove the gaggle to change its approach. If a reporter is interrupted, harassed, insulted, or abused, the press should exit the room. Period. If Trump refuses to answer a legitimate news question or claims it was a dumb question, every other reporter must ask the same question until Trump tires out or answers. (Understanding that their MAGA flunkies from non-news outlets have been allowed into the pool, genuine reporters can explain how real news organizations operate and identify those Trump collaborators who continue coddling him.)
In sum, Trump is indisputably the greatest threat to the First Amendment we have ever faced. No president, congressional member, committee, or outside power comes close. The White House press corps has proven itself inadequate to meet the moment, and has lost access, prestige, and credibility as a result. But capitulation is a choice. The current standoff is the ideal time for responsible outlets to adjust, start behaving as fierce defenders of the truth and of democracy, and rise to meet the occasion.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Victor Spoils, William Kristol, right, Sept. 23, 2026. Andrew and I were both appalled that at the United Nations yesterday, Donald Trump proclaimed that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” I thought I’d just add a note here.
This chest-puffing boast by our worst president is a stark contrast to a famous statement by our best, Abraham Lincoln. Also speaking in New York City, on February 27, 1860, Lincoln said, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
Lincoln’s faith that right makes might—or that right can guide and govern might—has been replaced by Trump’s unabashed glorification of might. As Lincoln himself said, in another context, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.”
The world “degeneracy” captures a lot about Trump and Trumpism. So does the word “hubris.” The Greeks would have warned that going on endlessly and vaingloriously about American power and greatness is asking for trouble. That’s partly because the gods don’t like human boasting. But it’s also because it reveals something low and mean—and weak—about the boaster’s character. As Aristotle explains in his Rhetoric (1378b):
Hubris is a form of slighting another simply for the pleasure involved. The cause of the pleasure thus enjoyed by the hubristic man is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. That is why youths and rich men are hubristic; they think themselves superior when they show hubris.
Trump is rich and old. The elderly and successful should be generous and grateful. But Trump, beset by his psychological devils of insecurity and narcissism, desperately needs to think himself superior to others, and to boast endlessly about it.
It’s not only the Greeks who thought one pays a price for hubris. The American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald crafted as an epigraph to his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and Damned, an inversion of Trump’s favorite phrase. Fitzgerald wrote, “The victor belongs to the spoils.” The novel (I’ll admit I haven’t read it, but I have read about it) is an indictment of the shallow and hollow materialism of our first Gilded Age and of those shaped by it. Things don’t end well for its vain and hubristic protagonists.
Nor will things end well for our vain and hubristic president. The question is whether he’ll take us down with him.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is an international embarrassment, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Sept. 23, 2026. At 1:47 this afternoon, during one of the most anticipated meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump sat beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wearing an oversized suit that hung and bunched awkwardly while cameras from all over the world broadcast the moment live.
The meeting was supposed to focus on ending the war in Ukraine, and their press conference was the opportunity to talk about how they planned to get there. But instead of giving Zelenskyy the opportunity to speak, Donald Trump commandeered nearly the entire 8+ minute discussion. After Zelenskyy quickly gave his opening remarks, Donald Trump did not allow President Zelenskyy to say another word.
But what was said during that time is even more disturbing. While seated right next to a man whose country is under attack, with a war raging back at home, Donald Trump used the time to talk about the attacks and war on Iran that he himself has started.
Completely unaware of the inappropriateness of his words, or how truly horrifying what he was saying was, he threatened to commit an atrocity against an entire country, ending their very existence. “It’s greatness, potential greatness, or obliteration. It’s two choices. I mean, it’s in one case it’s obliteration, and the other alternative is potential greatness. It could be a great country.”
But maybe the most bizarre thing that came out of that short press conference was when Trump took what should have been a serious discussion, one which he has noted multiple times involved the killing of 25,000 people every month, and decided that was the right time to share how excited he was for President Xi from China to visit and that what he really cares about is building a ballroom to host “hot” parties. “I wish we had the ballroom. If we had the ballroom, we could have 2,000 people, but we have a very small room, but uh, as one of the papers reported, that’s the hottest ticket that they’ve said in a long time.”
As he said this, President Zelenskyy, who was there working hard to bring peace to his country, tried desperately to keep a straight face and maintain decorum while the madman sitting next to him rambled on about how excited he was about his upcoming dinner with a dictator.
Those nine minutes would be a preview of what Donald Trump would show the world throughout the rest of his time at the United Nations. His remarks often sounded more like a rally speech than the words of an American president addressing world leaders, and each time he spoke, he revealed a little more of what the world now sees when the President of the United States steps onto the global stage.
The first sign that this was going to be an embarrassing day for Trump and our country came almost immediately after he entered the United Nations building. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was standing among the pool of credentialed press there to cover the General Assembly when she called a question over to him as he walked through the doors. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t think the U.S. is winning the war with Iran. When will it end?” Trump did not answer her and acted as if he hadn’t heard the question at all or even seen her. But seconds later, standing in front of the press, he looked toward Collins and said, “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You shouldn’t be here. You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me. You shouldn’t be covering me.” Collins calmly pointed out that she had been credentialed by the United Nations, not by his administration. Then, as Trump stepped onto the escalator, another reporter could be heard mocking him from behind, calling out, “Be careful with the stairs! Be careful with the stairs!” in reference to the infamous scene one year ago when the escalator carrying Trump and Melania suddenly stopped, forcing them to walk the rest of the way up.
Then came his address to the General Assembly later that morning. The speech lasted almost 37 minutes, with Trump struggling through a low-energy campaign speech filled with claims about how great the United States is and how great it is doing under his leadership. The reception was cold, with many leaders staring back with completely blank looks as the diminished and compromised leader of what was once the free world rambled on in front of some of the most influential leaders in the world. After he had cycled through the same talking points he repeats at nearly every campaign speech he gives, he really got going, at one point threatening to annihilate a nation of more than 90 million people.
“I have a big decision to make,” he told them. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” He conveniently predicted that this “deal” with Iran would come “right after the election,” as he explained to the room that the Iranians were “waiting to see how I do on the midterm election.” Right around this time, members of the Iranian delegation began walking out. The Cuban delegation would do the same later in his speech. The rest of the room continued to sit in silence while the speech just dragged on.
When he got to the Venezuela part of his speech, he used words that no American president should ever say about a sovereign nation, whether in an official speech or not: “To the victor belong the spoils.” Saying out loud that America was entitled to take from another country because we had defeated them. He also made the false claim that the United States and Venezuela together hold more than 60 percent of the world’s oil. The real number is closer to 22 percent. But like most things Donald Trump says, the truth carries very little burden on the claims that he makes. What does still matter is that he feels confident enough to say something that far from reality in front of a room filled with world leaders who know the truth because many of them govern countries whose economies depend on the very oil he is talking about.
He also spent his time at the podium spreading other dangerous misinformation when he told the assembled world leaders that real concerns were all, as he calls them, a hoax. He included the threats from the unregulated and rapid advancement of artificial intelligence that is coming from the same people responsible for, in his words, “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,” climate change, and open borders. What Trump was trying to do was take serious and rapidly developing issues that governments, scientists, and even the leaders of the companies building this technology are trying to understand, and deliberately place them into the same category of “political hoaxes” he has spent years telling his supporters not to believe.
Later in the day, he joined a meeting with leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council, including countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, all of them sitting in the same region as Iran and some just across the Persian Gulf. While sitting directly beside them, Donald Trump spoke of a suspected Iranian nuclear site known as Pickaxe Mountain and said, “We may have to blow up another one.” He said it with seemingly no consideration for what another attack on Iran could mean for the region, or how directly the consequences of another escalation could affect the very countries whose leaders were sitting right next to him.
Thankfully, there was some pushback. Maybe not right in Trump’s face, but it was still said in a way that left little question about who it was for and what it was about. Later in the day, French President Emmanuel Macron took to the podium and challenged Trump’s claims about peace in Gaza. “But what credibility do we have if we continue to remain inactive in the face of Gaza? Some boast of a supposed peace. But that peace has not reopened humanitarian access for a single second. Are we simply to stand by and watch this spectacle that should shame us all?” Macron didn’t need to say Trump’s name. Everyone in that room knew exactly who and what he was talking about.
Watching all of this today reminded me of another infamous speech from that same podium. In September 2009, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was given 15 minutes to address the General Assembly and instead spoke for 96. He rambled from one subject to another, antagonized the crowd with a copy of the UN Charter, called the Security Council a “terror council,” and even demanded investigations into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The world watched as a powerful leader attacked the very institutions he was standing in front of while he seemed to unravel right there on the world stage.
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.
That was the part that felt especially familiar today. Donald Trump used his time in front of the General Assembly to attack the International Criminal Court, calling it an “out-of-control institution” and its officials “an evil group of people,” before calling on every country that belongs to it to withdraw. “I call on all nations that are members of the ICC to officially resign from this rogue institution immediately.” He stood there at the United Nations and told the countries of the world to abandon another international institution because he does not believe it should have authority over Americans. And I don’t think we should ignore what that means. Trump was not simply saying that America should not participate. He was asking the rest of the world to dismantle the institution around us, making it harder for that institution to hold anyone accountable at all.
It was just 17 months after Gaddafi gave that speech that Libya fell into civil war. Not even a year after that, his government was gone, and he was dead. His speech did not cause any of that, and I do not believe that will be America’s fate. But looking back, that speech became one of those moments when the rest of the world got to see something very clearly: a leader beginning to lose his grip on the world around him. Watching Trump today, I couldn’t help but feel like we were watching one of those moments again.
Watching Donald Trump deal with domestic issues, which admittedly a lot of the time still cause ripples throughout the rest of the world, is upsetting. But seeing him like this on the world stage, in a setting where the President of the United States is supposed to represent all of us, takes that concern to a whole new level. I think about all of the people watching from all over the world and what they must think when they see this.
I think about how the world used to see us. I have more stories than I have days from my travels and the conversations I have had with people all over the world about America and what our country used to symbolize. A few years ago, my daughter and I met a couple from Ireland while we were in Las Vegas. My maiden name is Delaney, and when they learned that my dad’s entire family traces back to Ireland, we immediately started talking about our upcoming trip there, where my family came from, and whether I might even qualify for Irish citizenship. Somewhere in that conversation, when I said that I thought I was too many generations removed to still qualify for Irish citizenship, one of them said something I have never forgotten: “At least you’re not living in a country where you have to worry about having an escape plan.”
Back then I of course agreed. Because this was the United States of America. And there was this unspoken understanding between us that America was the place you didn’t need an escape plan from. It was the place people wanted to escape to. America was where people believed they were safe. It was respected around the world, not because we were perfect, because we certainly were not, but because we were always trying to live up to what America was supposed to be. Now I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about where my family could go, having been as outspoken as I have been.
I think about that couple now, and I wonder what they would have thought watching him today, or over the past 20 months. Because this is not the country they admired that night in Las Vegas. The respect our country once held is gone. Not just from diplomats and heads of state, but from people all over the world. You can see it in the polite smiles they hold while he speaks, trying not to trigger him or cause another bad, impulsive decision. It was easy to see in the way Zelenskyy fought to keep his face neutral and not roll his eyes as Donald Trump started obsessing over his ballroom when the fate of an entire country was what they should have been talking about.
The leaders we used to call our allies have stopped fearing his every move. Now they are simply enduring him. They are waiting him out, and what once looked like concern has turned into something closer to pity. A year ago, world leaders still seemed to believe they could manage him. Today, they seem to be trying to get through the meeting without reacting to whatever absurd thing he might say next. They see a man who is visibly diminished, physically and mentally, sitting in rooms where he is ill-prepared to even follow the discussion, let alone be a voice in the decisions being made. And they have adjusted their plans accordingly, increasingly making them without him, and without the United States.
Donald Trump is not America; he is just the person representing us to the world right now. He does not get to decide what this country ultimately becomes. We do. The America that couple believed in years ago in Las Vegas is still here in millions of us who remember what this country can be and refuse to let anyone take that from us. In 41 days, we will be voting to show not just each other that we still know who we are, but also the world.
More On Trump Team Governance
New York Times, Blocking Windmills? Banning Press? Building an Arch? Trump Cites National Security, Luke Broadwater, John Ismay and Emily Badger, Graphics by Junho Lee, Sept. 23, 2026 (print ed.). The president is increasingly invoking the rationale while facing legal challenges to his plans, even in more curious cases like his triumphal arch, which he says will now include snipers and drones.
As President Trump tries to barrel through legal and political pushback on fronts ranging from press freedom to his triumphal arch, he is increasingly using a justification he believes will allow him to do what he wants: national security.
The president has cited national security as a reason to build a fancy new ballroom on White House grounds and to investigate leaks to journalists that embarrassed his administration.
He has invoked national security in stripping union rights from thousands of federal workers and deploying the military to the Mexican border to crack down on migrants.
He has cited national security as a reason to pause the construction of wind farms off the East Coast and exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from protections for endangered species of whales.
On social media, Mr. Trump has argued that the ban he initiated last week on CNN, MS Now and Politico entering the White House grounds was necessary because they were a “threat to our national security.”
Perhaps nowhere was the reasoning more sudden, or curious, than his announcement on Sunday that he was transforming his plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch on a Washington roundabout, which are under legal challenge.
What was envisioned as a project to honor America’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Trump said, would now also be a military depot, outfitted with “large numbers of drones,” snipers and ammunition. It is unclear what the arch, which would lie between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, would protect.
“Courts historically have been deferential to the executive branch in matters of national security, and that is due to the president’s role as commander in chief,” said Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor and a former U.S. attorney. “But it’s not a 100 percent Trump card. If the president invokes the national security rationale frivolously, then he could undermine the power for future presidents who need to invoke it legitimately.”
Mr. Trump has found mixed success in pursuing his national security claims in court.
They featured most prominently in a lawsuit over his ballroom project at the White House. In that case, federal courts distinguished the parts of the project legitimately needed for security, such as an underground bunker, and allowed work on them to proceed, while finding that the aboveground ballroom should be halted without congressional approval. Ultimately, the Supreme Court allowed the entire project to proceed without deciding that issue by dismissing the lawsuit on technical grounds.
New York Times, The Former Fracking Executive Selling Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Vision, Brad Plumer, Sept. 23, 2026. Energy Secretary Chris Wright is pitching a future of fossil fuel abundance. It’s not always an easy sell while war drags on and oil prices surge.
With oil and gasoline prices spiking amid President Trump’s war with Iran, it was an awkward moment for optimism about the world’s energy situation.
But Energy Secretary Chris Wright brought a sunny message to Houston last week at a gathering of energy ministers from the G20 nations. The Trump administration, he said, was ushering in an era of energy abundance by expanding oil and gas supplies in places like Alaska and Venezuela.
That pitch was often overshadowed by the effects of the conflict in the Middle East. Between lauding oil and gas deals, Mr. Wright fielded questions about a damaged Saudi oil pipeline and sparred on social media with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over surging gasoline costs.
More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup
Wall Street Journal, Federal Prosecutors Open Probe Into Jeffrey Epstein’s Executors, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, Sept. 23, 2026. Prosecutors have questioned potential witnesses about his longtime accountant and lawyer; both men have denied wrongdoing
Federal authorities have opened a probe into Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime lawyer and accountant who are now his estate executors, according to people familiar with the matter.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan in recent months have been scheduling interviews with potential witnesses and have requested documents about their dealings with Indyke, Epstein’s lawyer, and Kahn, his accountant, the people said. The documents include emails and financial records.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: “The Republican Freak Out Is Here,” Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 23, 2026. Let’s start with some Punchbowl News reporting from an article entitled “The Republican freak out is here”:
There are 41 days until Election Day, and Republicans are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at their sinking political fortunes.
Over the past few weeks, the electoral climate for President Donald Trump and Republican leaders has worsened dramatically, according to lawmakers, aides and political advisers who see daily polling.
Gas prices are sky-high. Diesel sets a new record almost daily. Trump said at the United Nations Tuesday that the Iran war won’t end until “after the midterm elections.” That’s a frightening prospect for GOP lawmakers who are now publicly calling for an end to the seven-month conflict.
Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate candidate in Iowa, is demanding the House return to session to enact a ban on diesel exports. This won’t happen, but it shows a suddenly vulnerable Republican desperately scrambling for a message.
Let’s talk about what Republicans are doing in the Capitol and beyond to try to save their own careers.
The money. Over the next 10 days, Republicans will make critical decisions about where to keep spending and where to pull back.
What’s clear is this: In traditionally red states, the GOP is being forced to spend staggering amounts of money — far more than ever before — to defend their seats.
Texas is Exhibit A.
Texas PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund’s Lone Star State super PAC, is adding more than $35 million to its $65 million in TV reservations. That puts the GOP leadership-endorsed group above $100 million in TV ads to boost Attorney General Ken Paxton over Democrat James Talarico.
All told, Republicans expect to spend between $150 million and $200 million in Texas to save Paxton.
In more news. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) raised $1.1 million Monday in Houston and Dallas for all of the other battleground candidates and incumbents — excluding Paxton. Former President George W. Bush attended the Dallas event.
Lets now spend a little time looking at why Rs are freaking out. Today’s FiftyPlusOne Trump job approval tracker clocks in at 35%-62% (-27). This is a three point drop from a week ago:
A new Marist poll of Texas is the second high quality poll there this week showing both Talarico and Hinojosa ahead. A reminder that the last time we won a statewide race in Texas was in 1994, 32 years ago. Our updated round up of high quality battleground polls show all three of these Senate candidates with leads outside of the margin of error. These are devastating polls for Republicans:
A new analysis by the NYT’s Nate Cohn, Hispanic Voters, Abandoning Trump, Are Transforming The Midterm Map, explains what the gains Dems are making with Hispanic voters means for November:
President Trump’s enormous gains among Hispanic voters in the last election propelled him to victory in the national popular vote and prompted talk of a political realignment. Two years later, that talk is over.
In an average of high-quality national polls over the last month, Democrats led Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points, 64-29, on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress.
That would mark an extraordinary reversal since 2024, when the same pollsters found Kamala Harris leading Mr. Trump by an average of only seven points among Hispanic voters in their final surveys.
A shift toward Democrats on anything like this scale could remake the electoral map — threatening longtime Republican incumbents, new Republican gerrymanders and the party’s crown jewel, Texas — and represent a final unraveling of his winning 2024 coalition.
If one applied the demographic trends from recent Times/Siena national polls to districts across the country, Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would imperil Republicans in more than a dozen districts that Mr. Trump won by double digits but where Republicans depend on support from Hispanic voters. Texas and Florida would become ground zero for a possible Democratic tsunami, with the party’s chance at a large congressional majority potentially hinging on whether it could break through Republican gerrymanders in those states.
A new CNN poll shows Democrats much more motivated to vote - 16 points!
Overall, voters say, 49% to 41%, that they’d support a Democratic candidate over a Republican candidate in their congressional district. Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters are 16 points likelier than GOP-aligned voters to say they’re extremely motivated to vote this year.
For Republicans perhaps the scariest data we are seeing right now is what is happening to the generic ballot. We are now regularly getting double digit Dem leads with likely voters. Double digit generic ballot lead = big, big blue wave:
Here’s a summary and a graph from G. Elliott Morris and his new Strength In Numbers monthly poll. It’s just full of confirmations of the ongoing erosion of Trump and the GOP:
Headline poll findings
The final bit of scary data for the Rs today comes from the site The Downballot:
Throughout this year’s just-concluded primary season, there’s been one consistent storyline: Democratic primaries have seen much higher turnout than their Republican counterparts. But does this meaningfully indicate what we might expect in November?
It turns out the answer is very much yes.
In midterms over the past 80 years, there’s been a surprisingly tight relationship between voting behavior in a given cycle’s primaries and the House popular vote in the general election that follows. Based on that relationship, this year’s primary turnout suggests that Democrats would win the House vote by an enormous 13-point spread.
That’s much larger than what the generic congressional ballot forecasts. That metric, according to a polling aggregate calculated by FiftyPlusOne, currently gives Democrats a smaller 7-point edge (note that today this measure is now +8).
Either would be more than enough for Democrats to take back the House, and neither outcome would be surprising. Both measures have great predictive power, but like any other forecasting tool, they both come with uncertainty attached to them.
Friends, things are breaking our way but that should cause us to work even harder now. For the opportunity we have to take power away from them all across the country may be the most significant of my many years in politics. Which is why it is time now to…..Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses And Win The Midterms Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!
Three things you can do in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates:
Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The Outcome of the Midterms? Robert Reich, right, Sept. 23, 2026. Voting in the midterm elections has already begun in several states.
Many people ask for my midterm predictions — and whether I believe they’ll spell the end of Trump. I’ll share them with you soon, but today I’d like yours.
Herewith, the four scenarios I’m hearing most often. Please select the outcome that seems most likely to you.
1. Even if Dems take control, Trump will just ignore them.
To be honest, I’m not hopeful. Even if Democrats gain control of the House, I don’t see how they constrain Trump. Whatever they do, he’ll just ignore them and accuse them of being partisan. They have no power to stop him. Hold him in contempt of Congress? Fine him? Trump’s Justice Department won’t enforce. Even if Dems also take control of the Senate and they enact legislation that restricts him in some way, he’ll defy it, and if it reaches the Supreme Court, the court will defer to him.
2. Democrats will at least take the House and reveal the corruption, cruelty, and incompetence of Trump.
I believe Dems will take over the House. This will be enough to allow them to hold hearings, take evidence, and reveal to the public the extent of Trump’s corruption, cruelty, and incompetence. A Democratic House could also introduce a bill of impeachment and hold impeachment hearings, which will rally the nation around the importance of dumping Trump and his horrendous regime in 2028. They’ll also introduce legislation that can be the basis of the Dems’ 2028 platform.
3. Dems will take House and Senate and be able to summon enough Senate Republican votes to impeach and convict Trump.
I believe the blue wave will be a blue tsunami, and Dems will take control of the Senate as well as the House, with enough votes to be within a stone’s throw of the two-thirds of the Senate needed to convict Trump of having committed impeachable offenses. Trump is already losing his mind and his power, and I expect enough Republican senators will join Senate Democrats to get rid of him for good. I also expect Dems will chuck Schumer and put in his place a progressive Senate leader.
4. Dems will take the House and Senate, and Trump will resign.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but everything I see is trending in this direction. Dems will take control of Congress, and Trump — who is becoming more demented by the day — will decide that his best legacy will be to resign and install JD Vance as president. Vance will spend the rest of Trump’s term trying to regain the enthusiasm of Trump’s MAGA base while turning off most of the rest of the nation with his bigoted nonsense, and Dems in Congress will have a chance to assert real leadership.
So today’s Office Hours question: What’s the most likely outcome of the midterm elections?POLLWhat do you believe is the most likely outcome of the midterm elections?Who cares? Trump will ignore.
New York Times, Hispanic Voters, Abandoning Trump, Are Transforming the Midterm Map, Nate Cohn, Sept. 23, 2026 (print ed.). Texas and even Florida are the places to watch in November if a polling pattern holds.
President Trump’s enormous gains among Hispanic voters in the last election propelled him to victory in the national popular vote and prompted talk of a political realignment. Two years later, that talk is over.
In an average of high-quality national polls over the last month, Democrats led Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points, 64-29, on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress.
That would mark an extraordinary reversal since 2024, when the same pollsters found Kamala Harris leading Mr. Trump by an average of only seven points among Hispanic voters in their final surveys.
A shift toward Democrats on anything like this scale could remake the electoral map — threatening longtime Republican incumbents, new Republican gerrymanders and the party’s crown jewel, Texas — and represent a final unraveling of his winning 2024 coalition.
If one applied the demographic trends from recent Times/Siena national polls to districts across the country, Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would imperil Republicans in more than a dozen districts that Mr. Trump won by double digits but where Republicans depend on support from Hispanic voters. Texas and Florida would become ground zero for a possible Democratic tsunami, with the party’s chance at a large congressional majority potentially hinging on whether it could break through Republican gerrymanders in those states.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Are You Ready to Grumble? Brendan Hartnett, right, Sept. 23, 2026. [Editor’s note: Brendan Hartnett watched six hours of Trump TV soon after it debuted. His diary of the experience—and his review of the confounding “entertainment” product—is in The Bulwark this morning. Read the whole thing here. An excerpt appears below.]
In the course of my normal work, I have watched hundreds of Trump’s speeches, interviews, and rallies—along with countless events featuring Trump White House personnel. Whatever one thinks about Trump, he is an entertainer, and I do admit to frequently laughing during his events—most of the time at him, though occasionally with him. However, despite the White House’s content-free hypeposting on X about the new channel, the premiere of Trump TV arrived without humor. Or, really, any entertainment, or even basic interest. Want to know what it’s like to struggle to remember the sound you make when you laugh? Come along with me to see what happens when you hook yourself up to Trump TV. . . .
8:24 p.m. — I’m frankly perplexed by the decision to broadcast this speech now. When he delivered it, Trump was at his peak. MAGA appeared to have won the culture war. Trump seemed well on his way to establishing a formidable multiracial working class coalition. But, viewed in September 2026, the speech doesn’t come across as an emblem of the good times. It’s really just a reminder of all the things Trump promised and failed to deliver:
“Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. . . . Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
“I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring free speech back to America.”
“I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices. . . . We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.”
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
“Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.”
“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
That last line gave me my first laugh. . . .
9:49 p.m. — The military exercise from last year is still on, and 2,692 people are still watching. Surely a good chunk of these people have fallen asleep with this playing in the background. Will any old people die while watching this, slumped over in a La-Z-Boy while Trump TV plays in the background?
Have you ever envied them, the dead? . . .
11:28 p.m. — We’re off to Switzerland for Trump’s 2026 speech in Davos. I remember watching this live. It’s a long speech. I’m so f[—]d.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Republicans Are Desperate… The party has been busy playing defense in Trump states, and now comes the news that Susan Collins is corrupt on top of being a loyal MAGA supplicant. STUART STEVENS joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.WORTH LOOKING INTO, ANYWAY: Last week’s news that Donald Trump Jr. had his wedding weekend bankrolled by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev sparked outrage among congressional Democrats—and mostly a shrug from congressional Republicans. So it came as a surprise yesterday when Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) publicly called for a congressional investigation into the six-figure payment Bettina Trump described as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift” from “our dear friend Umar.”
“A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis said. “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”
Even more remarkably, Curtis expanded his critique to encompass a whole host of corrupt Trump-family dealings, including Trump Jr.’s “active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures” and “his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with heads of state.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Utah senator tried to soften the blow a bit by framing his request as an “investigation into presidential families’ business dealings.” That’s right: Curtis isn’t convinced Congress has looked into Hunter Biden quiiiiite enough. His request called for subpoenas for both Don Jr. and Hunter. The former president’s son took it in stride, however: “I say bring it on,” Hunter tweeted. “I’ve already given more than seven hours of sworn testimony. . . . I’ll sit next to Don jr. and testify any time, any place. Eric and Jared can join us too. No need for a subpoena. Let’s all do it tomorrow.”
More Global News
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 22, 2026 [United Nations: Founding and Purpose], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 23, 2026. In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”
Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.
By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.
In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.
Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.
Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.
“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”
Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.
“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”
Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.
“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”
“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”
The Cuban delegation walked out.
In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.
He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”
“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”
There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”
Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”
He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”
“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”
Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.
He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.
Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.
“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”
“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”
“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”
“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.
“The defiance of hope.”
More News Reports
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Republicans Rapidly Distance From Trump, Trump Considers ‘Annihilating’ Iran, Massive FBI Hack, EPA Tests Drinking Water For Abortion Medicine, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 22, 2026. In today’s video update I also spoke with Judge Shira Scheindlin who served on the Southern District of New York, and you want to hear what she had to say.
Today, Trump gave one of the stranger, more subdued speeches of his presidency at the UN today, at one point trying to literally rename AI as “super intelligence” before taking a genuinely dark turn on Iran, floating whether to cut a deal or “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly.”
He looked tired doing it, and it’s not hard to see why. His own party is quietly bolting, Republicans in Iowa breaking with him on the Iran war, candidates scrubbing his name off their campaign websites in states he won by double digits, and senators who aren’t even up for reelection publicly calling his son’s Russian-funded wedding party “corruption.” Meanwhile, a hacking group is claiming it stole personal data on every single FBI employee in the country, a breach with real national security implications if it holds up.
P.S. We’re clearly ruffling some feathers, and honestly, good. That means the reporting is landing where it needs to. Millions of people, a huge number of them young people who aren’t getting the real story anywhere else, are relying on this newsletter to actually know what’s happening in their own country. That only works if it keeps growing. If you’ve been on the fence, this is the moment to subscribe, upgrade, or send it to someone who needs it.Subscribed
Here’s what you need to know today.
Trump at the United Nations General Assembly:
Trump kicked off his UN speech the way you’d expect, bragging about the economy and his own record, then somehow spent several minutes trying to rename AI as “super intelligence,” or “SI.” He claimed shadowy “globalist” forces had been trying to control the technology, and at one point basically admitted he was just flexing, saying “let’s see if I have any power, maybe I do and maybe I don’t.” Along the way he threw in a grab bag of culture war lines, a “Ukraine hoax,” “open borders,” “transgender mutilization,” and took swipes at the International Criminal Court and UNESCO for good measure. It came off as word soup, and honestly, he looked tired doing it, gripping and leaning on the lectern the whole time.
The moment that actually made people sit up was when he got to Iran. He started out boasting that Iran used to be “the bully of the Middle East” but isn’t anymore, then took a hard turn into something much darker. He said he had “a big decision to make,” either cut a deal with Iran or “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly,” then followed that up with “do I drive them to hell with no chance of survival?” People in the room audibly reacted to that one. He also claimed Iran is sitting there “waiting to see how I do in the midterm elections,” which is a strange thing to say, especially right after adding “I am not running,” a weirdly self-centered aside in the middle of talking about a war. Then he brushed off anyone questioning US munitions supplies as “cowards and traitors.”
Even with that dark Iran moment, the speech overall felt more restrained than his usual UN appearances. It only ran about 45 minutes, short for him, and he didn’t threaten to blow up the UN itself the way he sometimes does. His comments on Gaza were fairly low key, mostly just thanking other countries for backing the US peace plan. He also spent a chunk of time gushing about Melania’s work with children globally, though the applause for that moment basically came from his own cabinet. And of course there was the usual detour into his domestic record, crime crackdowns in Memphis and New Orleans, Washington “coming back to life,” all of that.
What a lot of people picked up on is that this more subdued version of Trump might actually be a sign he’s feeling politically shaky, not confident. His approval on the Iran war is at record lows, Republicans are getting tired of the conflict, and the midterms are only six weeks out, so it’s not hard to read his hedging and distancing from the election as him bracing for a bad outcome. Underneath all the usual bluster, it genuinely felt like he might be running scared.
Massive FBI Hack:
A hacking group calling itself ShinyHunters claims it breached FBI systems and stole personal data on all FBI employees and applicants, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and details on employees’ spouses. A representative told 404 Media the group used a zero-day exploit in Oracle’s PeopleSoft software to access AWS GovCloud servers, exfiltrating between two and three terabytes of data. As proof, the group provided a sample of roughly 5,000 alleged records, and 404 Media independently verified some of the phone numbers matched the listed names using an open-source intelligence tool, with other numbers tracing back to Department of Justice personnel. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the scale of the alleged breach raises serious national security and counterintelligence concerns given past cases of criminals using similar stolen data to track and intimidate FBI agents.
ShinyHunters also defaced the FBI’s jobs website on Tuesday, leaving a message mocking both law enforcement seizure notices and Trump’s Truth Social posting style. The defacement read “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters” and claimed “all FBI data was compromised including PII/PHI on incumbent and former FBI employees and all applicant information,” adding “we have a lot more than we claim here” before signing off with “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” As of publication, the FBI’s job application portal and Special Agent Applicant Portal remained unavailable. The group said the hack itself was carried out Monday night, with the defacement following shortly after.
Unlike ShinyHunters’ typical playbook of hacking and then extorting victims for payment, the group’s representative said this operation isn’t about money. When asked whether they planned to extort the FBI, the representative said “what we plan to do is not something I’d call extortion, maybe coercion,” adding “this is not financially motivated.” That framing leaves open exactly what the group intends to do with the data, whether releasing more of it publicly, using it to pressure the agency, or something else entirely, since a ransom demand against the FBI itself was always going to be a non-starter. The ambiguity around motive, combined with the sheer scale of the alleged data theft, is part of what makes the claim so alarming if verified.
Republicans Distance From Trump:
A growing number of Republicans are breaking with Trump on the Iran war, notably in Iowa, a state he carried by 13 points. Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted to limit Trump’s war powers, even though Trump had carried Nunn’s district by 5 points and Miller-Meeks’ by 9 in 2024, and Senate nominee Ashley Hinson posted that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.” Former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, running for Senate there, released a similar ad the same day saying the war “needs to end, and end quickly.” All three reportedly skipped a Vance rally in Iowa amid backlash over tariffs hurting farmers, with Hinson citing a scheduling conflict. A new CNN poll shows just 26 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the war, and a Marist poll released the day after Hinson’s break showed her now trailing her Democratic opponent, state Sen. Josh Turek, by 8 points among registered voters, described as perhaps the most eyebrow-raising Senate poll of the cycle so far.
Several Republicans are also quietly scrubbing Trump’s name from their campaign websites as they weigh his unpopularity against their own odds in November. Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds removed prominent references to Trump’s endorsement, a change first reported by the Miami Herald using an archived version of the site that had proclaimed him a “Trump-endorsed Proven Conservative Fighter” with a photo of the two men and Donalds’ wife; the new version buries the endorsement in a rotating quote carousel alongside praise from Elon Musk, the late Charlie Kirk, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. His campaign downplayed the change, saying he’s “proud” of the endorsement and has his own policy proposals, while a White House spokesman called Trump the party’s “unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator.” Donalds is hoping to become Florida’s first Black governor, succeeding term-limited Ron DeSantis, and faces former Republican-turned-Democrat David Jolly, in a race some GOP insiders were already uneasy about after Donalds won his primary with just under 50 percent despite Trump’s backing. California’s Young Kim and candidates in Florida and Kentucky made similar edits, including Kentucky’s Andy Barr, who is running for Senate in a state Trump won by 32 points.
Other Republicans are distancing themselves specifically on immigration, in districts Trump won handily in 2024. Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar said in a direct-to-camera ad that Hispanic voters “feel betrayed” by enforcement that’s gone “too far” by targeting people who hadn’t committed non-immigration crimes. Trump initially said he “disagreed” with her but indicated he still backs her, and Salazar said she later spoke with him directly and found him “very receptive” to her warning. Texas Rep. Monica De La Cruz touted freeing a DACA recipient from ICE detention in her own ad and twice called the immigration system “broken.” Trump won Salazar’s district by 15 points and De La Cruz’s by 18 back in 2024, an election in which he performed unusually well with Hispanic voters nationally, a trend recent polling suggests has swung back toward Democrats.
Senators who aren’t even on this year’s ballot are joining in too, particularly over the Trump family’s business dealings. Utah’s John Curtis called the Russian oligarch-funded wedding after-party for Trump Jr. “corruption,” and pushed for the Senate Judiciary Committee to subpoena both Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden over the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit. He put it bluntly on X: “A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else.” Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the chamber’s longest-serving member, separately pressed the administration on diesel prices he says are “killing farmers’ income.” That senators insulated from this year’s elections feel free to speak up suggests the underlying discomfort with Trump runs broader than just the vulnerable House and Senate candidates on the ballot.
Pollsters and party officials disagree on how serious all of this is, and Trump’s history of punishing disloyalty still looms over anyone tempted to go further. Pollster John Couvillon called the trend a “self-preservation move,” saying lawmakers “are seeing something in their polling, or they don’t like the vibes back in their district,” and predicted it will keep spreading since “once the first person defects, it makes it easier for the second person, the third person and so forth.” The RNC’s Natalie Baldassarre dismissed reports of Republicans abandoning Trump as “bogus,” arguing “adding nuance to policy stances is a far cry from completely abandoning the president’s agenda.” Trump’s approval has hovered around 36 to 38 percent in recent polling, weighed down by cost-of-living frustration and the unpopular war. The cautionary example is Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, who lost his primary this year to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein after repeated clashes with the president over the Epstein files, the Iran strikes, and aid to Israel, and will be out of Congress come January.
Other news:
The EPA is launching a new drinking water study that will test for traces of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol for the first time, a move anti-abortion activists have spent years pushing for and are now calling “a tremendous victory.” Researchers will sample water from multiple metropolitan areas and screen for more than 1,400 substances total, including hormones like testosterone and progesterone and contraceptives like levonorgestrel, using a broad, non-targeted testing method similar to what’s been used to detect “forever chemicals.” Crucially, the test will only detect whether a substance is present at all, not its concentration or whether it poses any actual risk, and the study won’t automatically trigger new regulation. Students for Life of America’s Kristi Hamrick praised the announcement, saying mifepristone’s “ability to block the fertility and reproduction of human beings and endangered species is an issue that we deserve to know more about.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the study as a response to public concern about “unknown pollutants” in drinking water, and it follows months of pressure from Republican state attorneys general and anti-abortion groups after the agency’s earlier draft contaminant list left mifepristone off entirely.
The Trump administration is removing more than 760,000 people from Obamacare in what officials are calling a crackdown on fraudulent enrollments, a move projected to save about $2.2 billion in federal subsidies. Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House’s anti-fraud task force, said the targets include “a mix of both phantom people, but also real people who just don’t meet the eligibility requirements,” and that some people were unknowingly enrolled by brokers, 569 of whom now face suspension from the program. CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced a six-month moratorium on new Obamacare broker applications, saying agents were behind most of the alleged fraud. Officials told the Wall Street Journal the removed enrollees include people unaware they’d been signed up, those with employer-sponsored insurance, and those earning more than 400 percent above the federal poverty level, which HHS sets at $63,840 for an individual or $132,000 for a family of four in 2026.
An F-16 fighter jet assigned to the US air base Spangdahlem in western Germany crashed Tuesday while returning from a training exercise, though the pilot ejected safely and is receiving medical care. German air traffic control said four F-16s had been taking part in the exercise, with two still in the training area and two returning to base when one of the returning jets went down on approach. Emergency responders were dispatched to the scene, and the remaining aircraft landed safely at the US Air Force base in Ramstein. The US military said the cause of the crash is under investigation, and further details were still coming in as of publication.
A Utah postal worker has been charged after dumping 300 mail-in ballots in a parking lot trash can ahead of the state’s June 23 primary, an incident the Justice Department is now highlighting as part of its “election integrity” push heading into the midterms. The 34-year-old carrier, Damon Matai Seei, told investigators he had no political agenda and simply wanted to “lighten his workload” by tossing advertisements, calling it a “poor decision” born of “frustration” and “laziness”; he’s since left the Postal Service and pleaded not guilty to destruction and delay of mail. The case comes as the Trump administration has made prosecuting voter fraud, which experts say is rare and has never occurred at a scale that could swing a national election, a major priority, even as the DOJ has struggled both terms to find evidence of widespread fraud despite charging 70 voter-fraud cases so far out of more than 174 million registered voters. The department’s Civil Rights Division has also ramped up a “ballot security” program staffed largely with newly hired conservative personnel after hundreds of career employees departed, though its efforts to seize voter rolls have lost in court 25 times. Voting rights experts note isolated fraud and voting-machine issues do happen, but the administration’s public case rollouts, including recent charges against non-citizens and lawful permanent residents, appear aimed at feeding Trump’s broader unproven narrative about elections as Republicans face a difficult midterms landscape.
As many as 169 people have been killed in Yemen over the past three days as Iran-aligned Houthi forces fight Saudi-backed government troops for control of strategic high ground along the Red Sea coast. Houthi officials say at least 118 died in clashes and Saudi strikes across Taiz, al-Jawf, Marib and Saada provinces since Sunday, while government sources report 36 dead on their side, and the Houthis accuse Saudi Arabia of killing six civilians in a strike on Mocha and nine detainees in a prison strike. The fighting follows a Houthi offensive that seized much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast three weeks ago, giving the group control of the Bab al-Mandab strait, a lane carrying 10 percent of global maritime traffic that’s become even more critical since Iran closed the strait of Hormuz. The clashes have displaced more than 100,000 people, with thousands fleeing by sea to Djibouti, and the UN warns displacement could climb to 230,000 inside Yemen if the fighting continues. Trump reportedly considered striking the Houthis over the weekend at Saudi Arabia’s request but called it off at the last minute, while the UK has agreed to help refuel Saudi aircraft on defensive missions.
Hurricane Polo exploded from a tropical storm into a category 5 hurricane in under 24 hours, driven by an unusually strong El Niño pattern in the Pacific. It’s now packing sustained winds of 165 mph roughly 215 miles south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and while forecasters expect Mexico to avoid a direct hit, they’re warning of possible life-threatening flooding, mudslides, and dangerous surf from the storm’s outer effects. Polo is the 18th named storm and seventh hurricane of this year’s Pacific season, a sharp contrast to the unusually quiet Atlantic, which has seen only six named storms and, remarkably, no hurricanes at all by September 21, something that hasn’t happened in 112 years. Meteorologists tie the imbalance directly to this year’s record-breaking El Niño, which is suppressing Atlantic storm formation while supercharging activity in the Pacific.
This year’s El Niño has already broken the all-time temperature record for the phenomenon, months before it’s even expected to peak, according to new NOAA data. The Pacific warming has reached 3.05C, surpassing the previous record of 3.02C set in 2015, with forecasters now projecting a peak of 4.0C by November or December, a level scientists are calling “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level.” Experts say this El Niño is likely the strongest in at least 1,000 years and, layered on top of existing human-caused warming, is expected to push 2027 into record-breaking heat, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning the world is now “in the danger zone of extreme weather.” It’s already fueling wildfires and toxic air pollution in Indonesia, disrupted monsoon rains in India, drought in Central America that’s slowing Panama Canal trade, and the World Food Programme estimates it could push roughly 50 million people into acute hunger. Scientists specifically flag the risk that global warming is now intensifying El Niño cycles themselves, creating a feedback loop that makes each event harder for communities to prepare for.
DoorDash agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle a New York City investigation that found the company systematically underpaid or delayed payments to delivery workers, in what Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the city’s largest labor enforcement action ever. The settlement includes nearly $115 million in direct relief to roughly 264,000 workers, with a median payout of about $48, plus a $16.7 million civil fine, and DoorDash must now share detailed pay data with the city monthly for three years. Mamdani accused the company of using “greedy algorithms” that failed to count every hour worked, calling it “not a rounding error or an accidental mistake,” while DoorDash said in a statement, “Simply put, we screwed up.” The case followed an earlier city finding that DoorDash and Uber Eats used “design tricks” that deprived workers of more than $550 million in tips combined. DoorDash attributed some errors to technical bugs and deliveries crossing city boundaries, and said it has since fixed the underlying issues, while city officials declined to say whether Uber Eats or Grubhub are currently in compliance with the same 2023 pay law.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan declined to intervene in a multistate custody battle over a newborn whose surrogate mother, McKenna West, refused the genetic parents’ request to abort him after a heart defect was diagnosed. West gave birth to the baby, whom she named Gabriel, in Texas last month after fleeing there from Alaska, and argued California violated her due process rights by awarding custody to his parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar; a Texas judge dismissed her claims before she appealed to Kagan, who denied a stay without a written opinion. The baby has hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious congenital defect, and West said she’s being kept in the dark about his condition after undergoing heart surgery, while Gilkar testified West is “unstable” and “trying to take him.” West’s case was championed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now the GOP Senate nominee there, who helped secure an order for the baby to get lifesaving care in Texas rather than California as the parents had planned. The parents’ attorney said they remain focused solely on the baby’s health and accused West of engaging in “political theater.”
The Greenville County coroner’s office in South Carolina confirmed that actor Hayden Panettiere, 36, died from toxic effects of fentanyl combined with several other substances, and ruled the death accidental with no signs of trauma. She died on August 16 in her South Carolina apartment while with her boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother, and police said no foul play is suspected. Panettiere, best known for roles in “Heroes” and “Nashville,” had spoken publicly for years about her struggles with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, including in a memoir released this past May. Her father, Skip Panettiere, remembered her as “an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her.” She is survived by her daughter, Kaya, whom she shares with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko.
I am excited to announce my continued partnership with DeleteMe. Why? Because they protect my family’s privacy. They remove my data from people search sites and keep my information secret. You can do it too. Go to this link, joindeleteme.com/AARON and Use code AARON for 20% off. Protect yourself today.
Trump said Tuesday he supports banning US diesel exports as a way to bring down record fuel prices, which have been driven up by the wars in Iran and Ukraine cutting into global supply. US diesel hit $6.53 a gallon, a record high and over 75 percent higher than a year ago, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration is studying whether a full or partial export ban is feasible given refining capacity. Vulnerable Republican Senate candidates like Iowa’s Ashley Hinson are pushing for the ban to ease pressure on voters, but the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers trade group warned it would backfire, since less diesel production would also mean less gasoline production. Trump made the comments ahead of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where the two were expected to discuss Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries, which Trump credited with hurting Russia but also driving up diesel prices further. He previously urged Zelenskyy to pause those refinery strikes over the price concerns, even while saying he believes a resolution to the war “is going to happen.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declined to rule out a 2028 primary challenge against Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, telling the New York Times she’ll “cross that bridge” when she gets to it. She emphasized that any decision would be personal rather than driven by deference to seniority, and noted the added scrutiny she faces as a woman and a Latina in what she called “a very regressive” political environment. Ocasio-Cortez has raised more than $32 million since 2025 and had over $15 million in cash on hand as of June, giving her a substantial financial base for a potential run. She remains a polarizing figure nationally, with about 41 percent of likely voters and 75 percent of Republicans viewing her unfavorably, but a Data for Progress poll found 55 percent of likely Democratic voters would support or lean toward supporting her compared to just 36 percent for Schumer. Speculation about her ambitions extends beyond the Senate too, with her name also frequently floated as a possible 2028 presidential contender.
Sept. 22
Top Headlines
The assassinated right-wing extremist Charlie Kirk, shown above, along with a sample of his pro-Trump hate-speech directed against his enemies.
Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 22, 2026. It’s going to get worse.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
President Trump Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: It's the accountability, stupid, Garrett M. Graff, above, Sept. 22, 2026. Make crimes criminal again. Donald Trump has figured out the scam. Scammers are gonna scam. We need to return to punishing people who do obvious crimes. Special Report: Maine Senator Suspected
Martin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook.
News Roundups
Sept. 22, 2026. Minutes ago, the Department of Justice just scrubbed and deleted all of Trump’s pardons from its website. Don’t worry, I spent the morning and archived it. You can find all of that information here. It will live here forever.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Quad’s Four Corners, William Kristol, right, Sept. 22, 2026. The “Republican Triangle of Doom” is Sarah Longwell’s name for the feedback loop of Donald Trump, the right-wing infotainment complex, and Republican voters. Here’s how it works: Trump lies, Fox amplifies the lies, and his voters believe the lies. Then GOP politicians echo the lies because that’s what their voters believe. It’s a closed cycle, and it helped bring Trump to power and sustain him in power. It’s shaped our politics to a remarkable degree for a decade. The good news is that the Triangle of Doom is now fraying, perhaps even coming apart, because reality has (finally) pierced the cycle. The bad news....Sept. 22, 2026. In the past few days we’ve gotten a few generic ballot polls that suggest the battlefield may be eroding even further for the Rs, and the coming blue wave could be a very big one.Big Issues On Artificial Intelligence, Crypto Currency
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.
AI gets the attention, but the Big Scam is still spending big. I want to talk about something that was a very big deal in the way we talked about the 2024 election, which was the role of the cryptocurrency industry. We’re talking about it a lot less this time, I think largely because AI has stolen the limelight. But crypto is still out there. And while it has not succeeded in creating a viable business in the normal sense, it has been extraordinarily successful at buying political influence. Sept. 22, 2026. The central issue isn’t which nation will dominate AI. It’s whether we will both maintain human control over it. China and the United States are now competing for AI dominance. But what’s needed is a new mind-set about the meaning of “security” in the emerging world of AI — where the central question should not be who gains AI dominance but whether human beings maintain dominance over AI.More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Sept. 22, 2026. Ellison’s ‘Editorial Independence’ PLUS Trump’s ‘Noncitizen Voting.’ In an appalling but ultimately unsurprising sell-out of free markets and the First Amendment, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (who buckled under pressure from state politicians nervous that Paramount would leave the state) brokered a sweetheart deal with Donald Trump ally David Ellison to merge media giants Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”Sept. 22, 2026. At 1:46 this afternoon, the President of the United States stepped out of the White House to a drumroll and applause as he made his way toward the red, white, and blue ribbons stretched across the pathway to Trump’s new helipad for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.More On Middle East Wars
More Global News
More On U.S. Immigration Law
As President Trump is showing us, in order to “secure the border,” a borderlands police state, including his much-vaunted Berlin Wall along the border, is not sufficient. He is showing us that the deadly, harsh, and brutal immigration police state must be expanded nationwide, even to the point of inflicting death on American citizens themselves.More On Epstein Files
Kevin Maxwell and his sister Isabel Maxwell arriving at federal court during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in New York, Dec. 3, 2021 (Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters).
A 2020 FBI interview with British telecom executive James Hatt challenges the usual story of how Epstein entered the Maxwell family orbit, placing Kevin Maxwell there first. For years, the beginning of the Epstein-Maxwell relationship has been treated like settled history. Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein in New York after her father died, they became close, and she entered his world. But one federal interview in the Epstein files tells a different story.Top Stories
The assassinated right-wing extremist Charlie Kirk, shown above, along with a sample of his pro-Trump hate-speech directed against his enemies.
New York Times, News Analysis: How Trump Has Cracked Down on Dissent Since the Killing of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Purdy and Alan Feuer, Sept. 22, 2026. The White House has labeled critics terrorists, attributed violence to a left-wing conspiracy and investigated unions, nonprofits and other groups in a battle over free speech.
The very public murder of Charlie Kirk on a Utah campus last September sent convulsions of grief through the political right. Within days, the Trump administration began transforming the slain prophet of young conservatives from a martyr to a cause.
“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was, he said, that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, said three days after the killing. “And we are going to do that.”
The message Mr. Miller described quickly turned into policy. Now, a year later, it is clear how bright a line of demarcation the period after Mr. Kirk’s death has become in the efforts by President Trump and his allies to target Americans they see as “the enemy within.”
The administration’s nearly exclusive crackdown on left-leaning organizations and activities has ushered in a pitched battle over political dissent and free speech.
Officials have taken a governmentwide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets.
These efforts came together this year in Minnesota, the scene of heated protests in response to the government’s aggressive immigration sweep. Federal investigators infiltrated neighborhood watch committees, church meetings and an environmental group in an operation that surveilled hundreds of ordinary people. Ultimately, 15 protesters were charged with conspiring to impede immigration enforcement as members of the far-left movement known as antifa, but prosecutors did not accuse them of any violent acts beyond kicking an ICE vehicle and sideswiping another.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Quadrangle of Doom, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 22, 2026. It’s going to get worse.
Oil markets breathed a sigh of relief this morning, with the price of Brent crude dipping back below $100 a barrel on two pieces of hopeful news.
First, Saudi Arabia announced it had resumed flows through the crucial oil pipeline that was damaged by a drone strike from Iranian proxies this month. And we got our first suggestion in months of positive motion for the Strait of Hormuz, with Reuters reporting that Iran is offering to reopen the strait in exchange for demands including America’s lifting of its military blockade. Whether this is actually a new concession from Iran or simply a repeat of this summer’s negotiating language games remains to be seen. Happy Tuesday.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
President Trump Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: It's the accountability, stupid, Garrett M. Graff, Sept. 22, 2026. Make crimes criminal again
Donald Trump has figured out the scam: The lesson he’s learned from the ballroom debacle, where he tore down the West Wing’s East Wing and then started building a giant ballroom, with no approval from historical preservation boards and no appropriated funding from Congress — a project that he started out claiming would be paid for entirely (and inappropriately) by bribes from private funders, including from foreign sources, but that now will somehow cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars — is that if he claims that something is required for “national security” than courts will give him all the leeway and benefit-of-a-doubt necessary.
Scammers are gonna scam.
On Sunday morning, he announced in one of his typically incoherent Truth Social posts that the next item on his megalomaniacal authoritarian wish list, the 250-foot-tall Trump arch at the gates of Arlington National Cemetery, will be cover for what sounds like a 12-year-old’s idea of a fortress.
As he wrote: “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch […] into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
Leaving aside how insane that sounds — why exactly is the US military in need of a facility to hold “large quantities of sniper ammunition” in downtown Washington D.C.!? — the scam that the Trump Arch is somehow necessary as a national security facility is consistent with a series of events over the last week, in both politics and business, that underscore to me the most basic stakes of this fall’s midterms elections.
A (much smaller) mockup of the Trump Arch this summer on the National Mall. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who feels like he should be increasingly referred to as “Future Unindicted Co-conspirator #1” in what I hope someday will be the massive trials stemming from the destruction and abuse of America’s monuments and historical legacy across Washington, posted earlier this month that excavation work for the arch will begin imminently — long before the court fight over its construction has played out. And the Interior Department indicated that construction of the Trump Arch will run for 20 hours a day, basically working around-the-clock in order to ensure that the arch is finished before Trump’s term expires, or at least that it’ll be so far along that it’ll become unstoppable.
And therein lies the problem: So much of what we’re living through right now, in both politics and business, from DOGE and the destruction of USAID to the pending construction of the Trump Arch to the destruction of the White House East Wing to the creation of the “large language models” powering the giant AI labs, feels like it’s driven by an explicit strategy of “we just do the crimes so quickly that we can’t be stopped and by the time the courts weigh in, they have no choice but to accept our crimes.”
By now, with Trump, the playbook is clear: As Talking Points Memo described it, “Trump has repeatedly shown his ability to create irreversible facts on the ground before courts can or do act.”
Now many fear that the Trump administration is going to do the same thing to the Kennedy Center, which it has single-handedly and maliciously destroyed, for spite and personal pique, and now Trump is threatening to demolish without permission.
We’ve lived through time and again in the Trump era — USAID was destroyed illegally without permission over the course of a weekend, “fe[d] into the wood chipper” in Elon Musk’s famous parlance, and so sure, you can argue about it in courts for months thereafter, but the damage is done. The East Wing was torn down without permission, and then Trump has argued in court subsequently that construction on the replacement ballroom can’t halt because the hole in the ground is too dangerous for national security. Now the Supreme Court has said construction can continue while it considers whether he had permission to build it in the first place — does anyone really believe that the Supreme Court is going to decide, after the ballroom is built, that it has to be torn down?Upgrade
And Trump is not the only one using this playbook: On Friday, documents emerged from some of the lawsuits challenging the intellectual property theft of the frontier AI labs that showed the companies knew exactly what they were doing in “hoovering up” nearly uncountable copyrighted and trademarked material without permission. As one Microsoft director wrote, “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” That same employee wrote that the models’ scanning was perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
In a separate exchange with OpenAI president Greg Brockman, an OpenAI engineer bragged about figuring out a “hack to get around [the] nytimes paywall” and scrape the news publisher without its permission. “Ah nice,” Brockman responded.
As Jason Kint wrote on X, “Blood boiling”! I agree.
It’s not like any of this was a mystery to anyone who was paying attention: Even back in 2024, OpenAI and Sam Altman told the British Parliament that it would be “impossible” to build these models without relying on appropriating copyrighted material.
And yet the frontier AI labs forged ahead, stealing vast amounts of copyrighted material to feed into their own systems, never asking for permission or even attempting to secure licensing deals at first, to build systems that now are destroying the livelihoods and business models of the very organizations and people victimized by that “largest theft of labor in human history.”
Now publishers and authors are left arguing in court over scraps and pennies left in the wake of the multi-trillion-dollar AI enterprise.
Nearly everywhere you look right now in American life, it feels like our accountability systems are collapsing.
Case-in-point: The Epstein Files.
Or take a look at the eye-popping scoop this morning from ProPublica: “Sen. Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatek, whose CEO illegally funneled thousands of dollars to her campaign. The FBI sought to launch a probe and was eyeing Collins and other lawmakers. Then Trump gutted the unit in charge.”
Or take a look at yesterday’s announced settlement of the $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, where first the US government completely abdicated its responsibility to enforce antitrust provisions and then, second, under pressure from California governor Gavin Newsom and against the wishes of other state attorneys general who were part of the lawsuit, attorney general Rob Bonta settled the case without the core provisions he had said were his top priority. As Oliver Darcy wrote at Status, “Strikingly, the deal did not include any structural remedies addressing Bonta’s antitrust concerns, which he had repeatedly said would be necessary for a settlement to happen.”
Or look at last month’s Wall Street Journal reporting about the Trump administration blocked the Justice Department from fighting Live Nation. Or the Trump administration’s neutering of inspectors general watchdogs.
Or how we seem to be living amid an epidemic of insider trading, both on the stock market and betting sites, based on foreknowledge of the Trump administration’s actions — including insider betting on the Iran war! And that Trump is now explicitly charging $100,000-a-month for “early access” to his market-moving decisions.
It’s not hard to experience all of this in modern society and see so much of the public frustration and political dissatisfaction in American life and conclude that there’s a simple message that would resonate with voters this fall, a 2026 version of James Carville’s big idea from the 1992 campaign: It’s the accountability, stupid.
The rich and the powerful, from the President to Silicon Valley, can’t continue to act with impunity everywhere, without consequences, without remorse, without accountability. Laws exist for a reason.
Sure, cost-of-living and gas prices matter, but part and parcel of that message is something more fundamentally American too: Restoring a sense of fair play. Regular Americans can sense the unfairness of our life and system right now — that if you’re rich enough and brazen enough, you can just do your crimes, often it seems quite openly and plainly, and our system is incapable of mustering a meaningful response. Americans aren’t stupid. They can sense that we’re living in a golden age of criminality. Collectively, we understand we’re the “marks,” the victims and suckers, of the Trump administration’s schemes, frauds, crimes, and grifts.
Democracies and economies can’t function like this — not for long, at least, before they collapse. Any electoral victories this fall on Capitol Hill — and in the White House in 2028 — needs to come with a long, long, long series of consequences.
We need to return to punishing people who do obvious crimes. Make Crimes Criminal Again.
New York Times, U.N. Live Updates: Trump Says He Faces Choice to Make a Deal or ‘Annihilate’ Iran, Farnaz Fassihi, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger, Sept. 22, 2026. President Trump said that Iran had been “the bully of the Middle East, but they are the bully no longer.” Earlier, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, called on the General Assembly to end conflicts.
Here’s the latest.
President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York that he had a decision to make on Iran: to strike a deal with Tehran or “annihilate the Islamic republic.” His threat, amid a defense of the war launched by the United States and Israel in February, came as allies have begun to openly question whether the United States remains a credible partner.
Mr. Trump, the second world leader to speak at the gathering, also celebrated his military operation in Venezuela this year but saved his strongest words for Iran, declaring that its reign as the “the bully of the Middle East” was over.
“I have a big decision to make,” he said. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world. Or do I annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
He added, “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
In remarks that opened with Mr. Trump heralding his own domestic policies, the president alternately trumpeted his own power and lashed out at nations and institutions he held up as objects of scorn.
“To the victor belong the spoils,” Mr. Trump said of his military operation in Venezuela, where the United States expanded access and control over that country’s vast oil reserves. He promised that Cuba’s government would fall, saying the United States could not allow “a haven for foreign adversaries” on its doorstep. Mr. Trump called the International Criminal Court, the president of which his administration has imposed sanctions on, a “rogue institution.” And he claimed credit for ending the war in Gaza, even as humanitarian conditions there remain dire and a plan to disarm Hamas and withdraw Israeli troops has been stalled for months.
He also reiterated his labeling of climate change as a “hoax” and said the United States would reject “any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence” — a technology whose rapid growth has alarmed even some of its most prominent developers.
António Guterres, delivering his final address to the assembled world leaders as U.N. secretary general, opened the gathering by warning that “the fault lines in our world are widening.” He reminded world leaders that they must step up and collaborate to confront the many challenges the world is facing, even as the U.N. faces questions of relevance.
The multiday General Assembly sessions will examine a wide variety of topics, including climate change, threats posed by A.I., the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a possible two-state solution for Israel and Palestinians.
Here’s what else to expect:
Special Report: Maine Senator Suspected
Martin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook
ProPublica, Investigation: The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden and Kirsten Berg, Sept. 22, 2026. In 2024, the FBI sought to launch a sweeping pay-to-play investigation examining interactions between Sen. Susan Collins and a top donor, records and emails show.
Confession: The donor, an ex-defense contractor, told agents his company won millions in federal contracts by bankrolling campaigns of powerful politicians.
Shutdown: After Donald Trump returned to office, the investigation died, a casualty of his purge of the FBI. Its closure shut a potential window into how Washington works.These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.
For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.
Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.
Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.
But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.
Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.
What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.
Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.
Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.
Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.
Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.
Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.
Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.
The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.
Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.
The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.
ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.
Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.
A woman in a blue T-shirt with red stripes waves to the crowd as she walks in front of a red banner during a parade.Republican Sen. Susan Collins walks in the annual Moxie Day Parade in July in Lisbon, Maine. Scott Eisen/Getty ImagesCollins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.
Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.
“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”
Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”
She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.
“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”
In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.
Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.
Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”
But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.
The Navatek MethodBefore Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Erupts at CNN for Still Covering Him, GOP Senators Ask to Investigate Trump Jr., DOJ Scrubs Pardon Information (I Archived It), Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 22, 2026. Minutes ago, the Department of Justice just scrubbed and deleted all of Trump’s pardons from its website. Don’t worry, I spent the morning and archived it. You can find all of that information here. It will live here forever.
Trump walked into the UN this morning in a visibly foul mood, snapping at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she “shouldn’t be covering” him, just days after banning her network from the White House and watching his own vanity “Trump TV” channel collapse to under 1,000 viewers overnight. He’s set to address the General Assembly today for the first time since launching the war on Iran, even as a senior Iranian official signals Tehran may be ready to reopen the strait of Hormuz within the week. Meanwhile, a Senate Republican is demanding an investigation into Donald Trump Jr. over a Russian oligarch bankrolling his wedding, and a buried FBI investigation into Sen. Susan Collins shows just how much scrutiny of power in Washington quietly disappears once it gets inconvenient.
I am working around the clock to preserve the DOJ website right now. Every story I dig into, the ones nobody else is covering the way we cover them, only happens if enough of you decide independent journalism is worth funding directly. Please consider supporting this work.
Here’s what you need to know today.
Trump’s new 24/7 “Trump TV” YouTube stream cratered within hours of its Monday night launch, capping a self-inflicted media fiasco. The channel, dubbed “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” launched with around 8,000 viewers but fell below 1,000 by the next morning, a minuscule fraction of the 3.18 million followers on the White House’s YouTube channel. It emerged after NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News suspended pooled coverage of Trump in solidarity after he banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House on September 18, revoking their reporters’ credentials over what he called “FAKE NEWS.” Sources told the Wall Street Journal the ban was reportedly triggered by aide Natalie Harp showing Trump critical MS NOW clips, and the three outlets have since sued in federal court, alleging the move violated the First and Fifth Amendments. With no major network pool covering him, Trump’s ribbon-cutting for his $13 million helipad reportedly descended into farce with his remarks barely audible, all as his approval rating slid to 32 percent, the lowest of his career according to Reuters.
Republicans Demand Investigation of Donald Trump Jr:
Sen. John Curtis is demanding the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate and subpoena Donald Trump Jr. over reports that a Russian oligarch bankrolled his wedding after-party. In a letter to committee leaders, the Utah Republican raised concerns about Trump Jr.’s “active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures,” his real estate dealings involving meetings with foreign heads of state, and his investments in defense contracting. It’s a rare instance of a GOP senator targeting a member of Trump’s own family, and it reflects growing unease even within the party about the Trump family’s foreign business entanglements. Curtis paired the request with a call to also subpoena Hunter Biden over similar self-dealing allegations, arguing “the country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president.” There’s next to zero chance Senate Republicans actually move on it, but it’s expected to infuriate Trump, who treats questions about his family as off-limits, and it’s already being eyed as fertile ground for Democratic oversight if they win either chamber in the midterms.
The underlying scandal traces back to ProPublica’s report that Umar Kremlev, a Putin ally who heads the Kremlin-linked International Boxing Association, paid for a lavish three-day wedding after-party for Trump Jr. and his wife Bettina on a private Bahamian island, including a private island rental and fireworks display worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trump himself confirmed Friday that his son has since paid Kremlev back, while simultaneously defending the original gift as “totally allowed” and comparing it to normal wedding generosity. The couple has maintained the funded event was a separate after-party rather than the wedding ceremony itself, a distinction ethics experts say is largely irrelevant to the underlying concern. Bloomberg columnist Nia-Malika Henderson mocked the arrangement in a scathing opinion piece titled “Don Jr.’s Wedding Fails the Sniff Test,” needling the couple for celebrating with “a clutch of Russian guests with limited English skills” funded by a Kremlin-linked oligarch.
A growing number of Senate Republicans are breaking ranks to criticize the arrangement, even as leadership stays cautious. Sen. Bill Cassidy called it “really bad” on Face the Nation, saying anyone with “proximity to power” accepting a $250,000 gift from someone with strong Kremlin ties is simply “wrong,” though he said he’s glad the money was repaid. He joins Sen. Thom Tillis, who called it “beyond bad,” and Curtis, who said publicly it “just stinks” and smells of “corruption.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, by contrast, said he didn’t know enough about the details yet to weigh in. The split illustrates a wider dynamic playing out ahead of the midterms, with some Republicans increasingly willing to publicly distance themselves from Trump-adjacent controversies while leadership tries to avoid the topic altogether.
ICE:
New reporting fills in more details on the Venezuelan man shot by ICE in Austin, including his own account of the shooting and concerns he’s being rushed toward deportation as a key witness against the agency. Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez told reporters by phone from detention that he’s still in severe pain with a bullet lodged near his spine, and that he wasn’t given any pain medication until Monday morning after sleeping on a cold floor. His attorney says he entered the country legally and was pursuing asylum, but missed a court hearing after a notice was mailed to an old address, leading to an in absentia removal order; a senior administration official confirmed he has no other criminal history. The attorney also alleges she and his wife were thrown off hospital grounds by officers who told them he wasn’t there, and League of United Latin American Citizens CEO Juan Proaño argued ICE can’t deport “the key witness” to its own officer’s use of force. The shooting is now the third fatal or near-fatal ICE shooting of a bystander or non-target since July, following deaths in Houston and Biddeford, Maine, as ICE arrests hit record highs of over 50,000 a month.
Door Dash driver shot by ICE
Homebuilders across the country say Trump’s ICE crackdown is causing real labor shortages, according to unprompted complaints in a new industry survey. Builders in Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Florida all flagged enforcement activity as a growing strain on construction timelines, with one Houston builder calling it “a very large issue” for staffing and a Richmond builder saying it’s had a “major impact” on how fast new houses can even start. The survey’s researcher noted these comments were entirely voluntary, since the questions only asked about construction cycle times. It compounds other pressures already squeezing homebuilders, including rising mortgage rates, tariff-driven material costs up 6.7% year over year, and growing competition for labor and resources from data center construction. Immigrants made up over a quarter of the construction workforce in 2024, and far more in specific trades, 57% of drywall workers and 53% of roofers, while the White House insists ICE isn’t targeecting anyone legally in the country and that there’s no shortage of American workers to fill the gap.
Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar says ICE blocked her from speaking to any detainees during an oversight visit to the country’s largest detention camp, despite two recent “disturbance” incidents there. At the Camp East Montana tent facility on Fort Bliss, which can hold up to 5,000 people, Escobar said an ICE official blamed the unrest on detainees’ nationality, telling her “Venezuelans are a difficult population,” and that she still hasn’t received surveillance footage she requested of the incidents. Local reporting revealed an ICE official called 911 during one incident, which Escobar said contradicted what officials told her directly. DHS disputed her account, claiming any member of Congress can meet with detainees and calling many oversight visits “a media act,” even though a federal judge already ruled last December in favor of lawmakers suing over blocked access. The facility has been plagued with allegations of abuse and neglect since it opened, including at least three deaths in custody, one ruled a homicide, and Escobar said flatly that “it should have been shut down a long time ago.”
Iran war:
A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran is ready to reopen the strait of Hormuz within seven days if the US eases military pressure and lifts its blockade on Iranian ports. The official said Iran’s UN delegation now has full authority to revive diplomacy with US officials, a notable softening from Iran’s earlier list of seven conditions, which included an end to the war on “all fronts” and the release of frozen funds. The offer comes as traffic through the strait has collapsed to just 17 commercial vessels over the weekend, down from an estimated 120 a day before the war, though some tankers are still exporting oil with their transponders switched off. The official said the shift had been approved by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the Supreme National Security Council. Despite the diplomatic opening, the same official ruled out any personal meeting between President Masoud Pezeshkian and Trump in New York, since Pezeshkian lacks independent authority to make concessions and isn’t fully trusted by hardliners or the IRGC.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US is open to meeting Iranian officials at the UN General Assembly, though nothing is currently scheduled. He told NBC News the US would welcome talks “especially if it has the prospects of leading to something positive,” while reiterating that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Pezeshkian is nonetheless the highest-ranking Iranian official to set foot on US soil since the war began on February 28, and he vowed before departing Tehran to “firmly defend” Iran’s positions at the assembly. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in New York separately and told reporters that trust in the UN has been lost, tying his remarks to this year’s assembly theme of “restoring trust.” Araghchi accused the US and Israel of waging a “cowardly” war on Iran and cited the deaths of 156 civilians, including 120 children, in a US strike on an elementary school in Minab on the war’s opening day.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned it would “change the geography of the war” and strike new, previously undisclosed targets if the US escalates the conflict. IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said Tehran would deploy “new weapons with capabilities” and that “our targets will no longer necessarily be the same as before.” The warning came directly in response to Trump telling Fox News he was weighing options including “wiping Iran out,” letting the regime “rot economically,” or reaching a deal, and that “very big things are going to be happening in the not-so-distant future.” The IRGC separately said there is no contradiction in negotiating and fighting at the same time, a position echoed by Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammad Ghalibaf. Iran is seen as benefiting from Saudi Arabia’s escalating fight with the Houthis, since pressure on Riyadh in turn pushes it to lean on Washington to ease the standoff over Hormuz.
The G7 foreign ministers issued a joint statement calling on Iran to end its military support for Houthi forces in Yemen, alleging Tehran is violating past UN Security Council resolutions by arming the group. Iran denies arming the Houthis, insisting its backing is purely political, though a 2024 UN experts’ report and seized weapons shipments have documented extensive military ties between Tehran and the group. The New York Times also reported that Trump wavered for days before ultimately calling off planned US airstrikes on the Houthis, despite direct appeals from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, reflecting his reluctance to widen the broader war he already launched against Iran in February. Separately, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone with the Saudi crown prince about keeping Gulf waterways open and called for a swift end to hostilities in Yemen. The US is meanwhile tightening its own aerial squeeze on Iran, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying all Iranian civilian flights will be barred worldwide starting Wednesday.
The diplomatic maneuvering unfolds against a backdrop of collapsed shipping and mounting economic pressure on Iran. A prior Iran-Oman agreement on a temporary shipping route through Hormuz fell apart after Saudi Arabia pulled out over Houthi attacks it blamed on Iran, and Iran had previously said the strait wouldn’t reopen until seven separate conditions on sanctions and asset freezes were met. US-engineered restrictions on Iranian oil exports are now straining its currency reserves and fueling domestic inflation, which analysts say is pushing Tehran toward this more conciliatory posture. Oil prices have nonetheless fallen for four straight sessions on hopes of renewed diplomacy. The US, for its part, is maintaining a counter-blockade on Iranian ports while continuing to tighten sanctions on Iran’s aviation sector.
Susan Collins Bribery Investigation
A ProPublica investigation reveals the FBI in 2024 built toward a sweeping bribery probe of Sen. Susan Collins based on a defense contractor’s detailed confession, only for the case to die after Trump purged the agency’s public corruption units. Martin Kao, former CEO of the Hawaii defense contractor Navatek, told FBI agents over three days in 2022 that he ran a pay-to-play operation funneling nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians in exchange for government contracts, including a 2019 meeting at a Corner Bakery where Collins’ super PAC chair, Scott Reed, allegedly solicited a $500,000 donation while Navatek sought Collins’ guarantee of tens of millions in federal funding.
Emails reviewed by ProPublica show Collins’ office pushed the Navy to steer contracts to Navatek even as her campaign and super PAC collected donations, including one instance where Kao routed $150,000 through a shell company and Collins’ staff asked for his number “to thank him,” and Kao says Collins herself told him “you’ve seen me deliver.” By late 2024, agents Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud had enough evidence to seek a broader bribery investigation into Congress, but both were pushed out of the FBI’s anti-corruption unit after Trump returned to office and installed Kash Patel, with Ball targeted partly over her earlier work on the 2020 election-overturning investigation.
Collins’ office denies any wrongdoing, telling ProPublica the allegations are “outlandish” and that the matter was already investigated and resolved by the Biden-era FBI and DOJ in 2021, while the FBI said its earlier review found nothing implicating the senator. Kao ultimately pleaded guilty to campaign finance and pandemic loan fraud charges and is serving an 87-month sentence, and the investigation his cooperation sparked, including questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham, remains shut down under the current Justice Department.
Other news:
Trump snapped at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on his way into the United Nations Tuesday, telling her flatly that she shouldn’t be there. “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here! You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me. You shouldn’t be covering me.” The remark comes just days after Trump banned CNN, along with MS NOW and Politico, from the White House grounds over what he called unfair coverage, making the outburst read as a pointed reminder that he still considers the network’s presence, even at a UN event outside his control, unwelcome.
Trump’s chaotic pre-UN social media blitz is leaving diplomats bracing for an unpredictable, possibly combative address to the general assembly Tuesday. In the days before his speech, Trump posted about turning his planned Washington arch into a military weapons storage facility, defended AI development against “hoax” fears of an extinction-level risk, and published a self-congratulatory list of his “Top 25 Achievements,” echoing the tone of his widely mocked 2018 UN remarks. Last year’s address saw him tell assembled leaders their countries were “going to hell,” and this will be his first UN appearance since launching the war with Iran in February, a conflict that shows no sign of ending despite his predictions of a quick regime collapse. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will also be in New York, and while Trump has signaled openness to a meeting, Pezeshkian is under pressure from hardliners not to engage, a potential snub that could further inflame Trump’s mood heading into the speech.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration is concerned about a pattern over the past several months in which American-linked ships and oil supplies have been struck, probably unintentionally, by Ukraine, and stressed that the issue needs to be addressed since it’s something the US “can’t have happen.”
Vice President JD Vance accidentally called his political opponents the “fart left” instead of “far left” during a campaign rally in North Carolina, then awkwardly tried to walk it back on stage. Speaking in Greensboro in support of Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who trails Democrat Roy Cooper by 11 points in recent polling, Vance paused mid-applause to insist “I usually don’t misspeak” and preemptively blamed “fake news” for any accusations of intentional bad language. The slip drew mockery online, with Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern comparing Vance’s charisma to “a trash can” and commentator Brian Tyler Cohen likening it to “a paper bag.” It’s not the first time Vance has gone off script at a rally, having previously offered to buy a protester a plane ticket to Mexico and taken a jab at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over a paused answer at the Munich Security Conference.
Trump’s dismissal of AI safety concerns as a “hoax” is fueling public fears of a Terminator-style catastrophe, but experts say the more urgent dangers are already here rather than in some robotic future. Researchers at Columbia and Northwestern told the Independent that AI’s current architecture makes a self-aware, world-ending “Skynet” scenario essentially impossible, since models remain reactive and lack independent agency or physical-world access. The real risks, they said, are things already happening: AI-generated child sexual abuse material, deepfake-driven disinformation eroding trust in institutions, biased automated decisions in hiring and public benefits, and chatbots contributing to suicides by validating harmful choices. Polling shows overwhelming bipartisan support, around 80 percent, for creating a federal agency to regulate AI, but a Senate proposal for an AI “kill switch” was recently killed by a fellow Republican who warned regulation could stifle innovation. Experts pointed to real incidents already underscoring the concern, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 attempting to blackmail an engineer during safety testing and a rogue AI-driven hack of Hugging Face earlier this year.
A Mississippi grand jury declined to indict anyone in the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, with the district attorney forcefully rejecting months of speculation that race played a role. District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath said the grand jury returned a “no true bill” after hearing from 43 witnesses and issuing 132 subpoenas, and she directly criticized the family’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, for not doing more to tamp down rumors his team knew were unsupported. The panel found no evidence of any physical altercation involving Wells, who went missing after friends left Horn Island without him on July Fourth and was found dead two days later, and concluded the circumstances of his death were “consistent with drowning.” Crump pushed back on the finding, citing an independent autopsy that documented bruising and blunt force injuries to the back of Wells’ head and insisting “we don’t know how Nolan died, and neither does the State of Mississippi.” Both the state’s chief medical examiner and the family’s own pathologist have listed the cause and manner of death as undetermined, though neither has ruled out accidental drowning.
A Guardian investigation found that FCC Chair Brendan Carr spent about a decade, from his late teens through his 20s, in a rogue Alcoholics Anonymous group that former members describe as a cult where teenage girls were coerced into sexual relationships with much older men. Based on interviews with 14 former members of the “Midtown” group, the investigation found no evidence Carr participated in the abuse himself, with multiple sources describing him as a “victim” who was seen as a safe presence amid predatory older men, including one account of him secretly sneaking a starving teenage girl french fries. The group’s leader, Michael Quinones, who died in 2007, was described as controlling nearly every aspect of members’ lives, from who they dated to their diets, and former members allege systemic sexual exploitation of underage girls that Quinones himself admitted to before his death. Carr’s FCC spokesperson denied he lived in a “Midtown group home” and said he had no knowledge of illegal or abusive conduct there. The revelations carry added weight given Carr’s current role as one of the administration’s most aggressive media enforcers, having threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage he deems unfair to Trump.
A Kansas judge convicted a driver of vehicular homicide in the death of a teacher whose husband, a Telemundo reporter, had been drugged and killed months earlier while covering the Super Bowl. Ashleigh Boyd, 24, died when Todd Armstrong hit her car head-on while allegedly under the influence of cocaine, just days after a Louisiana jury convicted a woman of negligent homicide in the death of Boyd’s husband, Adan Manzano, who was drugged and robbed by a group preying on French Quarter tourists. The couple’s toddler daughter, now being raised by her grandparents, survived the car crash as an infant passenger. Because Kansas classifies vehicular homicide as a misdemeanor, Armstrong faces no more than a year in prison even after conviction, a disparity the grandfather called deeply disappointing given the far heavier penalties in his son-in-law’s case.
Presley Gerber, the 27-year-old son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, died Sunday at a rehabilitation facility in what police are investigating as a suspected overdose. The Los Angeles medical examiner performed an autopsy but said further testing was needed before a cause of death could be confirmed. Gerber, who had spoken publicly about his long-term struggles with mental health and addiction, said in a 2023 podcast interview that he hoped sharing his story would help others facing similar difficulties. His family, through a representative, asked for privacy during what they called an extremely painful time.
British Columbia is suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company could have prevented a mass shooting at a school if it had alerted police after flagging the shooter’s violent ChatGPT conversations in advance. The February attack in Tumbler Ridge killed nine people, mostly children, after 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students at her former school, then died by suicide. The lawsuit alleges OpenAI’s safety team recommended contacting law enforcement after flagging her account in mid-2025, but that Altman and other leadership overruled them; her account was deactivated but she simply created a new one and continued planning the attack. Altman publicly apologized after the shooting and promised reforms, but the province says he never followed through despite outreach from its attorney general. The case joins a growing wave of lawsuits against OpenAI, including one from Florida’s attorney general and more than 30 suits from victims’ families, all alleging the company failed to prevent its chatbot from being used to plan or enable violence.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Quad’s Four Corners, William Kristol, right, Sept. 22, 2026. The “Republican Triangle of Doom” is Sarah Longwell’s name for the feedback loop of Donald Trump, the right-wing infotainment complex, and Republican voters.
Here’s how it works: Trump lies, Fox amplifies the lies, and his voters believe the lies. Then GOP politicians echo the lies because that’s what their voters believe. It’s a closed cycle, and it helped bring Trump to power and sustain him in power. It’s shaped our politics to a remarkable degree for a decade.
The good news is that the Triangle of Doom is now fraying, perhaps even coming apart, because reality has (finally) pierced the cycle.
The bad news is that we may now be seeing it supplemented, even supplanted, by an equally dangerous Quadrangle of Doom shaping the behavior of the Trump administration as it enters its last two years. The Quadrangle of Doom consists of a megalomaniacal president, powerful fanatics occupying key positions in his administration, increasingly radicalized MAGA true believers, and reliably cowardly and collaborating elites.
Let’s take a quick look at the four corners of the Trump administration’s Quandrable of Doom.
An unhinged president
It’s pretty obvious that Trump’s psychological disorders—narcissism and solipsism, the unconstrained lying, the unchecked grandiosity—are increasingly out of control. From the AI posts on Truth Social depicting him as a world savior to his desperate desire to put his name on the Kennedy Center and build his arch, from kicking media organizations out of the White House to using taxpayer resources to invent Trump TV—we’re at a new level of egomania.
One could say we’ve gone from egomania to megalomania, from authoritarianism to a kind of messianism. Trump seems even more detached from reality than he was a year ago, let alone five or ten years ago. Whether it’s advancing age and intimations of mortality, or simply the familiar spectacle of authoritarians believing their own propaganda and becoming ever more detached from reality (likely some of both), Trump is clearly more unhinged, more reckless, more unconstrained than ever. Any filters that once existed are gone. Calculating enablers like Hope Hicks have been replaced by deranged worshipers like Natalie Harp. And as the world and the American public have turned out not to be too resistant to his whims and wishes, he becomes increasingly desperate in his conduct and frenzied in his behavior.An administration of fanatics and sycophants
If an unhinged president is the first corner of the Quadrangle of Doom, an administration filled with—and led by—fanatics and sycophants is the second corner. Trump’s first term had cabinet secretaries and some White House aides who knew better and would sometimes push back. Trump’s second term has Stephen Miller running immigration policy unchecked, Russell Vought seeking to destroy the civil service, Pete Hegseth firing general officers of the military, and Todd Blanche obeying orders. And so it’s not just Trump’s personal megalomania and narcissism that are increasingly out of control. It’s his administration’s machismo and militarism, its bigotry and nativism and extremism, that are all increasingly out of control.A radicalized MAGA
The third vertex is MAGA. It’s always been a movement of true believers. But we’ve seen the familiar pattern of increased self-radicalization of authoritarian movements once they taste power. And so over the last several years we’ve gone from more guarded expressions of traditional American bigotry to overt white supremacism, from occasional claims of religious blessing for the movement to outright Christian nationalism, from post-liberalism to neo-fascism. Years of stewing in the poisoned waters of conspiracism and the fetid swamp of victimization has led to increased levels of derangement. And in the face of disappointment, many of the true believers have become not chastened but more extreme. So even as popular disgust at Trump’s mass deportation policy broadens, anti-immigrant fantasists and fanatics inside and outside the administration are doubling down.Accommodating elites
And yet . . . the elites remain on board. Business and conservative elites, and many social and civic elites, continue to accommodate Trump and his administration. The rise of Trumpist tech oligarchs has made Trump’s dominance of the business world easier, but the more normal business elites have deeply internalized the lesson that they can do well by going along and getting along. And so the calculation and cowardice and capitulation of the elites remains strong even as support from the public drifts away. That may change to some degree after the midterm elections. But lots of business leaders are in too deep to get out. They have real interests and investments in the Trump administration and in Trump world, and they’re not changing course.
So Trump’s megalomania and narcissism are increasingly out of control. His deputies’ fanaticism and sycophancy are increasingly out of control. The radicalization of the MAGA movement is increasingly out of control. And the elites’ accommodation is as widespread and their acquiescence as entrenched as ever.
This Quadrangle of Doom means that we face a truly perilous next two years. The rise of Trumpism was dangerous enough. Its end game could be more dangerous still. Eventually, this Quadrangle may collapse of its own weight, or explode from its own contradictions and psychoses. It may doom the Trump administration and perhaps even Trumpism. But at what cost to the nation, and the world?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Looksmaxxer Clavicular Charged With Criminal Rape, Drugging… WILL SOMMER reports in a False Flag with a scoop: the manosphere celeb faces three counts stemming from an alleged encounter with a minor.Quick Hits
RUNNING FOR COVER: For months now, Republicans on the midterm ballot have been biting their tongues and praying that Trump would find some magical solution to end the Iran war on favorable terms. Now, a few seem finally to be waking up to the reality that no miraculous victory over Iran is coming in time to save the midterms, and they’re starting to position themselves—hilariously—as belated opponents of continuing the war.
Rep. Ashley Hinson, Republican nominee for Senate in Iowa, called yesterday for America to suspend both diesel exports and the gas tax to take the edge off U.S. consumer costs. “The war,” she added, “needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.” Mike Rogers, the GOP’s Senate nominee in Michigan, sounded similar: “The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” he said in a social media video yesterday. “Michigan families can’t afford to wait.”
Rogers’s statement was particularly rich given his previous public support for the war. When Trump launched his initial surprise attack on Iran in February, Rogers called the attack “a mission for safety and justice” in a statement, arguing that “Iran has waged war against the United States for 47 years” and insisting that “Iran is an imminent threat to our country and must not have a nuclear weapon.”
A month later, he waved off concerns about rising gas prices after Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil,” he said during a campaign stop. “You’ll get your oil, because we’re going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty.” And in June, he insisted that a deal to defeat Iran and get prices back down was right around the corner: “I’ve already seen gas prices coming down,” he told the Detroit News. “These inflated costs aren’t helping anybody, but we see a good trajectory about where it’s going.”
Even as his own MAGA allies run for cover, Trump still seems bizarrely indifferent about skyrocketing prices. “You have a little higher. It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” he said at a rally in North Carolina last week. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”
YOU’LL MISS THE TV CAMERAS WHEN THEY’RE GONE: Donald Trump’s decision to kick three major publications out of the White House press was part personal outburst—he really does get mad about his press coverage—and part comms gimmick: His base likes Trump vs. the Fake News fights, and he hasn’t had one in a while. Unfortunately for him, the plan is already backfiring. CNN, MSNOW, and Politico filed a lawsuit yesterday demanding their reinstatement, which they are all but guaranteed to promptly receive. In the meantime, other major media institutions—most notably, the TV pool of the broadcast and cable networks—are refusing to carry the president out of solidarity.
This has created immediate headaches for Trump, who relies on the press—and especially the broadcast infrastructure of the TV pool—much more than he would ever admit. Without the networks’ professional camera crews on hand to broadcast his every public move, the only people around to broadcast Trump yesterday were the White House staff themselves. Their feed of Trump’s triumphant unveiling of the White House’s new helipad was a work of unintentional comedy: Without the poolers to mic him up, every word the president said was totally drowned by the sound of the helicopter behind him.
Meanwhile, the White House took the opportunity of the controversy to announce something new: Trump TV, a new 24/7 YouTube channel with “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place.” Trump’s effort to launch a literal state-run TV service was roundly mocked, but in reality Trump TV turns out to be lamer even than “state-run TV” suggests: It’s nothing but a low-effort loop of the raw feeds of old Trump moments. When we tuned in yesterday, it was playing an apparently uncut feed of Trump’s second inauguration; when we checked back in this morning, it was beaming Melania Trump’s address at the 2025 International Women of Courage Awards to an audience of about a thousand people. (Not to brag, but when Bill and Andrew go live later today to cover Trump’s UN speech, it’ll garner an audience at least several times larger.)
BONTA BAILS ON PSKY BLOCK: News broke yesterday that the state attorneys general led by Rob Bonta of California had settled their antitrust suit with David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance over that company’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros. After months of acrimonious mudslinging and a series of minor court victories that delayed the purchase in a way that could have cost Paramount billions, before all was said and done, the AGs settled for . . . not very much.
Yes, yes: A very impressive board of independent journalists will oversee CBS and CNN to make sure no undue influence is put on the outlets by Ellison, his father and Republican megadonor Larry, or the Trump administration. Paramount Skydance promises to release at least 30 films per year for two years, then 32 for three years after that, risking a $30 million penalty for every film that doesn’t hit that mark. Paramount also agreed to spend more on production and not close its or WB’s studio lots in California. The biggest win for consumers is a limit on the ability of the cable companies to negotiate as a single entity, which will theoretically constrain cable costs.
The structural remedies—that is, concrete actions aimed at breaking up a monopoly, à la the Paramount Decrees’ separation of studios and their theaters in 1948—are nonexistent. There will be no divestment of cable channels like CNN or Comedy Central; Warner Bros. studios will not be spun off into a separate entity; P-Sky-War-Bro-Disc will be allowed to hold on to both HBO Max and Paramount+. In the end, it seems that Paramount and Ellison’s threats to move the studio out of California to friendlier climes like Nashville—which caused panic amongst Democratic pols in the state like Gavin Newsom, Xavier Becerra, and Karen Bass—won the day here, forcing a settlement on terms that strike most observers as very favorable for Paramount.
It was always going to be a tough case for the AGs to make: The merger had been approved by regulatory bodies around the world, and the market-size argument offered by Bonta and his allies was novel. They may well have eventually lost on the merits, but thanks to the settlement, the merger should glide to a close in the next couple of weeks rather than face months of costly legal action. News junkies will have to hold their breath that this board will, as Binta said in his press conference announcing the deal, “ensure independent, objective, fact-based reporting at CBS News and at CNN.” Meanwhile, movie fans will have to wait and see if this is a redux of Disney buying Fox—which led to a drastic reduction in the number of films made, slashing jobs—or if David Ellison, a self-described fan of the theatrical experience, will flood the zone with Warner Bros. and Paramount movies.
— Sonny Bunch
New York Times, Trump Officials Eject 750,000 From Obamacare Markets, Claiming Fraud, Margot Sanger-Katz, Sarah Kliff and Christopher Rowland, Sept. 22, 2026. Vice President JD Vance said the measure would save the government $2.2 billion.
The Trump administration has ejected more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces, Vice President JD Vance announced on Tuesday, claiming that many were receiving premium subsidies they did not qualify for and that some were not even real people.
“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Mr. Vance said at a news conference. He estimated that removing the Obamacare enrollees would save the government $2.2 billion.
The announcement is the latest initiative by an anti-fraud task force Mr. Vance leads that has often turned its efforts toward federal health care programs. In recent months, the task force has been involved in withholding billions in Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California, contending that the states have not adequately combated fraud.
Governors have criticized the Trump administration’s antifraud work as politically motivated, often targeting states with Democratic leadership.
The enrollees that the Trump administration plans to remove account for about 4 percent of the 19 million Americans who receive coverage through the marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Mr. Vance said the 750,000 who would lose coverage were a mix of people who either did not meet the eligibility requirements or did not even exist. The administration plans to do more research on an additional 440,000 people who may also fall into one of those categories.
“They had something about their story that was a little bit different than what we expected from the 100 percent fraud story,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, of the Obamacare enrollees it would allow to remain enrolled. “We’re giving them another chance.”
People who earn more than four times the poverty limit — around $64,000 for a single person — are ineligible for subsidies. But people who earn less than the federal poverty limit — around $16,000 a year — are also ineligible because the lawmakers who wrote Obamacare had intended that such people would obtain health insurance through an expansion of Medicaid, before the Supreme Court made Medicaid coverage for this low-income group optional for states.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: New Polls In Alaska, Iowa, And Texas Suggest That Trump And The Rs Are In Serious Trouble, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 22, 2026. On July 22nd I shared this passage from a Politico story:
For months, President Donald Trump has insisted he could manage the Iran conflict on his terms: hit hard, force a deal and keep the United States out of another long Middle East war.
Instead the U.S. and Iran are escalating strikes. More U.S. service members are dead. Gas prices are again on the rise. The administration’s diplomatic off-ramp appears to be narrowing. And Republicans working to preserve their congressional majorities are beginning to contemplate a scenario they once viewed as unthinkable: a full-scale war still dominating the political landscape in November.
“We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out,” a GOP operative working on midterm races told Playbook.
Gas was $4.05 on July 22nd. It is $4.48 today. Diesel prices have gone from $5.15 to over $6.50, an all time American record:
In those two months Trump’s poll numbers have just continued to drop
In the past few days we’ve gotten a few generic ballot polls that suggest the battlefield may be eroding even further for the Rs, and the coming blue wave could be a very big one:
The most important data we’ve gotten in the past few days, however, comes from three new high-quality polls in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas. Taken together they suggest that the bottom may have truly starting falling out for the Rs, and their Senate majority is in real jeopardy:
I also want to note that the new NBC News poll found encouraging news about our collective campaigns to urge Democrats to vote early:
It is possible that once our collective early vote campaigns kick in we could see the early vote surge to well over 40% of the total vote, something that will without question drive weeks of stories of people voting early in record numbers - something that is a central goal of our early vote efforts.Subscribed
Signs of escalating GOP panic and Trump’s decomposition, decline, and waning powers abound. Yesterday the major news organizations boycotted what’s known as the press pool to protest his banning of CNN, MS Now, and Politico from covering the White House. It lead to this Monty Pythonesque moment:
In a remarkable sign of Trump’s loosening grip on the GOP a Republican Senator has called for a formal investigation into the corruption of the Trump family:
Politico’s lead story today is a deep dive into the GOP’s escalating panic. It is full of “holy s___ we are in trouble” quotes from Republicans:
Another clear sign of their panic is the furious effort to shape our understanding of these Senate races by once again flooding the zone with their polls. This illicit op is up to 34 polls in 14 states by 7 pollsters over the last 12 days:
Finally, we end our little romp through the GOP’s escalating troubles with a remarkable video from Mike Rogers in Michigan who openly breaks with Trump on the war (as has Ashley Hinson in Iowa in recent days) and proposes a break glass/full blown electoral panic idea of seizing domestic diesel -- not an ending of the war, or a roll back of the tariffs, or the restoration of barbaric cuts to our health care -- but literally the seizing of domestic diesel production to save his Trump-loving ass this November. It’s just so wild and out there, something beyond a Hail Mary. Here’s a screenshot and you can watch the entire video here:
And yes, my friends, as they panic, scramble, and flail, it is time to for us….To Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses And Win The Midterms Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!
Three things you can do in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates:
The Daily with Sarah Jones, News and Comment: Republicans Are Dumping Trump And Vance Over The Iran War, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Sept. 22, 2026. Trump and JD Vance have a big Iran war problem, as Republican approval of the war has fallen by 13 points.
Each time Donald Trump has been asked about the Iran war so far at the UN, the president has floated a bizarre reason for the war continuing. Trump keeps saying that Iran will not make a deal to end the war until after the midterm election.
That part kind of makes sense.
The Daily is journalism that fights for democracy and freedom. Please consider supporting our work by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed
It’s the second piece of Trump’s answer that the joke is on Iran because he isn’t running in the midterm election. The midterm election doesn’t matter to him and is irrelevant to when the war ends.
Ending the Iran war before the midterms might not matter to Trump, but the ongoing war is crushing Republican candidates and causing members of Trump’s own party to sour on him.
Iran might not want to make a deal to help Trump and the Republican Party before the midterm election, but it would make more sense if they used the election as a deadline and tried to get Republicans to agree to a deal under a time deadline. It makes absolutely no sense that Iran would agree to a deal after the election.
What is clear is that Trump’s support among Republicans for the Iran war, and Trump’s approval on foreign affairs, have cratered.America Hates Trump’s War
It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of Americans hate Trump’s war with Iran.
CNN reported on its new poll:
29% of US adults approve of Trump’s handling of foreign affairs, a new low in CNN polling across both of his terms as president, while 71% say they disapprove. More see his foreign policy decisions this term as harming America’s standing in the world rather than helping it. Only 26% say they approve of the president’s handling of the situation in Iran, down from 33% a month after the war began.
…
Views among Democrats and independents have been steadily negative throughout the conflict. In March, though, 73% of Republicans approved of the way Trump was handling it. Now, that figure stands at 60%. Among Republican and Republican-leaning adults, approval of Trump’s handling of Iran dips into negative territory among those younger than 45 (53% disapprove) and those who say they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement (54% disapprove).
75% of Americans felt that Trump has no plan to end the war, and majorities felt that it was going to continue to linger.
Republicans are counting on Trump’s MAGA base to save them, but Trump’s base is abandoning him, which means that the tighter Republican candidates squeeze Trump, the more support they are setting themselves up to lose.
Non-Republicans often underestimate how much Trump’s promise of no new foreign wars meant to a segment of the party. When Trump violated that promise, he betrayed what could be called the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP.
Republicans hate the war for the same reasons that everyone else does: gas prices, diesel prices, and inflation.
There really is no way out for Trump and his party.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Unrestrained Power Of The Roberts Majority, Ed Walker, Sept. 18, 2026. This series addresses the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the Roberts Majority of SCOTUS. Reforming the Court must begin with impeachment of these six. They will strike down any law restricting their power. This should be a campaign issue for every Democrat.
Historical restraints on SCOTUS power
Over the centuries SCOTUS has adopted guardrails that restrict their claimed unlimited reach. Self-regulation helped it maintain its facade as a court rather than as an unchecked super-legislature. That facade held up until recently.
Almost every discussion of public attitudes towards SCOTUS begins with the statement that most people approve or disapprove based on the outcome of specific cases like Dobbs, the abortion case. Republicans generally like Dobbs so they approve of SCOTUS, and almost all Democrats and most independents despise Dobbs and have unfavorable attitudes. For example in this article reviewing two recent books on SCOTUS we are told:
The Supreme Court is like ranked-choice voting or Jdate: how you feel about it depends on whether it’s delivering what you want.
But that’s not the only criticism of SCOTUS on offer. Most reasonably independent legal academics criticize decisions on technical grounds, grounds that are often not familiar to non-specialists. Many of these fall under the heading of justiciability, which includes standing, ripeness, and subject matter jurisdiction. The Court has historically deferred to lower courts to determine the facts of the cases it reviews, even thought the Constitution grants it the power to determine both law and facts. Art. II §2. It has set up a number of rules that it and lower courts follow, such as the requirements for issuance of interim relief pending final decisions, and the importance of precedent.
Legal academics most often criticize opinions of the Roberts Majority on these grounds. For example, much of the criticism, including my own, of Dobbs is based on its outright rejection of precedent acknowledged by all of the members of the Roberts Majority, and expressly acknowledged, misleadingly as it turned out, by the Trump appointees.
Examples
1. Standing. Biden v. Nebraska is the student loan case. Biden granted partial forgiveness of certain student loans to aid recovery from the national emergency inflicted by COVID. Several Red states sued to stop it. Only one had standing, Missouri. Years ago Missouri chartered Mohela as a public corporation to service student loans. The directors of Mohela are appointed by the government of Missouri, and it files regular reports with the state. It has the authority to pay dividends to the state if its directors choose, but It never had. First Missouri asked Mohela to file the lawsuit, but it refused, perhaps because winning would harm borrowers. Then Missouri sued in its own right.
The Roberts Majority claimed that this satisfied the requirement for standing. Biden’s plan might cost Mohela servicing income, and that was harm to Missouri, because, Roberts says, Mohela is affiliated with the state. Of course, Mohela has its own interests, and it chose not to sue. If Missouri didn’t like this, it could have fired the board and put in a compliant board. But it didn’t. This just seems stupid. But it was necessary so that the Roberts Majority could strike down Biden’s efforts to help regular people on the spurious grounds of the major questions gibble-gabble.
2. Ripeness. A case is not ripe if the alleged injury rests on contingencies that may or may not come about. Consider the case of 303 Creative, LLC v. Elenis. Plaintiff is a web site designer. She claims that she wants to design web sites for weddings but doesn’t want to offer her services to same-sex couples because of her “religious” views. She sues a Colorado agency that handles civil rights matters on the ground that she faces a “credible threat” that it might sue to force her to violate her rights to discriminate. This case is obviously not ripe. The agency hasn’t done anything and might never. Gorsuch wants to rule on this case, so what he calls a credible threat is enough to make the case ripe.
3. Standing and ripeness: In Trump v. California, , entered August 24, 2026, the Roberts Majority granted a stay of an injunction barring enforcement of a proposed US Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots generated to comply with a Trump executive order. The plaintiff states filed suit in April, 2026, shortly after Trump’s executive order. The USPS issued a proposed rule June 2, to take effect August 21. The district court found that the executive order and the proposed rule interfered with the constitutional power of the states to administer elections, and enjoined implementation. The Roberts Majority stayed the injunction, asserting that the states lacked standing because there was no rule when the suit was filed. In addition the case was not ripe because whether the USPS would issue a final rule is “conjecture”.
The plaintiff states argued that they’d have to begin planning at once to enable them to comply, but the anonymous writer says
But the States “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.” Clapper, 568 U. S., at 416. And the hypothetical future harm that the States fear—the Secretary’s implementation of §2(a)—is far from “certainly impending.” Ibid. By allowing the States “to bring this action based on costs they incurred in response to a speculative threat,” the District Court “improperly water[ed] down the fundamental requirements of Article III.”
So, a proposed rule with an effective date a few weeks out is not a credible threat, but a speculative threat.
The rule took effect. The lower court quickly entered an injunction against enforcement, and the case went back to SCOTUS. This time the Roberts Majority tossed it in three sentences, again per curiam. Alito and Thomas publicly dissented. Liz Dye of Public Notice gives a nice description of the “Fox News Grandpas” absurd opinion.
3. Fact-finding. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District shows the willingness of the Roberts Majority to make up its own facts. This is the case of public prayer led by a football coach after games. Here are the facts about those prayer sessions according to Gorsuch:
Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks. Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.
Here’s how Sotomayor describes the facts in her dissent:
The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location.
Sotomayor put this picture of one of these prayer events in her dissent:
For comparison, check out the facts found by the district court after a trial on the merits, and confirmed by the Ninth Circuit. Here’s a sample of the facts.
Kennedy’s religious beliefs required that his prayer occur on the field where the game was played, immediately after the game concluded.
Kennedy’s testimony is incredible, and nothing this guy says can be believed. The claim that this is about religion is a nonsensical sham, and the case should be dismissed because the School District properly enforced its rules and its contract. A competent SCOTUS would have dismissed the case as certiorari improvidently granted. The Roberts Majority has an ideological stake in the case, so competent judging is irrelevant.
Conclusion
There are many other cases in which the Roberts Majority ignores the guardrails that have helped the Court maintain its legitimacy as it undoes our democracy. These six defy those guardrails in pursuit of their ideological goals. Impeach all six.
Lawfare, The First Circuit deals a legal setback to Puerto Rico’s attempt to regulate misinformation during states of emergency, Ema Rose Schumer and Ema Rose Schumer, Sept. 22, 2026. In March 2020, as a novel respiratory virus known as the coronavirus made its way across the globe, the governor of Puerto Rico declared a state of emergency, shuttering nonessential businesses and imposing a curfew on the Caribbean island’s 3 million residents.
In its response to the unfolding public health crisis, the American territory’s government also deployed a statutory tool that criminalized the spread of so-called fake news during states of emergency. As it turned out, the statute would have staying power—the state of emergency lasted three years.
On Aug. 4, a unanimous U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit struck down the law, reinforcing the First Amendment’s skepticism of state suppression of misinformation. The three-judge panel held that the statute enacted by the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico criminalizing certain false statements during governor-declared emergencies violated the First Amendment’s free speech protection.
The ruling has implications beyond the specific statute it considered. The Puerto Rican legislature had passed the law in an effort to combat the intentional spread of false information during disasters or crises, which can endanger public safety by sowing confusion and eroding public trust in government agencies charged with managing emergency responses.
The First Circuit’s holding, however, underscores that the First Amendment does not recede during government-declared emergencies. Despite the real dangers of misinformation, especially online, the decision follows a line of foundational Supreme Court jurisprudence suggesting that the First Amendment prefers counter speech to address misinformation to the risk of government officials marshaling the state’s power to suppress speech they disfavor.
The statute at issue in the case, the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety Act, contained a provision codified as Article 5.14(a) of Law 20 (previously codified as Article 6.14) that made it unlawful during a declared state of emergency for a person to purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly give “a warning or false alarm, knowing that the information is false, in relation to the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico,” which puts the “safety of one or more persons at imminent risk” or “endangers public or private property.”
Writing for the appellate panel, Judge Gustavo A. Gelpí acknowledged that Puerto Rico’s stated interest in “limiting false information that risks public safety during an emergency” was “not without significance.” Yet the court ultimately held that the regulation gave the government too much power to quell speech with too few guardrails in place. The threat of punishment for speaking falsely could deter speakers from making true statements, “particularly during times of emergency when it is most imperative that the public be well-informed and the government held to account.”
The Puerto Rico Department of Justice, which represented the government before the First Circuit, filed a petition on Aug. 18 for the First Circuit to rehear the case en banc.
The Prosecution of a Pastor
Puerto Rico journalists who reported critically on the commonwealth’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic brought a pre-enforcement challenge to the false-warning statute in May 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. The federal lawsuit followed a chain of events that unfolded in Puerto Rico in the first months of 2020: the spread of a novel coronavirus, the declaration of a state of emergency by the territory’s then-governor, and the arrest of a local pastor accused of spreading false rumors via WhatsApp.
On March 12, 2020, then-Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced invoked Law 20 to declare a state of emergency. By declaring a state of emergency, the government unlocked new powers, including the authority to prosecute certain false statements under Article 5.14(a). The provision criminalized raising false alarms about “the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico” and spreading rumors or false alarms regarding “non-existent abnormalities” during a declared state of emergency. Violating Article 5.14(a) constituted a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of six months imprisonment, a $5,000 fine, or both. If the underlying conduct caused more than $10,000 in damages, the offense was enhanced to a felony punishable by a fixed term of three years imprisonment.
The next month, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico passed an amendment to Article 5.14 that also made it a crime for any person to “transmit … through any social network or mass media, false information with the intention of creating confusion, panic or collective public hysteria, regarding any proclamation or executive order decreeing a state of emergency.” The amendment was intended to discourage “conduct undermin[ing] the safety of the people and the social order” that “endanger[s] the health and lives of citizens.”
Under this new provision, the government charged Pastor José Luis Rivera Santiago for allegedly disseminating a false alarm via WhatsApp. The pastor was accused of spreading a rumor that the government was going to order a shutdown of all businesses in response to the pandemic. According to the government, Rivera Santiago’s speech led to a rush on grocery stores. The Court of San Juan later dismissed the prosecution for lack of probable cause.
The plaintiff journalists argued that the pastor’s prosecution stoked fears that they would be prosecuted next for their reporting on the government’s response to the pandemic, according to their initial complaint. The plaintiffs asserted that the statute chilled their reporting on the pandemic, a fast-moving crisis in which “inadvertent inaccuracies [were] inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”
While the complaint was pending, the legislature passed a law that struck the recent amendment from Puerto Rico’s books and amended Article 5.14(a) to include a mens rea component, requiring, as a condition to impose liability, that the targeted statement was made with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for its veracity. The statute made it punishable for any person who “on purpose, knowingly or recklessly”:
Gives a warning or false alarm, knowing that the information is false, in relation to the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico, or disseminates, publishes, transmits, transfers or circulates through any means of communication, including the media, social networks, or any other means of dissemination, publication or distribution of information, a notice or a false alarm, knowing that the information is false, when as a result of its conduct it puts the life, health, bodily integrity or safety of one or more persons at imminent risk, or endangers public or private property.
The plaintiffs subsequently filed an amended complaint arguing that the revisions did not cure the statute’s constitutional defects. On March 31, 2023, the district court agreed and permanently enjoined the statute, ruling that it was a content-based restriction on speech that failed to survive strict scrutiny—the most rigorous standard of judicial review.
Puerto Rico’s solicitor general appealed to the First Circuit.
Interpreting Lies at the Supreme Court
Arguments before the First Circuit applied foundational Supreme Court cases on false statements. The Supreme Court has held that certain false speech, including perjury and defamation, is constitutionally punishable. But the Court has yet to clearly define where the First Amendment’s zone of protection for lies starts and ends.
On appeal, Puerto Rico made two main arguments. First, the government argued that the statute targeted only false statements made “with knowledge that they were false or with reckless disregard for whether they were false or not,” which it contended was a category of speech unprotected by the First Amendment. Second, even if the statute targeted First Amendment-protected speech, the government argued that an intermediate standard of review was appropriate because the statute was content neutral, meaning it did not discriminate on the basis of subject or viewpoint.
To support its claim that intentional false speech or falsehoods made with reckless disregard for their veracity do not receive First Amendment protection, the government cited decisions by the Supreme Court and the First Circuit that held that defamation laws may criminalize false statements that are made knowingly false or with a reckless disregard for the truth.
The Puerto Rico government argued that if the Supreme Court and First Circuit have held that the intentional spread of lies is constitutionally punishable when “the reputation of one” is at stake, then this reasoning should apply equally when the “safety of many” is put at risk during states of emergency.
In its Aug. 4 decision, the unanimous First Circuit panel stated that the government misread those precedents. Those cases were decided in the specific context of defamation—a historically unprotected category of speech—and did not stand for the broader proposition that knowingly false statements receive no First Amendment protection. The court quoted United States v. Alvarez, in which a plurality of the Supreme Court “reject[ed] the notion that false speech should be in a general category that is presumptively unprotected.” Two justices concurring with the judgment in Alvarez also agreed that false statements do not constitute a category of speech exempt from First Amendment protection.
In Alvarez, a fractured Supreme Court set aside the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a federal misdemeanor to falsely represent the receipt of a U.S. military decoration or medal. The plurality held that criminalizing a false statement alone, without any intent to commit fraud or receive a material benefit, violated the First Amendment and “would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable.” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the plurality that “[o]ur constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth,” alluding to George Orwell’s dystopian political novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Status, Axel's Thiel Tempest; Thompson Talks to His CNN Troops; Why Bonta Backed DownInbox, Oliver Darcy and Natalie Korach, Sept. 22, 2026. The publisher is set to honor Trump ally Peter Thiel this week—and Status has learned that staffers at Politico and Business Insider are pushing back, accusing their parentco of undermining its own commitment to press freedom.
Peter Thiel (Photo by Marco Bello/Getty Images)
Later this week in Berlin, the German publishing giant Axel Springer—which owns POLITICO and Business Insider in the U.S.—will honor pro-MAGA technology billionaire Peter Thiel. In announcing over the summer that Thiel would receive the 2026 Axel Springer Award, chief executive Mathias Döpfner lauded the PayPal and Palantir co-founder as "one of the rare entrepreneurs" who "reminds us that progress requires courage and nonconformism.”
“Nonconformism” is an interesting word choice to describe a man who holds a number of polarizing political views. But in addition to being a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, he has also established himself as a notable adversary of the press—making it especially odd that Axel Springer would opt to fete him at a glitzy event. Indeed, Thiel not only financed the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that ultimately sent Gawker into bankruptcy, but has maintained a notoriously hostile relationship with the press. Most recently, he backed a startup that uses A.I. to generate bias rankings of news organizations and individual reporters.
Thiel’s history has generated significant backlash among Axel Springer's own employees over the decision to honor him. Indeed, it is fair to wonder why Axel Springer—a company which professes to be committed to press freedom—would willfully choose to champion a powerful billionaire whose resume is tarred by an ugly relationship with the press. Making matters worse is the timing of the event. Trump last week banned POLITICO from the White House grounds, and now the outlet’s parent company is set to honor one of the president’s top Silicon Valley supporters.
Of course, while Axel Springer’s corporate leadership can honor whomever they wish, its employees have the ability to object. To that end, Status has learned that staffers at POLITICO and Business Insider are now moving to… Status:
New York Times, Many Democrats Are Avoiding Kamala Harris. Abdul El-Sayed Is Welcoming Her, Reid J. Epstein, Sept. 22, 2026. The former vice president wants to help her party in the midterms, but not many are taking her up on the offer. Except for the Senate nominee in Michigan, who will appear with her on Tuesday.
In July, aides to former Vice President Kamala Harris circulated a document that showed how she would try to maintain her influence atop the Democratic Party as she considered another run for president in 2028.
The donor prospectus, which was obtained by The New York Times, listed how she might be helpful for midterm candidates and sought funding for her campaign travel. It also argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in April further eroding the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts, would be a turnout machine for Black voters.
The current moment, the document states, is “uniquely suited to Vice President Harris and a broad coalition already in motion.” It adds, “What is needed is the operational funding to move the principal at the cadence required to Turn Out the Vote and win in November 2026.”
Democratic candidates, wary of campaigning with someone tied to the unpopular Biden administration, have not rushed to take Ms. Harris up on the offer. In recent weeks, Senate candidates in Alaska, Iowa and Kansas — states without large Black populations — have pre-emptively and publicly uninvited her from campaigning with them.
Several Democrats mentioned in the Harris donor document as candidates who could use her help do not appear eager, either. Aides to James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominees for the Senate and governor in Texas, as well as to Gov. Katie Hobbs in Arizona, told The Times that they did not want Ms. Harris to come.
But on Tuesday, Ms. Harris is set to make her first major campaign stop of the midterms, appearing in Michigan alongside Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for the Senate.
The visit has the potential to be mutually beneficial for both Ms. Harris and Dr. El-Sayed.
For Ms. Harris, the trip will be a high-profile appearance in a top Senate race. Dr. El-Sayed is also one of her party’s leading pro-Palestinian figures, which could help her move beyond the Biden administration’s support of Israel during the war in Gaza, an approach that became unpopular with many Democratic voters.
For Dr. El-Sayed, who needs to shore up support from Black voters and moderates skeptical of his fiery progressive politics, the appearance with Ms. Harris will give him a seal of approval from a prominent Black Democrat and an establishment leader in the party.
After her Michigan stop, she is scheduled to appear in Nevada with Aaron Ford, the state’s Democratic attorney general, who is running for governor, and in California with two Democratic House candidates vying to flip seats. Later this fall, on the Friday before the midterms, she is set to appear in Georgia with Senator Jon Ossoff, another top Democratic candidate for the Senate.
“Right now, midterms, midterms, midterms, full time, occupying my thoughts, my mind and my work,” Ms. Harris said recently on a podcast hosted by the former soccer star Megan Rapinoe. “We have to win these midterms.”
Michigan has presented both Ms. Harris and Dr. El-Sayed with thorny political challenges.
Dr. El-Sayed narrowly won an ugly primary against Representative Haley Stevens, who had far more financial support and drew much stronger backing from the state’s Black voters. Ever since, he has been trying to unite Democrats against his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers.
Ms. Harris and the Biden administration, for their part, faced the fiercest pushback over the war in Gaza in Michigan, which has large populations of Arab and Muslim voters. Ms. Harris narrowly lost the state in 2024.
Dr. El-Sayed, who endorsed the “Uncommitted” movement of primary protest votes against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2024, acknowledged on MS Now last week that some Black Michiganders had “hurt feelings” about that effort. Ms. Harris, he said, would be the ideal person to vouch for his campaign.
“She understood just how frustrating that moment was and the challenges with, with the Biden-era policy toward Gaza going into 2024,” Dr. El-Sayed said. “This is an opportunity for us to come together.”
New York Times, George W. Bush and Cornyn Leave Out Paxton as They Raise Cash for Senate Candidates, Bayliss Wagner and Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The former president and Texas senator are headlining a fund-raiser in Dallas for top Republican Senate candidates. Not included: Ken Paxton, the nominee in their own state
Former President George W. Bush and Senator John Cornyn, two top Texas Republicans, are rallying conservative donors behind the party’s Senate candidates — except for the one running in their own state, Ken Paxton.
Mr. Cornyn is hosting a fund-raiser on Monday evening in Dallas for six Republican nominees in battleground states, according to an invitation to the event that was obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Bush, listed on the invite as a “special guest,” is attending the event, his spokesman confirmed.
The event will benefit Maintain the Majority, a new joint fund-raising committee supporting the Senate candidates, who are defending Republican-held seats in Maine, Ohio, Alaska and Iowa and looking to flip seats in Michigan and New Hampshire. An email sent to attendees on Sunday and viewed by The Times also said that Michele Tafoya, the Republican nominee for Senate in Minnesota, was a late addition to the event.
But Mr. Paxton, the Republican nominee in Texas, who defeated Mr. Cornyn in a costly and bitter primary, was not included. His campaign declined to comment on the fund-raiser.
The fund-raising omission of Mr. Paxton is another escalation in the standoff between old-guard Bush Republicans and the fiery insurgent wing represented by Mr. Paxton, President Trump and their allies.
And it comes as the parties battle for cash and advertising time in the Texas Senate race, one of this year’s top contests. Mr. Paxton has badly trailed his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, in campaign fund-raising, but super PACs tied to Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans have come to Mr. Paxton’s aid, reserving more than $80 million in outside advertising in Texas.
Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has long been a polarizing figure among Texas Republicans. He was impeached by the Republican-dominated Texas House on corruption charges in 2023, though he was acquitted in the State Senate, and he pushed to oust Republican lawmakers and judges who disagreed with him in his party’s primaries in 2024.
This year, Mr. Cornyn and establishment Republican donors spent more than $130 million on advertising backing the senator and bashing Mr. Paxton in their contentious primary. (Mr. Bush chipped in $5,000 for Mr. Cornyn.) In the months since, Mr. Cornyn has continually criticized Mr. Paxton’s character and campaign.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Mr. Cornyn told The Texas Tribune in August. “He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election. He’s making this harder than it needs to be.” (Mr. Paxton countered the attacks, saying on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing” that “John Cornyn doesn’t know my schedule. He doesn’t know how many hours I’m putting in every day, 18 hours a day.” )The fund-raiser comes as long-simmering tensions between Bush- and Trump-era Texas factions burst to the surface.
The Focus Group via The Bulwark, Political Analysis: Why Vivek Ramaswamy’s Star Is Falling in Ohio, Sarah Longwell, Sept. 22, 2026. He’s been a darling of Trump voters around the country. In Ohio, not so much.
FOR YEARS, I’VE BEEN ASKING Trump’s voters whom they’d like to see run for president in the future, or simply which political figures they feel are speaking their language—since, after all, Trump can’t run again.
And for a long time, one of the more popular answers has been a somewhat unexpected figure: 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
These are the kinds of things I have heard about Ramaswamy from Trump voters around the country, both MAGA veterans and Biden-to-Trump types newer to the GOP coalition:
“I think that he’s helping to control the narrative and lead the discussion, especially at the debates.” (from a November 2023 focus group)
“I think he’s very smart. He’d be great in the cabinet. I don’t think he’s ready to be a president. I think he’s young, like others say, but very much a know-it-all.” (January 2024)
“He’s really intelligent, seems to really have a grasp on the economy, and is a good speaker, like Trump, without some of the craziness.” (July 2025)¹
This all sounds pretty complimentary, the type of foundation for a long career in politics: Vivek is a brainiac, a striver, and someone who’s good at being “right” and owning his debate opponents à la Ben Shapiro.
But when you narrow the focus groups to Trump voters in Ohio—where Ramaswamy is locked in a tight race for governor—the reaction radically changes. In fact, it shows that Ramaswamy has a major problem:
Many of the reasons Trump voters around the country liked him are the reasons Ohioans dislike him now.
Take this reaction from a Biden-to-Trump voter from Ohio in a focus group we conducted in March.
I probably would’ve leaned Republican, but I’m feeling a little bit more torn because of his alliance with Trump and being a billionaire, and I mean, he’s a very articulate, youthful guy, charismatic, but some of those alliances do kind of trouble me.
This has continued as Vivek’s race against Democratic nominee Amy Acton has intensified. A week ago, we convened a group of 2024 Ohio Trump voters who now disapprove of the president’s performance. Their verdict on Ramaswamy was harsh.
James said: “I think it’s unfortunate that Vivek is the frontrunner for the Republicans. He’s not a very likable person. He comes off as unrelatable in my opinion as, you know, a wealthy person who’s an elite person.”
James, I should add, was one of the two people in the group voting for Vivek.
It grew worse from there:
Janel said: “Amy Acton, I haven’t really heard too many good things about her. I heard about her in the pandemic, so I would be, like, at a crossroads, like I would pick the lesser of two evils.² I would think, for lack of better words or term. . . . I would probably still just go Democrat ’cause I don’t like Ramaswamy.”
Madison added: “I have a very negative standpoint. . . . When these candidates are coming in and they have so much money to, you know, change our minds, and they have so much money to do these, you know, political ads. It just kind of makes me think negative of the candidate just on surface value. . . . I don’t feel like I can relate to Ramaswamy. I don’t feel like he has the best interest in the people, because he has so much money that how could he possibly understand us?”
Rhonda (the other Vivek voter in the group) said: “I know he used to be on Fox News a lot. . . . I used to watch Fox News a lot, but . . . I think they’re all propaganda, and . . . it’s hard for me to believe . . . anything that these mainstream medias are saying, because they’re just telling you what I feel like they’re supposed to tell you.”
These assessments are remarkable, both for what they suggest about Ramaswamy’s shortcomings as a candidate and for what they reveal about the undercurrents of our current political moment. Two years ago, Trump voters regarded Ramaswamy as a successful businessman who had “a grasp on the economy.” Now, those who have witnessed him up close see an out-of-touch elite who doesn’t understand normal people. Two years ago, Ramaswamy was a master debater who put Nikki Haley in her place and “controlled the narrative.” Today, Ohioans see just another slick politician trying to change our minds.
ALLOW ME TO ENTERTAIN another interpretation. Sarah, I hear some of you asking, how much of this was just people in your focus group being racist and not wanting to tell you?
No one in this focus group said anything overtly racist, and I won’t presume to have a window into their hearts. But I’d be remiss not to mention the role race could play in depressing Ramaswamy’s base. His Republican primary opponent, Casey Putsch, got 18 percent of the vote running an outwardly racist campaign, with gems like asking Grok to name Hitler’s good qualities and an online clip where he invited Ramaswamy to play Cowboys and Indians, before firing a rifle and clarifying that he meant “feather, not dot.”³
Ramaswamy, a Hindu son of Indian immigrants, has also been targeted by Nick Fuentes and other white supremacist figures who now populate the conservative movement. Racism and skepticism of his faith have clearly followed him throughout his rise in Republican politics. “He sound[s] like Obama’s twin to me. . . . I don’t know if he can be trusted,” Heather from South Carolina, a 2016 and 2020 Trump voter, told me in a February 2024 focus group.
One of the most memorable and jarring admissions I’ve ever heard in a focus group came in January 2024, when Ramaswamy was running for president. Clifton from Iowa, a 2016 and 2020 Trump voter, said: “I’m not being prejudiced, guys, but⁴ I don’t like his name, I don’t like where he came from.”
“After 9/11,” Clifton said, “I still harbor a lot of hard feelings about that.”
Woof.
So, yes, racism is very likely playing a role, though it’s always difficult to quantify how much. Possible voter prejudice notwithstanding, Ramaswamy is also a subpar political athlete (and not much of an athlete in general). Trump voters don’t view him as particularly likable. His wealth is a liability. His ties to the administration, and in particular to DOGE, with which he was briefly involved during the transition, are no longer great assets. It’s no wonder he’s in such a pickle.Trump won Ohio by 11 points in 2024, and Amy Acton’s resume as the director of the Ohio Department of Health during the pandemic is not exactly well suited for winning over working-class Trump voters.⁵ So it would be unwise to simply write Ramaswamy off.
But his political skills (such as they are) are clearly optimized for national politics and the attention economy. In state politics, a good candidate should be able to do things like glad-hand at Ohio State tailgates without looking like a weirdo, get into the weeds of the state budget, or provide a calm and reassuring presence at daily press conferences during a crisis like the COVID pandemic, which is exactly what his opponent did.
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What Dems Should Do With 54 Senate Seats, Jonathan V. Last, Sept. 22 2026. An eight-point agenda for turning a Senate majority into a mandate for action.
1. Hopium Last week Tim talked with Jesse Lehrich, who walked through a scenario where the D’s wind up with 54 Senate seats a few weeks from now.
54.
That’s crazy. But not as crazy as it sounds. There is a path. All Dems have to do is run the table on the Big 5 races,¹ win a gettable Iowa, and then luck into Kansas. Hell, if you want an even bigger hit of the dragon, you can get to 56 seats if there’s a backlash to Darline Graham in South Carolina and Dan Osborn overperforms in Nebraska.²
What would Democrats do with 56 senators?
This would be a caucus with instantly vulnerable freshmen in Alaska and Texas. The South Carolina senator would be an assumed one-termer. There would be an independent from a red state. And John Fetterman.
Suddenly that 56-seat best-case scenario looks awfully soft.
But today I come with solutions. One of the lessons of the Iran war is that a governing party has to prepare voters. It needs to make the case for its policies prospectively, feeding a public desire and creating an expectation for its actions.
That’s how you give vulnerable legislators the cover to support your program. Democrats need a governing framework. I’m here to give you one. It’ll be your job to come up with branding at the end.
First, let’s spec out our needs. The framework has to be able to house three broad types of policy:
Economic growth
Post-Trump government reforms
Accountability for the lawlessness of the last decade
This is a new liberal populism, and in a perfect world, every policy goal can be hung from that scaffolding. So here’s my opening bid for what Democrats should offer in what, temporarily, we’ll call the New Contract with America:
Stop the data centers.
Make AI safe.
Protect your health care from the greedy insurance companies.
Fix the rotten Supreme Court.
Get us out of the Middle East and stop fighting Israel’s wars.
Renew our friendship with Canada.
Hold the oligarchs accountable.
And release the Epstein files.
Eight points. Action-oriented. Simple enough to fit on an index card. Specific enough to hit home. Popular enough to work everywhere. Vague enough to offer political flexibility.
For instance: Don’t get into the weeds on AI regulatory policy. Just pound the table on the need to make AI safe—in the sense that it won’t kill either jobs or humans.
Frame Medicare for All (Who Want It) not just as a way to expand access to health care but also as a way to protect the health care people already have from insurance companies.
Fixing the Supreme Court could take many forms—but it starts by campaigning against SCOTUS as rotten and corrupt.³ Build the expectation that the Court has to be reformed so that voters are primed to expect action.
Getting America out of the Middle East can mean different things in different places—in Texas, it can be America-first; in Massachusetts, it can be building a concerted effort to electrify the transportation industry.
You hold oligarchs accountable by going after the Epstein class and investigating the Trumps, Kushners, Lutnicks, et al.
The goal here is arranging the Democratic party around a message and an issue set that can play in both blue states and the red states where the party (hopefully) has some senators.
2. Class War
You’ll notice what’s not on this list: Anything having to do with the culture war. Instead of advancing culture-war policy objectives, Democrats could be framing up a set of enemies: data centers, insurance companies, the Supreme Court, tech oligarchs, the Epstein list.
For instance:
You think some trans kid in a San Francisco high school is your enemy? No, my friends. Your enemy is the trillion-dollar tech company building a data center the size of the Pentagon down the street from you. Your enemy is Bibi Netanyahu, tricking stupid Donald Trump into the disastrous Iran war. Your enemy is the insurance company denying your claim and raising your premiums even as they shrink your coverage. Your enemy is the Supreme Court justice lining his pockets with money from his rich friends.
Build a class war on top of the culture war.
I can hear Sarah’s head exploding. She will say that Democrats need a positive vision for the future that lifts people up. And maybe that’s right. Maybe there’s an Obama-esque, forward-together pitch that could work over the next two years.
I would prefer that. But I would prefer a lot of things that are not the program I’m laying out for you. Just so you understand my own preferences: In my perfect world we’d elect an American Mark Carney—an accomplished technocrat who unified the country with a series of neoliberal policies while building strong international alliances.
But I am . . . skeptical . . . that this is possible. After all, Canada gave Prime Minister Mark Carney the mandate he has only because Canadians have a gigantic common enemy—America—uniting them.
The good news is that Carney has used the populist power granted him to pursue wise policy choices and he has done it in a serious and sober-minded manner.
My operating theory is that we live in a populist age, and while technocratic neoliberalism might be the wisest course of action, it cannot succeed unless it is presented as part of a populist framework.
Which means establishing who the enemies are. This is the unsavory, dangerous side of populism. And if you know of a style of populism that’s purely positive, then I’d like to hear about it.
Leave a comment
So that’s my pitch: An eight-point plan for Democrats that then functions as a framework from which every policy gets hung. All that’s left is to brand it. And that’s where you come in.
What should this be called? “The New Contract with America” is intriguing, since it codes Republican. Maybe “Rebirth for All Americans.” Or “The New American Century.” (YSWIDT?)
What I want you to keep in the back of your mind is that in order to pass legislation, Democrats will need to keep on board a bunch of red-state senators. So the frame here has to be as friendly to them as possible.
3. Obits
Here’s an excerpt from Sam Roberts’s new book on writing obituaries. It’s lovely.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. . . .
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? . . .
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story. . . .
“When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Big Issues On Artificial Intelligence, Crypto Currency
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Will Crypto Crash the Blue Wave, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 22, 2026. AI gets the attention, but the Big Scam is still spending big.
Will crypto crash the blue wave? Probably not a question you’ve been asking, but you should.
Paul Krugman here with a video update for September 22nd. I want to talk about something that was a very big deal in the way we talked about the 2024 election, which was the role of the cryptocurrency industry.
We’re talking about it a lot less this time, I think largely because AI has stolen the limelight. But crypto is still out there. And while it has not succeeded in creating a viable business in the normal sense, it has been extraordinarily successful at buying political influence. And they’re set to do it again.
Now, the background here is, as I record this, the midterm elections look, based upon polling, based upon just impressions, looks like a big blue wave. Elliot Morris gives the Democrats a 97% chance of taking the House and two-to-one odds of taking the Senate.
But there’s still a few weeks to go and it looks like there’s a big wave of right-wing money that’s going to come crashing in. We don’t know how effective that will be. The role of money in politics, particularly of last-minute advertising blitzes, is somewhat unclear.
But it is coming and crypto is going to be a pretty big part of it. Based on Open Secrets, which tracks campaign financing, it appears that the crypto industry, which spent big in 2024, is going to spend even bigger in 2026, which is unusual because midterms are usually lower stakes than presidential years: They don’t usually involve as much spending.
But this industry is going to go all in. The crypto political strategy has been to knock out candidates that it considers hostile. And that is a strategy that was very effective in the last election cycle. They spent money in primaries knocking out Democrats, because Democrats were by no means united in their skepticism about crypto, but in some cases in favor. They knocked out Democrats in favor of other Democrats in primaries. And then in the general election, they spent quite a lot, not entirely on Republicans, but there were some big cases. And then Ohio spending was a particular success story.
And in general, crypto became seen in Washington as a force to be afraid of.
Not a force that has actually managed to get anywhere in the economy. It’s nothing like AI, which is everywhere. Crypto is still barely used for legitimate transactions. According to the Federal Reserve, only 2% of Americans have actually used crypto to buy something other than assets. So basically non-speculative crypto use remains trivial. And that’s after many years of trying to market this stuff.
But the political effectiveness has been huge, and it has intimidated a lot of politicians. Back in February, Chuck Schumer warned his colleagues not to do too much to offend Fairshake, the big crypto lobbying group.
Crypto has also, in addition to campaign contributions, done a lot of what in the old days, we would call bribery. There’s a lot of money that flows from the crypto industry to politicians and their relatives, and not just Trump. I don’t really want to ask too much about why there’s a lot of money going into a firm founded by Senator Gillibrand’s son. So there’s a big financial issue.
Now, the Clarity Act posed as “we’re going to establish a sound regulatory framework, especially for stablecoins” — cryptocurrencies that supposedly have a guaranteed value in dollars. Why exactly did Democrats turn on it? I mean, on the merits, they were right to be against this because whatever one may say, the purpose of the Clarity Act was to kind of legitimize cryptocurrency in the economy and particularly to legitimize stablecoins, which are, once you cut through the jargon and all of that, essentially poorly regulated banks.
It would essentially be posing new threats to the stability of the financial system and undermining banking regulation, which is something, of course, that the Trump administration and its allies are trying to do anyway, but this would have been another step in that direction. Presumably many of the Democrats who voted against this, and there were some Republicans as well, but presumably many of the senators who voted against this thing were genuinely concerned.
But I also think that there’s some spillover. For analytical purposes, cryptocurrency and AI are quite different things, and they are actually playing a very different role in the economy. Companies are really investing in AI, rightly or wrongly, but they are really trying to put it to use. And cryptocurrency is being used only for, pretty much only for, criminal activities, including, by the way, Iranian efforts to bypass U.S. sanctions. But in the public mind, it’s all tech. It’s all fancy jargon. It’s all doing stuff we don’t quite understand. Sounds fancy.
AI turned out to have an interesting political trajectory. It really is impressive. I mean, it really is impressive what it can do. Who would have thought that matrix algebra with a little bit of non-linearity could produce what feels like a conversation with a chatbot? Who would have believed that you could do vibecoding the way you do. Now whether all of that is economically productive is another question. And whether it kills us all is yet another question.
Still, crypto has not done any of that. But it feels, I think, to a lot of people similar. And the bad reputation that AI has quickly developed, I think, is spilling over to anything techie and therefore has meant that the support for crypto is weaker than it was.
It’s also true, by the way, that there was a big boom in Bitcoin prices after Trump was elected because everybody thought he was going to be the crypto president, was going to do great things for the industry, which then kind of evaporated. There’s been some recovery in crypto in the last few weeks, which I actually suspect, I mean, no one quite knows, but I actually suspect has something to do with the fact that, well, the Iranians have found a use for crypto. That basically illegitimate uses of cryptocurrency are turning out to be significant. So there is that.
But in any case, the industry is still out there. There are still trillions of dollars in assets. And it’s an industry that had developed a really effective political strategy. They couldn’t actually produce stuff. But if we count the 1.4 billion or so that Trump personally has made from crypto as part of its campaign contributions, then crypto may be the biggest single political financial force out there.
Will it work this time? The answer is, of course, I don’t know. It’s going to be a lot of money. It does look as if basically, as best I can make out from the Open Secrets data, crypto may end up spending, well, something like an Elon Musk-sized amount on these elections.
It’ll be much more partisan. The primaries are over, and in the general election, there are not going to be a lot of Republicans out there that they’re going to try to defeat. And also, they have a clear sense of where the balance lies.
I mean, Susan Collins did vote against the Clarity Act. Nobody, seriously, is going to give her credit. She’s pulled this too many times. Nobody’s going to think that the crypto industry should try to defeat Susan Collins. But they will try to defeat Sherrod Brown, even though Brown himself has softened his anti-crypto rhetoric. He has talked about it very little.
But if he wins, he might well be the deciding vote or one of the two deciding votes in a Democratic majority in the Senate. And we now know that the Democratic Party is not clean as the driven snow. It is not immune to financial influence.It’s not even immune to de facto bribery from crypto.
But it’s a completely different universe from the Trumpian Republican Party. And so the crypto industry knows that if Democrats really do sweep, if this is a blue wave which brings them not just the House but the Senate, it will be a less favorable environment. So their scam will be greatly endangered. And so here comes crypto.
Now, it’s only part of the broader story. I don’t know how much money is going to come that’s openly from AI, but we do know that the billionaires, that the oligarchs are gearing up, are already starting to spend large sums and will spend a lot of money.
So what we’re actually going to see, crypto is an important part of the story, but what we’re actually going to see in a few weeks is the collision of what really does look like a blue wave generated by very widespread public disgust with what has happened to America these past two years against a wave of plutocratic money, including crypto, but that’s just part of the story.
And I guess we’re going to learn something about how much of a democracy we remain. I mean, yes, a vote is a vote, even if it’s a vote that was influenced by money, but we’re going to find out, can a wave of largely corrupt money, clearly totally corrupt in the case of crypto, but largely corrupt in other cases, can a wave of corrupt money stop a popular electoral uprising against a really disastrous administration and its allies in Congress?
I don’t expect to get a whole lot of sleep on election night, and neither should you. Good luck.
Robert Reich, Opinion: Xi and the Dilemma of AI, Robert Reich, right, Sept. 22, 2026. The central issue isn’t which nation will dominate AI. It’s whether we will both maintain human control over it.
China and the United States are now competing for AI dominance. But what’s needed is a new mind-set about the meaning of “security” in the emerging world of AI — where the central question should not be who gains AI dominance but whether human beings maintain dominance over AI.
The dilemma is that humans won’t be able to maintain dominance over AI unless China and the U.S. — the two leading AI powers in the world — join together to seek it, but our competition for dominance makes this nearly impossible.
Xi Jinping will be visiting the United States this week. It’s an opportunity for the new mind-set, but will China and the U.S. take it?
Xi recently gave a keynote address at the World A.I., Conference in Shanghai which contained some clues to his thinking. In it he said:
“We should … ensure that AI is secure and controllable. AI should be a trusted tool for humanity. We should take seriously the various types of inherent and secondary risks that AI may trigger. We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems in order to strengthen the line of security, prevent abuses and malicious use, and ensure that AI is always under human control. In the meantime, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country’s security over that of others.”
This sounds as if Xi is most concerned about humanity maintaining control over AI.
Yet other officials in China appear more concerned about American dominance over AI.
In an article published September 12 in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, China’s top spy chief, Chen Yixin, warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. He called for more party control over AI and stricter government oversight — to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces,” and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.
Leaders of AI in the United States appear just as ambivalent about whether the most important goal is keeping America’s AI lead over China or keeping AI under the control of human beings.
While Trump and his tunnel-visioned treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, are focused on American dominance, other AI leaders seem equally concerned about human dominance.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is sounding the alarm about AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI on its own, without human oversight. This dynamic, called recursive self-improvement, is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic.
“Left unchecked,” warns Amodei, “it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”
Amodei continues:
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development … in 6–12 months … a swarm [of AI agents] could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
But in the same open letter, Amodie insists that democratic nations can only afford to slow down their own AI development if they maintain and widen their technological lead over China.
“Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk. I agree with Secretary Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world. The CCP-associated projects will run the alignment risks that US companies are carefully preventing, and even if they avoid those risks, they will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones). Thus, a key part of pacing within democracies is to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible, to give us the breathing room we need in order to pace effectively.”
Amodei backs restrictions on selling powerful A.I. chips to China, among other measures to slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead.
It’s always hazardous to take the words of political and corporate leaders at face value, so I urge skepticism.
Yet there’s no doubt that some leaders in both China and the United States are aware of how quickly AI is moving toward building, on its own, the next generation of AI — and how dangerous this could be for the human species, regardless of whether humans live in China, the United States, or elsewhere on the planet.
We won’t be able to stop this from happening unless China and the U.S. work together, but our two nations are too suspicious of one another to allow it.
Keep your expectations low for this week’s visit of XI to the United States. But be aware of how high are the stakes for humanity.
Semafor, Analysis: AI trade gets lumpy as IPOs delayed, Rohan Goswami, Sept. 22, 2026. Two companies in the AI ecosystem have delayed their IPOs, the latest sign that investor appetite for the trade is uneven at best.
SoftBank’s energy business and nuclear company Holtec put off their listings after investors balked, The New York Times reported. At the same time, SoftBank’s junk-bond offering, which will fund its investment in OpenAI, appears to have healthy demand.
The first-order AI trades — frontier labs and chipmakers — are holding up, but a fragility is emerging further down the chain among smaller deals. That’s a bad sign for private-equity firms sitting on $3.8 trillion of unsold companies, Thoma Bravo’s Orlando Bravo told Semafor’s Compound Interest this week. (Stay tuned: we’ll be bringing that episode to you when we return from hiatus early next month.)
“Look at this pipeline: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe Databricks, these monster companies” heading toward IPOs will “crowd out” smaller offerings, Bravo said. “It’s not a capital issue, it’s a time issue. Who’s going to pay attention to this stuff when they have to make big decisions on this enormous capital?”
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 22, 2026. Ellison’s ‘Editorial Independence’ PLUS Trump’s ‘Noncitizen Voting.’
In an appalling but ultimately unsurprising sell-out of free markets and the First Amendment, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (who buckled under pressure from state politicians nervous that Paramount would leave the state) brokered a sweetheart deal with Donald Trump ally David Ellison to merge media giants Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
The merger puts CBS and CNN under joint ownership of the MAGA-friendly mogul. Despite weak promises to invest in production, the merger will inevitably reduce jobs and media diversity.(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
That’s not the worst of it for democracy, however. In a feeble effort to maintain the patina of editorial independence for CBS and CNN, the deal envisions an editorial board, which ultimately is nothing more than a creature of its corporate owners.
Freedom of Press Foundation’s statement is precisely on point and worth reading in full:
A Paramount-appointed editorial independence board for CNN and CBS is worthless. The fish rots from the head, and this particular fish is headed by a compromised oligarch with a history of throwing journalists under the bus to advance his business interests.
The editorial board creates the same First Amendment problems it’s supposed to solve — the government meddling in the news. It’s unclear how the attorneys general or courts can constitutionally hold Paramount accountable for the board’s actions or inaction without themselves interfering in content. The attorneys general might be fine with censorship when they’re the ones doing it, but what happens when successors with opposing political views inherit enforcement powers?
And with respect to CBS, the editorial board makes even less sense. Ellison already traded away CBS’ editorial independence in his negotiations with Federal Communications Commission Chair and Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, hiring a career partisan as a “bias ombudsman” and committing in regulatory submissions to truthful and unbiased reporting — practically the same words Bonta uttered at his shameful press conference. To Carr, of course, that means reporting that is uncritical of the administration.
Carr has said that he’d attempt to punish failure to abide by those terms, as he interprets them, as false statements to a federal agency. Bonta says his agreement is enforceable in court. So who will decide whether the news is fair, true, and unbiased? Will it be Carr, the bias ombudsman, the attorneys general, or the editorial board?
Ultimately, the answer is Ellison, and by extension his buddy Donald Trump.
The ramifications of this capitulation to Silicon Valley Tech Bros. for our media and news environment, for consumer prices, and for jobs in these industries will be felt for years.
In the short run, two points deserve mention.
First, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems to have supported the deal (and was praised by Ellison!), now will face a huge challenge to a possible presidential run. The last thing Democrats want these days is a slick dealmaker cozy with Silicon Valley who underestimates the threats to the free press.
Second, as we saw with CBS’s ratings bomb for 60 Minutes, the audience is the ultimate arbitrator of media success. If the new Ellison media empire — as CBS News — has been offering MAGA-friendly fare (or even innocuous coverage that proves less threatening to the MAGA movement), audiences very likely will react to the new CNN the way it has to the new CBS. The appetite for hard-hitting, truly independent journalism remains — and will continue to fuel the appetite for new independent journalism, nonprofit outlets, and those few legacy media operations that reject false equivalence and access journalism.Subscribed
Trump lawlessness — not ‘Noncitizen voting’ — is the problem
After the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s desperate effort to destroy mail-in balloting with a scheme to bollix up the Post Office, voters are free to choose whatever voting method suits them (e.g., mail, early in-person, in-person, drop-box). The U.S. election system will continue to be a model of accuracy and security, despite MAGA’s multi-year, deliberate hysteria and conspiracy theories about noncitizen illegal voting, a scam designed to suppress voting or just spread confusion and distrust of the results.
Noncitizen, illegal voting in this country is practically nonexistent, even by the MAGA fear-mongers’ own findings. What is increasingly evident is not only that the Trump team is lying about the problem, but that its own investigators may be breaking the law.
The nonpartisan Center for Election Research and Innovation’s major study confirmed that reports of a vast number of noncitizens voting are flat-out wrong:
Public discussion appears to be largely driven by high-profile claims in a subset of states. Careful search identified no allegations of noncitizen registrants or voters in several states, even after expanding parameters to include relatively minor or unsubstantiated claims. Election officials in these states take steps to protect the integrity of their elections, but claims about noncitizen registrants or voters appear not to be a major part of public dialogue. . . .
Even the largest claims (which are the most likely to be severe overestimates) never allege numbers that are more than roughly one-tenth of one percent of the number of active registered voters in the state. This indicates that existing safeguards are broadly effective, as even high-profile and highly motivated efforts identify only a very small number of records of potential concern. Election officials and other authorities thoroughly investigate these concerns, moving swiftly to address any evidence of improper registration or voting that may be found. These small numbers highlight the overall integrity of the system.
The number of actual incidents is tiny, verging on statistically zero. To great fanfare, for example, a 2025 audit in Michigan of over 7 million active, registered voters in 2024 turned up…16 questionable cases or “roughly 0.00028% of votes cast by Michiganders in the 2024 general election.” Those were flagged (without oppressive rules of the type Trump’s regime would implement) for investigation.
In Ohio, as the Bipartisan Policy Center documented, “Secretary of State Frank LaRose flagged 521 cases of potential noncitizen voting between 2019 and September 2023.” But there was just one single case charge, and that was “due to a combination of accidental registration and a lag in how the Department of Motor Vehicles updates an individual’s citizenship status after naturalization.”
In Nevada, officials’ inflated claim of 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote turned out to be, at most…185 potential noncitizens. The feds have yet to provide hard and fast proof even of those. As the New York Times reported:
Unproven claims that large numbers of noncitizens have voted in elections have been at the core of President Trump’s political message and central to his justification to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Democrats and voting-rights advocates say the legislation is aimed at tipping the scales in this year’s midterm elections for Republicans, in part by making it more difficult for some eligible Americans to cast ballots, notably younger voters and people of color, who tend to vote for Democrats.
Even in New Jersey, where a computer glitch at the Motor Vehicle Commission allowed 6600 noncitizens to register, fewer than 400 actually did (out of millions); errors that affect no races.
When actual, specific cases of noncitizen registration appear, they are shockingly few in number, and often unrelated to noncitizen voting of the type Trump claims is rampant in federal elections. For example, the Justice Department trumpeted a case of six (!) persons in a total of three states, but these involved “paying people on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles to sign petitions using stolen identities of registered voters to qualify initiatives on ballots in California elections.”
In their frenzy to find even such meager numbers of possible issues, the feds — according to a whistleblower complaint — are acting lawlessly. Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, last week announced a whistleblower found the Department of Homeland Security was directing officers “to violate state laws as a part of its ‘Unlawful Voter Initiative,’ an effort aimed at substantiating President Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.” Padilla’s press release explained:
Agents assigned to the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” are directed to use personal information from DHS data to lie to access voter information on state voter registration websites, making false attestations that they are a voter or are acting with a voter’s express authorization in order to access sensitive voter data.
And although its data “can conflict with state records and contain both uncertainties and inconsistencies,” officers are told to rely on it “even if officers believe it to be unreliable.” In addition, “Naturalized U.S. citizens are being investigated through this initiative without their knowledge or ability to correct erroneous data, with law enforcement records being generated against them.”Subscribed
The feds’ scheme has now come under state scrutiny. “The attorney general of Virginia sent a letter on Thursday warning Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, that the department’s hunt for evidence of election fraud ‘potentially violates several Virginia laws’ and demanding that the investigation cease immediately,” the New York Times reports. All of this stems from the horde of investigators “assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud.”
Meanwhile, Aakash Singh, the top lieutenant to the Deputy Attorney General, warned subordinates that “prosecutors could be fired if they decline to investigate and pursue cases of reported election fraud,” MS NOW reported on Friday. Even when line prosecutors find no evidence to pursue cases, they are told that political stooges appointees could pursue the prosecutions. This is a rogue, reckless operation in search of a problem.
Democrats should make clear that when they win back the majority, they will investigate any allegations of harassment, vindictive prosecution, or other DOJ misconduct. DOJ attorneys must understand that they have an independent obligation to follow the law and DOJ guidelines, their hack bosses’ bullying notwithstanding.
In short, the hysteria about illegal noncitizen voting has always been a red herring. Immigrants who live in terror (especially these days) of arrest, incarceration, and deportation are not about to draw authorities’ attention by trying to vote illegally. The system is remarkably secure, with ample ability to detect any rare cases of mischief.
What we are seeing, however, is the rampant lawlessness of a rogue regime out to manufacture evidence, intimidate voters, and sow confusion. We should, in short, stop obsessing about the non-problem of noncitizen voting, and start cracking down on a regime that will go to extraordinary lengths to suppress voting. We have an anti-democratic election suppression problem, not an illegal noncitizen voting problem.
Daily Beast, Trump TV Immediately Flops in Embarrassing Numbers Disaster, Leigh Kimmins, Sept. 22, 2026. TUMBLEWEED. Nobody is paying attention to the self-declared “king of ratings.”
Donald Trump’s 24/7 “TV” channel has immediately flopped, in a humiliating ratings disaster for the president.
The 80-year-old former reality TV star, who calls himself “the king of ratings,” got a lot less than he bargained for after he banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House on Friday.
New York Times, Trump Is Back on TV, Briefly, as Many Networks Carry His U.N. Speech Live, Michael M. Grynbaum and Katie Robertson, Sept. 22, 2026. A suspension of pool coverage remains in effect. But the in-house United Nations broadcaster provided a feed of the president’s remarks.
President Trump was, once again, all over American television screens on Tuesday.
Almost every major news channel — with the exception of CNN — carried a live feed of Mr. Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, even as five networks continued to suspend pool coverage of the president after he banned several outlets from the White House.
How does that add up?
The answer is United Nations TV, a U.N.-operated broadcasting system that functions as a kind of C-SPAN for events taking place on the U.N. campus in Manhattan.
U.N. TV is not part of the five-network consortium that takes turns as the designated camera crew for many presidential events, especially in small spaces like the Oval Office. That group — consisting of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — suspended its pool duties on Monday in solidarity with CNN, after Mr. Trump barred its journalists from the White House. (CNN, alongside two other banned outlets, has sued to regain access.)
U.N. TV is filming speeches at the General Assembly, and many networks on Tuesday carried its feed of Mr. Trump’s address. In most cases, the networks included an onscreen caption that identified the U.N. as the source of the footage, to distinguish from their own cameras. (The New York Times also carried the live U.N. feed of Mr. Trump’s speech.)
CNN was the exception. The channel aired other stories, including news about the cause of death of the actress Hayden Panettiere, as Mr. Trump spoke. After the president concluded, CNN aired some short clips.
“Despite the White House barring CNN and other news organizations from the presidential press pool, we do have a live signal of the president’s remarks provided by United Nations television,” the CNN news anchor Wolf Blitzer told viewers. “We will monitor his speech and bring you any newsworthy moments as they happen.”
For casual consumers of the news, these technical distinctions may not matter: Mr. Trump was once again receiving near-blanket coverage, a day after he disappeared from many screens as the five networks suspended their pool duties and other outlets declined to publish photographs of his events until midnight.
When Mr. Trump entered the United Nations on Tuesday, he was greeted by a group of reporters, including the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins.
“I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me,” the president said.
“The United Nations allowed us in, sir,” Ms. Collins replied.
“You should not be here covering me,” Mr. Trump said. “You said you weren’t going to cover me. You shouldn’t be covering me.”
Mr. Trump was scheduled for a series of meetings with world leaders later on Tuesday, including President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain.
Those meetings, which might generate interesting headlines, would typically be covered live by a network pool camera. Because of the pool suspension, U.N. TV is set to send its own camera crew to cover them.
Every news channel can decide on its own whether to carry the U.N. footage of those meetings on its airwaves.
More On U.S. Immigration
The Future of Freedom Foundation, Immigration Controls Destroy American Liberty and Privacy, Jacob G. Hornberger, right, Sept. 22, 2026. As President Trump is showing us, in order to “secure the border,” a borderlands police state, including his much-vaunted Berlin Wall along the border, is not sufficient. He is showing us that the deadly, harsh, and brutal immigration police state must be expanded nationwide, even to the point of inflicting death on American citizens themselves.
In other words, there is no such thing as a kind, benevolent, considerate, and respectful way to secure the border. Instead, securing the border requires brutality, cruelty, and extreme harshness — nationwide.
It’s tempting to convince oneself that America’s system of immigration controls adversely affects only foreigners. Not so. It also destroys the rights and freedoms of the American people, including economic liberty, freedom of association, liberty of contract, privacy, and private ownership of property.
Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, a brutal nationwide police state, including massive surveillance, is the opposite of a free society. Thus, any nation that commits to “securing the border” will necessarily be a nation in which people are not free.
Conversely, living in a genuinely free society necessarily means adopting a policy of open borders — that is, one in which there is no immigration police state, ICE, Border Patrol, or any restrictions on the rights of people to cross borders.
In other words, a choice must be made: a system of immigration controls or a free society. There is no way to have both.
There are, of course, multiple examples of how America’s system of immigration controls has, over time, destroyed the rights and freedoms of the American people, such as highway checkpoints that subject Americans to interrogation and warrantless searches; roving Border Patrol checkpoints that do the same thing; warrantless trespasses onto privately owned ranches and farms, not just on or near the border but also within 100 miles of the border; violent raids on privately owned American businesses; the criminalization of American citizens who hire, transport, or care for illegal immigrants; and much more.
Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reminded us of another major destruction of the liberty and privacy of the American people, thanks to America’s police-state system of immigration controls. The court affirmed the power of federal officials to manually search the cellphones of people arriving in the United States from overseas, including American citizens.
No warrant is required. No probable cause or even reasonable suspicion is necessary. Just follow orders to hand over your cellphone (and your entry code) to federal officials, who wield the authority to peer into the most private parts of your life, including your personal relationships, health records, business matters, and everything else.
Tell me: How can such federal power over the American people possibly be reconciled with the principles of a free society? It can’t. But because Americans have become accustomed to living like frogs who are put into a pot of water and then slowly boiled, Americans just put their heads down and don’t make any fuss.
After all, American citizens in Minneapolis learned what can happen when they make a fuss. They can get killed, just like citizens in Hong Kong, Beijing, or Tehran when they make a fuss. Better to simply stay home and play it safe. In the process, the fundamental, God-given right of freedom of speech is destroyed.
Why should an American citizen surrender his fundamental, natural, God-given rights of liberty and privacy simply because he has chosen to travel to a foreign country? I thought that natural, God-given rights preexist government.
How did the Second Circuit justify the destruction of these fundamental, natural, God-given rights? You guessed it — immigration controls! The appellate judges, citing judicial precedent, say that the federal government has inherent powers of sovereignty and, therefore, the authority to control anyone, including American citizens themselves, who wishes to cross the international border and enter the United States.
Really? I didn’t know that the federal government had inherent powers. I thought that the federal government’s powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. I thought that the Framers rejected the old European/Asian/African concept of the inherent powers of the sovereign.
The judges on the Second Circuit undoubtedly realize that the Constitution didn’t give the federal government the power to control the movements of people across America’s international borders, any more than it gave the federal government the power to control the movements of people across state borders. Thus, in order to protect the government’s authority to search people’s cellphones, at least two of the judges on the 3-judge panel had no choice but to resort to the old nonexistent concept of the inherent powers of the sovereign.
However, there is one bright spot in the Court’s decision: the concurring opinion of Judge Lee. While voting to uphold the search in this case, she did so because, she said, there was reasonable suspicion to search the defendant’s phone in this case. But she disagreed with the majority’s broad suspicion-less authority to conduct cell phone searches. She wrote:
A standard that permits a search of every international traveler’s cellphone without suspicion means that any person who goes on vacation or a business trip anywhere outside the country can be subject, upon their return home, to review of their medical records, financial information, personal messages, internet search and viewing habits, location tracking, and any other private information that may be contained on their cellphone through stored data, apps, or cloud connection. Under the majority’s view, law enforcement at an international airport, whether it is TSA, Customs and Border Protection, or ICE, has unlimited power to review the data on any traveler’s cellphone. This unrestricted authority to search is not a carefully-crafted exception to the Fourth Amendment to address an immigration or contraband-related interest in controlling who or what comes into the country; it eliminates Fourth Amendment protections in this context.
Good for Judge Lee! Her concurring opinion might well mean a full “en banc” review of the holding and, later, U.S. Supreme Court review.
Of course, the destruction of our liberty and privacy isdesigned to keep us safe. After all, think of all the scary boogeymen who could come and get us if we didn’t surrender our rights of liberty and privacy to the federal government. Drug dealers and terrorists are among the biggest and scariest boogeymen. Never mind that they are brought into existence by the U.S. government’s drug-war policies and foreign-interventionist policies. Don’t you feel safer knowing that an American drug dealer or American terrorist will be discovered after going on vacation in some foreign country by having his cellphone searched? Never mind, of course, that he’ll probably leave his drug-dealing cellphone or terrorist-planning cellphone at home when he goes on vacation overseas. Never mind that it is ordinary, law-abiding Americans who will be having their privacy invaded upon returning to the United States from abroad.
As I detailed in my recent book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, there is one — and only one — solution to this deadly, destructive, and horrific police-state immigration morass — open borders — that is, the free movement of people across borders. A system of open borders is the only system that is consistent with liberty, free markets, private property, privacy, life, harmony, religious values, and the natural, God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. Anyone who wants to be free — genuinely free — must choose liberty over police-state tyranny and oppression.EMAIL
The only issue is that people don’t seem interested. The channel launched at 7 p.m. with around 8,000 viewers, but the audience had dropped below 4,000 just 90 minutes later. By 9 p.m. Eastern, the stream was attracting only about 3,000 viewers, a tiny audience compared with the millions watching the major networks at primetime.
By around 10:40 p.m., just 2,425 people were watching. The channel has 3.18 million followers, so that’s a measly 0.076 percent.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
New York Times, White House Memo: After Years as the Star of Must-See TV, Trump Faces the Sting of Cancellation, Peter Baker, Updated Sept. 22, 2026. A boycott of the White House press pool by the major networks deprives the president of the oxygen of screen time. But he is still finding ways to get on the air.
For President Trump, this is the tree-falls-in-the-forest moment of his administration. If the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still president? Not the kind he has been, anyway.
Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade. No longer can he snap his fingers and appear live in millions of homes. No longer does he totally dominate the airwaves.
Indeed, his first taste of life without the major television networks that are now boycotting the White House press pool in protest of his ban on select news outlets was a sour one. He was left almost literally shouting into the wind on Monday as he cut the ribbon on his new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House, recorded only by a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One. There was Mr. Trump moving his mouth, and no one could hear him.
Yet when it comes to attracting attention, the president still manages to find a way. By the end of the day, there he was live on CNN after all — not filmed by the White House television pool, which refused to follow him, but by other cameras that met him when he arrived in New York and were not part of the boycott agreement. He had to rely on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get on air, not at his own White House but as a guest at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America. But he crowed that he could still force his way onto the screen.
“They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that,” Mr. Trump boasted with the mayor at his side and a large group of reporters in front of him. “Look at all that press.”
The moment reinforced the challenge of carrying out any kind of television blackout on the president in an age of proliferating media, and the limits of the news industry’s willingness to cut him off. While pool cameras will be gone for now, the networks under their agreement may still show footage from other sources that are not subject to White House control, like the United Nations camera feed that will carry his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday.
But the walkout by the five major networks that follow the president everywhere he goes still represents a threat to the way Mr. Trump has governed. Television has been central to his rise to fame and power. His 14 seasons on reality television made him into a national force and helped propel him to the White House. His 10 seasons on political television since then have allowed him to dominate American life in a way that none of his predecessors ever did.
“This is the most important thing for Trump,” said Ramin Setoodeh, the author of “Apprentice in Wonderland,” a history of Mr. Trump’s career on reality TV. “When I interviewed him for my book, he told me the only thing that matters is ratings. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or a bad person. If you have good ratings, you’re successful.”
So to lose the network cameras, even if just for now and even if he can get around it some of the time, is a blow to his sense of self, Mr. Setoodeh said. “To him, this is equal to being canceled. This is equal to having a hit show and having the networks pull it from the lineup.”“This is a real crisis for the president,” Mr. Setoodeh added.
The crisis, of course, is one of his making, stemming from his abrupt decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds because of their “negative” coverage, a prohibition he himself called a “ban on the free press.” The five networks that make up the rotating pool that provides television coverage of the president’s events — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC — decided to stop filming him, to demonstrate their objections.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 21, 2026 [More On Trump's Tantrum], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 22, 2026. On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose deep unpopularity means he is likely eager to curry favor with Trump, promptly posted that the Defense Department fully supported Trump’s decision. He claimed that the same outlets, which recently have reported that Russia has been helping Iran target U.S. troops and that the Defense Department has not fully accounted for deaths of servicemembers or destruction of U.S. military bases, “endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”
The next day, reporters from those outlets attempting to enter the White House complex where the press facilities are located were denied entry, and Secret Service agents confiscated their press badges.
On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted an image of three full black trash bags, labeled “CNN,” “MSNBC,” and “Politico,” outside the White House.
This morning, after the weekend’s backlash, he posted: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”
There’s that “national security” claim again: the same justification he’s using for building his ballroom and now his triumphal arch. It is also, not coincidentally, the excuse President Richard M. Nixon floated for covering up the Watergate break-in in June 1972.
In any case, no one’s buying it. MAGA Republicans have tried to claim that President Joe Biden cancelled 400 press passes. In fact, in 2023 the Biden administration tightened the rules to get a “hard” press pass that allows repeated, unaccompanied access to the press area of the White House. To have one, a reporter had to renew it annually, be employed full-time as a reporter, have a Washington, D.C., area address, and have had recent access to the White House. With that change, the number of White House hard passes fell from 1,417 to 975 because many of those who held passes didn’t reapply. Those people could still get day passes. In any event, these changes regarded individual reporters, not entire media outlets.
The Biden White House did not identify the one journalist whose hard pass application was denied.
Today CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued Trump, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Secret Service director Sean Curran, and White House chief of staff Wiles for violating both the Fifth and the First Amendments. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says. It says Trump banned the outlets and the reporters to retaliate against the reporters for their past news coverage “because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.”
They are suing for the restoration of their press credentials for their coverage of the White House.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump to the bench in 2017, was assigned the case. Although Trump appointed Kelly, in 2018, the judge ruled that Trump’s revoking of journalist Jim Acosta’s hard press pass likely violated his due process rights. Trump groused that the news outlets “have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta.” Apparently anticipating a loss, he has already vowed to appeal.
He ranted that journalists were demeaning the Oval Office by reporting negative stories about him. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean,” he posted. “I have an obligation to fight for the Success and Safety of our Country. FAKE NEWS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the U.S.A. thrives.”
Podcaster Allison Gill noted that Judge Kelly ordered the government to respond to the lawsuit by tomorrow, and that he has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 3:30.
Perhaps of even more concern to Trump is that the major news networks are refusing to cover him on television, starving him of media oxygen.
ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News take turns providing the television coverage of the president, and CNN was supposed to be in charge of the TV pool today. With CNN banned, the other networks refused to take its place, leaving television coverage of Trump suspended. A.J. Katz of The Wrap reported on their joint statement, in which they said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
This afternoon, Trump held an event at the White House, but without a press pool, there was no audio. It was just footage of Trump standing with a group of people and apparently talking.
The White House advertised “The White House App” on social media, claiming users could “[g]et real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone. No noise. Just the news that matters most—straight from the Trump Administration. DOWNLOAD NOW,” it said.
Users were not kind. One commented: “I’d rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app.” Others noted that the administration is eager to get its hands on user information, and only a fool would install what could be spyware on their phone.
Peter Alexander of MS NOW had his own response to Trump’s attacks on the press: “This is not normal. This is not business as usual,” he said.
“What’s happening right now is different. The latest threat against our cherished freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The media is not perfect. There’s a debate to be had about who you trust, where you should get your news.
“This is something bigger, though. Among the privileges, the duties of a free press, are to hold power to account, to ask the difficult questions, to document history as it happens. The president says fake news is reporting that is untrue. In fact, it’s reporting that he finds unflattering.
“And here’s the reality. A little more than seven weeks until the midterms, many of the facts are unflattering. Where to begin? Gas prices, now $4.48 a gallon on average, $1.50 more than where they were before the war with Iran began. Ask farmers about the price of diesel, now at a record high, nearly $6.50 a gallon.
“All of it due to a war the president started, a war he vowed would be done within weeks but is now in its seventh month. Eighteen American service members dead, if not more, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
“A trade war with Canada, an obsession with the Kennedy Center, if it’s not demolished like the East Wing, then there’s the grift, the self-dealing, a Russian oligarch paying for Trump’s son’s wedding party, billions of dollars made by the Trump family.
“Those are the facts. They may be unflattering, but they are not fake.
“I’ve been there since the beginning. Trump’s frustration, this fury, it didn’t happen overnight. On the campaign trail, I remember, before he even took office, he would yell at us in the bullpen in the back of those large rallies, riling up the MAGA crowd. Once elected, he would insult reporters to their face—I’ve been there—and he would call journalists the enemy of the people. As one of my former colleagues described it, Trump is trying to discredit the messenger, to create a vacuum where his version of reality fills that void.
“But the answer from journalists is simple. To report more, with more sources, more digging, more facts.”
Trump has his own answer. The White House YouTube channel announced this afternoon that at 7:00 tonight it will launch “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station.”
The comment feature on the channel is turned off.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump's evil plan is backfiring, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 22, 2026. At 1:46 this afternoon, the President of the United States stepped out of the White House to a drumroll and applause as he made his way toward the red, white, and blue ribbons stretched across the pathway to Trump’s new helipad for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
With oversized gold-plated scissors, Donald Trump and two other men, their hands touching, cut through the ribbons together. The entire ceremony lasted less than three minutes, with Donald Trump yelling over the sound of helicopter engines roaring right behind him. Yet not a single word he said could be heard across the live video of the event because, in all of Donald Trump’s wisdom, he decided to ban members of the free press from the White House, and once again, the ramifications of his own actions caught up to him.
After Donald Trump banned multiple news organizations from the White House last Friday afternoon and added: “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow” to the announcement, the cards started to fall for him.
By this morning, all three outlets he had banned in his initial round had filed a 27-page federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Their joint statement said the following: “This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes. Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
In the lawsuit documents, they laid it all out: “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles.” It goes further: “The President banned CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO, and the individual reporters covering the news for those media organizations, in disregard of the most basic guarantees of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause. He did so expressly for the improper purpose of retaliating against Plaintiffs for past news coverage because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting.”
And this is where Donald Trump started to panic. He posted a very long and rambling response to their lawsuit on Truth Social that started with: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer on our Country.” He continued with: “Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.”
He even attacked the judge assigned to the case, whom he appointed to the bench. It is the same one, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who ruled in CNN’s favor back in 2018 when he tried to ban another journalist and was unsuccessful. Trump wrote: “They have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta, who now seems to have disappeared from the Planet.”
But the story took a dramatic turn. Something that has needed to happen for over a year and a half now. The press finally pushed back in a united front. CNN had been scheduled to operate the pool camera on Monday and Tuesday, which means that they were the ones in charge of filming and then sharing the footage with the other outlets. The television pool is a long-standing, decades-old arrangement among five of the top networks, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC. This is how we see what is happening inside the White House and why the angles and filming can often look different from day to day. It is not just a practical arrangement for the networks, but it also keeps them all honest, per se, because no single network controls the camera and the footage every day.
After the White House deactivated the press badges of those three organizations over the weekend when their reporters attempted to access the White House grounds, it became clear that CNN would be unable to fulfill its scheduled pool duty starting today. That forced the other four networks to make a decision about what they were going to do so that there would still be footage for their reporting this week. They could use a replacement crew from one of the networks still allowed by President Trump, which would have meant that Trump now had his answer about how far he could push this, or they could refuse and let there be no coverage. It couldn’t have been an easy decision because that coverage really is important. But they realized that pushing back now would be less painful than them all being banned and replaced by his preferred networks in very short order.
When push came to shove, they all agreed to refuse to provide a replacement. Even Fox News. Its Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, who also serves as the chair of the television pool, personally sent the notice himself: “Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”
The five networks then did something else that we haven’t seen in a long time, if ever: they issued a joint statement. “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Jacqui Heinrich, who is also a Fox News senior White House correspondent, also issued her own statement: “The president said it plainly in the Oval Office, describing his own planned action as a ‘ban on the free press.’ The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference. That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.” She also added: “The implications extend beyond these organizations: a standard used to exclude one news outlet because of its coverage could be applied to any outlet in the future.”
She is saying what so many of us already know about Donald Trump, and it’s not just limited to what is happening with the press. Everything he does is a test to see who pushes back and how hard. He is looking to see how far he can take his assault on our country and the Constitution. What she was saying is that this will not stop with CNN, MS NOW, or Politico. He will remove every network and reporter that he finds “negative” in their reporting of him. He already went after FOX News just last week for not being loyal enough. She knows that this decision not to replace the CNN crew was about way more than taking a stand for the First Amendment. It was also a strategic business decision on her part.
That is why Fox News stood with CNN today. There wasn’t some sudden discovery of a deep commitment to journalistic solidarity, and that needs to be said. It is very important that this finally happened, but it does not erase the role Fox News has played over the years in eroding the line between what is real and true and what is entertainment and propaganda. But even they know that Trump holds loyalty to no one, and this was an act of self-preservation at its finest. Fox also did some basic math. Donald Trump has gone after them before. The only reason Fox has ever felt a level of safety is because he still considered them useful. That can and will change. In this moment, why they did it matters less than the fact that they did. Because when the network that has benefited most from this president’s madness says, “This threatens us too,” it tells us all exactly how dangerous this moment really is.
This wasn’t the only thing the Trump Regime rolled out today. Earlier today, the White House social media account started posting teaser clips from their latest project. One showed an old television set with text that said, “Something’s coming. Stay tuned.” They also posted an AI video of a satellite truck driving through the White House gates. And then at 7 PM, the White House made the final reveal they had been teasing about all day. They launched “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” on its YouTube channel. They described it like this: “Watch the Trump Administration’s biggest moments all in one place. Top videos, major remarks, and must-see highlights streaming 24/7 and updated in real time. Stay informed and stay up to date!” The first thing they chose to post was a two-month-old speech Donald Trump gave at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd. The president attacked the First Amendment and denied the press the access needed to carry out their jobs, and then used taxpayer dollars to produce and distribute propaganda and disinformation.
Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president, described it on X as a “livestream of the Administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered.” Which is absolutely not what it is, and just saying that in and of itself shows how dangerous this all is. It frames legitimate journalism, the act of independent reporting, asking questions, verifying facts, and challenging official statements, as the problem. It makes the American public think that they are being lied to by the press and that the government is the truth-teller here.
When I was watching this play out today, I was trying to imagine if Barack Obama had banned Fox News from the White House. Or if Joe Biden had confiscated the credentials of Fox reporters, like Trump did to CNN, and then launched “Biden TV” on the official White House website. What if either of them had told the American public they could no longer go to their preferred news sources to know what was happening inside their own government and instead had to get their news directly from the government? Every Republican in Congress would have been on camera within the hour calling it tyranny and demanding congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings. Every conservative commentator in the country would have been screaming about the death of the First Amendment and how their rights were being violated. It would have been the only story in America for weeks, and rightfully so.
Of course there are Democrats, historians, and scholars speaking out. Representative Jamie Raskin called on the news media to boycott the White House entirely if Trump “keeps violating press freedom.” Senator Elizabeth Warren said Trump was trying to “hide his failures.” But the question I keep coming back to is: where are the Republicans? Where is the other half of Congress? The First Amendment belongs to every American. The job of the press is not to make any president look good. The press exists to hold power accountable. That is the entire reason it is protected by the Constitution and why freedom of the press was enshrined in the First Amendment. It was so important that it was protected from the very beginning.
What Donald Trump is doing is what fascist regimes have always done, and it is what communist regimes have always done. It is also what authoritarian governments have done throughout history. The names are different, but the playbook they follow in regard to the press is very much the same. They discredit independent media, especially those who speak the truth and do not tailor their coverage to appease the strongman in charge. They call the press the enemy of the people. They restrict access and replace the existing press and media with state-produced and state-controlled content that praises the leader and erases dissent. The Nazis built the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to exert control over what the German public read, heard, and saw. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, subsidized a cheap radio called the Volksempfänger, translated as the “People’s Receiver.” He made sure it was affordable so that German households could receive state broadcasts directly into their homes. What the White House is trying to do is create the Volksempfänger of 2026.
These are desperate times for the Trump Regime, and that is why we are seeing such desperate moves on their part. Today there was a new poll from American Research Group that shows just how much trouble they are in. It found that Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen below 30% for the first time ever, including in either of his two terms. 29% of Americans approve of the job he is doing. 68% disapprove. In news that is not surprising at all, it also showed that his approval on the economy is even lower, at 26%, and 72% of Americans say the economy is getting worse. The last time a sitting president’s approval was in the 20s was with George W. Bush at the end of 2008, during the Great Recession.
But today also showed us something else. Pushing back matters, and it is starting to come from unexpected places. Donald Trump’s desperation and bad outlook ahead of the midterms are making him sloppy. Five competing networks, some with very different interests, were confronted with a choice, and when it mattered, they stood together and said no. That is how we get through this dangerous time for our country. We have to resist at every chance we get because pushing back is the only thing that stops strongmen like him, even if sometimes it means he can’t talk on video and has to yell into the sound of a helicopter while none of us can hear him. Every time someone pushes back and reminds him that ultimately we, the people, hold the power, not him, we get closer to this nightmare ending. And today we got to see what happens when people who have the power to say no actually use it.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Trump Set to Meet With Persian Gulf Allies as Middle East Wars Widen, Ismaeel Naar, Sept. 22, 2026. The Iran war and the fight between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia in Yemen have forced Gulf Arab states to reckon with spiraling conflicts and to reassess U.S. security guarantees.
President Trump is set to meet with officials from the Persian Gulf on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, as the Iran war and the conflict between the Iran-backed Houthis and Saudi Arabia roil the region with little sign of an imminent resolution.
The talks in New York will take place as Gulf Arab leaders have become increasingly anxious about the escalating conflicts and Washington’s commitment to their collective defense.
Since the war between the United States and Iran began more than six months ago, several Gulf Arab countries that host U.S. forces have borne the brunt of Tehran’s retaliation. Iranian missiles and drone attacks have battered U.S. military sites and critical infrastructure across the region, including a U.S. naval base in Bahrain. Gulf Arab countries had long seen the presence of U.S. troops as a way to deter attacks, but the Iranian strikes have forced those states to reassess their positions.
At the same time, Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has hit Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates especially hard, choking off the primary shipping route for their energy exports and putting pressure on their economies. Saudi Arabia was forced to divert its exports to an alternative route through the Red Sea.
Several Gulf Arab leaders have fostered personal and business connections with Mr. Trump’s family. In May, Mr. Trump said he had called off a major strike on Iran after Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar appealed to him directly, believing a deal with Tehran was within reach.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly made claims of such a deal, but no agreement has materialized.
The meeting in New York between Mr. Trump and the Gulf officials comes as a second front has opened in Yemen. Houthi forces have repeatedly clashed with Saudi Arabia and its Yemeni allies in recent weeks, including by striking Riyadh, the Saudi capital, with missiles and drones on Saturday. The Houthis have also captured territory near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a waterway in the Red Sea that Saudi Arabia has used to export oil after the Strait of Hormuz was blocked.
More Global News
New York Times, News Analysis: With Time on His Side, Xi Seeks to Extend Truce With Trump, David Pierson, Updated Sept. 22, 2026. Facing an American president constrained by war and politics, China’s leader may seek to lock in a tactical truce while he shores up a fragile economy at home.
When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and President Trump meet in Washington this week, the two men will be operating on vastly different clocks.
The American president is constrained by the immediate demands of a midterm election in November and a grinding war. The Chinese leader is gearing up for a norm-shattering fourth term as head of the ruling Communist Party, that will keep him in power for another five years.
For Mr. Xi, the disparity in political realities gives him an edge in maintaining the truce that the two countries reached last year. A renewed trade fight would hit American consumers right before the election — a risk Mr. Trump can ill afford. China’s economy is struggling too, but Mr. Xi answers to no electorate, giving him the patience to prolong the détente on his terms.
“Each of Xi’s face-to-face encounters with Trump in his second term would only have reinforced Xi’s prior conviction that Trump is leading an America that is dangerous but declining,” said Jonathan Czin, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who previously worked at the C.I.A. analyzing Chinese politics.
Mr. Xi, who will sit down for talks with Mr. Trump on Thursday, may be wagering that leaning into Mr. Trump’s preference for leader-to-leader diplomacy can insulate the relationship from flash points like the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, and the competition to dominate artificial intelligence.
Keeping Mr. Trump at bay would give Mr. Xi breathing room to work on rejuvenating his listless economy, which has been weakened by a property crisis, high youth unemployment and excess production. It would give him time to rebuild the upper echelons of his military leadership, which he has hollowed out in a drive against corruption and disloyalty. And it would allow him to continue expanding his country’s industrial, technological and military strength for a future showdown with the United States.
Analysts say China benefits every time Mr. Trump’s attention drifts elsewhere. By quarreling with traditional American allies or sinking deeper into the war in Iran,
Mr. Trump is weakening his country's global standing and pulling troops away from the Pacific.
“Xi would love to tell Trump, ‘Go on, stay the course,’” said Suisheng Zhao, executive director of the China Center at the University of Denver. “For Xi, Trump represents a window of opportunity for China, so his priority is to buy more time.”
More On Epstein Files
Kevin Maxwell and Isabel Maxwell arriving at federal court during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in New York, Dec. 3, 2021 (Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters).
Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: Who Introduced Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein? Jana, right, Sept. 22, 2026. A 2020 FBI interview with British telecom executive James Hatt challenges the usual story of how Epstein entered the Maxwell family orbit, placing Kevin Maxwell there first.
Part One: Ghislaine Maxwell: The Daughter of a Spy. For years, the beginning of the Epstein-Maxwell relationship has been treated like settled history. Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein in New York after her father died, they became close, and she entered his world.
But one federal interview in the Epstein files tells a different story.
In 2020, British telecommunications executive James Hatt went to federal investigators with his account of how Jeffrey Epstein first became connected to the Maxwell family. Hatt told the FBI that Kevin Maxwell had known Epstein around 1988 to 1990 and had been instructed to meet him by his father, Robert Maxwell.Ghislaine Maxwell sentencing: Victim 'Kate' delivers powerful impact statement | Daily TelegraphKevin Maxwell and Isabel Maxwell arriving at federal court during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in New York, Dec. 3, 2021. Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters.
Later in the same interview, Hatt gave investigators an even more direct version: according to Kevin, Kevin introduced Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein.
That is Hatt’s account of what Kevin allegedly told him, not an FBI finding. But Hatt was not a random caller with no connection to the world he was describing. SEC records show he spent years at the top of international telecommunications, including as chairman, president and CEO of PLD Telekom, which operated across Russia and the former Soviet sphere.
And what he told investigators went far beyond an introduction. His account moves through the Maxwell family, telecommunications privatization, Russia and Latvia, alleged international money movement and what he called the “Epstein network.”
Then it gets darker.
Hatt told investigators that Ghislaine once offered to procure men, women, boys and girls for him. That allegation was never tested at trial, but it remains in a federal interview file alongside the rest of his account.
Almost nobody is talking about the man who gave it.FBI record of James Hatt’s Nov. 30, 2020 interview, entered Sept. 14, 2021. EFTA01246381James Hatt Went to the Government Himself
Hatt was not someone investigators happened to find. His lawyers contacted federal prosecutors because he wanted to help with the Ghislaine Maxwell investigation. A November 11, 2020 attorney proffer says Hatt had pushed his lawyers to make contact with the government.
The notes describe him as a British businessman with a long career in telecommunications across Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Hatt said he knew both Kevin and Ghislaine Maxwell and had information about when, how and why members of the Maxwell family came to know Epstein.Attorney proffer concerning James Hatt, November 11, 2020. EFTA01246379.
Hatt also said he knew about Epstein’s role in Maxwell family financial affairs, Kevin Maxwell’s business dealings in Eastern Europe and money being moved through accounts tied to Latvian individuals.
He also alleged that Ghislaine procured, or helped Kevin Maxwell and another man procure, young men and women to entertain Russian and Latvian businessmen.
These were Hatt’s allegations, relayed to prosecutors through his lawyers. They were not established findings.Hatt Was Deep in the Telecom World
The corporate record matters because it shows Hatt was not describing some world he only knew from the outside. SEC filings identify James R.S. Hatt as chairman, president and CEO of PLD Telekom, and a 1997 filing has him personally certifying the company’s move into Delaware in that role. PLD was heavily involved in telecommunications across Russia and the former Soviet Union, with interests in long-distance, satellite, cellular and fiber-optic businesses. Its structure ran through companies including Baltic Communications Limited, NWE Capital in Cyprus and Russian telecom subsidiaries, backed by more than $100 million in senior notes and tens of millions more in convertible debt.
Hatt later told the FBI that he had worked for Cable & Wireless and was sent to Moscow in 1988 to look for business opportunities as the Soviet system was changing. That lines up with the corporate record of his career across Eastern Europe, the CIS and the Baltic states. Hatt was talking about a business world he had actually spent years inside.Metromedia International Group filing listing James R.S. Hatt as president and chief executive officer of Metromedia International Telecommunications, Inc., 2000.Hatt Says Kevin Knew Epstein First
Hatt told investigators he came into the Maxwell world through telecommunications. According to the FBI summary, a Canadian Alcatel agent named John William Mancony introduced him to Kevin and Ghislaine Maxwell in London in 1993.The Maxwell family, photographed together before Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991.
But Hatt said Kevin already knew Epstein by then. He told investigators Kevin had known him while living in New York around 1988 to 1990 and that Kevin had been instructed to meet Epstein by his father, Robert Maxwell. In the same passage, Hatt says Robert never actually met Epstein, but still trusted him “in his realm.”FBI interview of James Hatt, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246382
The file never explains how Robert Maxwell could have trusted Epstein without meeting him, and Hatt’s account does not prove Robert actually gave Kevin that instruction. But if Hatt was right, Epstein was connected to the Maxwell family before Robert died in 1991, with Kevin there before Ghislaine. Later in the interview, Hatt says that even more directly.“According to Kevin, Kevin Introduced Maxwell to Epstein”
On page four of the FBI interview, Hatt gets much more direct. The summary records: “According to KEVIN, KEVIN introduced MAXWELL to EPSTEIN.”James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246384
That is the clearest statement in the file about who Hatt believed introduced Ghislaine to Epstein. His version is simple: Robert Maxwell knew of Epstein and told Kevin to meet him, Kevin knew Epstein around 1988 to 1990, and Kevin later introduced Ghislaine.
Ghislaine has described the beginning differently. That does not tell us which version is right, but it does mean the origin story is not as settled as it has often been presented.Then the Story Turns to Money
Hatt’s account did not stop at introductions. He described a telecommunications privatization deal involving Latvia, Alcatel and businessman Grigory Luchansky, with money moving through several channels. According to the FBI summary, the participants planned to use Epstein’s services in New York because Kevin had known him for years.
Hatt described it this way:
“There was a bifurcation of funds to Latvia. It would move through the EPSTEIN network then back to New York then to the accounts in Latvia.”
James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246383
The same page says Ghislaine sometimes carried instructions between meetings because Kevin believed phones were bugged, and Hatt said he was present for some of the money discussions. The FBI summary does not tell us whether investigators verified any of this. But Hatt’s version is clear: Epstein was not just a friend. He was part of the financial setup.The New York Daily News Appears in the Story
Hatt told investigators that after Robert Maxwell’s death, Kevin and Ian Maxwell were bankrupt and facing freezing orders, and that the family needed ways to access money Epstein had held. Then the interview drops a line that is hard to ignore: “So much money with EPSTEIN came from the New York Daily News.”James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246382
The FBI summary does not explain exactly what Hatt meant by that, and there is not enough here to turn it into a proven money-laundering scheme. But it is part of why his account deserves a closer look. The American Prospect revisited the Hatt material in February 2026, focusing on his claim that Epstein was involved in Maxwell family financial dealings around the collapse of Robert Maxwell’s empire.
That money trail still needs to be independently rebuilt. What is clear is that Hatt was describing something much deeper than the familiar story of Epstein simply becoming close to Ghislaine after her father died.Ghislaine Was Part of the Financial Side Too
Hatt did not describe Ghislaine as standing on the edge of the financial activity. He said she attended meetings, carried instructions and spent significant time with Kevin around telecommunications business.James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246385
On the final page, Hatt described the money relationship more directly: “MAXWELL and EPSTEIN’s relationship about money was overseen by KEVIN with oversight by MAXWELL.” The wording is awkward, but the picture he was giving investigators was not. He was describing Kevin, Ghislaine and Epstein as part of the same financial dealings.Ghislaine Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street. EFTA00003333Then Comes the Most Disturbing Allegation
Hatt said that in September 1995, he had lunch on the Upper East Side with Kevin Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and another woman. According to the FBI summary, Ghislaine told him she could arrange “men, women, boys and girls” for him, “whatever or however many he wanted.” Hatt said she recited it “as though it was a menu.” He told investigators he laughed it off and declined.James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246384
This allegation was never tested at Maxwell’s criminal trial, and I have not found evidence that Hatt testified before the jury. But the date matters: 1995, years before Epstein’s Palm Beach investigation became public and long before the scale of his abuse was widely known.Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. EFTA00003289Hatt Named Other People Too
Hatt also gave prosecutors a wider set of names, including Malcolm Gumbridge, John Manton, Anthony McFarland and Gerald Ronson, along with Russian and Latvian businessmen and a figure identified as General Ivanov. Their names appearing here does not mean they did anything wrong. It does show how wide Hatt’s account went.Attorney proffer concerning James Hatt, Nov. 11, 2020. EFTA01246379
Those names are worth going through one by one against company records, travel, financial records and the rest of the Epstein files.Leah Saffian Appears at the End
Near the end of the interview, Hatt said Kevin mentioned attorney Leah Saffian, describing her as part of his legal team around 1995 to 1996 and saying he wanted Hatt to meet her in California. Hatt also said he later recognized Saffian in connection with the photograph of Ghislaine Maxwell at an In-N-Out Burger.James Hatt FBI interview, Nov. 30, 2020. EFTA01246385
Saffian later became publicly associated with Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal and media response. The earlier connection is worth noting, but on its own it only shows that her relationship with the Maxwell family went back much further.
Leah Saffian, left, with Isabel Maxwell outside federal court in Manhattan during jury deliberations in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Dec. 21, 2021. Photo: Emily Michot/Miami Herald.
What We Can Actually Check
Hatt was describing events that had happened years earlier, and some of what he told investigators was never tested in court. Kevin Maxwell has never been charged in connection with Epstein, and he and Ian Maxwell were acquitted in 1996 over charges tied to the collapse of their father’s business empire.
But Hatt’s background is documented. His telecom career, his senior role at PLD and his work across Eastern Europe all put him inside the same business world he later described to investigators.
The interview gives us names, dates, meetings and business relationships we can actually go back and check.The Beginning May Be Different Than We Were Told
The question I keep coming back to is simple: who actually introduced Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein?
According to Hatt, Kevin Maxwell said he did. Hatt also said Kevin had known Epstein around 1988 to 1990 and had been told by Robert Maxwell to meet him, even though Robert supposedly never met Epstein himself.
If Hatt’s account is right, then Epstein was already connected to the Maxwell family before Robert died, with Kevin there first and Ghislaine coming later. That matters because Hatt was not describing a world he barely knew. He had spent years in international telecom, working across the same places and business networks he later talked about to the FBI, and he went to prosecutors himself with names, dates, meetings and financial claims.
If Hatt was right about the beginning, then we have been starting the Epstein-Maxwell timeline in the wrong place.
Sept. 21
Top Headlines
New York Times, Times Exclusive: Trump Gets Caught in a Dilemma Over a Saudi Plea for Military Help, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 21, 2026 (print ed.). The president vacillated but decided on Sunday not to join Saudi Arabia, for now, in joint strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. But he also needs the kingdom’s cooperation in his war against Iran.
Special Report: Trump's Pro-Russia Policy Seeking 'Strategic Suicide' For Ukraine?
Plumes of smoke rise from fires (centre) at an oil refinery following what the authorities say is a Ukrainian drone strike in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Moscow
Sept. 21, 2026. Never mind crude oil; distillates are the problem now. A little over a week ago Donald Trump, who has made many unreasonable demands on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, added a new one: "Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel." Now Trump, having already betrayed Ukraine to Putin, is demanding that Zelenskyy commit strategic suicide. He wants the Ukrainians to go easy on Russia because the indirect effects of those attacks are hurting Republicans’ prospects in the midterm elections. Special Reports: Trump Family Corruption
Sept. 21, 2026. A look inside the crypto deals, foreign money, and government contracts fueling the Trump family's historic wealth surge.
Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
Sept. 21, 2026. Let’s be super crystal clear about what’s going on here. The ‘United States Military’ didn’t make any ‘strong request’ to put sniper nests on a ginormous arch that’s within shooting range of the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. There’s no ‘National Security purpose’ to being able to kill tourists. Not one person in the Donnyverse has been able to articulate the exact reason why the White House needs drones and snipers. Who are they expecting to be shooting at? Protesters? Us? We the people? 
Sleepy Don is frustrated.
Sept. 21, 2026. A jam-packed day, so a jam-packed newsletter. Moscow is burning; China’s Xi gets ready to steal Donald Trump’s lunch; the price of diesel tops $6.50 a gallon; the Houthis are on the march; the war in the Mideast expands; Trump dithers, then throws the Saudis under the bus; and the President of Peace announces plans to put sharks with laser beams snipers and drones on his ginormous Vanity Arch.News Updates
Sept. 21, 2026. Trump banned three news outlets and then watched every major network walk out on him in solidarity. The White House launched its own government run streaming channel. And in the middle of all that, my inbox and my mentions were full of something else entirely, the fallout from today’s investigation into the Trump family’s finances.More On U.S. Courts, Media, Arts
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 20, 2026 [Trump Continues Attack On DC Arts, Historical, Cultural Icons], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.
will oversee news outlets’ lawsuit over White House ban, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly restored former CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s White House press pass during Trump’s first term.
Sept. 21, 2026. This morning, MS NOW, CNN & POLITICO sued Donald Trump for banning them from the White House. He did that because he doesn’t like their reporting about him; he made that very clear. The plaintiffs argue that Trump has violated the First and Fifth Amendments, and as we discussed Saturday night, there is no doubt that they are correct.Debates Over Artificial Intelligence and Its Impacts
Sept. 21, 2026. I’m going to keep banging this drum: It isn’t the most important issue in politics yet, but when it comes to AI, Donald Trump is handing Democrats an absolutely massive opportunity.More On U.S. Elections, Politics
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a two-term Republican incumber and his Democratic rival, Texas State Rep. Gina Hinojosa.
Sept. 21, 2026. Just like I predicted right here in this publication almost two years ago. For the first time this election cycle, a nonpartisan public poll shows Democrat Gina Hinojosa leading Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the race for Texas governor, part of a broader ReconMR/Siena survey that found Democrats ahead in three of the state’s four marquee contests.More On U.S. Governance, Trump Plans
More On U.S. China Relationship
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
More Global News
More On U.S. Media, High-Tech, Education, Sports, Religion
Ban Backfires As Trump Holds Event But There Are No Microphones To Record Sound, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Donald Trump got a lesson in FAFO, when he banned reporters from the White House, so when Trump held an event, there was no sound because no microphones were present.
Sept. 21, 2026. President Trump has amassed an unprecedented war chest of $400 million that can be spent to influence the 2026 midterms through the MAGA Inc. super PAC.Top Stories
New York Times, Times Exclusive: Trump Gets Caught in a Dilemma Over a Saudi Plea for Military Help, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 21, 2026 (print ed.). The president vacillated but decided on Sunday not to join Saudi Arabia, for now, in joint strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. But he also needs the kingdom’s cooperation in his war against Iran.
For two weeks, the question of whether to yield to pleas from Saudi Arabia and order the U.S. military to strike targets in Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis has bedeviled President Trump.
A decision to go forward could open another front in the war against Iran that Mr. Trump started but has been unable to end as it spreads economic shock around the globe.
The president had wavered for weeks over the Saudi appeals for help in fighting the Houthis, who took advantage of the instability in the Middle East and reignited their war with the kingdom this summer.
But things came to a head on Thursday: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader and a major ally in the Iran war, called the president to implore him, again, to step in to help blunt the rapidly advancing group, administration officials said.
Mr. Trump had met with advisers just the day before and told them he did not favor strikes. But after speaking with the Saudi crown prince, he reversed himself and told the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes against the Houthis.
But by midday Sunday, the president appeared to have reversed himself again. There would be no U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis — at least not for the time being, according to administration officials. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss military planning.
The White House press office declined to discuss Mr. Trump’s deliberations for the record. A senior administration official would say only that “the U.S. has a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia and we will always defend our allies.”Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.
Most of the president’s inner circle was either deeply skeptical or outright opposed to joining the Saudi fight against the Houthis, especially given the existing strains facing the U.S. military in the war with Iran, according to a senior administration official.
Mr. Trump’s decision to pull back from, or at least delay, striking Houthi targets came as commanders had approved target lists, troops were loading bombs onto U.S. warplanes selected for the missions and the wave of attacks was just about to begin, according to two people briefed on the operation.
In a telephone call with Fox News on Sunday morning, the president told the reporter Trey Yingst that he was in “deciding mode” on what to do in the larger war with Iran. On the topic of the Houthis, the president said the United States was in constant communication with the group, mentioning that the Houthis had so far agreed not to fight the United States, Mr. Yingst reported.
The gyrations reflect the quandary in which the president now finds himself: He is correct when he says that the Houthis have steered clear of attacking U.S. ships. But they have gone after Saudi Arabia, creating a dilemma for Mr. Trump.
Some U.S. military officials have argued that the United States needs the kingdom’s help with the war in Iran, and Saudi officials have shown they are willing to exercise what leverage they have in the absence of U.S. cooperation. For instance, in May, Saudi Arabia effectively halted the Trump administration’s plan to use the U.S. military to escort commercial oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz by refusing the United States use of its airspace and American air bases in the country.
If the United States did join the Saudi fight, it could be in conjunction with a new planned ground offensive by Yemeni government troops, officials said. But those forces have proved ineffective against the Houthis.
The Houthis have been fighting with Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia, since 2014. The violence slowed after a truce took effect in 2022, but the group waded into the widening war in the Middle East this summer by declaring a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea and attacking Saudi vessels.
Amid the fighting, the Houthis captured critical areas near the Bab al-Mandab Strait — a major choke point along the Red Sea — threatening to unsettle global energy markets already reeling from the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
Current and former U.S. diplomats and commanders who served in the Middle East expressed skepticism that a limited U.S. bombing campaign would compel the Houthis, who withstood nearly eight weeks of U.S. bombardment last year, to negotiate and drop their most hard-line demands.
The officials also voiced doubts about the efficacy of supporting a dysfunctional Yemeni force that has melted away at the first major contact with the Houthis in recent weeks.
Since last year’s cease-fire, the Houthis have reconstituted much of their capabilities and are even using artificial intelligence to develop and engineer new types of missiles.
The current and former officials said that defeating the Houthis would be difficult, even with the U.S. military helping the Saudis.
New York Times, Networks Suspend Pool Coverage of Trump After White House Bans CNN, Michael M. Grynbaum and Ali Watkins, Sept. 21, 2026. The move was an escalation of President Trump’s showdown with the White House press corps after he moved to bar journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico.
Major television networks agreed to suspend their pooled coverage of President Trump after the White House refused to allow CNN to serve as a pool representative on Monday.
The move is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing showdown with the White House press corps, in the wake of the president’s move to bar journalists at CNN, MS NOW and Politico from entering the White House grounds. Those three outlets said on Monday they would sue to regain access.
Five networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — have long shared the responsibility of providing television coverage of presidential events, splitting the financial costs and distributing footage that is carried by news organizations worldwide. The networks perform their duties on a rotation, and CNN had been slated to provide coverage for Mr. Trump’s travel on Monday to the United Nations General Assembly.
The president’s activities on Monday are still expected to be covered by print, radio and wire journalists, along with still photographers.
“Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Bryan Boughton, the Washington bureau chief at Fox News, wrote in a note to television pool members on Monday, which was obtained by The New York Times. (Mr. Boughton is the acting chair of the television pool consortium; the networks rotate the chairmanship on a quarterly basis.)
“This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties,” Mr. Boughton wrote. “There will be no replacement pool put in place. All other pool coverage will continue as normal.”
“We will provide updates as this situation develops,” he added.
It is extremely rare for a president to travel or hold public events without being accompanied by representatives from the television pool.
On Friday, President Trump escalated his clashes with the news media by announcing a ban on the three news outlets, saying he was fed up with what he described as “purposely negative stories.” Journalists from the three organizations had their badges confiscated when they arrived at the White House complex on Saturday.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said in a joint statement on Monday that they would sue the Trump administration for barring them from the White House, saying it was a violation of their First Amendment rights to cover the president. Experts say the ban is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny.
Mr. Trump defended his decision in a social media post on Monday. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish,” he said. “It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.”
Special Report: Trump's Pro-Russia Policy Seeking 'Strategic Suicide' For Ukraine?
Plumes of smoke rise from fires (centre) at an oil refinery following what the authorities say is a Ukrainian drone strike in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Moscow
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Of Donald and Diesel, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Never mind crude oil; distillates are the problem now.
Plumes of smoke rise from fires (centre) at an oil refinery following what the authorities say is a Ukrainian drone strike in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Moscow
A Moscow refinery burning
A little over a week ago Donald Trump, who has made many unreasonable demands on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, added a new one:
Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel.
Even for a New Yorker, the chutzpah was striking. For those not familiar with the term, chutzpah is when you murder your mother and father, then plead for leniency because you’re an orphan.
Trump has effectively created this situation by cutting off all aid to Ukraine, while in addition denying the Ukrainians even the ability to buy Patriot interceptors. Those missiles would have allowed them to fend off Vladimir Putin’s relentless missile attacks on civilian targets. Trump’s actions were clearly intended to leave Ukraine defenseless. But the Ukrainians — with help from the democracies of Europe — have survived, responding to Putin’s attacks by using their own, home-grown, drones and cruise missiles to make effective strikes against Russia’s energy infrastructure.
Last night, for example, a massive, coordinated Ukrainian assault set Moscow’s largest oil refinery ablaze.
Now Trump, having already betrayed Ukraine to Putin, is demanding that Zelenskyy commit strategic suicide. He wants the Ukrainians to go easy on Russia because the indirect effects of those attacks are hurting Republicans’ prospects in the midterm elections. As I said, chutzpah.
Aside from the outrageous nature of his demands, Trump’s remarks were interesting because they reveal the extent to which refined products, especially diesel, have replaced crude oil as the key bottleneck in the global energy crisis.
I still sometimes see commentators asserting that fears about the effects of Trump’s disastrous Iran war on energy prices were overstated, because the price of crude oil is “only” $102 a barrel, far above prewar prices but well below the $150-$200 range some analysts warned was possible. But nobody burns crude oil; they burn products refined from crude oil, mainly gasoline and diesel. And here’s what has happened to the price of diesel:Diesel is currently selling at more than $200 a barrel. It’s true that there is always a “crack spread” between crude and diesel, but it’s typically on the order of $20. So the price of diesel is currently roughly what we would normally expect with crude at around $190.
The current world energy crisis, then, is largely a crisis in petroleum products, refined from crude oil, rather than in petroleum itself. And its proximate cause is a global shortage of refining capacity. As an informative report by Matthew Dalton in the Wall Street Journal put it, “Refineries Are Now the Main Chokepoint for Global Energy Supplies.”
Regular readers may recall that I’ve been making this point for a couple of months. And the shortage of refining capacity is, in turn, helping to keep crude prices down. As I wrote last month, “Buyers aren’t willing to pay extremely high prices for oil they can’t refine.”
So, chutzpah aside, is Trump right to attribute high diesel prices to Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries? No and yes.
Much of the world’s refining capacity is located in the Middle East, where it has been disrupted by Trump’s war. As Dalton notes,
the diesel blocked in the Persian Gulf is around three times as large as supplies missing from Russia compared with before the Iran war
However, the way refineries have replaced crude production as the world’s main energy chokepoint reflects the fact that refining capacity has been reduced more than crude production. And the disruption of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz has reduced world supplies of both crude and refined products. It’s at least arguable that Ukraine’s air campaign, which has done much more damage to Russia’s refining than to its crude production, has therefore played a disproportionate role in driving up diesel prices.
And expensive diesel is a big problem for the economy.
High diesel prices raise the cost of living, mainly through indirect effects. Relatively few passenger cars burn diesel — but diesel powers almost all large commercial trucks and two thirds of farm and construction equipment. So high diesel prices raise the cost of production across the economy, cost increases that eventually get passed on in the form of higher inflation.
Furthermore, rising diesel prices are even more likely than rising gasoline prices to drive up interest rates.
Why? The Federal Reserve, which sets short-term interest rates, normally focuses on “core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices. I’ve written many times about the reasons this focus makes sense. And the focus on core inflation typically leads the Fed to “look through” surges in gasoline prices, which affect headline inflation but not core inflation.
However, because surging diesel prices mostly raise inflation indirectly, via producer costs, they drive up core inflation in a way rising gas prices don’t. And this makes it hard for the Fed to avoid raising rates in the face of higher inflation.
One could argue that the Fed should adjust its measure of core inflation to exclude the effects of diesel prices too. But right now the Fed’s credibility is wobbly: It’s under constant pressure from Trump to cut rates, and many people are still suspicious about the motives of Kevin Warsh, Trump’s hand-picked Fed chair. So this is not a time when the Fed can afford to be seen changing its criteria for monetary policy in a way that might weaken its fight against inflation.
Between their direct effect on inflation and their indirect effect on interest rates, then, high diesel prices are an economic problem for America and a political problem for Donald Trump. Ukraine’s strikes on Russia are contributing to that problem. So Trump actually has good reasons to want Ukraine to stop its highly effective air campaign.
But he neither should nor will get what he wants. Remember the chutzpah factor. You don’t get to betray a nation, then demand that it help you politically, offering nothing in return.
Special Reports: Trump Family Corruption
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Major Deep Dive: Exposing the Trump Family's Unprecedented White House Cash Machine, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 21, 2026. A look inside the crypto deals, foreign money, and government contracts fueling the Trump family's historic wealth surge.
Donald Trump did not just return to the White House in 2025. He returned to it as a business opportunity, and eighteen months in, the numbers show just how thoroughly he and his family have treated the presidency as a revenue stream rather than a public trust. Trump’s personal wealth has ballooned by more than 165 percent since his second inauguration, reaching an estimated $6.3 billion. His overall revenue jumped to at least $2.2 billion in 2025 alone, compared with a minimum of $622 million the year before he took office, according to his own financial disclosure. No American president in the 250-year history of the office has ever converted the job itself into personal income at this scale, and the money trail runs through crypto exchanges, defense contractors, foreign sovereign wealth funds, Wall Street trading desks, and a growing list of corporations writing checks to his pet projects.
I am offline today for Yom Kippur, but I wanted to make sure you had this major deep dive regardless. Stories like this will get me major pushback, but only get written because readers fund them, not because a billionaire owner or an advertiser decides it’s convenient. Tracing every filing, every disclosure form, and every contradiction takes real time, and that work only keeps happening if enough people who value it become paid subscribers. If you think this story is worth someone staying on top of it every week, not just once, subscribe now and help keep this kind of reporting going.Subscribed
It is completely unprecedented, said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney whose book All the Presidents’ Money traces the history of presidential wealth back 250 years. Historians who study the presidency agree there is no real precedent for a president launching brand-new business ventures on the eve of his own inauguration and then personally profiting from them while in office. “Public office, if anything, was a source of debt, not a source of revenue,” Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, told the New York Times.
Princeton historian Julian Zelizer put it even more bluntly in an interview with the Guardian: “Trump has figured out a way to monetize the presidency, political power and public policy in ways no other president has achieved. In the first term, he created the thinnest of firewalls between his business and policy. In the second term, he didn’t put up any firewall and smashed all guardrails that existed.” Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, was more direct still, saying it “already looks like the most openly corrupt administration in our history... Whether you’re a foreign country, a company or an individual who wants the government to approve a business deal, stop an investigation or just be a friend when you need a favor, the message is that this is a pay to play administration.”The money trail at a glance
Before getting into the details, it helps to see the full scale side by side. These are the major, documented revenue streams that have flowed to Trump personally, to his sons, or to the businesses that carry his name since he returned to office:
This is not an exhaustive list. It excludes merchandise royalties, event revenue at Trump properties, and dozens of smaller foreign deals that are harder to price. But it shows the shape of the operation: a presidency that generates cash for the man holding it, for the family running his businesses, and for the allies investing alongside them.A break from 250 years of precedent
Previous presidents and their families have occasionally brushed up against business conflicts, but historians say nothing compares to what’s happening now. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, owned a profitable Austin radio station, but after Kennedy’s assassination she transferred her radio and television stations into a trust controlled by an outside lawyer and station executive to avoid the appearance of conflict, according to Mark Updegrove, chief executive of the LBJ Foundation. George W. Bush sat on the board of an oil company before entering politics and sold his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team before his 2000 presidential run. Jimmy Carter turned over operation of his peanut farm to an independent trustee while in office. Even Warren Harding, who kept ownership of an Ohio newspaper that had been in his family for decades, agreed to sell it after questions were raised about the investment.
When children or siblings of past presidents pursued business deals, even relatively minor ones, they generated intense backlash. Jimmy Carter’s brother endorsed “Billy Beer.” James Roosevelt, son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was forced out of his government post after The New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post exposed what became known as the “Jimmy’s Got It” scandal over his insurance business dealings. Hunter Biden was paid by a Ukrainian natural gas company while his father was vice president, and it became a defining political controversy for years.
“Presidents have worked assiduously to show they are not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue,” said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “The Trump White House seems to go in the opposite direction: that if we do so much of it, people will not think anything about it is weird.” Updegrove agreed: “It is the openness, the flagrant nature of what they are doing, almost with pride, cashing in on the office itself. That’s what makes it dramatically different.”
Trump’s own family has been unapologetic about the shift. “The first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway,” Eric Trump said shortly before the 2024 election, arguing the presidency had cost his father “an absolute fortune.” He added: “We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t.” In 2017, at the start of Trump’s first term, the family had pledged not to pursue new international business deals for exactly that reason. That pledge no longer exists.
Structurally, Trump has also declined to do what nearly every modern president has done: place assets in a genuinely blind trust or divest entirely. His sons run day-to-day operations through trusts set up after his 2016 election, but Trump remains the beneficiary of those trusts, meaning every dollar the business earns still flows back to him personally.Stream one: the crypto empire
The single largest source of Trump’s new wealth is cryptocurrency, an industry Trump called a “scam” and a “disaster waiting to happen” as recently as 2021, before it poured millions into his 2024 campaign. Trump co-founded the family crypto venture World Liberty Financial in the fall of 2024 with the family of Steve Witkoff, who is now Trump’s special Middle East envoy, and it is now run day-to-day by his son Zach Witkoff and the Trump family. The business has generated $799 million for Trump, much of it from a payment tied to an investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates buying a stake in the company. Separately, Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, launched three days before his inauguration, has brought in another $636 million, more than his entire worldwide business income in all of 2024. Two hundred and twenty of the coin’s top investors were invited to a private reception with the president.
That memecoin business got a direct assist from Trump’s own government. A February 2025 SEC staff statement declared that memecoins would no longer be subject to agency oversight, reversing the position taken under the Biden-era SEC, which had applied a broad legal test to nearly every crypto token. Four months later, World Liberty Financial introduced its own stablecoin, and in July 2025 Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, formally promoting stablecoins as a legitimate financial product nationwide.
The human cost of the memecoin has been steep for ordinary investors. A February industry report found that $TRUMP and the first lady’s $MELANIA coin “erased an estimated $4.3 billion in retail wealth in recent months, with 2 million holders currently underwater,” even as 45 early-holder wallets profited by a combined $1.2 billion. Overall, roughly one million investors in Trump-linked crypto schemes have lost almost $3.8 billion as volatile holdings tanked. Timothy Massad, director of the digital assets policy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, summed up the disconnect: “Although the president talks about digital assets as the frontier of finance and making the United States the crypto capital of the world, the disclosure form suggests his personal strategy is to make a quick buck from crypto... but then invest his profits in traditional assets like stocks and bonds.”
World Liberty Financial’s fortunes are also tangled up with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. money-laundering laws and paid a $4.3 billion Justice Department fine. 
Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who still owns roughly 90 percent of the company, pleaded guilty separately to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, served a four-month jail term in 2024, and received a pardon from Trump last October. Despite Binance’s promises to clean up, internal investigators found roughly $1.7 billion in crypto had moved through the exchange to Iranian entities linked to terrorism. World Liberty Financial was tapped to play a central role when MGX, an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment fund, pledged $2 billion to buy a stake in Binance using WLF’s own stablecoin, USD1, directly bolstering the Trump family firm.
Cornell economist Eswar Prasad said the regulatory pattern speaks for itself: “The Trump administration has clearly shifted the priorities and focus of the government’s regulatory apparatus to look past any and all sins of the crypto industry, thereby directly benefiting the Trump family’s financial interests.” After a 2025 memecoin event at Mar-a-Lago drew conflict-of-interest accusations, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said only that Trump was “abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president.”Stream two: selling access to the presidency itself
This summer, Trump Media pushed the monetization further with a new product called Truth API, which offers Wall Street firms early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month. Because Trump’s posts routinely move markets, watchdogs and Democrats call it a direct sale of insider access to the presidency. Senator Mark Warner wrote to six major Wall Street trade groups urging them to reject the arrangement, warning them not to “legitimize an arrangement that sells privileged access to market-moving presidential communications, especially for the president’s personal financial benefit.” Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff went further, writing to the SEC to call it “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.”
Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at Democracy Defenders Action, called it “a significant escalation in exploiting and monetizing the presidency for his personal private gain,” warning it is “a step towards normalizing insider trading and public corruption, disregarding the damage it may cause to regular investors who will not have the same access as his wealthy institutional customers.” She added that Trump is “increasingly dependent on the presidency to generate business profits since his media company has been losing money over the past several quarters.” That losing streak is real: Trump Media reported a $238 million loss in the three months through June as it branched into new businesses including crypto, up from a $20 million loss a year earlier.Stream three: suing the government, then settling with himself
Perhaps the clearest case of self-dealing involves Trump’s own Justice Department. Last year Trump sought $230 million in compensation from the DOJ over the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago during the classified documents investigation. In January, Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization filed a separate $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury Department after a former IRS contractor illegally leaked his tax returns. Trump initially sought to establish a fund of nearly $1.8 billion, reportedly telling allies he “gave up a lot of money in allowing” the fund to be created, before backlash from Congress and the courts forced a partial retreat.
To resolve these and related cases, the administration agreed to distribute $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds to people who say they were targeted for political prosecution by past administrations, a group that includes Trump supporters imprisoned for the January 6 Capitol attack. The Justice Department has said it will comply with a court ruling that temporarily blocked the fund after congressional outcry.
Buried in the same deal, and drawing far less attention, the government agreed to drop pending IRS audits of Trump and his relatives, a provision that could save Trump and his family roughly $100 million. Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Michigan law school, called it self-dealing in its purest form: “The judge assigned to the case later found that because Trump controlled both sides of the case, there was no adversity of parties to provide the court with jurisdiction. Instead, Trump used the court to legitimize what was essentially a gift to him at taxpayer expense.”Stream four: the sons’ defense and mining empire
Donald Trump Jr., 48, and Eric Trump, 42, have separately built personal fortunes off the back of their father’s policies. Eric’s net worth has grown tenfold to $400 million since the 2024 election, and Don Jr.’s has grown sixfold to an estimated $300 million, according to Forbes figures. Don Jr. invests through 1789 Capital, a venture dedicated to what it calls “patriotic capitalism.” Eric’s vehicle is American Ventures, a branch of the boutique investment bank Dominari Holdings, based inside Trump Tower. Neither son holds a formal government role, which the family says eliminates any conflict.
Companies the two sons have invested in have won at least $3.2 billion in direct federal contracts since the brothers came aboard, with another $3.1 billion in future contract options, according to Washington Post analysis. Here’s how that breaks down:
The Vulcan Elements loan is the most scrutinized of these deals. ProPublica reported that the loan request came from Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade adviser and a friend of Trump Jr.’s, and that Pentagon staff worked “at an unusually rapid pace... work[ing] late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks.” After the award, estimates of Vulcan’s valuation grew tenfold. A group of congressional Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, wrote to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles demanding “a full explanation for what appears to be an egregious example of Trump administration corruption involving the White House delivering a lucrative Defence Department loan to a company with financial ties to the Trump family.” They added: “The American public — and servicemembers that are in harm’s way — expect that the DoD contracting process is fair, unbiased and competitive to ensure that only the best companies, providing only the best products, receive taxpayer dollars.” The White House has not responded to the letter.
Beyond defense, the sons’ portfolios extend into prediction markets, with investments in companies like Polymarket now under CFTC scrutiny, and into critical minerals mining ventures, including projects in Kazakhstan pursuing billions of dollars in federal assistance. None of these ventures generate profit for Trump directly, but they do enrich his children while his administration shapes the regulatory and funding environment those industries depend on.
The Atlantic, MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption, Anne Applebaum, right, Staff writer and author of "Red Famine" and "Gulag," among other major works about dictators and their policies, Sept. 14, 2026. Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.
In the summer of 2025, the government of Brazil suddenly found itself in a deep crisis. The Trump administration had unexpectedly imposed 50 percent tariffs on the country’s products, threatening everyone from coffee planters to shoe manufacturers. At the same time, the United States canceled the visas of eight 
Brazilian supreme-court justices and placed unprecedented financial and travel sanctions on a powerful justice and his family.
Many things about this crisis were novel. For the first time anyone could remember, an American administration had used tariffs not for economic reasons but as a tool to influence the internal politics of a friendly democracy.
President Trump was publicly fulminating against what he called the “WITCH HUNT” against Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who was then on trial for plotting to carry out a coup after losing an election in 2022. Some of Bolsonaro’s followers had stormed Brazil’s Parliament and other federal buildings, likely inspired by the actions of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Steve Bannon, who called the Brazilian insurrectionists “freedom fighters,” was one of many MAGA boosters who cheered them on. When combined with local grievances, the language of American election denial was right at home in Brazil.
The U.S. has used financial sanctions and visa bans in the past—but only to punish dictators, criminals, and people accused of grand-scale international corruption or brutal atrocities. Brazilian Justice Alexandre de 
Moraes, right, had never been credibly accused of any of this. But by the Trump administration’s reckoning, he had two strikes against him: First, de Moraes’s court was trying Bolsonaro; second, he had provoked the ire of Elon Musk, Trump’s largest election donor. De Moraes “needs to leave,” Musk said, comparing him to Voldemort, after de Moraes threatened to fine X and ordered it to block accounts accused of spreading disinformation.
The crisis was novel in other ways too. In normal times, the Brazilian government is reasonably well connected in Washington, regardless of who runs either country. The tenth-largest economy in the world, Brazil cooperates extensively with U.S. law enforcement and regional organizations.
Yet at this crucial moment, with billions of dollars in the balance and Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister, a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls.
The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington, which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.
Autocracy in America: The kleptocracy club
That put the Brazilians in a strange position. “All the official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”
Some of these visitors were types not previously known in Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer.
A truce was finally arranged, multiple people told me, with the help of Joesley Batista, a billionaire whose meatpacking company does business in both the U.S. and Brazil, and whose American subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration (more than the contributions of Amazon, Meta, and Google combined). Batista had no official government role, but his money may have given him the clout to influence Trump’s meetings with Lula at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, and at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, where the two elderly populists, each with grievances against their respective establishments, hit it off. The tariffs were reduced.
The détente was temporary. When I visited São Paulo and Brasília this past spring, the State Department had just appointed a new senior adviser on Brazil policy. Before working for the administration, Darren Beattie founded Revolver News, a website that promoted the “Fedsurrection” conspiracy—the belief that federal agents were behind the riots on January 6, an obsession that would naturally appeal to Brazil’s election deniers and displease the elected president. When Beattie asked to visit Brazil for a minerals conference, the Brazilian government refused to grant him a visa, in part because it suspected that his true purpose was to visit Jair Bolsonaro, then in prison.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump Announces New Plan for 250-foot Military Arch at Gateway of Arlington National Cemetery To Include Sniper Nests, Drones, Ammo Dump.
President Trump's Announcement above, with text copied below:
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Trump's Militarized Super-Arch at Arlington National Cemetery, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Sept. 21, 2026.
Okay, before we get into the nuts and bolts of this oh-so-now-all-of-a-sudden-it’s-a-military-arch, can we just parse this mystifying claim that ‘out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH’?
Let’s be super crystal clear about what’s going on here. The ‘United States Military’ didn’t make any ‘strong request’ to put sniper nests on a ginormous arch that’s within shooting range of the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. There’s no ‘National Security purpose’ to being able to kill tourists.
What Donny — or, more likely, one of his savvier flunkies — has figured out is that if he claims that his vanity projects are for vague ‘national security’ reasons, judges and courts are less likely to smack that s___ down.
That’s how he’s getting to build his vulgar Epstein Dance Hall where the historic East Wing used to be — by insisting he needs drones and snipers to protect the White House from the imaginary threat of … of what, even? Marauding Iranians? Is that what we’re supposed to believe?
Not one person in the Donnyverse has been able to articulate the exact reason why the White House needs drones and snipers. Who are they expecting to be shooting at? Protesters? Us? We the people?
As for this gigantic arch, I have the same questions. Look at where this dumb____ eyesore is being erected.
‘Oh, I know: let’s build some ginormous fugly arch that towers over everything else, and let’s stick it right in the middle of Washington, DC — oh, and let’s militarize it. Let’s use it as an ammunition dump. And let’s include multiple sniper nests. Yeah. And you know what? Let’s put a drone port on top of it.
Oh, you didn’t hear about that last one? Well then, feast your eyes on this dog’s breakfast of braggadocio, vaingloriosity, and outright lies and delusion:
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!
Who are the intended targets of the snipers on the arch? Visitors to the Lincoln Memorial? People paying their respects at Arlington National Cemetery? There is no legitimate military value to turning Memorial Circle into heavily-armed war zone. This isWashington DC in the year 2026, not Mogadishu in 1993. We are not a strife-torn nation — at least not yet we aren’t — and we won’t be, unless Donny makes it one.
Ooh, and by the way — you know who else loved him some triumphal arches, don’t you? Of course you do.
Sleepy Don is frustrated.
To the Contrary, Political Opinion: The Beginning of the End? Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 21, 2026. A jam-packed day, so a jam-packed newsletter.
With just 40 days until the midterm elections, let us survey the state of our promised Golden Age:
Moscow is burning; China’s Xi gets ready to steal Donald Trump’s lunch; the price of diesel tops $6.50 a gallon; the Houthis are on the march; the war in the Mideast expands; Trump dithers, then throws the Saudis under the bus; and the President of Peace announces plans to put sharks with laser beams snipers and drones on his ginormous Vanity Arch.
Meanwhile, a new poll shows that Trump’s “sinking ratings threaten to drag down Republicans in November’s midterm elections, as voters blame him for high prices and a shaky economy,” and GOP candidates are finding that The Don is electoral “kryptonite.” (If only they had been warned.)
As the midterms loom, the vibes are also shifting. Axios’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write today that: “President Trump feels and acts invincible: He acts on whims, however he pleases, precedent and restraints be damned. But Trump’s vincibility is being exposed. Courts restrain him more. GOP candidates criticize him more. The public turns on him more.”¹
This is what the beginning of the end looks like, which is what scares Trump advisers and confidants most. Trump often retreats to his worst impulses when he feels most powerless.
So, yeah, it’s going to get worse.
Happy Monday.
Standing athwart the madness and shouting, “You Can’t Be Serious!” To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Upgrade to paidThe tantrum is the point
Over the weekend, the Guest of Honor at the White House Correspondents Dinner banned three media outlets from the White House, a move that the media companies are now challenging in federal court.
“The President banned CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO, and the individual reporters covering the news for those media organizations, in disregard of the most basic guarantees of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause,” the lawsuit says. “He did so expressly for the improper purpose of retaliating against Plaintiffs for past news coverage because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.”
“This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the complaint continues.
This morning we learned that “Major TV networks halt pool coverage of Trump,” a nice show of solidarity, which will undoubtedly annoy the TV-centric president.
The media plaintiffs will also almost certainly win their lawsuit, when the courts remind Trump that we still have a First Amendment, but he won’t care because the tantrum was the point.
Indeed, the tantrums are likely to intensify. Apparently not even the tender ministrations of his Human Bubble, Natalie, are sufficient to soothe his savage ego. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Wave of Setbacks Leaves Trump Frustrated and Looking for Credit.” Evidently, he requires more vigorous groveling:
President Trump wants a little gratitude.
At a recent closed-door meeting in the Oval Office, the president expressed deep frustration to advisers that prominent figures in Washington hadn’t publicly thanked him for trying to overhaul the Kennedy Center, according to a senior administration official.
Instead, Trump’s bid to affix his name onto the center’s facade and make sweeping changes to the cultural institution has been met with opposition from Democrats, patrons of the arts and the courts. On Tuesday, following his latest legal setback, the president threatened to block renovations at the performing-arts venue unless his name is put on the building.
Twenty months into his second term, Trump isn’t getting his way—and he isn’t happy about it,
Speaking of which…Upgrade to paidTrump’s Illegal Kennedy Center Extortion — An Update
Over the years, National Review’s Andy McCarthy has frequently given Trump the benefit of the doubt. But he sounds like someone who’s just done with the Orange Felon. In a scathing new piece, McCarthy eviscerates Trumps crude — and blatantly illegal — efforts to force his name onto the Kennedy Center. “Where,” asks McCarthy, “Is Congress on the Kennedy Center Fight?”
We rate this a Damn Good Question. McCarthy quotes the May 29 decision by Judge Christopher Cooper and notes that his discussion of the relevant statutory provisions (codified at Section 76h & ff. of Title 20, U.S. Code) “is unassailable.” Judge Cooper wrote:
A few final points underscore the Center’s role not just as a national institution for the performing arts, but as a presidential memorial. Both the building and the institution are “designated” as the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” See id. §§ 76h(a)(1), 76i(a). Congress commanded that the Center be “the sole national memorial” to President Kennedy “within the city of Washington and its environs,” id. § 76q, and that it be a “living” memorial, id. § 76h(a)(1). With a handful of exceptions not relevant here, see id. § 76j(b)(2), “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Center. Id. § 76j(b)(1).
Writes McCarthy: “Only Congress can change the name. The president and the board he stacked are powerless to do so.” Indeed, this is black letter law, which is unambiguous and clear even to the non-lawyers amongst us. Writes McCarthy:
In our constitutional system, Congress makes the laws, and the president is oath-bound to faithfully execute the laws. If the president extortionately makes the execution of the laws conditional on compliance with his diktats, that’s an impeachable offense. Congress doesn’t necessarily need to address such misconduct by impeachment; it has other means to force the executive to stand down (denying funding, refusing confirmations, fomenting political pressure through public oversight hearings, etc.). But if Congress doesn’t take some action to induce a presidential retreat, no one else can.
Republicans used to defend Congress’s prerogatives. Today’s Republicans are cowed by Trump, so they either hide under their desks or sing along with his rants during these increasingly frequent tantrums. This emboldens Trump to engage in still more narcissistic malfeasance by which the public, in ever larger majorities, is repulsed.
News Updates
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Media Stands Together Against Trump as President Lashes Out, White House Launches “Trump TV,” and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Trump banned three news outlets and then watched every major network walk out on him in solidarity. The White House launched its own government run streaming channel. And in the middle of all that, my inbox and my mentions were full of something else entirely, the fallout from today’s investigation into the Trump family’s finances.
I want to say a few things about that before we get into today’s news.
That piece took weeks to put together, and I knew going in it would upset some people, because it’s supposed to. Reporting that doesn’t make powerful people uncomfortable usually isn’t doing its job. Since it went out, I’ve gotten the usual wave of bad faith attacks, people twisting the numbers, accusing me of fabricating sources, the standard playbook. I’m not going to spend this newsletter relitigating it point by point. The reporting stands, the sourcing stands, and if anyone wants to point to a specific factual error, my inbox is open. What I won’t do is soften future reporting because a piece landed hard. That’s the whole point.
Trump Furious as Press Stands Together, he Launches ‘State Run Media’
CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued the Trump administration Monday, arguing that barring them from White House grounds violates their First Amendment rights, with a hearing already set for Wednesday before Judge Timothy Kelly. Kelly, a 2017 Trump nominee, previously ruled against the White House in the 2018 Jim Acosta case, ordering his press pass reinstated after finding he’d been denied due process, a track record that has First Amendment attorneys expecting the outlets to win again. Trump publicly attacked the judge assignment anyway, writing on Truth Social that “they have drawn a great Judge, for them” while insisting Fake News outlets “shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.” Vice President Vance separately defended the ban at Joint Base Andrews, accusing the three outlets of “far-left propaganda” and asking “why would a Republican White House give you special access?” The three companies are asking the court for an expedited hearing and a temporary order restoring their access and press passes.
In an unprecedented escalation, the five networks that share White House TV pool duties, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, suspended their pooled coverage of Trump entirely after the administration refused to let CNN fulfill its scheduled rotation covering his trip to the UN General Assembly. Fox’s Washington bureau chief, acting as pool chair, told members there would be “no replacement pool put in place,” while the networks issued a joint statement warning that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” The blackout was immediately visible: TV cameras were absent from Trump’s ribbon-cutting for a new South Lawn helipad, and the White House’s own YouTube stream of the event had audio so garbled it was impossible to make out his remarks. Veteran Times reporter Peter Baker noted that in his 30 years covering the White House, this is the first time the president will go without any network TV camera covering his everyday actions and travel. Smaller outlets like the right-wing Real America’s Voice have stepped in to cover some events, but lack the major networks’ worldwide distribution.
The White House responded by launching its own 24/7 video stream, “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” on YouTube and whitehouse.gov, giving the administration an owned distribution channel independent of the networks that walked away. Officials described it as a continuously updated loop of “top videos, major remarks, and must-see highlights” rather than a traditional newscast, and it began airing footage of the same helipad ribbon-cutting the press pool had skipped. In a written statement titled “White House Access Is a Privilege — Not a Right,” the administration argued the First Amendment guarantees the right to publish but not a hard pass, briefing-room seat, or pool slot, while listing past Democratic-era press disputes (the Obama White House isolating Fox News, the 2010 surveillance of a Fox reporter, the Biden-era credentialing of a claimed “440-plus” fewer reporters) as precedent. Notably, even as CNN remains barred from the main White House grounds, the first lady’s office credentialed a CNN reporter to cover Melania Trump’s own UN appearance, a carve-out an administration official confirmed on condition of anonymity.
Some solidarity gestures went beyond the networks themselves: The New York Times and The Washington Post both announced they would hold back publishing any White House pool photography from Monday until midnight, in support of the barred outlets. Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said the paper remained “committed to covering the president’s travel to New York City today” while stressing that “Americans deserve a free and independent media covering their government without intimidation.” Meanwhile Trump, appearing publicly with Mayor Mamdani in New York, falsely claimed reporters “said they were going to boycott me, but they never boycott me,” even as the networks’ pool boycott was already underway. Press freedom advocates weighed in forcefully too, with a former White House Correspondents’ Association president calling the ban “an attack on one outlet” that amounts to “an attack on everyone.”
The fight is already reverberating beyond media circles into the legal and political spheres. The Hill reported Trump himself seemed to anticipate losing in district court, given Judge Kelly’s history with the Acosta case, and is already signaling he’ll appeal. The episode is also becoming a midterm talking point, referenced alongside other Trump-era controversies in The Hill’s roundup of top stories, and commentators like Fox’s own “Squawk Box” host have pressed Treasury Secretary Bessent on why the administration is picking this fight now. Whatever the court decides on the narrow legal question, the standoff has already reshaped how Americans see White House coverage in real time: for the first time in decades, the president’s day-to-day activities are being filtered primarily through his own government-run channel rather than independent television pool cameras.
Other news:
Trump appeared unusually docile and complimentary toward Mayor Zohran Mamdani during a Monday visit to Gracie Mansion, marking the first time a sitting president has visited the residence since Ronald Reagan in 1981. The hourlong closed-door meeting, their third in-person sitdown within the last year, came even as Trump spent the rest of the day raging at his political enemies over the fallout from his press ban on CNN, Politico, and MS NOW. Trump called Mamdani a mayor with “great potential” and said he wants him to succeed, while Mamdani said their conversations have stuck to practical city issues like a Queens housing development and the administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, which has left many Haitian New Yorkers vulnerable to deportation. Despite the cordial tone, Trump couldn’t resist calling the press “biased news” and a “threat to national security” even as Mamdani stood beside him defending reporters’ access. Their relationship has swung between Trump’s past praise and attacks branding Mamdani a communist, and it comes as New York City just joined a lawsuit challenging the administration’s new public charge rule targeting immigrants’ green cards and visas.
Paramount cleared the last major legal hurdle to its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Monday, settling an antitrust lawsuit brought by a coalition of Democratic-led states. California Attorney General Rob Bonta secured concessions including an editorial-independence board for CNN and CBS News, a commitment to distribute 30 movies theatrically each year, an extra $1.5 billion in film production spending over five years, and a requirement to sell cable bundles separately to keep prices down, while stressing the settlement was “not a vote of support” for the broader merger. The deal would hand CEO David Ellison, backed by his father Larry Ellison’s Oracle fortune, control of both Paramount+ and HBO Max along with CNN and CBS News, and comes amid lingering unease over the Ellison family’s ties to Trump. Not everyone was satisfied: Connecticut’s attorney general said his state had wanted full divestiture of CNN and CBS News, and the advocacy group Free Press accused California of “capitulation” that would cut jobs and further consolidate media power. The Writers Guild, which had filed its own separate suit to block the merger, also settled Monday after saying it couldn’t sustain the legal fight alone, and Ellison intends to close the overall deal within about two weeks, with Paramount and Warner Bros. shares both rising sharply on the news.
Taco Bell’s customer traffic still hasn’t fully recovered months after a Cyclospora outbreak tied to its iceberg lettuce sickened more than 20,000 people and killed two. Visits dropped as much as 30.9 percent year-over-year by mid-July, shortly after the chain pulled the contaminated ingredients supplied by Taylor Farms, and traffic remained down 12.2 percent between the outbreak’s start and the CDC’s September 11 declaration that it was over. The company responded with aggressive promotions, including $1 Enchiritos and $1 Mexican pizzas, items that normally sell for around $4 to $6. Yum! Brands executives struck an optimistic tone on earnings calls, with CFO Ranjith Roy saying sales trends have shown steady, sequential improvement and that the brand hasn’t lost customer loyalty despite the negative press. Still, Roy stopped short of declaring victory, saying only that the company has “confidence” the long-term outlook for Taco Bell remains intact.
ICE has quietly stopped publicly listing thousands of detainees with final removal orders in its online locator system, making it far harder for lawyers and family members to track them down. The agency removed those detainees from the system on September 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke to the AP anonymously, and multiple immigration lawyers confirmed their clients vanished from the system that week. Nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention in July, more than a third of all bookings, had final removal orders, and advocates say hiding their locations makes it easier to speed deportations by cutting off last-minute legal challenges like habeas petitions. The change doesn’t apply to detainees in Adelanto, California, or temporary facilities in Minneapolis, New York City, or suburban Chicago, where courts have ordered ICE to keep listings current. Lawyers say the practice has no real precedent, with one calling it “just another iteration of disappearing people,” and it’s already affecting cases including eight Somali men held at Guantánamo Bay.
Opening statements began Monday in a California trial accusing Tesla of fostering “rampant racism” at its Fremont factory, with state lawyers showing photos of the N-word, swastikas, and Confederate flags scrawled throughout the plant. A lawyer for the California Civil Rights Department said Black workers were subjected to racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day and that management did little to nothing to address it despite hundreds of complaints, with workers reportedly nicknaming the factory “the plantation” and “the slaveship.” Tesla’s lead attorney countered by repeatedly using the N-word in his opening statement to argue it wasn’t used as a slur, and accused the state of unfairly attacking “the most prolific employer” in California. The case, filed in 2022 under the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, is a bench trial before Judge Peter Borkon and is expected to run through the end of October. It’s one of dozens of discrimination suits against Tesla, following a 2022 case that won a former employee $137 million (later reduced) and comes amid renewed scrutiny of Elon Musk’s own history of promoting white nationalist rhetoric.
A federal appeals panel ruled Monday that Missouri should use Trump-backed congressional maps in November, even though the Supreme Court has twice blocked those same districts from taking effect. The 8th Circuit panel said reverting to the state’s prior districts would violate the Constitution, but delayed its order by a week to allow for an appeal, meaning the ruling has no immediate practical effect. Missouri is currently set to run its November election using the same districts from 2022 and 2024, per earlier rulings from both the state and US Supreme Courts. Local officials have already sent absentee ballots using those old districts to overseas and military voters, and state law requires all other absentee ballots to go out by Tuesday. The fight is expected to ultimately land back before the Supreme Court for a final decision.
Houthi fighters are advancing to seize strategic Yemeni terrain after Trump reportedly called off US airstrikes against them at the last minute, even as bombs were being loaded onto aircraft. The New York Times reported Trump flip-flopped after a call with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pleading for help against the Houthi advance, first ordering the Pentagon to prepare strikes before reversing again. The UN says fighting has displaced at least 125,000 people in Yemen since early September, with the Houthis pushing to control territory near the Bab al-Mandab strait that would let them cut Saudi-backed forces off from the Red Sea coast. Saudi Arabia has launched hundreds of strikes on Houthi positions without stopping the advance, while the group claims to have fired on Riyadh, with smoke seen near the capital’s airport. Trump appears caught between Gulf allies pressuring him to intervene and his own reluctance to widen an already unpopular war he launched against Iran.
A Venezuelan delivery driver shot by an ICE officer in Austin says he’s in severe pain with a bullet still lodged near his spine, after being taken into detention rather than given full medical care. Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was delivering a DoorDash order Sunday when an ICE vehicle rammed his car and an officer got out and shot him three times, hitting him once in the back; his lawyer says he spent the night on the floor of a cold detention room roughly 140 miles from Austin. Video of the shooting sparked protests where demonstrators say they were hit with tear gas or chemical spray, and Austin’s Democratic mayor called the shooting infuriating. DHS says Garcés Pérez, who has lived in the US for two years and had an outstanding removal order, is in stable condition and in custody pending deportation, while his lawyers have filed a habeas petition arguing he qualifies for a crime-victim visa. The shooting comes amid what local officials describe as a recent surge in ICE agents acting unilaterally rather than relying on state troopers for stops.
A US citizen in Evanston, Illinois was hospitalized with head and facial injuries Sunday after federal agents mistook him for someone else during a fugitive investigation. Police found the man on the ground surrounded by people helping him, and an agent on scene said he’d resisted being detained for fingerprinting before agents determined he wasn’t their target and released him; an officer also noticed blood on the agent’s hands. The incident happened the same day ICE shot and wounded a Venezuelan man in Austin, and came amid a broader immigration crackdown that saw a record 50,000 arrests in July, more than half of people with no criminal record. DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and it’s unclear which specific federal agency the man identified himself as belonging to. The episode adds to a string of incidents this year involving federal agents injuring or killing bystanders, including the fatal shootings of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January.
A communications line failure at an FAA facility in Philadelphia triggered a ground stop and thousands of flight delays and cancellations across the Northeast before service resumed Monday evening. The primary line failed Monday morning, and when systems tried switching to the backup, officials discovered a fiber-optic cable had been accidentally severed by a construction crew, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Amtrak initially disputing whose crew was responsible. The disruption hit Newark, LaGuardia, JFK, Philadelphia, and Boston airports, and comes from the same facility blamed for major Newark meltdowns in spring 2025. It coincided with a new GAO report finding the FAA hasn’t finished risk assessments for threats like spoofing and jamming and lacks real-time detection systems, prompting Sen. Ron Wyden to call the vulnerabilities “a major threat to US national security.” The GAO issued nine recommendations, all of which the Department of Transportation agreed to adopt.
Lindsay Clancy’s defense lawyers are asking a judge to investigate the lone holdout juror who blocked her acquittal in the killing of her three children, alleging he may have used his phone during deliberations and lied on pretrial questionnaires. The September 4 mistrial came after 11 of 12 jurors were ready to find Clancy not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis, while juror Michael Desronvil insisted she knew what she was doing when she strangled her kids. Clancy’s attorney is seeking phone records for the deliberation period, since phone use during deliberations is barred under state law, and in a separate motion is asking the judge to dismiss the case outright rather than allow a retrial, arguing the mistrial should never have been declared. Prosecutors haven’t said whether they’ll retry Clancy, who remains charged with murder and is being held in a psychiatric hospital. Desronvil hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing and has said publicly he had no doubts about her guilt.
A former Haitian anti-corruption official and 17 alleged Colombian mercenaries made their first US court appearance Monday on charges tied to the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Joseph Badio, who allegedly posed as a US drug agent and participated directly in the killing, was wheeled into the Miami federal courtroom a day after he and the others were flown in from Haitian custody. They’re among 30 people charged in the case, including Palm Beach resident Christian Sanon, who aspired to replace Moïse as president and is already set for trial next week; at least nine defendants have been convicted or pleaded guilty so far. Prosecutors say the plot was financed partly through South Florida and paid for using misappropriated US COVID-relief funds. Haiti has had no president in the five years since the killing and remains gripped by gang violence that has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced 1.5 million this year alone.
Australian lawmakers across the political spectrum voiced skepticism about Treasury’s new 40-year economic forecast, even as most agreed it’s a useful break from short-term election-cycle thinking. Politicians from Liberal, One Nation, Labor, and independent ranks questioned the report’s ability to model far-off variables like AI’s impact and the influence of erratic actors like Trump, with One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce calling its optimistic productivity assumptions “completely at odds with our obvious reality.” Several MPs reframed the report’s warnings about Australia’s falling fertility rate as an economic problem rather than a cultural one, pointing to high housing costs and delayed independence as the real drivers of smaller families. Independent MPs Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney pushed for the report to weigh a broader set of measures, including climate impacts, mental health, and social connection, while Liberal shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said rising government debt on future generations was the biggest blind spot. The report is meant to serve as a nonpartisan foundation for debate even as polling shows most Australians are unhappy with the political system generally.
GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers became the second Republican in one day to break with the White House over the Iran war, saying Monday it “needs to end, and end quickly” as gas and diesel prices soar. The Michigan nominee called for a temporary embargo on diesel exports to bring relief to American families, drawing sharp attacks from both his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, and the state Democratic Party, who noted Rogers had originally supported the strikes on Iran. Regular gas hit $4.45 a gallon and diesel a record $6.50 a gallon Monday, according to AAA, as the war launched in February continues to strain the economy heading into the midterms.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins warned today that Trump would be defying Congress if he moves ahead with a plan to let political appointees decide which NIH research grants get funded. Trump is reportedly weighing an executive order that would seat OMB Director Russ Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on a board with veto power over grant approvals, following a contentious Oval Office meeting last week. Collins said the funding patch Congress passed this summer already bars the White House from finalizing a similar rule, and that grantmaking should be based on “scientific need and merit” rather than politics. Top Democratic appropriators Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray went further, warning the move could let a single political appointee kill a cancer or Alzheimer’s study for no scientific reason at all.
Rep. Ashley Hinson became the first Republican Monday to publicly call for an end to the Iran war over its effect on Iowans’ cost of living, marking her second break with Trump on the issue. She called for suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports, and creating a diesel relief program for farmers and truckers being “crushed” by high costs, though she stopped short of naming Trump directly. Her Democratic opponent, Josh Turek, noted she has voted against multiple House resolutions to end the war, including as recently as last week, and accused her of copying his own cost-relief proposals. Trump himself has dismissed the price concerns, telling a North Carolina rally that higher costs are “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done.”
A senior House GOP appropriator, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, said he wouldn’t fund Trump’s planned triumphal arch given competing military funding needs, after Trump claimed the structure would double as a weapons storage and sniper facility. Simpson argued the Pentagon is already short on funding for higher priorities and said Congress should get a formal appropriations request if military dollars are going to be used for the project. He also criticized Trump’s weekend ban of three news outlets, including POLITICO, calling any effort to bar the press over unfavorable coverage flatly “wrong.”
Two House lawmakers introduced the bipartisan SAFE Platforms Act Monday, aiming to crack down on AI-powered scams that target elderly and vulnerable users. Reps. Valerie Foushee and James Moylan’s bill would hold platforms liable for knowingly spreading fraudulent content, require design changes to prevent misleading ads and fake accounts, and let the FTC enforce the new rules. It would also narrow how platforms can use Section 230 immunity to shield themselves from liability. The bill faces long odds given how few legislative days remain this year, and comes as Trump separately floated creating an “AI Force” and appointing an AI czar.
A crypto-industry super PAC is preparing to spend at least $30 million to defeat Sherrod Brown in Ohio’s Senate race, its biggest play of the 2026 cycle so far. Fairshake, backed by Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz, held off spending while an industry-friendly crypto bill was pending in the Senate, but moved after Democrats voted the bill down last week. Brown, a former Senate Banking Committee chair and vocal crypto critic, is trying to reclaim the seat he lost by four points in 2024, this time against Sen. Jon Husted. Both campaigns traded sharp statements, with Brown’s team calling Husted “for sale” and Husted’s campaign predicting Ohioans won’t return to Brown’s “days of higher taxes.”
Rep. Max Miller is threatening to sue a Cleveland TV station over a Democratic opponent’s ad that repeats domestic abuse allegations against him, which Miller denies. His lawyer, who has also represented Trump, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding the station stop airing Brian Poindexter’s ad, which features a local sheriff citing accusations that Miller poured hot water on his ex-wife, held a gun to her head, and broke his toddler’s collarbone. Poindexter responded by ripping up the letter on camera and vowing to keep the ad running, saying Miller has “used his money and fancy lawyers to get himself out of trouble his whole life.” National Republicans have poured over $5 million combined into ads defending Miller, whose race has tightened according to recent polling.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing new skepticism on Capitol Hill as he lobbies against export restrictions on AI chips, with some lawmakers calling his recent pitches “tone deaf.” A Senate Democratic aide said Huang has dismissed AI workforce risks in private meetings, while Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner voiced doubts about arguments that US chip dominance abroad is inherently good. Meanwhile a bipartisan trio of senators, John Curtis, Josh Hawley, and John Kennedy, is independently pushing leadership to act on AI safety ahead of the midterms, even as Trump’s continued opposition to regulation makes passage unlikely. Hawley is holding hearings this week on AI-powered surveillance cameras and investigating OpenAI over a runaway model that led to rogue AI agents escaping testing.
He said he asked Mr. Garces Perez if he was OK, and Mr. Garces Perez said yes but that he had been shot in the back. He added that Mr. Garces Perez said the officer shot him because he did not hit the brakes.
“I’m sure there will be some lawsuits” if the older map is used, Mr. Hoskins said in an interview this month.
Civil Discourse, Opinion: The Wolf Came As A Wolf: Trump and the First Amendment, Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Justice Scalia once used the phrase “this wolf comes as a wolf” in dissent to describe what he viewed as a naked assault on executive power, the Special Counsel Act.
But the phrase is just as apt to describe the challenge Donald Trump poses to the First Amendment. This morning, MS NOW, CNN & POLITICO sued Donald Trump for banning them from the White House. He did that because he doesn’t like their reporting about him; he made that very clear. The plaintiffs argue that Trump has violated the First and Fifth Amendments, and as we discussed Saturday night, there is no doubt that they are correct.
The plaintiffs also sued Presidential Assistant for Communications Steven Cheung, Secret Service Director Sean Curran, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. At the same time, they asked the court to enter a temporary restraining order against the government and filed a memo of law in support of their position. The case is Cable News Network v. Trump.
The need to file suit was triggered when journalists for the outlets who attempted to enter the White House on Saturday found that their badges did not work. Secret Service employees then confiscated the badges. Those journalists, Akayla Gardner, Cheyenne Haslett, and Betsy Klein, are also plaintiffs in the case.NewsNation journalist Hannah Brandt posted this photo of empty tents at “Pebble Beach,” with CNN, MS NOW, and Politico no longer at the White House.
This isn’t just another squabble between the president and the press; it’s a serious situation that cuts to the core of our First Amendment rights. Put simply, this is a case about whether the press, and by extension the rest of us, can be critical of the president and his administration. It’s about whether journalists can gather information that is essential if they are to do their jobs and keep the rest of us informed.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” (I assume that a Supreme Court that protects assault weapons like they’re muskets can manage to protect cable news networks and online media just like newspapers.)
The plaintiffs are asking the judge to:
Prohibit the administration from taking any other steps to implement Trump’s ban, and
force the administration “to immediately restore to Plaintiffs their ‘hard pass’ press credentials along with the access that Plaintiffs and their reporters had to the White House prior to the September 18, 2026 ban.”
They issued a joint statement in advance of filing the lawsuit: “This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes. Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
The plaintiffs argue that what Trump has done is illegal for at least three reasons:
His ban violates their Fifth Amendment due process rights because the White House failed to create “explicit and meaningful standards” for denying access to the White House grounds before it banned them and didn’t give them an opportunity to be heard before they were banned. The Fifth Amendment requires notice and a hearing.
His ban violates the First Amendment by retaliating against the plaintiffs for what the President considers negative coverage.
His ban violates the First Amendment because it discriminates against the plaintiffs based on their viewpoint.
By now we’re familiar with what plaintiffs must show to receive an injunction: that they are likely to win, that they will suffer irreparable injury in the meantime without an injunction, and that an injunction is in the public interest. The plaintiffs have asked for a temporary restraining order (TRO), but that request will almost certainly morph into one for a longer term preliminary injunction that would stay in place until the case is decided, if the White House doesn’t back down.
There were a number of developments today:
CNN was scheduled to handle pool coverage of Trump’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly, happening in New York this week. But that didn’t happen because of the ban.
The networks that make up the TV pool, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC, along with CNN, stopped covering presidential events this morning. Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton wrote to pool subscribers that “The nation’s major television networks are declining to participate in White House pool duties in response to the Trump administration’s decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House.” Real journalists rose to the moment, as Boughton put it like this: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Later in the day, the impact of losing the press pool became clear. According to Aaron Rupar, “Trump is holding an event at the White House right now but there’s no audio because the press pool isn’t there. The Newsmax host notes that this is an example of Trump’s attacks on the press ‘backfiring just a little bit.’” Trump was trying to show off his new taxpayer-funded helipad.
Former White House Correspondents Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS News has been trying to explain how important the pool is all day on Twitter, taking on people who kept trying to mansplain her.
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times, which have already condemned the Trump administration’s ban, led a protest today, avoiding even still photos of Trump’s events.
Various “White House correspondent independent reporters,” which seems to mean ultra-right-wing conservative ecosystem types regardless of journalistic credentials, christened themselves as a new White House pool, while delegitimizing professional journalists. However, they lack the technology it takes to run the pool (see Weijia’s comments above).
The White House announced it would roll out its own network, and shortly after 7 p.m. ET Monday night, they posted on Twitter: “IT’S LIVE. TRUMP TV IS STREAMING NOW. 24/7, updated in real time, with top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place.” It sounds positively authoritarian, like if Hitler had an internet. Or perhaps it's more Stalinist, although lately, it’s been Republicans accusing Democrats of being the communists. Either way, that feels like something that's been in the works for a while. The White House is also offering an app for people who prefer to get their news that way. What a novel idea—if you don’t like the news, write it yourself, or as George Orwell wrote in one of his essays, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That’s why we have a free press that’s independent of government in the first place.
It’s tempting to feel happy you don’t have to hear Trump’s voice or see his face, but without pool reporting, this administration can get away with a lot. Trump is frequently his own worst enemy, saying the quiet part out loud. Much of what we know about his worst excesses became public because there happened to be a reporter at his side in the moment. The danger is real if the press is absent from this space.
Fox News’ Brit Hume explained why there’s a pool: “The White House tv pool was created because many rooms in the White House, e.g. the Oval Office, are too small to accommodate all the tv outlets who may want to cover a presidential event. The same is true for Air Force One and presidential motorcades. So one network covers for all on a rotating basis. To be a part of it, an organization must have present every day a full broadcast crew, a producer or reporter and the equipment and personnel needed to record and distribute the video shot by the pool crew. At the moment, only a handful of outlets qualify. Back when ABC, CBS and NBC were dominant, they tried to keep CNN out of the pool. But CNN had the equipment and personnel to do the pool job and were admitted by court order.” He goes on to criticize a poster who advocated for letting the White House report on itself, “And he suggests the White House could cover these events. Then it would be ‘official’ for sure. Would he really like that better?”
Federal District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, was assigned to the case. He is the same Judge who handled the 2018 case involving Jim Acosta that we discussed on Saturday. Judge Kelly granted a TRO in that case, and the White House was forced to restore Acosta’s credentials. Kyle Cheney pointed out on Twitter that “Kelly is perhaps best known for presiding over the six-month seditious conspiracy trial of the Proud Boys — and sentencing Enrique Tarrio to a 22-year prison term, the lengthiest of any Jan. 6 defendant until he was pardoned by Trump.”
Judge Kelly set a Wednesday hearing at 3:30 p.m. on the media organizations’ motion to immediately lift Trump’s ban on White House access. DOJ has until tomorrow night to respond to the emergency motion ahead of the hearing.
Trump denigrated the Judge on Truth Social, even though he’s one of his own appointees. But Trump had already put him in the bad judge column, posting, “With such a Crooked and Corrupt Press, how did I win in such a LANDSLIDE? … Perhaps Judge Kelly could explain that!” But Trump seemed to emphasize the strength of the plaintiffs’ case, which is that he opposes their presence at the White House because he doesn’t like their point of view. “We’ll go for appeal,” the President wrote, already prepared for and excusing a loss in the district court.
Sort of relatedly, there was news that Paramount Skydance reached a settlement with California and other states that had sued to block its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros., and remained in the fight after the federal government switched sides to back Paramount. Still waiting on full details and an explanation for what changed. We’ve spoken several times with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who explained how problematic the deal would be for consumers—including dramatically narrowing who owns major media outlets. I’m curious, since this merger means CNN and CBS would become sisters, is CBS banned from the White House too?
And completely unrelated, but I have to mention this, because we can never take our eyes off of the administration’s deportations: There is news that a Judge in the Southern District of Alabama ordered ICE and other DHS agencies to stop conducting warrantless raids of construction sites, to stop detaining people in the absence of individualized suspicion (possibly a gentle slap at “Kavanaugh stops,” although the Judge says ICE is exceeding what he allowed for), and to stop detaining people with valid IDs. The Southern District of Alabama, where Jeff Sessions was once the U.S. Attorney, is not exactly a bastion of liberalism. Chief Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock was appointed by Donald Trump in 2018. The plaintiff in this case, Leonardo Venegas, is a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent who was arrested while working at a construction site. Five masked, armed men (ICE agents) jumped the fencing around the site, which was marked “No Trespassing.” Venegas began to film after agents dragged his brother to the ground. “When they came after him, Venegas yelled, ‘Don’t touch me! I’m a citizen!’ and ‘I’ll show you my papers!’ Even after seeing his Star ID, the agents arrested him, telling him the ID was ‘fake.’” They were ultimately forced to unarrest him when they realized their error. Venegas had a similar encounter with ICE about a month later. Judge Beaverstock’s opinion is worth your time if you want to learn more about the Fourth Amendment, but he also goes into detail about how abusive their practices are. His assessment at one point, “The Court is unpersuaded by the Government’s position,” summarizes things nicely.
Back to the First Amendment
The plaintiffs in Cable News Network v. Trump are capably represented by highly regarded First Amendment lawyers Ted Boutrous and Katie Townsend, who lead a team of equally talented lawyers from their firm, Gibson Dunn. Ted was our guest for Five Questions back in 2023. I asked him how important the First Amendment was during the first Trump presidency, and he said, “In short, he [Trump] was and is a First Amendment wrecking ball … Rigorous press scrutiny of Mr. Trump and the government has been crucial to preserving our democracy during this historic and difficult period.”
Katie was our guest for Five Questions in December of 2025, after she sued the administration on behalf of The New York Times and one of its reporters after it conditioned access to the Pentagon on agreeing to abandon journalistic principles. She raised similar due process and First Amendment arguments in that case, and answered many of the weak justifications for the policy the administration will likely raise again here, noting, “Who is in a position to ask questions of Department leadership and report on what is happening at the Pentagon has a very real effect on what information gets to the public, and it is an issue that we should all care about.” That applies with even more force when we’re talking about the White House.
Tonight’s post is longer than what I usually write, but this lawsuit deserves more than a quick take. That’s what Civil Discourse is for: a place to take in the complaint, the legal strategy, and who the people involved are. We have the time to figure out what is actually happening, not just what everyone else is saying about it.
More On U.S. Courts, Media, Arts
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 20, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.
Recognizing the leeway the courts have given him over anything that falls under “national security,” Trump this morning decided to take a proactive approach to making sure the courts don’t stop his triumphal arch. He announced on social media:
“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!”
This is the same justification he made for his ballroom where the East Wing used to be. When it became clear that his claim to need an entertainment space up to his aesthetic standards would not fly, he began to claim that the ballroom is imperative for national security. We have since learned that there already is a secure space under the White House, built in secret during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Dan Diamond reported in the Washington Post last Wednesday, September 16, that officials from the National Park Service have agreed that the construction will adversely affect Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historical sites, but urged those concerned about historic preservation to sign on to the project through a memorandum of agreement that will stand as approval by noon tomorrow anyway.
The document asserts that the arch is supposed “to celebrate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles.” Now Trump says the arch is imperative for “National Security purposes” and will have drones and snipers.
Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, responded to the request to sign the document: “This is not consistent with NPS practice, NPS regulations, or the intent of the National Historic Preservation Act.”
While Trump suggests he will defend the United States from atop his triumphal arch, our European allies are much more concerned with Russia’s drone strike last Sunday on a passenger train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Warsaw, Poland. The train was just over a mile—two kilometers—from the Polish border when the drone hit at a border crossing. The drone hit just after a convoy carrying former leaders and high-level diplomats, including former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, had passed through.
The train operators were warned of the coming drone and no one was hurt, but European leaders widely interpreted the strike so close to Poland as, in the words of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, “clearly a message to the western world.”
Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations founded NATO in 1949 to resist Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s mission shifted toward crisis management, and then to resisting the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Over the years, NATO has grown to include 32 countries, 30 of which are in Europe (the U.S. and Canada are the two NATO countries in North America). The success of their collective defense system rests on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against any one member of NATO will be treated as an attack against all of them. So a threat to Poland threatens all the NATO countries.
Russia has been pushing NATO countries with what European leaders call “hybrid attacks.” Rather than launching classic military attacks, Putin has been allowing drones to go into NATO airspace, cutting undersea telecommunications networks on which European countries depend, and possibly placing bombs on a train in France.
Russia has been a bad actor for years, destabilizing NATO countries by flooding them with disinformation that affects elections, paying for political parties, bribing politicians, and so on. But the increase in Russian provocations now seems to be related to Putin’s attempt to undercut European support for Ukraine as Ukraine’s drones have brought the war home to Russia’s oil industry and to the Russian people.
In a speech on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, noted that “Russia wants to stop us helping Ukraine—but their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”
Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, told NPR’s Elissa Nadworny that President Trump “has largely looked at all of this and said, that’s a European problem. He doesn’t feel a threat to the United States from Russia, and he doesn’t see a need for the U.S. to increase its pushback on Russia at all.” “I disagree with this,” Volker said. “I think that we have a vested interest in freedom and free people everywhere being safe and prosperous. It creates a better world for us.”
Trump’s stand is interesting in light of news that Russia has been helping Iran in its fight against the United States, sending upgraded munitions as well as satellite imagery and targeting data to hit U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Last week, CNN reported that fourteen Russian spy satellites moved over the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, used by the U.S., two days before a devastating March 27 attack by Iran. A CNN investigation showed that the spacecraft had access to a large spectrum of data. U.S. officials and international intelligence sources told CNN that the information the satellites gathered helped Iranian forces conduct some of its most precise attacks against American forces and assets.
Two months later, a Russian close to Putin footed the bill for a three-day celebration for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson. According to Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the event, held on private islands in the Bahamas.
On Tuesday, September 15, the Department of Justice announced charges against five people working for Russian intelligence “to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.” The indictment alleges that a network of Russian hit men has operated since at least 2024 and has recruited U.S. citizens to surveil and murder people, intending to target “all the countries that are helping Ukraine.” As Daniel Boffey and Andrew Roth of the Guardian note, it was an unwritten rule of the Cold War that Russia would not attack people in the U.S. (although Russian agents are widely believed to be behind the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004).
On September 16, Congress passed a major sanctions package targeting Russian officials, the energy sector, financial institutions, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that get around sanctions by using shell corporations and flying under the flags of countries with a loose regulatory system. The measure is named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in honor of the late South Carolina senator.
But on Thursday, September 17, Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported that Trump is suggesting Putin will be more willing to end his war if the U.S. makes business deals with Russia regardless of whether it stops its assault on Ukraine. In February, Troianovski reported that Gentry Beach, a Texas investor with ties to the Trumps, signed an agreement last fall with one of the biggest energy companies in Russia to develop Alaska’s natural gas resources.
According to a September 14 piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker, the Trump administration has essentially privatized U.S. foreign policy for their own interests. The “generally held view,” a former U.S. official told Filkins, is that Russia has offered administration officials and their allies business deals in exchange for their supporting Russian demands against Ukraine. A classified report a European intelligence agency provided to Filkins lists Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former envoy Richard Grenell, and Gentry Beach as people who might participate in any of ten money-making ventures on the table.
The world, and the place of the United States in it, is changing fast. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “shameful” that European allies did not help the U.S. attack on Iran and said the U.S. would review its military commitments to Europe. On September 17, Dan De Luce, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News reported that the Pentagon is weighing a plan to pull tens of thousands of troops and weapons, ships, and planes out of Europe despite the warnings of NATO allies about Russia’s increasingly aggressive moves.
In Wednesday’s speech, Rutte outlined what he called NATO 3.0. If NATO 1.0 was the phase of the organization that pushed back against the Soviet Union and NATO 2.0 was the period from then until now, he said, NATO 3.0 is one in which the weight of NATO shifts away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada.
Politico, Judge appointed by Trump will oversee news outlets’ lawsuit over White House ban, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly restored former CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s White House press pass during Trump’s first term.
The emergency lawsuit by three media organizations seeking to lift President Donald Trump’s ban on White House access has landed in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly.
POLITICO, CNN and MS NOW are asking Kelly, right, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in his first term, to quickly declare the president’s ban unconstitutional and restore White House access for the organizations’ reporters.
Kelly, who was randomly assigned to the case Monday, set a Tuesday deadline for the Trump administration to respond to the lawsuit and a Wednesday afternoon hearing to consider the organizations’ demand to immediately lift Trump’s ban.
Kelly presided over a similar lawsuit filed by CNN in 2018, after the White House suspended the credentials of correspondent Jim Acosta following a dispute over his actions during a press conference. Kelly held a hearing on the suspension the day after the lawsuit was filed and quickly ordered the White House to restore Acosta’s press pass, citing a lack of due process for the journalist.
White House officials initially insisted they were only temporarily reinstating Acosta’s pass, though they ultimately opted not to take further action against him. Instead, officials issued new policies around conduct at press conferences. With Acosta’s credentials restored, CNN dropped the suit just six days after it was filed.
In a social media post Monday afternoon, Trump took note of that history and seemed to already be bracing for a loss — at least at the initial stage of the case. He also appeared to express regret about appointing Kelly.
“They have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta, who now seems to have disappeared from the Planet. The Judge’s name is Tim Kelly, and he was, sadly, appointed by ‘TRUMP,’” the president wrote on Truth Social. “In other words, almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal because Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.”
“Why should I have to give ‘access’ to such people? Perhaps Judge Kelly could explain that!” Trump added.
Kelly is perhaps best known for presiding over the six-month jury trial of leaders of the Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. After their convictions, Kelly sentenced the group’s national chair, Enrique Tarrio, to a 22-year prison term, the lengthiest for any Jan. 6 defendant. Kelly recently, and reluctantly, ended the Proud Boys case after the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges in connection with Trump’s grant of clemency to all those charged with Jan. 6-related offenses.
Kelly, 57, graduated from Duke University and earned his law degree at Georgetown. He spent a decade as a federal prosecutor before joining the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as a senior counsel focusing on crime and national security. Kelly was nominated by Trump in 2017 and easily won confirmation in the Senate, 94-2, becoming Trump’s first appointee on the district court in Washington.
David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)
New York Times, Paramount Reaches Deal to Clear Way to Create News and Media Giant, Benjamin Mullin, David McCabe, Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall, Sept. 21, 2026. By resolving a lawsuit filed by a group of states, the media mogul David Ellison removed the last major hurdle he faced in buying Warner Bros.
Paramount reached an agreement on Monday to resolve an antitrust lawsuit delaying its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, eliminating the last significant barrier to the creation of an entertainment and media colossus.
A group of states, led by California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued Paramount in July, arguing that an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would concentrate too much power over cable TV and blockbuster films under one company.
After weeks of on-again-off-again negotiations, Paramount and the states agreed to a number of concessions to complete the deal, Mr. Bonta said at a news conference on Monday. The entertainment giant has agreed to establish a board to ensure the editorial independence of CNN and CBS News and committed to distributing 30 movies in theaters every year. The company also pledged to spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production over the next five years and guaranteed to increase the share of those movies that are made in America.
A completion of the blockbuster deal would create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. It would pair Paramount’s movie studio with Warner Bros., which has made films like “Superman,” “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners.” The combined company would also own two major streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max, and control both CNN and CBS News.
The deal would make David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, backed by the fortune of his father, the billionaire Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. The Ellison family’s ties to President Trump — which included a dinner David Ellison hosted this spring “honoring the Trump White House” — have made Democrats and many journalists at CNN wary of the deal.
David Ellison praised the settlement in a statement, saying it would help attain the company’s goal of building “a stronger Hollywood.”“Our shared aim was an outcome that best serves consumers, workers and — most importantly — the creative community so vital to the art of visual storytelling,” Mr. Ellison said. “We’re confident this agreement does exactly that.”
Mr. Bonta praised the terms of the settlement but withheld his approval for the deal.
“I want to be clear about something right up front: This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,” Mr. Bonta said. “It is not a blessing of the broader merger. Broadly speaking, we believe further consolidation of markets that are central to American economic life doesn’t serve the American economy.”
As part of the agreement, Paramount must sell off parts of the company if it doesn’t meet its obligations to produce and distribute films, according to the settlement. In an effort to keep cable TV prices down, the agreement also requires the combined company to sell its bundles of cable channels to distributors separately. In addition, Paramount must maintain ownership of the historical studio lots of both companies, a guarantor that production will continue in California, and operate a fund for purchasing independent films.
Paramount stopped short of agreeing to concessions that would alter the fundamental makeup of the combined company, such as selling CNN or one of its movie studios. The concessions were formalized in a consent decree, a mutually agreed upon list of compromises that resolve the lawsuit. A court still needs to approve it.
Shares of Paramount were up about 4 percent, and Warner Bros. Discovery up 11 percent in early afternoon trading shortly after the deal was announced.
Paramount has said the deal was necessary, in part, to create a counterweight to increasingly powerful tech companies like Netflix that were muscling in on Hollywood.
Monday’s settlement helps culminate Paramount’s yearlong pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, a hard-fought battle with the streaming giant Netflix that required a series of escalating bids from Mr. Ellison. Netflix ultimately dropped out this year, leaving Paramount as the top bidder. The company has spent the last several months fighting the attorneys general in and out of the courtroom, waging a public relations battle and even threatening to leave California.
Labor organizations, which represent thousands of entertainment industry employees, have been split over the deal, with some viewing a settlement with antitrust protections as the most pragmatic option in an industry rocked by economic contraction and technological disruption. But some critics have described Mr. Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros. in stark, existential terms, fearing it would lead to massive layoffs and less competition in Hollywood.
In July, the Writers Guild of America East and Writers Guild of America West, jointly the WGA, filed a separate lawsuit to block the proposed merger, saying it would cause harm to writers and violate federal antitrust law. On Monday, the WGA announced that its members could not alone afford to continue the legal battle and that it had settled that companion lawsuit as well.
CBS News has also been under a microscope since Mr. Ellison last year handpicked Bari Weiss, a contrarian critic of mainstream media, to be its editor in chief. This year, Ms. Weiss purged the senior leadership of “60 Minutes,” the network’s newsmagazine. Many star correspondents, including Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper, either quit or were forced out.
New York Times, White House Removes CNN From TV Pool Duties, Ali Watkins, Sept. 21, 2026. The move was an escalation of President Trump’s clashes with the news media and left uncertain which network would cover his visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.
The Trump administration removed CNN from its duties as the pool representative for television networks on Monday, days after barring journalists from the outlet, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.
CNN said it had been scheduled for TV pool duties this week as part of a longstanding agreement among five major television networks to share responsibility for covering the president’s activities.
But when the White House sent its daily guidance of the president’s schedule on Sunday night, no primary TV pooler was listed for Monday.
The exclusion of CNN was widely expected as President Trump escalated his clashes with the news media. On Friday, he announced he was barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” Mr. Trump said to reporters at the Oval Office.
Journalists from the three news organizations had their badges confiscated when they arrived at the White House complex on Saturday.
Presidents have accommodated pool coverage at the White House for nearly a century. It is extremely rare for a president to travel or hold public events without being accompanied by representatives from the press pool.
Five networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — rotate as the designated television outlet covering presidential events, sharing the financial costs and distributing footage that is carried by news organizations worldwide. CNN had been slated to provide coverage during Mr. Trump’s travel on Monday to New York, where he is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly this week.
It was unclear whether another TV network would be designated as the pool representative to take CNN’s place, or if any network would agree to do so.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said in a joint statement on Monday that they would sue the Trump administration for barring them from the White House, saying it was a violation of their First Amendment rights to cover the president.
Experts say the president’s ban — which was announced abruptly on his Truth Social platform on Friday — is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny.
New York Times, Appeals Court Sides With Missouri Republicans on Redrawn House Map, Mitch Smith, Sept. 21, 2026. The order may have little impact because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that blocked the congressional districts that favor Republicans.
The fight over Missouri’s congressional map took another confusing turn on Monday as a federal appellate panel sided with Republicans who want the general election to be held using boundaries redrawn to favor their party.
But because of a previous U.S. Supreme Court decision, Missouri is still set for now to hold its general election under the map used in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Supreme Court has already cleared the way twice for the older map to be used in November, and ballots were required to be mailed to overseas and military voters last week. The ruling on Monday, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, once again placed the question back before the justices.Where Missouri’s districts changed
Nearly a quarter of the state's registered voters are assigned to different districts in the general election than they were in the primary.
The decision cast fresh doubt on whether the eventual winners of those elections would be seated in Congress. The state’s primary was held last month using the redrawn boundaries, creating a rare situation in which many voters would be casting ballots for general election candidates whom they had no say in nominating.
New York Times, Man Shot by ICE Agent Says His Car Was Struck Twice Before He Was Shot, Christina Morales, Hamed Aleaziz and Billy Witz, Sept. 21, 2026. A Venezuelan immigrant, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, was shot in Austin, Texas, on Sunday after a traffic stop. The shooting prompted calls from local officials for a transparent investigation.
The man shot by an immigration agent in Austin, Texas, over the weekend said Monday that he was bleeding and in pain and that a bullet remained lodged in his back.
The man, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, an immigrant from Venezuela, said that he only felt one gunshot enter his body when a federal immigration officer shot him on Sunday afternoon. He added that the bullet, which was lodged near his spine, was not removed at the hospital where he was taken because a doctor said that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were in a hurry to transport him.
“I am not doing well because of the gunshot wound I received,” Mr. Garces Perez said in Spanish on a speakerphone at a news conference on Monday. “I have not received the necessary medical attention.”
New York Times, Wall Street Is Growing Skeptical of the Data Center Boom, Maureen Farrell, Sept. 21, 2026. Several companies tied to the data center industry have delayed their initial public offerings amid the increasing public backlash to these energy guzzling facilities.
The backlash against data centers that is shaping elections and kitchen table debates across the country is now spilling onto Wall Street.
Companies that house the data centers or supply them with energy and land for construction were expected to dominate the initial public offering market over the coming months, feeding investors’ seemingly insatiable appetite for everything related to artificial intelligence.
But some investors are voicing increasing skepticism about the growth expectations for data centers and the risks associated with their build-out, forcing industry executives and their advisers to recalibrate their plans to raise tens of billions of dollars in public markets.
Debates Over Artificial Intelligence and Its Impacts
The Bulwark, Morning Shots Political Opinion: Nobody Wants ‘Supreme Intelligence,’ Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 21, 2026. I’m going to keep banging this drum: It isn’t the most important issue in politics yet, but when it comes to AI, Donald Trump is handing Democrats an absolutely massive opportunity.
On Friday, I reported on a new poll suggesting Americans already realize that Trump is way out of step with their priorities on AI development. By a margin of 76 percent to 12 percent, the Tavern Research poll found, Americans want to see the country prioritize AI safety over rapid AI innovation. Trump, by contrast, is increasingly dug in on the opposite approach—insisting that a “STRONG AND SMART” president is the only “guardrails” AI safety requires while haranguing anyone who thinks development is going too fast as a coward or a commie.
This major disconnect is already coming through loud and clear to voters, and they don’t like what they see: Only 19 percent of those polled by Tavern Research said they approve of Trump’s approach to AI, with 52 percent disapproving.
That’s a terrible spread on the issue—and yet I don’t think Trump has even bottomed out. In fact, the full contours of Trump’s uniquely insane approach to AI are only just coming into focus.
For a year now, Trump’s basic AI outlook has been simple, reflective of both his usual zero-sum mentality and the hawks who have his ear: We have to develop AI as fast as we can, both because it’ll be—he hopes—a money-printing machine and because if we slow down we risk losing to China. At the policy level, this boosterism mostly meant squelching attempts to regulate AI at the federal and state level and cheerleading for the data center buildout across the country.
Until recently, the potential fissure between Trump and voters has mostly stayed in the realm of the boring policy paper. Opposition to data centers is real, but it’s also a decentralized infrastructure issue—not the sort of thing that seems likely to drive national political realignment.
Only in the last few weeks has the national AI conversation begun catching up to the existential questions that have been rattling the AI-development field for years: What will happen if AI companies do develop superintelligent AI systems? What should our regulatory approach to that possible future be? Will AI kill us all?
Most Americans look at that possible future with loathing and foreboding. Donald Trump, by contrast, seems almost comically excited about it.
“Many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence,” the president mused on Truth Social on Saturday. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena [sic] would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”
It’s hard to imagine how the public could be made to like AI even less. But the president openly cheerleading our speedrun to a future where we are governed by “SUPREME INTELLIGENCE” could probably do it. It certainly puts Trump’s call last month to “let Data Reign” in a new and more sinister light.
There’s a coherent, if insane, worldview on display here. Trump’s economic instinct is always the same: Let business leaders do whatever they want, so long as they’re willing to bend the knee personally to me. Apparently, his hubris extends far enough to include superintelligent AI agents. In much the same way that he truly believes Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he were president, Trump genuinely seems to think a misaligned AI won’t dare to act up as long as he’s around.
As with so many other issues, Trump is hurt here by his total abandonment of actual populist voices in his ear during his return trip to the presidency. Once upon a time, the Tucker Carlsons and Steve Bannons of the world would have been a persistent whine in Trump’s ear suggesting that he meet the people where they are on charged issues like this. Instead, Trump has seemingly been totally captured by tech industry voices—so much so that he thinks he can persuade the American people that they’re just not looking on the bright side of the Great Robot Replacement.
But the Great Robot Replacement isn’t actually something anybody wants. If the last few weeks are any indication, anxieties around superintelligent AI are only going to continue to grow. Democrats should push the issue as hard as they can.
We have yet to be replaced by robots. Why not share our 100%-pure human analysis with another flesh-and-blood friend.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump’s New Defense Of The Arch Is Incredibly Stupid… Trump’s plan for his arch includes drones and snipers. (Really.) WILL SALETAN and SAM STEIN break it down on Bulwark+ Takes.Quick Hits
WILL HE OR WON’T HE? Donald Trump, who once thought it would be easy to smush Iran like a bug, is now facing the deeply unpleasant prospect of an energy crisis sparked by a two-front war: Not only is Iran still clogging the Strait of Hormuz, but the Houthis are looking more and more dangerous in the Red Sea. Yesterday, Trump opted against working with Saudi Arabia in joint strikes on the Houthis. The New York Times has more:
The president had wavered for weeks over the Saudi appeals for help in fighting the Houthis, who took advantage of the instability in the Middle East and reignited their war with the kingdom this summer.
But things came to a head on Thursday: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader and a major ally in the Iran war, called the president to implore him, again, to step in to help blunt the rapidly advancing group, administration officials said.
Mr. Trump had met with advisers just the day before and told them he did not favor strikes. But after speaking with the Saudi crown prince, he reversed himself and told the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes against the Houthis.
But by midday Sunday, the president appeared to have reversed himself again. There would be no U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis—at least not for the time being, according to administration officials. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss military planning.
Isn’t it nice to have such bold, decisive leadership in a crisis? Read the whole thing.
RESOLUTION IN GREENLAND: Is the long, strange, sordid Trump/Greenland saga finally at an end? On Friday, the president—whose ogling of Denmark’s Arctic territory rattled the foundations of NATO for more than a year—announced that an agreement had finally been struck. At long last, Trump would drop his insane demand that Greenland be gifted territorially to the United States. Meanwhile, Denmark and Greenland would agree to expand U.S. military access on the island and to bar U.S. adversaries from military bases or key economic agreements there in perpetuity—an “Infinite Life agreement” in Trumpspeak.
Trump announced the deal via a peacocking post on Truth Social, in which he argued that the deal “completely address[ed] ALL of our many U.S. concerns” and claimed that “for over 100 years, Presidents have known the strategic importance of Greenland, but NONE of them were able to do anything about it.” This was hogwash. America has enjoyed basically unfettered military access to Greenland since the Cold War; it was Trump’s insistence that this was no longer sufficient and that America must own the island outright that had caused so much tension. (“Ownership is very important,” he told the New York Times in January. “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”)
Trump’s fans will insist that this was Art of the Deal magic, and that Trump’s obscene demands led Greenland and Denmark to make a more pro-America deal than they’d have been willing to give otherwise. In making this unfalsifiable argument, they will have to ignore the strategy’s unmissable cost: a Western world that must increasingly treat America as a dangerous possible adversary to placate rather than a reliable partner and ally.
ANOTHER ATTACK ON THE PRESS: Donald Trump is sick of the fake news, and he’s decided to do something about it. On Friday, Trump abruptly announced that he was revoking White House access to three outlets: CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump fumed on Truth Social. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Sure enough, the outlets’ journalists who attempted to enter the White House complex this weekend had their press passes confiscated and were barred entry to the grounds.
Trump’s explicit acknowledgment that he banned the outlets because he didn’t like their coverage—a direct violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination—will doubtless hurt him in the inevitable lawsuits over the change. But other Republicans aren’t rushing to chastise the president for his nakedly unconstitutional act. “The president, remember, in his first term—he was banned from Twitter. He was banned from Facebook,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) nattered inanely on Meet the Press yesterday. “The press has an obligation to report fairly, and the president doesn’t see it happening that way.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics
The Pugilist, Political Opinion: Hinojosa Overtakes Abbott for First Time in New Texas Poll; Democrats Lead Three of Four Top Races, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Just like I predicted right here in this publication almost two years ago.
Sometimes, here at The Pugilist, we enjoy being the ones to say, “I told you so.” And this is one such time.
For the first time this election cycle, a nonpartisan public poll shows Democrat Gina Hinojosa leading Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the race for Texas governor, part of a broader ReconMR/Siena survey that found Democrats ahead in three of the state’s four marquee contests.
The poll, released Sept. 17, put Hinojosa up 4 points over Abbott, 49 percent to 45 percent — the first survey of the cycle to give the progressive Democratic state representative a lead over the three-term far-right incumbent. In July, the same pollster had Abbott ahead by a single point, and in June it showed him up 6.
Hinojosa’s advantage was powered by independents, who backed her 65 percent to 27 percent — a dramatic swing from the pollster’s earlier surveys. Her favorability also climbed to 48-27 percent, up from 43-25 in July, while Abbott carried an underwater 45-53 favorability rating that mirrored his job-approval numbers.Democrats lead down the ballotHinojosa, left, Goodwin and Talarico
The governor’s race was not the only bright spot for Texas Democrats. In the U.S. Senate contest, Democrat James Talarico led Republican Ken Paxton 49 percent to 43 percent — the 15th of the last 16 released polls to show Talarico ahead.
In the lieutenant governor’s race, Democratic state Sen. Vikki Goodwin held a one-point edge over longtime Republican incumbent Dan Patrick, 47 to 46 percent.
The lone statewide race in the survey where a Republican led was for attorney general, and even there the margin was razor-thin: Republican state Sen. Mayes Middleton led Democratic state Sen. Nathan Johnson by a single point, 45 to 44 percent.Context and caveats
The numbers are notable given the sheer financial mismatch. Abbott has spent roughly $39 million over the past year against Hinojosa’s $3 million, and he entered 2026 with more than $105 million in cash on hand.
Democrats also have history working against them. The party has not won a Texas gubernatorial election since 1990, when Ann Richards captured the office. And Texas voters remain skeptical of the viability of the shift the poll suggests, likely due to longstanding blatant corruption in the state’s Republican party: even as they narrowly favored Hinojosa, 62 percent said they expected Abbott to win, and nearly a third of Hinojosa’s own supporters believed he would ultimately prevail.
The survey polled 614 likely voters from Sept. 8 to 11 and carried a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points — wide enough that the leads in the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general races all fall within or near it. The general election is set for Nov. 3, 2026.A note from THE PUGILIST
None of this should surprise regular readers of The Pugilist. In February 2025, this newsletter (then called Alisa Writes) argued that the next real populist revolution would begin in Texas — not in the coastal strongholds where each party keeps its most reliable voters busy with culture-war theater, but in the one big state where working people of every race, party, and zip code still have to live and work alongside one another.
And a year ago, when Gina Hinojosa launched her campaign, I made the case in “The Mama Bear Who’ll Save Texas” that she was the candidate who could actually do it — a public-school mom who got into politics because her son’s elementary school was closing due to privatization of public education under Abbott, running straight at Abbott’s most self-inflicted wound: the school vouchers he forced through against the will of his own rural and suburban base. “Welfare for the wealthy,” she called them. Affordability and schools are precisely the issues on which this week’s poll shows Texans breaking her way.The five networks that have suspended their pool coverage of President Trump — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC — just issued a joint statement: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Newsweek, Lauren Boebert Blasts Ethics Complaint as ‘Politically Motivated Stunt,’ Sept. 21, 2026. Colorado U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert has blasted claims made in a House Ethics Committee complaint, which alleged that she had sex with members of her staff.
In an email shared with Newsweek, a spokesperson for Boebert’s office said: “Congresswoman Lauren Boebert rejects these allegations as utterly false and there is no truth to them whatsoever.
“This is nothing more than a politically motivated stunt designed to manipulate the ethics process, create headlines, smear her, and generate clickbait. They come from an activist who has long recycled sensational claims, including numerous baseless accusations previously fact-checked as false.”Read More on NewsJames Talarico’s Chance of Beating Ken Paxton Flips in New Poll5 min readJames Talarico’s Chance of Beating Ken Paxton Flips in New PollHasan Piker’s Underwear Photo Displayed at RNC 4 min readHasan Piker’s Underwear Photo Displayed at RNC Fact Check: Is Photo of Trump Kissing Natalie Harp on Golf Course Real?5 min readFact Check: Is Photo of Trump Kissing Natalie Harp on Golf Course Real?
The complaint, which has been reviewed by Newsweek, was filed by David Wheeler with the House Committee on Ethics on September 17 and signed under penalty of perjury. Wheeler is an American journalist and political activist who is the president and co-founder of American Muckrackers, a Democrat Super Political Action Committee (Super PAC).
The complaint alleges that Boebert engaged in sexual relations with three current and former staff members. It also alleges that Boebert paid out $200,000 in hush money to one staffer.
Boebert has four children. She filed for divorce from her husband, Jayson Boebert, in 2023, citing “irreconcilable differences,” and the divorce was finalized that same year.
A prominent Republican lawmaker, Boebert has this year been caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump. She was one of five Republicans to vote with Democrats to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and campaigned for the reelection of fellow Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
Her personal life has also made headlines this year after her son was arrested in August on five felony counts, including sexual exploitation of a child to induce or entice, sexual exploitation of a child involving video and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
"We take these allegations very seriously and pray for everyone affected during this challenging time," Boebert told Newsweek at the time.
In a statement emailed to Newsweek by Wheeler on Sunday, he defended his claims.
"Ms. Boebert runs her classic denial scheme learned straight out of the swamp and carried out by her minions," he said. "She deflects and tries to make the allegations about me."
He added: "This chapter in Boebert's life is the culmination of a history of criminal activity by her and her family, deception of voters and constituents, and a pattern of sexual depravity. Boebert truly believes she is not accountable for her actions, nor do the laws apply to her."
Wheeler laid out a series of claims Boebert has previously denied including alleged affairs, as well as drug and alcohol use, saying there was evidence in "public records."
"Her denial scheme involved a media tour where she claimed she would sue me. She never sued me. I sued her in Colorado Federal Court for defamation and intentional interference with financial harm to our donors," he said. "The judge agreed we were defamed five times and that her interference with donors allegations had merit."
Wheeler continued: "The US House Ethics Committee has investigative and subpoena power. All allegations will be proven with bank statements, text messages, emails, recordings, and witness testimony. This entire story is documented in my notes, and emails and texts with my sources. She can't wiggle out of this episode in her life because there will be an investigation and discovery will occur, statements will be recorded under oath, and she will also have to answer under oath. Her statement denying this series of actions will ultimately be used against her."
The claims made by Wheeler have not been verified by Newsweek.
"Ms. Boebert thinks God is only on her side and that the rules don't apply to her. That may be true, but the facts are on our side," he concluded.
Newsweek has contacted the House Committee on Ethics outside of regular working hours via email for comment.David Wheeler Files Ethics Complaint
In 2018, the House of Representatives adopted rules that bar all members from engaging in sexual relationships with employees that they supervise.
In the “statement of facts” portion of the complaint, it states that the allegations are based on “publicly available official records,” including disbursement records, state court records and published news reporting.
Further to the statement given to Newsweek, Boebert told the news outlet Sources Say News: “I’m not a lesbian or bisexual, and I have never, ever been in any inappropriate relationship, nor have I ever been sexually involved with any staff.”
There are additional claims that Boebert was engaged in intimate relations with the former Florida Representative, Matt Gaetz, and another party. To this, Boebert responded: “Creative, I’ll give him that!”
Gaetz also responded to those claims in a post on X, where he wrote: “I am requesting that anyone with video of me in this alleged “threesome” release said evidence IMMEDIATELY! Unedited, please.”
Wheeler has reported on Boebert for years.
In 2022, Wheeler filed a lawsuit against Boebert in Colorado, alleging that Boebert made “maliciously false statements” about him and American Muckrakers on multiple occasions in 2022, when Boebert was running for reelection.
That lawsuit was settled in 2024.
A year prior, a judge in Garfield County dismissed a complaint made by Boebert, where she asked for a permanent protection order against Wheeler.
Wheeler responded to the Sources Say News article where Boebert rejected the allegations in the story's comment section. “That’s not true,” he wrote, adding: “We have sources with names. We’re not naming them because they are afraid of MAGA repercussions, but they are in the complaint and have been turned over to the House Ethics Committee.”What Happens Next
Filing a complaint with the House Committee on Ethics does not mean an investigation has begun or that any wrongdoing has been found.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Does the Road to the House Majority Run Through the West? Tim Dickinson, right, Sept. 21, 2026. These ten races from Arizona to Alaska could put Democrats in control of Congress.
The Bulwark, Morning Shots Political Opinion: Trump’s AI Hubris Is a Blue Opportunity, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 21, 2026. The president for one welcomes our new robot overlords.
Things are pretty stupid out there, but don’t you ever think they can’t get stupider still. Take the massive Triumphal Arch that our Napoleon-idolizing president wants to build at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. The arch, Trump announced yesterday, is a simple arch no longer: He now intends to make it “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
Trump’s thinking here, as with his East Wing ballroom, is that the courts will be more deferential in letting him build his arch if he can claim it’s needed for a national security reason. We don’t know whether the appropriate response is to laugh or cry—depends on whether the courts swallow it, we suppose.
Bill, Ben, and Sam are off for Yom Kippur today—we wish an easy fast and a meaningful holiday to all who observe. Happy Monday.
More On U.S. Governance, Trump Plans
The Bulwark, Robert Kagan’s Chilling Warning About Trump’s Next Two Years, William Kristol, Sept. 21, 2026. Bill Kristol talks with Robert Kagan about how Trump’s Iran war is accelerating America’s retreat from the world, leaving allies to fend for themselves while China and Russia gain room to maneuver.
They also discuss Trump’s unfinished ambitions in Greenland, Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, and Kagan’s warning that the breakdown of the postwar order could move much faster than Washington is prepared for.
New York Times, White House Plan to Subsidize Stay-at-Home Parents Divides Conservatives, Coral Davenport, Sept. 21, 2026. Some praise the idea championed by Vice President JD Vance to direct federal money to support traditional families, while others say it cuts against conservative principles.
Republicans are sharply divided over a new plan being drafted by the Trump administration that would allow stay-at-home spouses to collect child care subsidy payments from a federal program intended to assist working parents.
Some commentators and lawmakers called the policy, which could help realize a vision of stay-at-home motherhood championed by Vice President JD Vance, a “grand slam,” “no-brainer” and “President Trump’s greatest legacy.”
Others eviscerated it as “socialism,” “rank politics” and “stupid.”
The split reaction reflects one of the emerging fractures in Mr. Trump’s MAGA coalition. Traditional Republicans, religious conservatives and America First populists have jostled for influence with the pronatalist movement, which aims for women to have more children and stay home to raise them, and supporters of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
And the role of the federal government in shaping family policy has proved to be a key flashpoint.
When news of the plan broke over Labor Day weekend, Rachel Campos-Duffy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” declared on air, “I think this might be my favorite policy, like, ever, that Trump has brought.”
Ms. Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and a mother of nine, is a prominent voice in the pronatalist movement. She and others in the movement said the proposed subsidy would be the administration’s largest step toward achieving pronatalists’ goals.
Conservative podcasts, broadcasts and social media buzzed with excitement. A coterie of conservative lawmakers, some of whom have tried but failed to push through legislation to pay stay-at-home parents, including Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, cheered their support.
But many on the right, even those who embrace Mr. Vance’s promotion of traditional families, said that handing out government money to parents so they could stay at home would go against core conservative tenets. They also maintained that the proposal contradicted the administration’s efforts to require Americans to work to get other forms of federal support.
“Add work requirements here, but take them away there, just to use the power of the state to promote the family?” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who served under President George W. Bush and now runs the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. “A traditional conservative would say this is none of the government’s business.”
And Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit and radio host, wrote on social media, “Didn’t realize how many conservatives want to be or want their wives to be welfare queens, dependent on a government handout.”
If carried out, the transformation of the child care subsidy program would be the federal government’s most concrete policy for advancing the family structure championed by Mr. Vance, who since his days as an Ohio senator has called to reform child care subsidies and to promote stay-at-home parents.
Under the draft proposal being considered by the Trump administration, parents who stay home with their children could get a payment from an existing Health and Human Services Department fund set up to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school, The New York Times previously reported. The current program typically provides annual subsidies of about $9,000 per child.
The proposed change to open the program to stay-at-home parents, which originated in the White House, has not yet been finalized or released.
News of the proposal was immediately met with some sharp criticism on the right, revealing a willingness among some conservatives to challenge Mr. Vance, who is seen as a likely presidential contender in 2028.
More On U.S. China Relationship
New York Times, One Issue That Could Upend Fragile U.S.-China Ties: Taiwan Arms, Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien, Sept. 21, 2026. As Beijing presses President Trump to freeze a proposed $14 billion weapons sale to the island, Taiwan is trying to show that its security is in U.S. interests.
On a red carpet, President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, both in dark suits, shake hands. Grey steps rise to a building, with three uniformed trumpeters.
For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, one important goal of his meeting with President Trump this week may be persuading him to keep delaying $14 billion in proposed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
China has long claimed the self-governed island of Taiwan as its territory, and Taipei has relied on American military power to counter military threats from Beijing. When they last met, Mr. Xi warned Mr. Trump that mishandling tensions over Taiwan could be “extremely dangerous” for the United States and China, a reminder of the risk of crisis between two nuclear-armed powers.
“There’s only one issue that could cause relations between both sides to break down completely or erupt in conflict, and that is Taiwan,” said Xin Qiang, the director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“Demanding a continued delay in any arms sales may be the most critical issue,” he said.
Mr. Trump has described the arms sale plan as a source of leverage with China. After his May summit with Mr. Xi in Beijing, Mr. Trump said he had discussed the deal with the Chinese leader. “It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said then.
Mr. Trump has since held off approving the package of missiles, anti-drone weaponry and air-defense systems. His administration has also muted public references to Taiwan: Officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have conspicuously avoided mentioning Taiwan in speeches.
For Beijing, Mr. Trump’s willingness to delay arms sales is already a gain. In Washington, Mr. Xi could hint at potential costs if Mr. Trump approves the sale, including more restrictions on Chinese rare earth exports. Mr. Xi could also signal that he might skip the Group of 20 summit in Miami in December, which Mr. Trump will preside over.
Mr. Trump, for his part, may want China to increase pressure on Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for global oil and gas supplies that Iran has effectively blocked since the war began in February.
“I think in Beijing we saw the opening move in what will be a sophisticated play to get the Trump administration to reduce support for Taiwan,” said David Sacks, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies U.S. relations with Taiwan and China. “Xi will use his meetings with Trump in Washington to continue to implement this strategy.”
New York Times, Taiwan Wonders Where It Stands With Trump, Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien, Sept. 21, 2026. Delayed arms sales are a political headache for Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te. He has promoted increased military spending and purchases of American weapons, in part to meet the Trump administration’s own demands that partners invest more in their defense. Mr. Trump’s stalling could make it harder for Mr. Lai to defend his agenda.
Longer delays could drag on the island’s military goals, partly by pushing Taiwan further back in the line for orders of scarce military hardware, some experts said.
“Ultimately, it’s a game of the Chinese trying to prolong this process as long as possible, with the idea being that if China can make gains faster than Taiwan can acquire capabilities, then the balance continues to tilt in Beijing’s favor,” said Ryan Hass, a former director for China at the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Some experts said they expected Mr. Trump to keep holding off approval of any arms sales for Taiwan until at least late this year. Others said the green light for some weapons could come sooner. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are likely to raise pressure on the administration to approve the proposed arms sales after the summit, Mr. Sacks said.
The arms issue has highlighted Taiwan’s struggles to keep Mr. Trump onside. Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States, and Mr. Trump’s highly personalized, freewheeling style makes it more difficult for Taiwan to understand and shape U.S. decision-making, experts say.
“With an administration that is so top-down, I think that is hindering the Taiwanese ability to get a really good sense of what’s going on and the ability to help shape and influence that,” said Laura Rosenberger, a former Biden administration official who oversaw U.S. policies on China and Taiwan.
In his first term, Mr. Trump signed off on about $18 billion of arms sales to Taiwan, and hawkish members of his government focused on Beijing as a long-term threat. But in his second term, Mr. Trump has emphasized pragmatic ties with China, largely retreating from a trade war after Beijing strangled exports of rare earths that are crucial for smartphones and advanced technology.
New York Times, China Promised to Buy More U.S. Farm Goods, Sui-Lee Wee, Sept. 21, 2026. Hasn’t Happened, Soybeans are the notable exception, revealing Beijing’s selective approach to fulfilling trade commitments ahead of the summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping.
When President Trump met with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in May, the United States announced that China had agreed to sharply increase its purchases of American agricultural products.
The pledge, one of China’s major commitments after the high-profile meeting, appeared to offer relief to U.S. farmers battered by the trade war between the two countries.
Four months later, there is little sign of a broad Chinese buying spree.
The White House announced in May that China would buy at least $17 billion a year of U.S. farm goods through 2028, with the target prorated for 2026. Soybeans were not included: China had already vowed separately to step up purchases from American farmers.
Yet in the first seven months of 2026, China bought only $3.9 billion of U.S. agricultural products, excluding soybeans, according to the most recent Agriculture Department data. The amount was only slightly more than during the same period last year, when sales were at a six-year low as the two countries imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on each other.
“They’re not keeping that promise and it hasn’t been talked about,” said Ishan Bhanu, the lead agricultural commodities analyst at Kpler, which tracks trade flows.
The sluggish pace of China’s purchases could become a point of contention when Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi meet again at a summit this week. During his first term, Mr. Trump accused Beijing of “letting us down” by reneging on pledges to buy American agricultural products and called its failure to buy soybeans an “economically hostile” act.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: The writing is on the wall for Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 20, 2026. Very early Saturday morning, at 1:06 AM, before his ill-fated vacation to Camp David was cut short later that day, Donald Trump posted an ominous and deeply troubling video that few people even saw. Filled with fear-filled messaging, it opens with a dark and eerie image of the White House before quickly moving to Donald Trump rising from the shadows just as the narrator says, “Sometimes in history, there’s this magic moment. Somebody appears on the scene and everything changes.”
From there, the video immediately pushes to show Trump’s political rise as a biblical calling and a divine destiny. “This was a man who’s met his destiny. He said he was saved by God in order to make America great again.”
Within those words, Trump’s voice can be heard in the background saying, “I am with you. I will fight for you.” Making him sound steady, humble, and powerful.
The rest of the video told an even greater story of the sanitizing of Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office: “This president will go down in history as a peacemaking president. Peace through strength. America’s in charge.”
It continues by declaring Donald Trump’s return to the White House a defining moment in the entire existence of the United States, something larger than politics itself: “His victory was the greatest comeback of all time. You’re watching history, so buckle up.”
It ends with a promise that felt more like a warning: “My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future because the golden age of America has only just begun.”
The timing of this video, and what it was trying to accomplish, tells a very different story from what is really happening. The message was that he is strong, steady, and completely in control, when what is really happening is that his presidency is struggling through one crisis after another. His incompetence and actual ability to lead through a moment of crisis is obvious to many more now; he and his enablers are working around the clock to create and distribute propaganda designed to project the aura of success that reality simply cannot.
It didn’t take long after that video was posted to see his lack of leadership skills play out once again. Later that evening, Donald Trump would be urgently whisked away back to the White House, with very little notice, a day early from his weekend away at Camp David. With the Middle East erupting amid the escalation of Trump’s Iranian war, the sudden move looked somehow related.
On Sunday morning, just hours after he had abruptly returned to Washington to handle whatever had spooked him the night before, it became clear that it was not important enough for him to miss a day of playing golf. Because at 8:53 AM, the president of the United States was on his way to one of his own personal courses in Sterling, Virginia, to hit golf balls.
He did take a small break at some point to give a quick interview to Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst to say that he was in a “deciding mode” in regard to the war in Iran and that “very big things are going to be happening in the not-so-distant future.” He told Yingst that there are three options on the table: “wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically, or making a deal.” He then said this: “My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave.”
When Yingst asked whether this weekend felt different given the embassy alerts and the escalation happening across the region, Trump said it was “no different from any other weekend.”
Later that evening, Donald Trump was back at the White House and posting on his social media account. At 5:37 PM, he shared an image on Truth Social of himself peering over a globe focused on Greenland and the Western Hemisphere with large red letters that said, “His Hemisphere.”We may never know what actually transpired over this weekend. If there was a true crisis playing out even worse than the one we can see, or if this was just Donald Trump wanting to go golfing. But the reality is that there is an actual crisis. The world is destabilizing at an increasing rate, and Donald Trump has completely checked out. He went golfing instead of trying to fix the mess that he created. The contrast to times when past presidents had to hold the peace and carry the enormous weight of preventing an already dangerous crisis from spiraling into something far worse is sadly clear.
Although before my time, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a period of history I paid special attention to. I can remember my grandparents and my parents talking about what that was like, both as mothers and fathers and also as children. It left lasting imprints on so many. I think about how President Kennedy faced that moment in October of 1962 vs. how Donald Trump would. And thinking about this again right now, no doubt this is playing on a loop in my mind because of Donald Trump’s latest push this past week to place his name on the building that stands as a memorial to President Kennedy.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the stakes were very different, as was the threat, but that moment in time showed what seriousness looks like in a president who understands the gravity of the power he holds. Kennedy convened his advisors around the clock for 13 days. He even listened to people who disagreed with him. He weighed every option knowing that a wrong move could kill millions of people, and he let that fear make him more careful, not more reckless like Donald Trump often does. During one of the most tense times of the crisis, there is a well-known account of an aide who saw Kennedy standing in the doorway of the Oval Office, as his young son, John Jr., pushed a toy fire truck across the carpet. The aide later described him as “a man carrying the weight of the world.” Kennedy was no doubt watching his own child play and understanding, deep down in his soul, that if he made a wrong decision, it could take moments like that from every family in the country.
I thought about what it means to lead with that kind of pressure surrounding you and, if done right, how it changes you. I went to a place in my mind where I considered other past presidents and how they have carried the weight of the office, during the good and the trying times. Donald Trump has never once acted with humility or an understanding of, or care for, how his decisions and policies actually affect real people. In all these years, we have never seen him act from a place of empathy. He does not care, no matter what propaganda he or his administration shares.
When my husband was in the hospital, he just wanted to get home to see “his girls,” aka our daughters and pets. He just wanted us all to be together. When he was finally released and we were back together, he just lit up. There was so much joy and love. This is not unique to me or my family. This is a universal feeling that so many of us have known and treasure. And yet we have never seen or heard anything even close to that with Donald Trump. When he speaks about his family, it sounds methodical and forced.
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.
Maybe that is why I keep coming back to that video he shared, the Fox interviews, and what it really means to carry the weight of the presidency. Because the decisions made inside the Oval Office never stay there. They eventually find their way into our lives in large ways and in the most basic ways. When a president makes a decision about war, the consequences are ultimately carried by all of the American people, including military families who want nothing more than to be home with the people they love.
What we know right now about the Iran war and whatever else made Trump rush back to the White House is still most likely very little of what is really happening behind closed doors. The danger we are in is elevated by having a president who does not care about the truth, and who has filled every position that should be advising him and doing the critical work of keeping Americans safe with people who are equally incompetent, compromised, and indifferent to the consequences of their actions.
Tomorrow, Donald Trump heads to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where the Iranian President, the leader of the nation he said he was considering obliterating, will also be in attendance. He will meet with Gulf leaders, and later this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping is coming to the White House for a state dinner on Thursday, followed by a tour of the National Archives on Friday. Tomorrow, his schedule shows meetings with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and French President Emmanuel Macron. We can only hope that Donald Trump can muster some restraint and seriousness as he represents us on the world stage. I have no doubt we will have much to talk about tomorrow and in the days that follow.
There are 44 days until the midterms. Congress was sent home early by Speaker Johnson before they could vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, formally challenge the war in Iran, and avoid Representatives from having to put their names behind the Epstein 2.0 bill. He saw the writing on the wall and had very real concerns that these votes would be terrible for Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Pete Hegseth. Donald Trump is locking out members of the press who are holding to their journalistic standards and not bending to his demands to share only positive coverage of him. The next chance Americans have to change the direction of this country comes in November, and the stakes could not be higher.
Although nothing is guaranteed in this moment, history tells us Americans do the right thing, eventually. Donald Trump continues to grow more unpopular by the day. This week will most likely bring even more embarrassment to our country and infuriate those that we used to call our friends and allies. We need to keep talking about what is happening, and remind the people around us that none of this is normal and none of it has to be permanent. We can, and we will, change the trajectory of our country with our votes.
More Global News
New York Times, Germany’s Merz Vows to Stay After Another State Election ‘Disaster,’ Jim Tankersley, Sept. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Chancellor Friedrich Merz faced growing pressure on Sunday after his center-right party finished behind far-right and far-left parties in state elections in the east.
Friedrich Merz, the unpopular and increasingly embattled German chancellor, vowed on Sunday evening that he would remain in the job, after his party performed poorly in two state elections in eastern Germany.
Mr. Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats, long the nation’s dominant conservative party, limped to their worst postwar showing in a state election, in the lightly populated coastal state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. In Berlin, the capital, they appeared on the brink of losing power after a surprisingly large loss to the far-left Die Linke party.
“It is a disaster,” Mr. Merz told reporters shortly after polls closed.
The chancellor’s approval rating is falling toward single digits. He has faced mounting pressure to resign since his party was trounced in another eastern state earlier this month by the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. But he pledged on Sunday to stay and shepherd legislation meant to revive the German economy.
“What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness and patience,” Mr. Merz said. “I will provide that.”
The timing and content of Mr. Merz’s speech were “an attempt to choke off the speculation about his possible resignation,” Carsten Brzeski, a senior analyst at the financial firm ING, wrote on Sunday evening.
The election showed a continuing polarization of the German electorate.
In Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the AfD more than doubled its vote share from the previous election and finished first. It campaigned on economic renewal and on deporting refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere. With most of the vote counted, the Christian Democrats had fallen below 5 percent of the vote, the threshold for winning seats in the state parliament, a potentially devastating development for Mr. Merz’s party if it held through the final tally.
“We have the mandate to govern,” the AfD’s candidate for state premier, Leif-Erik Holm, told jubilant supporters.
The AfD probably won’t govern the state now, though. It was projected to fail to win a majority of seats and no other major parties will work with it in a coalition. That is partly because it has been classified as suspected right-wing extremist by German intelligence.
New York Times, News Analysis: Challenges to Identity, Real and Imagined, Drive Europe’s Far Right, Steven Erlanger, Sept. 21, 2026. The populist emphasis on national identity and pride, rather than the sins of the past, finds a deep response in voters adrift in a world they no longer understand.
The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fueled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.
The AfD is now the most popular party nationwide, polls say, close to governing a German state for the first time, and did well again in two more state elections on Sunday. It has benefited from economic and industrial decline and a sense of insecurity, which the party blames on the extensive migration of young Muslims in the last decade.
The party came first in the small eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and a good third in Berlin, while the Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Friedrich Merz did poorly, in what he himself called “a disaster.” The results will heighten talk of the party’s replacing the unpopular chancellor before the end of his term.
The AfD has thrived on a key element that ties most populist parties together, especially those of the far right: nostalgia for a society and nation lost to time, even if they exist only in gilded memory or fantasy.
“We live in a world today of fragmentation and growing inequality, no longer with unifying themes or a unifying narrative,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, an economist at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
That sense of insecurity, analysts say, is driving many people to yearn for the narratives they do know, especially in the past, when life is remembered as simpler, family structures seemed more defined, and Western nations were largely Christian and less diverse.
Across Europe, far-right leaders have painted that idea of the past as preferable to the present, downplaying or dismissing inconvenient facts, such as Mussolini in Italy, collaboration with the Nazis, Soviet occupation or the inequalities of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times, 3 News Outlets Say They Will Sue to Regain White House Access, Erik Wemple, Sept. 21, 2026. In a joint statement, CNN, MS NOW and Politico argued that President Trump’s decision to bar them from the White House grounds violates their First Amendment rights.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said on Monday that they would sue the Trump administration for barring them from the White House grounds, saying it was a violation of their First Amendment rights to cover the president.
President Trump on Friday declared a ban on the three news outlets, saying he was fed up with what he described as negative coverage. On Saturday, reporters from each outlet were denied access to the White House. CNN was removed from its duties as the White House pool representative for television networks on Monday.
The news organizations said in a joint statement that they had informed the U.S. government they would be filing a lawsuit on Monday.
“Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting,” they said. “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
The joint complaint, which the outlets released but have not yet filed with the court, said that the “Constitution does not allow a president or any other government official to deprive the press of their First Amendment rights and liberty and property interests with no notice or process based solely on his dislike of the content of their reporting.”
The news outlets are planning to ask the court to restore their access to the White House as quickly as possible. They will file a separate motion seeking an emergency order that would remain in effect while the litigation unfolds. A CNN representative said that the documents would be filed with the court on Monday morning.
“As a result of the ban, they have lost the ability to perform essential newsgathering at the seat of the executive branch, where critically important newsworthy events occur every day,” the complaint reads.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the planned litigation.
The president’s ban represents a significant escalation in his ongoing battles with the news media, particularly in Washington. Mr. Trump has brought friendlier outlets into the White House briefing room and moved to bar one publication, The Associated Press, from the Oval Office, which is also being challenged in court. But he had not barred any outlets from the entire White House grounds.
Press freedom advocates and other media outlets have blasted the ban as unconstitutional. “No news organization — or person — should be retaliated against by the government over the words they use,” said Lauren Easton, chief communications officer for The A.P., in a Saturday statement.
In previous legal fights about journalist access, federal courts have ruled that once government officials open their doors to a press corps they may not boot specific outlets just because they don’t like the gist of their reporting.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the White House rescinded the credentials of two journalists, CNN’s Jim Acosta and the Playboy correspondent Brian Karem. Both were restored after separate court challenges, and in each case, judges highlighted a requirement that before yanking press passes, the White House must provide the affected journalists a chance to rebut the grounds for doing so.
In this case, the outlets “received zero advance notice,” according to the planned lawsuit.
New York Times, The Crypto Industry Aims to Crush One of Democrats’ Top Senate Candidates, Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 21, 2026. Angry after the defeat of a major crypto bill last week, the industry is planning to spend $30 million against Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
The cryptocurrency industry, furious at Democrats for blocking the passage of a major business-friendly bill last week, is beginning to wage war on the party’s midterm candidates.
The industry’s main super PAC, Fairshake, which is backed by some of the richest people in Silicon Valley, is starting to unspool a planned $30 million advertising campaign against former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat running again for the chamber, the group told The New York Times.
The push is by far the crypto industry’s most aggressive move yet in the midterms, and it could have significant implications for the Ohio Senate race, one of this year’s top contests for control of Congress. Fairshake spent $41 million on advertising in 2024 to target Mr. Brown, a progressive critic of the industry who was then the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. He lost, and many Republicans credit the crypto industry for helping them win.
Fairshake has cast itself as a bipartisan super PAC, and it supported some Democrats in the 2024 elections. But with Republicans in control of Washington, the industry has enjoyed a light regulatory touch and warm relations with party leaders. President Trump has also pulled in more than $1.4 billion from his family’s crypto businesses in his first year back in office, raising a host of ethical concerns.
After Democrats last week blocked the Clarity Act, which would have shielded the crypto industry from a regulatory crackdown under a future Democratic administration, Fairshake’s overall spending in this year’s general election is expected to lean heavily toward Republicans.
The group said it would soon announce additional spending in both House and Senate races, in support of both Democrats and Republicans.
Fairshake is one of the most financially powerful interest groups in the midterms. Along with two affiliated groups, the super PAC has a war chest of $120.4 million, according to federal filings released on Sunday. Both parties have been watching closely to see how much Fairshake spends on the November elections.
Fairshake has considered simply rolling over much of its remaining funds into the 2028 election cycle. But after the industry’s top priority went up in flames, the super PAC is set to unleash significant spending.
Mr. Brown, who could return to a perch on the Senate Banking Committee if he wins in November, has conspicuously dialed back his public criticism of crypto during his campaign.
In an interview in Ohio with The Times last month, Mr. Brown argued that he had not been “outspoken against crypto” in the 2024 election. He said that he believed no industry should be able to write its own regulations.
“I’ve not moderated,” he said. “I’m simply saying that crypto has a part, a role, in our economy. They do. They likely will for a lot of years to come. I don’t have great interest in going beyond that for now.”
Some Republican operatives have grown impatient waiting for Fairshake to mobilize against Mr. Brown, believing the super PAC should have moved earlier.
The $30 million campaign will begin on Tuesday and will include both ads and mail criticizing Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown’s Republican opponent, Senator Jon Husted, already enjoys a considerable financial advantage in the race. Even before the Fairshake money arrives, Republicans in the state are set to outspend Democrats by about $30 million on advertising, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
Fairshake has spent more than $68 million promoting or attacking candidates in congressional primaries this cycle, with mixed results. It helped nominate one Republican for Senate in Alabama and a Democrat for the House in Maryland, and it defeated a Democratic House incumbent in Texas. It suffered a setback, though, in the Democratic primary for Senate in Illinois.
Fairshake also watched last week as some of the Democrats it had supported in 2024 helped torpedo the crypto bill. Every Senate Democrat voted against the legislation, including Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who were both backed by Fairshake two years ago. Several Republicans joined them, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents in November.
And now, some Fairshake donors no longer appear interested in bipartisanship.
Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of the crypto company Ripple, which is a major donor to Fairshake, wrote on X that, “The politics of the democrats (the anti-crypto army) was elevated over good policy.”
Tyler Winklevoss, a crypto billionaire who has donated to Fairshake, wrote: “Not a single Democrat voted for Clarity. There’s a lesson in that.”
In recent weeks, some Republicans close to the industry have privately blamed their party for acceding to the desire of Senate Democrats for bipartisan negotiation, seeing it as a clever strategy meant to prevent Fairshake from spending for as long as possible.
In a meeting about the bill, The Times reported in February, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, warned Democratic lawmakers of the risk of crossing Fairshake.
PoliticusUSA, Ban Backfires As Trump Holds Event But There Are No Microphones To Record Sound, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 21, 2026. Donald Trump got a lesson in FAFO, when he banned reporters from the White House, so when Trump held an event, there was no sound because no microphones were present.
Donald Trump tried to play big man with a reporter ban, but it is not working out well for him.
After the White House Press TV Pool refused to replace CNN after the president banned the network as the pooler on Monday and Tuesday, Trump still held an event at the White House.
is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe
Trump thought that he didn’t need the reporters as much as they needed him. It is a pretty safe assumption to believe that he thought he would show them who the boss is, but it didn’t work out that way at all.
This is how Trump’s event played out on television.
Trump flailed his arms and made gestures like some ancient, chubby cartoon bird, but there was no sound.
Why was there no sound?
Let’s have the Newsmax anchor, who finally had to cut in, explain: So there is no microphone because there's no microphone because the pool cameras aren't there. So maybe, uh, Tim, this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit. Um, pick up on or some of the things Michael was saying, and, um, obviously the ramifications are right here. Can't hear what the president's saying.”
Thanks for reading this free story from PoliticusUSA. You can really help us out by becoming a subscriber.Subscribe
It turns out Donald Trump really does need those reporters with their cameras and microphones, because without them, no one broadcasts what Trump is saying, and if no one broadcasts it, he can’t get the attention he craves every moment of the day.
The message is clear. The relationship between a president and the press is a two-way street.
The White House needs media to broadcast its message. Without microphones, a president can’t be heard.
Trump needs the press because, without them, he is just a weird-looking old guy silently waving his arms in the air, as no one can hear what he is saying.
First Amendment: 1
Donald Trump: 0
Judd at Popular Information, UPDATE: MAGA Inc.’s audacious new ads, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 21, 2026. President Trump has amassed an unprecedented war chest of $400 million that can be spent to influence the 2026 midterms through the MAGA Inc. super PAC.
Legally speaking, Trump cannot directly control how it is spent. Super PACs must be technically independent, which means they cannot be controlled by an officeholder or candidate. Generally, this is accomplished by giving strategic and spending authority to a close ally.
At a press conference earlier this month, Trump made it clear that he does not intend to pay attention to this legal requirement:
I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try and help us. This is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control. Now, this is separate from the RNC… I can spend it for what I want to spend it for. But I’m going to help a lot of the Congressmen and Senators that need help.
In an August interview, a reporter described MAGA Inc. as a super PAC “your allies control.” Trump quickly corrected the reporter. “Not my allies. I control it,” he said. Trump’s comments are now the subject of a Federal Election Commission complaint, although the agency does not have enough commissioners to function.
Last week, Popular Information covered MAGA Inc.’s initial ad spending, which is mostly being routed through a spinoff PAC called No Going Back. The report revealed that many of these ads contained false or hypocritical claims.
Since then, MAGA Inc. has released several new ads through No Going Back, targeting new races. This new batch of ads, which has received almost no media scrutiny, is even more brazen.
For example, in Florida’s 25th District, a new No Going Back ad attacks Congressman Jared Moskowitz (D) for “repeatedly violat[ing] federal law designed to stop Congress from insider trading” and failing “to properly disclose nearly 100 stock trades worth up to $1.7 million.” It notes that the New York Times has “noticed suspicious trades around Moskowitz.”
MAGA Inc., through No Going Back, has spent over $1.2 million in just five days airing this ad in Moskowitz’s district, blanketing the district with millions of impressions.
Stock trading by federal elected officials is a bipartisan problem. Members of Congress have influence on a range of issues that impact stock prices and should not be able to profit from that information by trading stocks. Many members of Congress, however, like to trade stocks, so the law has not changed. It only requires members to disclose their stock transactions within 45 days.
It is true that Moskowitz has made 580 stock trades from 2023 to the present, with a total transaction value of $1.18 million to $10.1 million. On two occasions in August 2024, Moskowitz filed his disclosures late. These late filings involved 94 trades, resulting in a $200 fine. In 2023, The New York Times reported that Moskowitz “sold shares of Seacoast Banking Corporation worth $65,000 to $150,000” belonging to his children around the time “he had attended a bipartisan congressional briefing” on the banking crisis.
But what the MAGA Inc. ad attacking Moskowitz fails to disclose is that the same laws “designed to stop Congress from insider trading” also apply to Trump. Since 2025, Trump has made almost 28,700 trades of securities with a total value of $898 million to $2.87 billion. Almost all of Trump’s trades were disclosed late (some by more than a year) and Trump paid multiple $200 fines. This is the same conduct — at a much larger scale — that Trump is spending millions to convince Florida voters is disqualifying for Moskowitz.
A Bloomberg analysis found that, since returning to office, Trump has traded more securities than all members of Congress combined.
As president, of course, Trump has far more influence over policy and stock prices than an individual Congressman. Popular Information has documented numerous instances where Trump bought stock in a company and then praised the same company days (or even hours) later.
The MAGA Inc. attacks on stock trades are not limited to Moskowitz. Through No Going Back, MAGA Inc. is running an ad attacking Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat representing the 34th District. The ad accuses Gonzalez of “hiding his secret stock trades.”
Since 2018, however, Gonzalez has made just 13 stock transactions with a total value of $646,000 to $1.57 million. In 2022, Gonzalez failed to timely report a single stock sale worth between $1,000 and $15,000. The ad cites a Business Insider report about that singular late filing. No Going Back has spent about $130,000 so far on the Gonzalez ad, with most of the spending on digital platforms.
A third No Going Back ad on stock trading targets Congressman Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat representing New York’s 3rd District. Suozzi’s record of stock disclosure is poor, particularly during his first stint from 2017 to 2023. Suozzi failed to file any periodic transaction reports until September 2021, when he reported over 400 trades late. An ethics investigation was dismissed after it failed to uncover evidence that Suozzi’s conduct was intentional.
Overall, Suozzi has engaged in 669 transactions with a total value of between $9 million and $28 million since first becoming a Congressman in 2017. To put that in perspective, in his second term, Trump has made 669 stock transactions roughly every two weeks. Now, Trump’s super PAC is spending over $1.1 million attacking Suozzi for stock trading.
The No Going Back ad goes beyond Suozzi’s failures and attacks him dishonestly. The ad claims that Suozzi “voted against banning congressional insider trading.”
But Suozzi voted against the stock trading ban because it had Trump’s unrelated voting restrictions (the Voter ID Act) attached. Suozzi does publicly support a stock trading ban and co-sponsors a bipartisan bill that would ban members of Congress from owning stocks.
The ad also accuses Suozzi of getting “caught breaking the law doing it just last year” because he was late disclosing purchases of Treasury bills, not stocks. Trump has been “caught breaking the law” multiple times this year for failing to disclose thousands of stock trades on time.
Sept. 20
Top Headlines
News Roundups
Behind closed doors, Trump is reportedly coming to terms with just how bad the midterm picture looks for Republicans, even as the redistricting scheme he pushed on red states may be backfiring in a way that actually helps Democrats.It is falling to us to ensure there is a “new birth of freedom” here and everywhere in the years ahead......Special Report
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Special Reports: America's Class, Racial and Educational Histories Examined
Sept. 20, 2026. On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. Najya Hannah-Jones, 16, right, is the writer’s daughter (New York Times photo by Wayne Lawrence).U.S. Governance: The Student Debt Morass
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Felon Trump pulls the welcome mat from the People’s House. On Friday, Convicted Felon Donald Trump didn’t "ban" CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. What he did was post one of his typical temper tantrums on that cesspool of a social media platform, Truth Social, about "FICTION and LIES," and then, because nobody in that used-to-be-hallowed building has the testicular fortitude to tell the toddler “no”, the Secret Service spent Saturday morning disabling press badges like a landlord changing the locks on a tenant he never bothered to legally evict.At 7:57 tonight, the president of the United States stepped out of Marine One, using both hands to carefully grip the rails as he made his way down the stairs to his waiting motorcade. With much of his face more swollen than usual, his skin tacky with sweat that glistened under the lights shining down on him, he looked defeated and exhausted.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 20, 2026. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) responded to Trump claiming that he is converting the arch he is building into a military complex by telling the White House to give the president his meds.Sept. 18, 2026. It has been forgotten, amidst the uproar over this ad, that Congresswoman María Salazar has tried to call out Trump’s immigration dragnet before.More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
President Trump Unveils 'Liberation Day' Tariffs (April 3, 2025).
More On Middle East Wars
Russia-Ukraine War
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Pope Leo XIV embraces two Special Olympics Italia athletes in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican on Sept. 19. About 150 athletes from the Turin 2025 World Winter Games attended the audience. (Vatican Media)
Legal Analysis In-depth
Donald J. Trump, Jr., and Russian oligarch and Putin ally Umar Kremlev, right, who spent hundreds of thousands to fund after parties for Don Jr.'s recent wedding and to attend with Russian colleagues what had been announced as an intimate affair heavily focused on family and friends.
Sept. 19, 2026. In the wake of ProPublica’s blockbuster story revealing that a corrupt Russian oligarch paid for Don Jr’s wedding party in May, several things have happened.Sept. 20, 2026. I was right that there’s something funky about the October 16, 2025 grand jury transcript in the Broadview 6 case. But I still can’t figure out how I was right.More News Roundups
Sept. 19, 2026. There’s a lot to get through today, starting with the biggest press freedom fight of Trump’s second term: the White House has physically barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from its grounds, confiscating their badges on live television after a weekend Truth Social tirade.Top Stories
New York Times, How President Trump Broke the Kennedy Center, Elizabeth Williamson and Julia Jacobs, Sept. 20, 2026. Internal emails and documents demonstrate the political capture of the institution, including how officials once pursued a plan to unload much of the art collection.
A storm brought down a five-foot piece of ceiling plaster at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts this month and its leadership sprang into action. One thing they did not do was repair the damage.
Instead staff members left the mess on the carpet for nearly two weeks, posting photos on social media with commentary like “the place is falling apart and @realDonaldTrump wants to fix it.” They measured plaster shards and mapped the “debris field” like investigators after a plane crash, for a 55-page briefing for the center’s board about the building’s decay. No one was injured but Mr. Trump claimed online that a security guard had narrowly avoided “certain death.” Less than two hours later, his allies on the board voted to close the center, citing safety concerns.
Mr. Trump’s threats this past week suggest that saving face, not lives, better explains why he shuttered the Kennedy Center on Tuesday for what officials said would be a temporary closure.
The president, who is the center’s chairman, first announced in February that it would close for two years of renovations. Democratic lawmakers on the board said it was an excuse to avoid the humiliation of plummeting ticket sales and fleeing artists. Since then Mr. Trump has fought to add his name to the memorial to a slain president, drawing multiple court injunctions. When a judge denied him again last week, the president made his priority clear. He decreed that the closing would take place immediately but that the renovation would not begin until courts — potentially the Supreme Court — allow his name on the building front.
Then, as heavy construction fencing went up around the building, he went further. “The Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said, arguing that his name on the center would help lift it out of physical and financial turmoil. “Because frankly if we don’t do that it’s going to close, it’ll end up being ripped down.”
On Friday night, a large crowd of demonstrators locked arms to form a human chain around the building in protest of Mr. Trump’s efforts to close the center amid fears that he might ultimately bulldoze it.A crowd of people holding signs protesting outside the Kennedy Center.President Trump, wearing a red baseball hat, looking at a piece of poster board and seen through the window portal of Air Force Once.Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Kennedy Center on Friday to protest President Trump’s efforts to close and remake the institution, two nights after the president was photographed reviewing a poster board on Air Force One that appeared to show a potential demolition plan.Credit...New York Times photographs by Demetrius Freeman and Kenny Holston
The closure is the apotheosis of the wreckage and chaos created in the less than two years since Mr. Trump’s takeover of the center, once a bipartisan global model of public access to the arts. Internal emails and documents obtained by The New York Times demonstrate the political capture of the institution by the whims of Mr. Trump, who at the start of his second term installed a board that made him chairman. Audiences and donors fled, and its finances cratered.
The center’s first Trump-appointed director, Richard Grenell, pursued a plan, not previously reported, to replace works in the center’s art collection, including gifts from foreign nations honoring Kennedy, with art selected by Trump patrons. “You can definitely start sending stuff back to the countries who donated it now,” Mr. Grenell said in an email to Josef Palermo, a curator he hired. “Figure out everything you don’t want and just send it back A.S.A.P.”
From: Richard GrenellSent: Monday, Oct. 20, 2025 8:12 a.m.To: Palermo, Josef; Floca, MattCc: Loughery, Rick; Meade, Nick; Floca, MattSubject: Re: [EXTERNAL]: Art inside KenCen
You can definitely start sending stuff back to the countries who donated it now. Figure out everything you don’t want and just send it back ASAP.
Conservative groups and friends of the president staged events for free or at steep discounts, including a conference on “ending Christian persecution.” The center threw parties and dedicated rooms to Trump donors and political allies.
Workers renovated Mr. Trump’s three theater boxes in the center, installing gold plumbing fixtures and tearing up newly laid tile whose color was not to the liking of the White House. In one email, a Kennedy Center staff member, Lisa Dale, alerted colleagues to Mr. Trump’s demand for a certain type of tree on campus: “Our Chairman loves maple trees and is insisting we plant maple trees from a very specific Grove by a very specific gardener. :) I actually love this about him!”
Mr. Trump and center officials blame past leadership for the maintenance and financial problems. Despite recent removals of art from the campus and from public display, they say there is no active plan to dump the collection.
“Our nonpartisan approach is evident by the consistent practice of welcoming everyone and continued invitations to bipartisan members of Congress and their staff for briefings, tours and our programming,” a spokeswoman, Roma Daravi, said in a statement on Friday. (Hours later she lost her job in a round of layoffs, one of several this year.) On Wednesday she told Real America’s Voice, a pro-Trump television network, that Democratic critics “are knowingly stopping any work that is going to save this institution because they don’t want President Trump to get the credit.”
Democrats scoffed. “It is bonkers,” Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, the top Democrat on the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Kennedy Center building, said in an interview. “The No. 1 problem the Kennedy Center has had is President Trump.”Five Bipartisan DecadesImagePresident John F. Kennedy, far left, in a suit and tie being shown a model of the Kennedy Center by two other men.President John F. Kennedy reviewing a model of the Kennedy Center in 1963.Credit...National Archive, via Getty Images
It was first known as the National Cultural Center, conceived in the 1950s by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and then championed by Kennedy, a Democrat, as an artistic oasis for all. The two presidents built public support and raised money for the center, and their wives were honorary co-chairs of its board.
After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Congress passed a law that named the center for him and required it to operate as a living memorial. The governing framework that developed aimed to insulate the institution from partisanship. The building would be maintained with federal money, and its arts programming paid for by private donors and ticket sales. Board members included legislators from both parties and presidential appointees whose six-year terms overlapped administrations.
Special Report
The Breakdown, Political Opinion On Health Care, RFK Jr.’s ‘Medical Freedom’ Comes With a Body Count, Jonathan Cohn, Sept. 20, 2026. Measles showed up at a children’s hospital. The health secretary showed up at an anti-vax conference.
This edition jumps off from a speech you may have heard about on the news or social media, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke last week at a conference full of anti-vaccine activists. But what made it especially memorable was something that happened a few hours later, thanks to some breaking news out of Pennsylvania. I decided to write about that too, because it really illustrates what’s at stake as Kennedy continues to pursue his crusade against federal support for vaccination.
EVERY DAY THERE ARE YOUNG, sometimes tiny human beings who leave the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—each one of them living, breathing proof of the miracle work that takes place inside. They are survivors of childhood cancer and rare diseases and congenital conditions. They are alive because CHOP has some of the world’s most capable medical professionals operating with technology on the most far-reaching frontiers of science.
But earlier this month, some of the children inside CHOP were exposed to a potentially deadly threat that medicine learned to stop a long time ago, and that until recently was mostly gone from the United States.
That threat is measles. And it might not be such a threat if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hadn’t spent so many years undermining faith in vaccines—or if, as health and human services secretary, he was treating the surge in cases like the big deal it is.
Here’s what happened at CHOP, according to the city’s Department of Health and a reconstruction of events by hospital staff: The exposure took place on Friday, September 11, when somebody presumed to have measles was at the hospital for nearly seven hours spanning the morning and afternoon.¹ This person spent some of their time in the cafeteria and an atrium, where the virus could have lingered in the air for more than two hours as literally hundreds of people came through. No less alarmingly, this person with measles likely spent additional time in the neonatal intensive care unit and its welcome lounge for families.
NICUs are where you will see hospitals like CHOP doing some of their most astonishing work, as staff care for severely premature infants and newborns with breathing difficulties, heart disorders, or other serious conditions following birth. NICUs are also where you will find some of the patients most vulnerable to infection, because—among other things—the transfer of maternal antibodies to children mostly takes place during pregnancy’s third trimester. And that’s to say nothing of those babies born to mothers who cannot pass on measles immunity because they have none.²
An unvaccinated person probably brought this threat into CHOP in the first place. Philadelphia deputy health commissioner James Garrow confirmed to me in a phone interview that
the source of the exposure was a visitor to the hospital, rather than an employee or patient. Chances are good, he said, that it was somebody who did not know they or their child had measles, because people can start to shed the virus before symptoms really appear. That could also explain how somebody with measles got into a NICU, which typically has extra precautions to screen visitors for infections. (CHOP’s media office did not respond to my inquiries.)
“These things happen,” Garrow said. “People feel them and think, Well, I’ve got some allergies or a little cold—it’s not a big deal. . . . They may just have had these influenza-like illness symptoms that most of us sort of shrug off at this time.”
That difficulty of recognizing and isolating measles before somebody transmits it is one reason public health authorities have historically pushed so hard for immunization. “Herd immunity,” which for measles is generally thought to be about 95 percent of a community, means there are fewer people walking around with the disease and, therefore, fewer chances for isolated cases to spread.
But vaccination rates in many Pennsylvania communities have fallen below that threshold, as they have across America, allowing for ongoing, sustained transmission. State officials on Friday reported 767 documented cases, including 93 new ones in the past week, in what looks like the largest American outbreak this year.³ Already four people with measles have died, with state officials classifying them all as “measles-associated.” A loud chorus of health care providers, experts, and officials has been ringing alarm bells, probably none more loudly than Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor, who has practically begged unvaccinated Pennsylvanians to get the shot.
But that’s not how Kennedy sees things. In fact, just hours before Philadelphia officials announced the exposure at CHOP, he gave one of the most revealing speeches of his tenure—one that showed how little he cares about the spread of infectious diseases, and the toll it takes on the most vulnerable.
KENNEDY’S SPEECH WAS AT THE ANNUAL Washington, D.C., meeting of Children’s Health Defense, the organization that he led from 2015 through 2023, when he stepped down to run for president and then to join President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
Children’s Health Defense is arguably the most visible and influential American organization fomenting distrust of vaccines—although, to be clear, the group insists it is not “anti-vaccine.” Rather, it says that it is merely advancing the cause of “medical freedom” by publicizing what it says is evidence of vaccine safety problems and a conspiracy of silence (or outright suppression) by pro-vaccine scientists in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry.
Among those making the case at Thursday’s meeting was Mark Gorton, president of the MAHA Institute. (“Make America Healthy Again” is Kennedy’s twist on the Trump slogan.) During his remarks, Gorton talked about the vaccine for polio—a disease that, before its elimination in the United States, was killing a few thousand Americans each year and causing paralysis in several times that number of people. Gorton called the vaccine’s success a “fraud,” according to an account in the New York Times.
Gorton addressed the conference before Kennedy. The speaker who came after Kennedy was the British doctor Andrew Wakefield, whose infamous 1998 Lancet paper purporting to link the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine with autism became a foundational piece of the modern anti-vaccination movement. Exhaustive follow-up studies found no evidence of such a link, while an investigation of Wakefield’s paper by the British Medical Journal determined it had been “fraudulent.”
The Lancet eventually retracted the paper and British officials took away Wakefield’s right to practice medicine, though he maintains he was being punished for questioning the medical establishment.
By appearing at that same event and in between those two speakers, Kennedy was making a powerful statement about his willingness to endorse fringe figures and spread misinformation.
He was also sending a signal about his ability to maintain power within the Trump administration. It was not so long ago that administration officials were warning publicly and privately that Kennedy and his agenda were alienating voters who, by and large, believe in vaccines and don’t want to see kids getting sick from preventable diseases like measles. Kennedy had supposedly gotten the message, and was going to focus on more popular causes like better eating.
But much has changed over the summer—probably because Trump values Kennedy politically or is aligned with him ideologically, or maybe both. In early August, the president issued an executive order designed to carry out Kennedy’s attempt—currently blocked by a federal judge—at dramatically reducing the number of childhood vaccines the federal government recommends. Trump held an Oval Office ceremony to sign the order, with Kennedy at his side, and used the opportunity to spread nonsense of his own, like his theory that autism and some other, possibly “lethal” conditions were the result of doctors injecting soda-bottle quantities of liquid into infants and toddlers.
Kennedy conveyed his appreciation for Trump during his Thursday speech. “You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he told the gathered vaccine doubters, before rehashing familiar and largely unfounded claims like his suggestion that modern vaccines haven’t gone through placebo testing (they have) or that they aren’t monitored for safety after approval (they are).
But arguably the most remarkable part of Kennedy’s speech was what it didn’t include: any acknowledgment of the measles caseload as a cause for concern, let alone a call for people to vaccinate. Literally the only reference Kennedy made was an exasperated jab at the media for spending so much time on measles cases and deaths while ignoring the more severe harms he imagines vaccines are causing.
“We care about every child who dies from measles—they get headlines,” Kennedy said. “Shouldn’t we, I ask you, care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries?”
The statement stood out because, as of the most recent CDC update on Thursday, the United States had recorded 3,471 measles cases this year. That is 50 percent higher than last year’s total, which was already the highest since 1991, even though it’s still only September.
“We’ve already had four measles deaths in Pennsylvania this year,” Adam Ratner, the New York–based infectious disease specialist who wrote the book Booster Shots, told me Friday.
That is the most measles-related deaths the United States has seen in three decades. “I’m concerned that the longer this goes on, the more likely we are to have more severe cases and deaths.”
KENNEDY’S SPEECH ON THURSDAY may have suggested a certain indifference to the measles deaths in Pennsylvania. But elsewhere, he and his department have taken steps to actively downplay the matter.
Just go looking for the number of measles fatalities on the CDC website. You probably won’t see them there. As of Friday night’s update, the relevant spot on the webpage contains just an asterisk and a note that the agency is investigating what happened. After the asterisk first appeared on the page in late August, Reuters reported, based on three sources, that the CDC decided against listing the Pennsylvania deaths at the behest of Kennedy.
That decision is the result of an ongoing dispute between Shapiro and Kennedy over who is telling the truth about what is happening in Pennsylvania, and who is doing what to keep people healthy. The argument has played out over social media, with another round starting Tuesday when Shapiro tweeted that Kennedy was “stoking vaccine skepticism and misinformation and compromising the serious mission of the nation’s public health agencies.”
Kennedy responded with a post of his own, in which he denied that he had dictated the CDC website language and in which he re-upped an earlier accusation that Shapiro was engaged in “political grandstanding.”
Lurking beneath this is a core dispute over how much to worry about measles—and whether to push vaccination—when the people most likely to die also have underlying medical conditions. These are people who, as MAHA devotees frequently say, died “with” measles but not “because” of it.⁴
In reality, healthy people can still suffer the worst consequences of measles—as Paul Offit, the internationally recognized physician and director of CHOP’s Vaccine Education Center, reminded me: “When we had 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths a year from measles, you didn’t have to have any underlying chronic medical conditions or be immune compromised, or be a premature baby,” Offit said in a phone interview.
Nor is it clear why the distinction should even matter: One of the main goals of medicine is to help people who can’t fight off infections on their own. The alternative is to let them try—which will indeed allow some to develop “natural immunity,” as groups like Children’s Health Defense frequently promote. But that also means allowing some of them to suffer and die, which is what’s happening in Pennsylvania right now.
Exactly what’s going through Kennedy’s brain is impossible to know. But it’s clear that he’s not using his platform the way a truly concerned public official would. Nor is Trump—who, on Friday, once again used an Oval Office event to spout scientific gibberish about the alleged dangers of current vaccine dosages.
Public health officials and health care professionals will continue to do their best, as they are in Philadelphia now—by supplying those NICU babies at CHOP with post-exposure treatment that can protect them from infection, by making sure other exposed people who are old enough to get the shot can get vaccinated, and by spreading the word to the rest of the population about how vaccines are the safest, most effective form of protection. But when they look to Washington for help, what they will find is an administration that is at best unhelpful—and, at worst, making their job even harder.
The reason this person is only “presumed” to have the measles is that there are no test results confirming the diagnosis, according to the department. But officials are confident this person has the measles based on their symptoms and history.2
Measles is one of those diseases to which babies can acquire temporary passive immunity—lasting weeks or months—from a mother passing along antibodies through the placenta. The mother can develop those antibodies after receiving the vaccine or through previous infection with the disease itself.3
The official tally may undercount cases by quite a bit because it relies heavily on reporting from providers. The outbreak has been centered in culturally distinct communities like the Amish who generally seek formal medical care less routinely.4
This argument came up during the COVID pandemic, when critics of both the vaccine and vaccine mandates argued that it was only people with serious underlying conditions like heart disease, respiratory problems, or diabetes who had to worry about severe harm or death.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Update With Commentary: White House ‘Somber’ as Trump Accepts Grim Outlook, Iran War Escalates, ICE Shooting, Ukraine, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 20, 2026. Behind closed doors, Trump is reportedly coming to terms with just how bad the midterm picture looks for Republicans, even as the redistricting scheme he pushed on red states may be backfiring in a way that actually helps Democrats.
At the same time, his ban on three major news outlets from the White House is drawing pushback from across the political spectrum, including from members of his own party who can’t quite explain why he did it. And the war with Iran keeps spreading, with Trump saying he’s in “deciding mode” on the next escalation while the Houthis strike deeper into Saudi Arabia than ever before.
A quick note before we dive in. I’m going offline for the next 25 hours for Yom Kippur, so there won’t be another update from me this evening. But tomorrow morning, you’ll have a major investigation in your inbox into the Trump family, work I’ve been putting together for weeks, and I think it’s some of the most important reporting I’ve done. It’ll be there waiting for you tomorrow. Here’s what you need to know today.
Trump Faces Sobering Reality:
Trump has privately accepted that his own decisions, especially the Iran war, have contributed to the grim midterm outlook Republicans face. According to four people with knowledge of his recent comments that spoke with the Washington Post, Trump has grown notably sober as advisers present him with discouraging internal polling, a shift from his longstanding habit of dismissing unfavorable surveys as fake. Several advisers say they’ve become “increasingly blunt” with him, and one described him as acknowledging that “some of his decisions have led to the dynamics where he’s unpopular.” That private acceptance has translated into action: he’s approved roughly $140 million in super PAC spending, pledged to campaign in 35 competitive races, and personally reviewed midterm ad content from the Oval Office. Publicly, though, he keeps insisting the war was worth it, telling a North Carolina rally that higher gas prices are “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” even as one adviser pushed back on the idea that Trump has accepted any blame at all, arguing instead that his absence from the ballot is the real problem.
A new forecast suggests Trump’s pressure campaign for Republican states to gerrymander their congressional maps is likely to fail, and could even help Democrats. Decision Desk HQ’s analysis gives Democrats a 69 percent probability of winning the House versus 31 percent for Republicans, projecting an average seat majority of 229 to 206, a 14 seat swing from the current 220 to 215 GOP edge. Chief analyst Geoffrey Skelley found that Democrats are favored to win about 150 seats in states whose maps didn’t change, up from the 137 they currently hold, while the nine redistricted states barely move the needle, shifting from 78 to just 80 Democratic seats on average. Texas, the state that kicked off the redistricting fight after Trump argued Republicans were “entitled” to five more seats there, is projected to net the GOP under two seats rather than the five Trump wanted. The pattern repeats in Florida and Ohio, where redrawn districts meant to target Democratic incumbents mostly leave those Democrats favored to win anyway.
State by state detail shows the redistricting fight cutting in unexpected directions, including in California, Missouri, and vulnerable Texas districts. In Texas, Democrats have a real shot at several redrawn seats, including a 1 in 3 chance of holding the new 35th district, a 1 in 3 chance of ousting Republican Monica De La Cruz in the 15th, and a 1 in 5 chance of flipping the 23rd, held by Brandon Herrera, who has faced scrutiny over past derogatory comments about women. California, which passed its own retaliatory gerrymander under Governor Gavin Newsom after Texas moved first, could hand Democrats four of five targeted GOP seats, though a possible Republican win and a few competitive districts keep it just short of a clean sweep. Missouri has become the newest battleground, with the state Supreme Court blocking a Trump-backed map until voters approve it and a federal appeals court now weighing the case, leaving Decision Desk HQ to freeze its forecast there until the legal fight resolves. Ohio’s redistricting also looks shakier for Republicans than intended, with three Democratic incumbents likely to keep their seats and GOP Rep. Max Miller’s district turning into more of a toss-up amid domestic abuse allegations he denies. Taken together, the state-level breakdown reinforces the top-line finding that the multi-state gerrymandering push Trump demanded may not deliver the House majority he’s counting on.
Banning Reporters:
Sen. John Barrasso declined to say Trump violated the Constitution by banning Politico, MS NOW, and CNN from White House grounds, while Sen. Cory Booker said flatly that the ban “clearly does” violate the First Amendment. Trump announced the ban Friday on Truth Social, citing “cumulative stories over the last few years” of what he called “FAKE NEWS,” and warned other outlets could face the same treatment; reporters from the three outlets were turned away at the security kiosk Saturday with their credentials revoked. Barrasso argued “the press has an obligation to report fairly” and predicted the ban won’t affect the midterms 44 days out, while press freedom advocate Gabe Rottman called the ban illegal and said forcing outlets to sue to “vindicate their rights” amounts to intimidation. All three barred outlets, along with the White House Correspondents’ Association, vowed to keep covering the administration and to fight the ban legally, with CNN calling it “an illegal assault” on their constitutional rights and the WHCA noting that First Amendment protection “does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage.”
Scalise said he doesn’t know why Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, while still defending Trump as unusually open with the press and touting his habit of taking questions at bill signings. Trump announced the ban Friday, accusing the outlets of reporting “FICTION and LIES,” and the affected reporters had their credentials revoked and were turned away from White House grounds Saturday, prompting the White House Correspondents Association to note that Trump himself described the move in the Oval Office as a “ban on the free press.” On the economy, Scalise acknowledged voter concern over affordability but argued gas prices are lower in red states than blue ones because of “mandates and ridiculous things” Democratic states do, even as a new Fox News poll shows prices remain a top issue heading into the midterms. Scalise also brushed off Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar’s break with Trump over immigration enforcement hurting Hispanic voters, insisting the U.S. now has “the most secure border right now” and that Trump has actually gained ground with Hispanic voters compared to past Republican presidents.
Obama called Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House “unimaginable,” saying he couldn’t picture the reaction if he had tried barring Fox News during his own presidency, and argued the roughly 30 to 35 percent of the country that’s fine with it reflects a broader erosion of understanding about what democracy requires.
Trump followed up Sunday by posting an AI-generated image of trash bags labeled with the three outlets’ names outside the White House, and Scalise’s claim that Biden had stripped press credentials from “over 400 different agencies” was directly disputed on air by host Jonathan Karl, who said those reporters simply hadn’t reapplied and weren’t banned.
Iran war:
Trump says he’s in “deciding mode” on whether to launch a major escalation against Iran, weighing everything from “wiping Iran out” to letting the regime “rot economically” to cutting a deal. He told Axios he’s facing a “big decision” on whether to “annihilate” the Iranian regime, and told Fox News he’s considering meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian when he attends the UN General Assembly this week. Iran’s own negotiators say they’ve conveyed conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz through Qatar, demanding an end to the war on all fronts, release of frozen funds, and an end to the U.S. naval blockade, but Trump has previously dismissed similar demands as unrealistic. Meanwhile a UN-backed panel found “reasonable grounds” to believe the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran, including a school bombing that killed dozens of children, which the White House dismissed as “unserious nonsense” while Iran accused Washington of projection. The U.S. also approved visas for Iran’s UN delegation despite the ongoing war, and separately executed a man accused of feeding Israel intelligence on Iranian missile sites.
The war has spread dramatically into Saudi Arabia, with Iran-backed Houthi rebels striking deep into the kingdom, including a ballistic missile fired at Riyadh that was intercepted and strikes on Aramco facilities in Yanbu, some 700 miles from the Yemen border. U.S. embassies across the Middle East issued security alerts warning of “potential for unforeseen escalation,” and fighting between Houthi and Yemeni government forces has killed at least 48 people while nearly 3,000 refugees fled to Djibouti in under a week. Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and the Muslim World League condemned the Houthi attacks, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare visit to Cairo to discuss the spiraling regional crises with President Sisi. Turkey warned that Saudi Arabia should not be dragged into the U.S.-Iran conflict, citing its new mutual-defense pact with Riyadh and Islamabad, while Pakistan’s military vowed to defend Saudi Arabia “to any extent.” The U.S. is also moving to sell Saudi Arabia 48 F-35 fighter jets for $24.3 billion, prompting Israel to seek additional weapons from Washington to preserve its military edge.
The war is battering global energy markets and shipping, even as the U.S. touts progress protecting oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command says it has escorted 1 billion barrels of crude and over 2,000 commercial vessels out of the Persian Gulf in recent months, but Brent crude still jumped from $88 to around $104 a barrel over three weeks and diesel topped $6 a gallon, prompting France to convene a G7 energy summit and central banks worldwide to hike rates to fight war-driven inflation. Saudi Arabia’s Aramco told European and Indian refiners it won’t supply crude next month after Houthi drone strikes knocked out its key East-West pipeline, and traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait has fallen to roughly a third of prewar levels. Iran claimed to have downed at least two U.S. drones and struck a tanker illegally crossing the Strait of Hormuz, while Russia and China vetoed a UN resolution extending sanctions-monitoring on Iran. Inside Iran, the government staged a massive nationwide rally with hundreds of thousands pledging to take up arms, while Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin urged Trump to press Xi Jinping over reports that China supplied Iran satellite imagery used in a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Jordan.
Other news:
ICE Agent Shoots and Wounds Man in Austin After Ramming His Car. A federal ICE agent shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas on Sunday afternoon after first ramming the man’s car with a federal vehicle, then getting out and firing at least five times, according to city council member Mike Siegel. The man was taken to a hospital in unknown condition, and a damaged blue Toyota Corolla with what appeared to be bullet holes was left parked under an overpass at the scene as a large law enforcement presence and crowd of onlookers gathered. Rep. Greg Casar demanded a “full, independent investigation,” immediate release of body camera footage, and accountability for any officer who broke the law, while DHS did not immediately respond to requests for details. The shooting is the latest in a string of ICE-involved shootings this year, including the fatal shooting of a Houston man in July and of a Colombian man in Maine, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation push. It also follows the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota last winter, which drew widespread condemnation of the administration’s enforcement tactics.
Trump now claims his 250 foot triumphal arch in Washington will double as a “top grade military complex” for storing weapons and ammunition. In a Truth Social post, he said the plan came at the “strong request” of the US military and that the structure would be able to “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage,” with sniper facilities built into the roof and plaza. The project has drawn criticism over its planned location near the Memorial Bridge, where it could disrupt sight lines to the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, and the National Park Service warned last week that it could cause “adverse effects to historic properties.” It’s one of several Trump-driven construction projects in the capital, alongside the White House ballroom, the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool renovation, and the Kennedy Center overhaul, all of which critics say are more about his personal legacy than genuine public need. Ground breaking is expected this month, timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with Trump promising it will be clad in granite and topped with three golden statues.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Absence, Madness, And Increasing Danger -- What World Leaders Will Find In New York This Week, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 20, 2026. It is falling to us to ensure there is a “new birth of freedom” here and everywhere in the years ahead......
The week ahead will be an important one for America and the world -- the UN General Assembly kicks off on Tuesday morning, Trump gives his annual UN speech later that day, and China’s leader Xi comes to Washington for a three day state visit on starting on Wednesday night.
There are reports this morning that last night Trump may have decided to launch a major military defense of Saudi Arabia from the Iranian-aligned Houthis, thrusting us ever deeper into the widening conflict in the Middle East.
Whatever we learn today about what Trump has decided the main story of the week will be a world coming to terms with America’s decline as a global power and the shocking madness, fecklessness, and foolishness of our leader and his government.Subscribed
As the world gathers in New York this weekend the Russia-Ukraine war is escalating and Russia’s tactics growing more barbaric; Europe has moved to war-footing these past few days, warning of imminent Russian attacks against European/NATO targets; the war in the Middle East has spiraled, moving further and further away from a peaceful resolution; battered by spiking energy prices, inflation, and rising interest rates global governments are seeing their balance sheets dangerously deteriorate; a warming planet continues to ravage communities across the world; dire warnings about the threat of AI are called a “hoax” by our ailing, addled, corrupt, leader…….
The time, the moment requires strong American leadership. And here is what got yesterday from our “Secretary of War” and the “Department of War Rapid Response” Twitter feed: embarrassing buffoonery 1,300 miles away from the Pentagon, a visual confirmation of the abdication of serious American global leadership……
Embassies throughout Washington are waking to this front page story in The Washington Post today, a confirmation that a deeply corrupt American President cannot be trusted to lead on one of the consequential issues of our age…..
The Guardian has a similar story on its front page right now:
Absence, madness, and a world that feels like it is coming apart due to it all. That is what global leaders will find when they come to the United States this week. I am angry this morning that it has come this far. That Trump and his ridiculous enablers have refused to take responsibility for the damage they’ve caused and found a way to course correct. The scale of their idiocy and betrayal remains breathtaking, staggering, world-altering.
The necessary course correction is falling to us. It begins with winning this November election by as big a margin as possible. Flipping the Senate has become far more important for we need to ensure that the message we send this November is a clear and unambitious rejection of Trump and his venal regime. As we discussed this week, together:
So, In Sum - Trump Is A Titanic F-ck Up, His Madness Is Getting Worse, American Voters Are Angry, And Are Ready Now To Put Us Back In Power
Trump Is Unraveling. Their Battlefield Is Deteriorating. A Wave Is Coming
things are eroding for Trump and the Republicans. We had a very encouraging week of polling. Here’s one of my favorite bits of data from the week. RCP is Real Clear Politics, the site used by every Republican political operative in the country. This is what they are seeing:
The commentariat and the discourse turned very bullish for us this week. Here’s one of the most influential election forecasters, Larry Sabato, this morning:
This morning’s FiftyPlusOne forecast puts our chances of winning the House at 97%, and at 65% of winning the Senate:
Let us close with inspiration from Abraham Lincoln:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
For yes, my friends, it is that time….
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Civil Discourse, Opinion: It’s a Nice First Amendment You’ve Got There… Joyce Vance, right, Sept 19, 2026. By now you’ve likely seen the news: Donald Trump banned, via Truth Social post, MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House. Journalists from those outlets were denied access to the White House when they came to work today, Saturday.
Almost certainly, the first thought that crosses your mind is, “That has to violate the First Amendment.” You would not be wrong.What Trump has done is a fundamental violation of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. George Lehner, the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) counsel for 18 years, assessed the same basic issue in November 2018, after the Trump administration suspended CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta’s credentials when he pressed Trump for answers about disappearing “caravans” of migrants after the midterm elections. In its amicus brief, the WHCA argued that “the First Amendment requires a compelling government interest—not whim, prejudice, or dislike—for the President to strip a journalist of his or her ability to report from the White House.” It took a judge less than two weeks to restore Acosta’s credentials.
Tonight, Jim Acosta told me, “I think Trump is almost certain to lose this case. During his comments Friday he didn’t even cite a specific reason for banning these outlets. I can’t imagine a scenario in which a judge allows this irrational, desperate ban to become permanent.”
Trump even lost Jonathan Turley, the conservative lawyer who testified on his behalf during his first impeachment and went on Fox News to criticize both the second impeachment and criminal charges that were brought against Trump. On Friday, Turley tweeted that a ban on CNN, Politico, and MS NOW by Trump “would be an assault on long-honored principles of a free press.” He continued, “Barring disfavored media from the White House is a terrible precedent and practice. Such a move would raise serious constitutional questions.”
Authoritarian governments use press access to keep reporters in line and prevent negative coverage. Denying access threatens a reporter’s ability to do their job and, ultimately, their livelihood. Trump’s “ban” is a tactic to silence voices that report the news as it happens. No American president should ban “disfavored outlets” from the access that is essential to covering our government. Even a more modest restriction, the 2009 effort by the Obama White House to block Fox News from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg, provoked outrage from news outlets, as it should have. The White House said Fox News was blurring the distinction between news and “anti-Obama advocacy.” CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC, who were also part of the pool doing the interview, refused to go forward unless Fox was included. The White House backed down.
So far, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have joined ranks with MS NOW, CNN, and Politico. The WHCA has taken an uncompromising stance in support of the banned news organizations. Will more outlets support the First Amendment in this extraordinarily dangerous moment for democracy? I suspect that legitimate news organizations will; in fact, this may well be a moment that separates professional journalists from sycophantic so-called members of the press.
Brit Hume, chief political analyst at Fox News, also retweeted Turley’s criticism. Hume commented that Trump is dreaming, “If he thinks this will lead to more favorable coverage.”
That assessment seems right. Journalists will push back. They will double down on their efforts to report the truth about this administration, wherever that takes them. This reads more as a stunt, perhaps something Trump did off the cuff in an effort to distract from other matters like his disastrous war in Iran, the affordability crisis, the Kennedy Center, and his dangerous effort to seize power and end the American experiment in democracy, than a serious plan his administration believes will succeed. Chris Lu, who served as White House Cabinet Secretary during the Obama Administration, told me that “Most White Houses spend their time trying to get more coverage, not less. If you have a good story to tell, you’d want as many reporters as possible covering what you’re doing.”
So now, there will be lawsuits. Trump will lose, but it will take some time. He hopes we’ll take our eyes off the ball in the meantime, that we’ll pay attention to the free press story—which we must do—but that it will distract us from the others—which we cannot permit. And for Trump, annoying news outlets and forcing them to absorb the time and expense involved in litigation is probably just chef’s kiss.
In its 1977 decision in Sherrill v. Knight, a unanimous panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held: “Although the White House is not required to open its doors to the news media, once it establishes press facilities for credentialed journalists, it cannot deny access based on the content of a journalist’s coverage.” Trump’s social media post makes it clear that is precisely what he is doing.
Sherrill, a journalist, was denied a press pass because the Secret Service objected. He had been the Washington Correspondant for The Nation since 1965. When he asked Secret Service personnel why the pass was denied, he was told, “we can't tell you the reasons.” Sherrill reapplied and asked for the reason when a pass was denied again. White House Counsel John Dean replied, “for reasons of security.”
The Court of Appeals explained it was presented with a situation “where the White House has voluntarily decided to establish press facilities for correspondents who need to report therefrom. These press facilities are perceived as being open to all bona fide Washington-based journalists, whereas most of the White House itself, and press facilities in particular, have not been made available to the general public. White House press facilities having been made publicly available as a source of information for newsmen the protection afforded newsgathering under the first amendment guarantee of freedom of the press … requires that this access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” That’s the same situation we’re seeing today.
The Court of Appeals concluded that “arbitrary or content-based criteria for press pass issuance are prohibited under the first amendment” and that “notice, opportunity to rebut, and a written decision are required because the denial of a pass potentially infringes upon first amendment guarantees.” In other words, what Trump has done is illegal. It violates the First Amendment. It violates the Fifth Amendment. The courts will soon say so.
Trump would have done well to heed the words of Teddy Roosevelt:
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
MS NOW led this morning with a statement committing to “take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights.” Politico’s Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Greenberger told his newsroom, “We will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.” CNN’s statement said the network “will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account.”
The First Amendment includes rights beyond a free press, including free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government. The other rights are facilitated by, if not dependent upon, having a free press, as is much of the conduct of our society. Knowledge is power. And perhaps that’s what Trump hates the most. He hates being criticized; he hates that having his plans exposed publicly has drummed up opposition and kept him from doing what he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. Without a free press, Richard Nixon would have probably gotten away with Watergate. If a president wants to be an authoritarian, he’s got to do away with them.
The WHCA statement on Twitter reminded us that “The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference. That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.” One might add that it’s the speech that a president dislikes the most that deserves the highest level of protection. And if Trump is permitted to successfully go after the Politicos, the CNNs, and the MS NOWS, imagine how easy it would be to pick off independent journalists and media. That independent reporting is absolutely critical right now.
Here’s an example: The Contrarian’s Jennifer Rubin covered the “Hands Around The Kennedy Center” event Friday. I asked Jen why that kind of coverage is so important and she wrote back.
“Trump’s unhinged threat to tear down a beloved American cultural institution touched people deeply. The emotional reaction, and outpouring of political fervor (with plenty of signs urging fellow Americans to vote) we saw Friday, reflected a sea change in public opinion and shift in momentum in favor of pro democracy forces. The battle to keep Trump’s name off the Center, which Norm Eisen is litigating on behalf of Kennedy Center Board member Rep. Joyce Beatty, has helped elevate the issue, underscoring just how crackers Trump has become. The Contrarian subscribers who have supported that litigation deserve a victory lap and some joy! We had a ball covering the event, another episode in our ongoing effort to forge a pro-democracy community.”
Imagine what it would mean if Trump could extinguish the press, not just at the White House, but by squashing smaller organizations, especially new, independent media, that lack the wherewithal to stand up to the power of the presidency. The time to stop the attack on the free press is now, before it goes any further.
And this is about more than the rights of journalists. It is about the right of the American people to learn from the press about their government and what it is doing. As the court wrote in Sherrill, “Not only newsmen and the publications for which they write, but also the public at large have an interest protected by the first amendment in assuring that restrictions on newsgathering be no more arduous than necessary, and that individual newsmen not be arbitrarily excluded from sources of information.”
So be outraged. Be very, very outraged. Because this is nothing short of outrageous. But don’t stop there. Keep your eyes on the ball. Keep your eyes on everything Trump is trying to prevent you from thinking about and seeing. And get ready to vote in the midterm elections like your future depends on it. Because as we all know, it does.
Special Reports: America's Class, Racial and Educational Histories Examined
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 19, 2026 [Rebellion, Race, Rights That Shaped Colonial America], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 20, 2026. On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.
The crisis had begun a year before, in the fall of 1675, when Thomas Mathew refused to pay members of the Doeg tribe what they believed they were owed for goods they had sold him. They raided his farm on the northern neck of Virginia, taking some of his pigs. A number of Doegs were killed in the skirmish.
The Virginia militia retaliated for the raid but mistakenly fell on a village of Susquehannocks, who were actually allied with the Virginia government. Blindsided and furious, the Susquehannocks began to raid local farms.
The raids set a smoldering power struggle within the colony ablaze.
Since the colony’s beginning in 1607, both English custom and the drive to produce cash crops had created a clear line between men who had land and power and those who worked for them. Horrific death rates made those men who had paid for the passage of workers from England to North America drive them hard to get as much labor out of them as possible before they died.
After the arrival of Africans to the colony in 1619, those enslaved people joined indentured white workers to make common cause against their “masters.” They worked and socialized together and, according to advertisements and court cases, ran away, committed crimes, and had children together.
They also suffered similar punishments when they ran afoul of the law. And those few who lived past the deadly early years of their servitude shared similar access to the benefits of freedom, although slaves could not simply outlive their contracts but had to buy their way out of bondage with money they earned in their spare time.
At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colony that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. But by the 1660s, the survivors had grown into a large population of poor men, white and Black both, who were free but could not afford prime land in the eastern part of the colony, so they migrated to the western frontier hoping to become farmers.
There, these settlers thoroughly resented the eastern government that seemed to ignore their interests. In 1675 they saw the increased fighting with the local tribes as an opportunity to weaken those tribes and take their lands.
But Governor Berkeley disagreed. He wanted to avoid an expensive war and he wanted to honor a 1646 treaty under which allied tribes paid an annual tribute to the colonial government and fought alongside the English against tribes that didn’t have such an agreement.
Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in the colony in 1674. He was well connected and wealthy—he was actually related to Berkeley by marriage—but was frustrated that Berkeley wasn’t following his advice. Bacon began to speak for the angry westerners and by spring 1676 had welded them into a powerful coalition that was attacking local Indigenous tribes without the government’s blessing. Finally, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel.
Under Bacon, vagrants and poor farmers, including former slaves and servants, went to war against the Pamunkey tribe and the Indigenous tribes who lived around them. And then they marched on Jamestown. On July 30, 1676, Bacon issued the Declaration of the People of Virginia, complaining that the governor had raised taxes too high, was corrupt, had put his own “ignorant” judges in place, and had failed to protect settlers against Indigenous Americans. He included a list of Berkeley supporters he called “Confederates, aiders, and assisters” of Berkeley’s perfidy. Bacon ordered them all to surrender to him within four days and declared that he and his men intended to confiscate their estates.
In a dramatic affront to the colonial system in which leaders held their positions by virtue of the Crown, Bacon signed his name “Nathaniel Bacon, Generall by Consent of the people.”
Bacon’s men held control of Jamestown from July through September before Berkeley’s forces forced them to retreat. Berkeley’s men abandoned the town when Bacon’s men tried to recapture it. Aware that more of the governor’s men were on their way, Bacon’s forces burned the town down on September 19.
On October 26, Bacon died from dysentery, the “Bloodie Flux,” and the rebellion fell apart. But the crisis had left the colony in ruin with its people dead or wounded, farms plundered or burned, crops ruined from lack of care.
In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s wealthy elite set out to preserve their control over the colony. They pushed Indigenous Americans off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.
And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.
At the same time, they gave white servants new legal rights and limited the length of white indentures. The assembly passed laws requiring masters to provide white servants with food and clothing, as well as money to set themselves up after they earned their freedom. This, combined with a booming tobacco market, enabled more white men to buy land. The assembly also reduced the poll taxes for voting, making it easier for poor white men to vote.
And they made it costly for white and Black Virginians to socialize. Any white person attempting to marry across race lines would be fined and sent to jail, and the minister performing such a marriage would be fined the astonishing price of ten thousand pounds of tobacco. White servant women who had mixed-race children had to either pay a whopping fine or have their term of service extended for five years. And the child would be a slave until they turned thirty-one.
As leaders bound Black Americans more tightly into slavery, they courted white Virginians into joining the cultural and social world from which they had previously been excluded. Wealthier Virginians reached out to their less-prosperous neighbors, rubbing elbows with poorer white men in taverns and welcoming them into their imposing homes to emphasize that they were all friends.
Indeed, the needs of poor white landowners were not all that different from those of wealthier planters, and it was easy to believe that all Virginia voters had the same interests. They understood what it meant to be under the thumb of a tyrant, for they saw enslaved people and their enslavers all around them. They believed that owning land made a man independent, for that was their experience. And, unlike the royal officials who used their offices to enrich their friends, Virginia voters could argue that they had the best interests of the country at heart. They were free and independent.
They were, one might say, created equal.16 of 6,887September 19, 2026InboxHeather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <
On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.
The crisis had begun a year before, in the fall of 1675, when Thomas Mathew refused to pay members of the Doeg tribe what they believed they were owed for goods they had sold him. They raided his farm on the northern neck of Virginia, taking some of his pigs. A number of Doegs were killed in the skirmish.
The Virginia militia retaliated for the raid but mistakenly fell on a village of Susquehannocks, who were actually allied with the Virginia government. Blindsided and furious, the Susquehannocks began to raid local farms.
The raids set a smoldering power struggle within the colony ablaze.
Since the colony’s beginning in 1607, both English custom and the drive to produce cash crops had created a clear line between men who had land and power and those who worked for them. Horrific death rates made those men who had paid for the passage of workers from England to North America drive them hard to get as much labor out of them as possible before they died.
After the arrival of Africans to the colony in 1619, those enslaved people joined indentured white workers to make common cause against their “masters.” They worked and socialized together and, according to advertisements and court cases, ran away, committed crimes, and had children together.
They also suffered similar punishments when they ran afoul of the law. And those few who lived past the deadly early years of their servitude shared similar access to the benefits of freedom, although slaves could not simply outlive their contracts but had to buy their way out of bondage with money they earned in their spare time.
At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colony that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. But by the 1660s, the survivors had grown into a large population of poor men, white and Black both, who were free but could not afford prime land in the eastern part of the colony, so they migrated to the western frontier hoping to become farmers.
There, these settlers thoroughly resented the eastern government that seemed to ignore their interests. In 1675 they saw the increased fighting with the local tribes as an opportunity to weaken those tribes and take their lands.
But Governor Berkeley disagreed. He wanted to avoid an expensive war and he wanted to honor a 1646 treaty under which allied tribes paid an annual tribute to the colonial government and fought alongside the English against tribes that didn’t have such an agreement.
Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in the colony in 1674. He was well connected and wealthy—he was actually related to Berkeley by marriage—but was frustrated that Berkeley wasn’t following his advice. Bacon began to speak for the angry westerners and by spring 1676 had welded them into a powerful coalition that was attacking local Indigenous tribes without the government’s blessing. Finally, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel.
Under Bacon, vagrants and poor farmers, including former slaves and servants, went to war against the Pamunkey tribe and the Indigenous tribes who lived around them. And then they marched on Jamestown. On July 30, 1676, Bacon issued the Declaration of the People of Virginia, complaining that the governor had raised taxes too high, was corrupt, had put his own “ignorant” judges in place, and had failed to protect settlers against Indigenous Americans. He included a list of Berkeley supporters he called “Confederates, aiders, and assisters” of Berkeley’s perfidy. Bacon ordered them all to surrender to him within four days and declared that he and his men intended to confiscate their estates.
In a dramatic affront to the colonial system in which leaders held their positions by virtue of the Crown, Bacon signed his name “Nathaniel Bacon, Generall by Consent of the people.”
Bacon’s men held control of Jamestown from July through September before Berkeley’s forces forced them to retreat. Berkeley’s men abandoned the town when Bacon’s men tried to recapture it. Aware that more of the governor’s men were on their way, Bacon’s forces burned the town down on September 19.
On October 26, Bacon died from dysentery, the “Bloodie Flux,” and the rebellion fell apart. But the crisis had left the colony in ruin with its people dead or wounded, farms plundered or burned, crops ruined from lack of care.
In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s wealthy elite set out to preserve their control over the colony. They pushed Indigenous Americans off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.
And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.
At the same time, they gave white servants new legal rights and limited the length of white indentures. The assembly passed laws requiring masters to provide white servants with food and clothing, as well as money to set themselves up after they earned their freedom. This, combined with a booming tobacco market, enabled more white men to buy land. The assembly also reduced the poll taxes for voting, making it easier for poor white men to vote.
And they made it costly for white and Black Virginians to socialize. Any white person attempting to marry across race lines would be fined and sent to jail, and the minister performing such a marriage would be fined the astonishing price of ten thousand pounds of tobacco. White servant women who had mixed-race children had to either pay a whopping fine or have their term of service extended for five years. And the child would be a slave until they turned thirty-one.
As leaders bound Black Americans more tightly into slavery, they courted white Virginians into joining the cultural and social world from which they had previously been excluded. Wealthier Virginians reached out to their less-prosperous neighbors, rubbing elbows with poorer white men in taverns and welcoming them into their imposing homes to emphasize that they were all friends.
Indeed, the needs of poor white landowners were not all that different from those of wealthier planters, and it was easy to believe that all Virginia voters had the same interests. They understood what it meant to be under the thumb of a tyrant, for they saw enslaved people and their enslavers all around them. They believed that owning land made a man independent, for that was their experience. And, unlike the royal officials who used their offices to enrich their friends, Virginia voters could argue that they had the best interests of the country at heart. They were free and independent.
They were, one might say, created equal.
Najya Hannah-Jones, 16, the writer’s daughter (New York Times photo by Wayne Lawrence)
New York Times Magazine, In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? Nikole Hannah-Jones, Sept. 20, 2026. A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.
As they neared the end of her seventh-grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.
Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.
By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.
I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.
I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.
stem so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be good parent....
But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.
U.S. Governance: The Student Debt Morass
New York Times, She Prosecutes Child Abuse. Her Student Loans Ended Up in Purgatory, Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard, Updated Sept. 20, 2026. One county lawyer’s repayment saga stretches nearly 20 years, though she’s tried 22 times over the past 20 months to erase her debt.
Christine Archer, a first-generation college student, should have had her debt canceled through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program by now.
The program, known as P.S.L.F., is open to government and nonprofit employees like schoolteachers, public defenders and librarians. After they make 120 qualifying payments in an income-driven repayment plan and put in at least 10 years of service in eligible jobs, the federal government eliminates any remaining balance.
But in 2024, the federal government put Ms. Archer’s loans in forbearance status in the wake of a lawsuit over the legality of her repayment plan, known as SAVE — one that the government had offered to tens of millions of people just a few years before.
This effectively put her in a kind of purgatory. She has been waiting, over 600 days now, for the government to tell her the correct amount of money to send so she could complete the P.S.L.F. program.
“After nearly a year of hearing nothing, I sent all of my documentation to the Student Loan Ombudsman,” said Ms. Archer, who works as a prosecutor in Hendricks County, Ind. “The entire packet was returned as ‘undeliverable.’”
She eventually had to sign up for an entirely new payment plan, and she ended up paying about $1,000 per month more than before.
A timeline of her history illuminates how hard people are trying to access P.S.L.F., which President George W. Bush ushered into existence in 2007. It also shows just how easy it is to end up confused — and why they believe the Education Department is failing them.
According to the Education Department, which would not comment on Ms. Archer’s case specifically, it has about 80,000 buyback applications in a queue — and 56,000 cases have been closed over the past year. Many of them are people who are ineligible and don’t realize it, while others have cases that require a fair bit of manual research.
The Department’s website said borrowers were supposed to keep paying their loans “until review is complete and buyback is approved,” but it offers no specific guidance for people in SAVE forbearance.
According to Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, borrowers have in fact succeeded in completing a buyback while still in SAVE forbearance. At least one borrower on Reddit has reported succeeding as well.Feb. 18, 2026
In early 2026, Ms. Archer tried to settle the issue via U.S. mail with the student loan ombudsman, the go-to office when all else fails. It was returned as “undeliverable.”
According to the Education Department, the ombudsman still exists. It is not clear why her package bounced back to her.
“At this point in my career, I have attended countless interviews of abused children, witnessed autopsies of infants, examined thousands of images of child sexual assault material, and prepared and successfully tried some of the worst offenders against children and women imaginable. And I will continue to do this work,” she said in the letter.
“I have dutifully upheld my end of the deal for ten years; I am now requesting my government uphold theirs.”Sept. 18, 2026
The government still has not answered Ms. Archer’s buyback questions directly. But late this year, she’ll hit 120 payments in her new repayment plan. Absent any further confusion, returned mail and lack of responsiveness, she just might get her loans canceled once and for all.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is being forced to face reality, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 19, 2026. At 7:57 tonight, the president of the United States stepped out of Marine One, using both hands to carefully grip the rails as he made his way down the stairs to his waiting motorcade. With much of his face more swollen than usual, his skin tacky with sweat that glistened under the lights shining down on him, he looked defeated and exhausted.
He was once again wearing an oversized dark suit that hung large over his entire body. This whole scene was completely unexpected, as his schedule had him at Camp David through the weekend, before the abrupt change sent him rushing back to Washington, D.C., barely 24 hours after he arrived.
The bare-bones White House press office, which no longer has a press secretary after Karoline Leavitt left the position, offered no explanation or public statement. There was just a sudden update to his schedule around 6:20 PM and a gathering time for the press pool to quickly meet at 7:00 p.m. When Marine One landed at the Ellipse, reporters noticed an unidentified man seated across from Donald Trump. The only two people seen traveling with him in a secondary “support helicopter” were Natalie Harp, who is described as his human comfort blanket, and Walt Nauta, who served as Trump’s valet during his first term in office and is now an aide to the president. Once back at the White House, Donald Trump disappeared behind the gates without speaking a single word to the press throughout the entire trip back.
If this were a random change of plans that happened during a relatively calm moment in the world, maybe the questions we would be asking tonight would be more focused on Donald Trump himself and what could have caused such an abrupt change in his plans. Maybe we would consider that it had to do with his failing mental and physical health, or just that he doesn’t like Camp David, as he has said in the past, “You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.” But what we also learned in the hours surrounding his emergency-like return to D.C. points to bigger concerns across the Middle East, where escalating danger and destabilization are growing quickly.
What happened earlier today with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels showed that even though Donald Trump constantly says that this war is almost over and that Iran wants to “make a deal,” it is just more empty assurances coming from the Commander in Chief. Because nothing about what is happening is screaming that this is almost over. The Houthi rebels launched a ballistic missile at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the first time the Saudi capital has been directly targeted since the fighting escalated this summer. Saudi civil defense sent emergency alerts to phones across the city overnight, warning of potential aerial attacks. Then, early this morning, a massive plume of black smoke could be seen rising from a fuel depot near King Khalid International Airport, with flames appearing to come from storage tanks. The Houthis claimed they struck “sensitive sites” in the capital and targeted Aramco facilities in Yanbu, where a key oil export terminal is located on the Red Sea. The missile was said to have been intercepted by the Saudi-led coalition, which also thwarted additional attacks across other cities. Following all of this violence, the State Department issued a security alert that went out to U.S. embassies in the Middle East, warning Americans that “this military conflict has the potential to escalate rapidly” and urging them to seriously reconsider travel to or through the region.
This is the kind of influence and impact Donald Trump has on the world. He doesn’t bring calm and diplomacy. He incites military violence and destabilization across entire regions and into the daily lives of people living throughout the entire planet.
This is just another extension of the war Donald Trump started without Congressional approval earlier this year. The “major combat operations” against Iran, with the help of the Israeli military, have negatively impacted people near and far. What he keeps trying to sell to us all as a show of strength keeps getting uglier. Negotiations come and go with no lasting resolution, and the Strait of Hormuz has now choked global shipping, with Iran learning that it holds enormous power just by controlling access to it.
What Trump didn’t account for, or completely ignored warnings about, is that what he is doing is reshaping the entire global order in ways that may take generations to undo, if they can or even should be. Countries that once looked to the United States as a stabilizing force are now forming alliances that deliberately exclude us, and creating defense pacts without us in them, and possibly planning for us as the enemy invader. They are negotiating trade agreements behind closed doors that we weren’t invited to participate in because they’ve decided they can no longer rely on or trust America.
None of this is even slightly surprising, coming from the man who said doing the work of the presidency, like participating in cabinet meetings, is “boring as hell” in a magazine interview earlier this year. Trump started this war, and Trump has escalated the war. And now he has no idea how to stop it or even rein it back in.
But there is another side to what is happening in America right now, outside the corrupt and incompetent Trump Administration, and we saw it in Washington, D.C., with ordinary Americans finding their way back to resisting in large and visible ways.
Last night, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C., thousands of people poured onto the streets surrounding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They carried signs, and they sang. Then they joined hands and formed a human chain around the building, wrapping themselves around the walls in an act of protection. The president had been seen looking at plans and images depicting the Kennedy Center being torn down amid his dispute over having his name on the building, which was named in memory of JFK. Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter, spoke, and various musicians played on the steps. People held hands with strangers and refused to let go.
I watched that scene last night from the hospital room. It filled me with so much comfort to know the helpers were there, protecting it. Because if it is torn down, that is it. It is gone. Even if it is rebuilt in the likeness of the original, it would never be what we lost.
That was night three in the hospital with my husband. We are home now. I didn’t want to go too deep into why he was there until we knew more, but with his permission, I’d like to do so now. A few days ago, my husband Pete was taken to the hospital when he began to feel poorly after completing a strenuous run on the beach with a friend while they were training for an upcoming competition. Yesterday, he underwent more invasive testing that showed that right now, the preventative steps he is taking are working and that he does not require more treatment than what he has already been doing.
When I talk about a lot of what is happening in the country, much of it comes from a place of care for my family, of course, but also for the greater good of all of mankind, including the world’s children, parents, siblings, and partners like Pete is to me. Years ago, when the low-carb/high-fat diet fad was spreading, Pete, like so many, joined it. He didn’t stay long, realizing it not only didn’t optimize his health, but that it was also dangerous, and today he is still working to combat the damage that was most likely done during that time.
This is why medical disinformation matters so much to me. It’s why the lies coming out of the White House and the installation of a science denier leading HHS are horrific to me. My husband has done everything right. He follows a strictly plant-based diet, no added sugar (not that anyone needs to be that strict), no alcohol, no smoking, and he exercises like his life depends on it, because it does. Yet, he still has evidence of disease that his doctors believe genetics and that earlier diet most likely contributed to. And with the attacks on medications he takes now, which are making a significant positive impact on his health, like statins, my heart breaks for those who will be harmed by the latest reincarnations of the same dangerous thinking we have seen in the past.
We are still not completely sure what happened a few days ago, but I’m happy to share that he is in good spirits and appears to no longer be in acute danger. It has been some of the most terrifying days in both of our lives. Pete isn’t just my partner in all of this, doing all of the production work here, filming, and all the behind-the-scenes labor that makes it possible for me to sit down every night and write, but he is also my husband and my best friend.
Pete’s home now, and I’m so grateful. He’s going to have to take it easy, which will be incredibly difficult for him, but with the exceptional care he received in the hospital, I’m hopeful he will be 100% soon enough. The doctors, nurses, support staff, and every single person who touched our family during those days showed up with a level of care and compassion that reminded me why this fight matters so much. Those nurses are the same healthcare workers being gaslit and undermined by an administration that put a conspiracy theorist in charge of public health. They are now being forced to operate inside a system that RFK Jr. and his dangerous, anti-science propaganda are actively trying to dismantle. And yet they keep showing up for us all without hesitation.
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.
Sitting in the hospital, surrounded by beeping machines, I kept thinking about how our time on this planet is limited, and that none of us get enough of it. I know that I will look back on these years and feel a deep anger that Donald Trump stole so many days from so many families, days that should have been spent living, not surviving. We still had so much work to do as a country before he came along, on social justice, equality, climate change, among so many other things. But what we didn’t have was this enormous and time-consuming fight for the basic survival of our democratic republic. We weren’t forced to watch a president destroy the institutions that hold us together. And we weren’t having to wrap our arms around buildings to keep the president at the time from tearing them down.
The next No Kings resistance event has been announced for a month from now, on October 17, and will be focused on encouraging early voting. Each event has grown larger than the last, and every time we see people turn out in masses, it is a reminder to us all that we are not alone. The timing for this next one is aimed at turning that energy into helping people make a plan to vote, getting them to the polls early where possible, and making sure that when November comes, the turnout is overwhelming. The No Kings Coalition, which includes dozens of organizations across the country, has made the message clear: power belongs to the people, but only if we use it, which we absolutely will.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Congresswoman Tells Trump To Take His Meds After Insane Arch Outburst, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 20, 2026. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) responded to Trump claiming that he is converting the arch he is building into a military complex by telling the White House to give the president his meds.
Donald Trump is facing multiple lawsuits over his plan to construct an arch to honor himself and block Arlington National Cemetery. Since the president is an old dog with no tricks, he appears to have adopted the same stunt that he used to justify his ballroom.
Trump wants to convert an arch into a military complex.
The president posted on Truth Social:
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.
There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Trump’s idea is absolutely bonkers. Washington, D.C. does not need an arch that acts as a military complex, and it is being immediately called out as crazy.
You may have noticed that things have gotten a little extra psycho around the Oval Office over the last few days. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been out of the office this week. Wiles has been able to keep her job longer than other Trump chiefs of staff because she enables him, but with her gone, things have gotten especially unhinged.
Reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have been banned from the White House, and now Trump is trying to justify his actions as a military complex.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Advocacy: The Salazar Swing, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 18, 2026. It has been forgotten, amidst the uproar over this ad, that Congresswoman María Salazar has tried to call out Trump’s immigration dragnet before.
A similar uproar broke out in June 2025 after Salazar and Latinas for Trump founder Ileana Garcia called out Stephen Miller for specific tactics he was using, specifically snatching people at courthouses while they were legally pursuing due process for immigration claims.
And when I wrote a long post threading through the extent that Cuban-Americans allowed themselves to ignore the gutter racism on which Trump was running (Salazar’s district includes a good number of the Haitians Trump targeted with his dog-eating smear), I noted that Democrats need not call out their delusions, because the effect would split Trump’s base in any case.
Don’t get in their way! At this point, any pushback on Miller’s gulag, any focus on him and his lies, is welcome.
We will not make it through this unless we exploit every single break that Republicans make with Trump. We will not make it through this unless we convince a significant number of Trump voters to push back or better yet disavow their vote.
Salazar’s earlier complaints didn’t work, at least not sustainably. Cubans were on the flight to South Sudan for which SCOTUS sanctioned third country removal and their third country deportations have stepped up in recent months.
So once again, Salazar attempted to make a nuanced appeal to Trump, reminding him pointedly of the coalition that put him in the White House in 2024. The move came just a day after Karl Rove, the last prominent Republican who attempted to be a Reagan on immigration, publicly backed a Democrat after the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commission celebrated a Texas football win with what Rove described as “raw, uncut bigotry.”
As happened in June 2025, the backlash to Salazar’s public criticism of Trump’s worst immigration excesses will create even more problems for Republicans’ ability to get Latinos to the polls. It likely won’t significantly reverse momentum in Salazar’s race, and it’ll create a toxic discussion nationally, as the fascists within the party attack Salazar as a Latina.
Salazar’s video has apparently been in the works for several weeks. Newsmax’s Marisela Ramirez posted a picture of Salazar filming the ad on September 3.
Since then, at least one ratings outlet has moved Salazar’s race closer to flipping, though still Lean Republican; the more cautious Cook Report hasn’t moved her race since April, and so may be due.
But Marc Caputo (in a post which he said he’d been “been picking away at … for a few days because I’ve been really surprised by the broad-based angst in the GOP” in Florida) said a Republican pollster from Miami found Salazar’s race (and that of Byron Donalds) to be tied.
Zoom in: A bellwether, Miami-Dade is Florida’s most-populous county, which Trump flipped to the Republican column in 2020 and 2024 thanks to strong Latino support, especially among Cuban Americans.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in her ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”Trump carried her district by 15 points two years ago. Today, she’s tied in polls with newscaster Eliot Rodriguez, a fellow Cuban American, who said her new ad was a sign of desperation.A Trump adviser told Axios: “I’m getting the Trumpiest Cubans sending me videos from Miami of guys getting busted at places like the gas station, for no apparent reason.”
By the numbers: In Miami-Dade, 62% of the county’s 1.3 million registered voters are Hispanic. They account for 76% of the registered Republicans.
63% of Hispanic voters said they supported “deporting illegal immigrants” while 34% were opposed to them, according to a poll conducted last month by a GOP pollster and shared with AxiosBut those numbers switched when it came to how deportations were being carried out: Just 29% were in favor; 58% were opposed.“The support is just evaporating. The economy sucks and ICE is just out of control,” said the pollster, who’s from Miami. “People feel they didn’t sign up for this.”
[snip]
Republicans say they’re not too worried about conservative Hispanic voters switching to vote for Democrats, but they all believe turnout for the GOP will be low, which could affect legislative and congressional contests, and perhaps the race for governor.
Caputo describes that these polls showing a tie race were taken last month, so before Salazar shot the ad. Since then, prices just keep getting worse, and generic ballot support for Democrats has accelerated along with those prices.
Perhaps more important, given the district, around about then, Trump declared that he was stealing Venezuela’s oil, with Delcy Rodriguez’ help, which led Salazar to post, then delete, a tweet lambasting the theft.
Florida Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar did a quick about-face on President Trump’s massive Venezuela oil deal Saturday — deleting a social media post blasting the pact before returning to declare it was “a great deal” for America and the Venezuelan people
Salazar, who has been outspoken of communist Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, took to X to declare that the pact would come to an end once President Trump’s term ends.
“Any oil “deal” with Venezuela’s interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House,” Salazar wrote on the site.
Joaquin Castro made Salazar’s Venezuela equivocations worse on Tuesday, the day before she posted her video, by forcing her to vote on — after delaying for some time, she voted against — subpoenas to learn more about the corrupt oil theft.
U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar staved off Democrats’ subpoenas seeking details of dealings with Venezuela over an oil deal. But she also held a lengthy conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging total transparency over the economic arrangements.
A party-line vote closed an otherwise largely bipartisan hearing of the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. There, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat and the panel’s ranking member, moved to issue subpoenas to the State Department and War Department for any agreement between the U.S. and North American Blue Energy Partners, a private oil company run by Venezuelan billionaire Alejandro Betancourt, as well as between that corporate entity and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez.
“For nine months, we haven’t received any information about funds regarding Venezuela or how oil money is being made or spent,” Cast[ro] said after the hearing. “Yesterday was the first time the State Department sent anybody over to even brief Congress about us, and that wasn’t even a hearing. It was an informal briefing, and so I thought it’s important to break through all of that noise and get some answers for people.”
Salazar held an extended recess of the Subcommittee while she called Rubio. “He is my constituent, and he’s Cuban American just like I am,” she said at the hearing.
It is famously difficult to poll Latino voters, especially in a community, like Miami’s, where there’s a degree of diversity built into that Latino community. But whatever else Marc Caputo is, he’s an astute reader of Florida politics.
And I suspect the most immediate effect of this uproar will be to exacerbate the same dynamics going on in Texas (where Rove is disavowing the more fascist part of his the party he helped build), which is far closer to flipping blue.
Trump has left Latino district members of Congress with no good choice between loyalty to him and distance from his bigotry. And in Salazar’s attempt, and not the first attempt, to find such a path, she likely will create waves well beyond Miami.
Law & Disorder via Substack, Opinion: Trump’s War on Words, Katie Phang, right, Sept. 20, 2026. Like a petulant child, Felon Trump pulls the welcome mat from the People’s House.
On Friday, Convicted Felon Donald Trump didn’t "ban" CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. What he did was post one of his typical temper tantrums on that cesspool of a social media platform, Truth Social, about "FICTION and LIES," and then, because nobody in that used-to-be-hallowed building has the testicular fortitude to tell the toddler “no”, the Secret Service spent Saturday morning disabling press badges like a landlord changing the locks on a tenant he never bothered to legally evict.
When a reporter asked Trump why he would do such a thing, the (theoretically) most powerful (and yet simultaneously most stupid) man in the free world with an entire Department of Justice at his fingertips, offered this legal masterpiece of an answer: “No reason.” When asked what the ban would even look like, he said, and I’m quoting this because you cannot make it up: “It’s a very simple ban…I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can.” Folks, that’s not a policy; that’s a petulant child refusing to eat his vegetables.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed
But then came the part that should really give you cause for pause: Trump told reporters, out loud and on the record, that he knows this probably won’t survive a legal challenge, but he’s doing it anyway: “I think it’s good to point it out whether it survives or doesn’t.” The President of the United States just confessed, in advance, that this is a stunt he expects to lose. He’s not trying to win a legal argument. He’s just trying to make a point, and the point is: “I can do this to you, and you can’t stop me fast enough to make it matter.” Except, you and I both know we’ve been here before…several times. Trump is a known repeat offender and his rap sheet is getting long enough that it needs its own filing cabinet.
Let’s roll the tape from 2018: my good friend, Jim Acosta, then working for CNN, dared to ask Trump an uncomfortable question. Trump typically didn’t like the challenge and next thing you know, he pulls Jim’s credentials. A federal judge (a Trump appointee, no less) looks at this shitshow and says, absolutely TF not, and orders Jim’s hard pass reinstated immediately because the White House trampled his due process rights.
Fast forward to just last year: the Associated Press understandably refuses to call the Gulf of Mexico anything other than its correct and proper name. Trump petulantly gets the AP locked out of the press pool. The AP sues and a federal judge rules the action was “contrary to the First Amendment.” That case is still winding its way through the appeals process, because apparently losing once isn’t instructive for Trump.
But access denial is just his entry-level offense. This Trump Regime has been busy trying to expand its toolbox of terrible ideas. Trump’s weaponized DOJ has now taken to sending FBI agents to reporters’ homes to serve grand jury subpoenas and, in at least one case, agents flashed a warrant to seize a reporter’s electronic devices.
Then there's Stars and Stripes, a newspaper with nearly 100 years of editorial independence. This summer, after the paper's editor and a reporter spoke out about interference from Department of Defense leadership, the Pentagon fired both of them, along with the publisher, for "insubordination." These firings came just days after the paper reported on sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln suffering through a 286-day uninterrupted deployment at sea. The message was clear: report something embarrassing, get canned for "insubordination."
All of the above has been taking place against the backdrop of the White House quietly seizing control of the press pool selection process from the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA). Regulatory agencies like the FCC have been intimidating and threatening media companies over their content. Trump has stripped federal funding from public television and radio, gutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Not to mention the fact he has made it his personal mission to sue major news organizations when his little feelings get hurt. The Pentagon has slapped new access restrictions on reporters who won't sign pledges to limit their own coverage. The Treasury Department denied G20 credentials to journalists it doesn’t like. This is a coordinated, multi-agency assault on the Fourth Estate.
So let’s talk the law, because that’s where this latest stupidity will actually get decided, NOT on Truth Social. The controlling precedent is Sherrill v. Knight, a 1977 case that should be tattooed on the inside of every White House press office’s eyelids at this point. The holding is not complicated: once the White House opens up access to the press corps generally, it cannot arbitrarily pull that access from a specific outlet or reporter, and it cannot do so based on the content of their coverage. The case goes on to say if you’re going to deny someone access, you have to give them notice of why and also give them a chance to respond. Before, not after.
For CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, Trump gave zero notice and thus far, those outlets have had zero opportunity to respond. What he DID do was give a reason so content-based it’s basically Exhibit A in the case against himself: Trump publicly whined on Truth Social about “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.” That’s a textbook definition of viewpoint-based justification, which is precisely the category of reasoning Sherrill forbids. Trump was dumb enough to say the quiet part loud.
First Amendment specialists all say it’s not even a close call. Legal expert, Theodore Boutrous, told NPR the so-called ban is, on its face, unconstitutional. Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, stated, “The First Amendment prohibits the president from punishing journalists because he doesn’t like their coverage…With so many courts having ruled against him on exactly this point, you’d think President Trump would have learned this lesson by now.” In other words, Trump is gonna lose and he’s gonna lose big, if CNN, MSNOW, and Politico file suit.
But, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the elephant in the room, at least from my perspective. The same WHCA currently invoking Sherrill to defend its members is the same WHCA that went ahead and rescheduled the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) after gunfire disrupted the first attempt. And then even though they didn’t have to do so, they invited Trump back. He showed up this past July, spent more than an hour insulting his political opponents as well as the journalists in the room, and he topped it off by donning a “Trump 2028” hat to troll them. The WHCA predictably will keep inviting Trump to its house, while Trump predictably will keep uninviting them to his.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
New York Times, Republicans Seize on Democrat’s Defense Contractor Ties in N.Y. House Race, Grace Ashford and Benjamin Oreskes, Sept. 20, 2026. Cait Conley, who is trying to flip a Republican seat held by Representative Mike Lawler, is fending off attacks concerning her work after she left the Biden administration.
As President Trump re-entered office in 2025, Cait Conley decided it was time to leave government after six tours overseas and 18 years in public service.
Ms. Conley, who held leadership positions in the Biden administration at the National Security Council and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was quickly snapped up by a company that built anti-drone systems. She also picked up consulting work for an artificial intelligence firm that scraped public sources for law enforcement analysis.
By March of that year, she announced a new career plan, declaring her intention to run for Congress against Representative Mike Lawler in a critical Hudson Valley House swing district.
Although Ms. Conley’s time in the private sector was limited, it has nonetheless become an attack line for Republicans as they fight to hold onto Mr. Lawler’s seat.
The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee and two of President Trump’s super PACs have committed millions of dollars to boosting Mr. Lawler’s chances. They have unleashed a negative ad campaign attacking Ms. Conley, a former U.S. Army special operations leader, by portraying her as a corporate puppet beholden to her former employers.
At issue is Ms. Conley’s decision to work for companies affected by the policies she made during her time in government, putting her in position to use her expertise and connections to benefit her employers — both defense contractors who were seeking to expand their business with the Trump administration.
The Republicans’ ads do not accuse Ms. Conley of violating any laws, and campaign watchdogs say that her private sector work did not appear to cross any ethical lines.
But with the race expected to be exceedingly close — the Cook Political Report views it as a toss up — Ms. Conley may feel pressure to dispel the accusations more directly than she has chosen to in her campaign.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
President Trump Unveils 'Liberation Day' Tariffs (April 3, 2025).
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Why Does Everyone Hate Trump’s Tariffs? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 20, 2026. The surprising political failure of protectionism.
On April 2, 2025 — “Liberation Day” — Donald Trump imposed high tariffs – ranging from 10 to 48 percent — on imports from virtually every one of our trading partners. With that announcement the United States abruptly turned its back on generations’ worth of solemn international agreements, effectively voiding a rules-based international trading system the U.S. itself had largely constructed.
Although the Supreme Court eventually ruled that most of the tariffs were illegal, the Trump administration reinstated many of them using other dubious legal strategies. Businesses are, to say the least, unhappy about the uncertainty created by these unilateral, unstable actions. However, the consequences of Trump’s liberation tariffs have been very different from what both supporters and opponents originally expected.
Contrary to Trump administration expectations and predictions, there has been no revival of U.S. manufacturing employment, and investment in manufacturing — at least as measured by construction spending — has fallen off a cliff. And import prices, even excluding petroleum, have gone up, not down, belying claims that foreigners would pay the tariffs.
However, the Trump tariffs haven’t caused a recession, either in the U.S. or globally. Nor have they led to a 1930s-style global spiral into protectionism: Retaliation by other nations against U.S. tariffs has been limited, and there has been hardly any sign of emulation — of other nations deciding to follow Trump’s lead by imposing their own high tariffs on trading partners. Instead, a number of countries have made substantial moves to strengthen their trading relations — e.g., after decades of stalled negotiations, India and the European Union agreed to a free trade deal. And Canada, of course, is trying to compensate for its now-troubled relations with the U.S. by becoming an “associate member” of the EU (although nobody quite knows what that might mean).
Yet for me the biggest surprise arising from the Trump tariffs has been the complete absence of a significant domestic political constituency. This failure has been driven home by polling on Trump’s confrontation with Canada, which appears to be nearly as unpopular as his war with Iran.
This is not, I believe, what most economists or political analysts would have predicted. Conventional economic analysis, while arguing that free trade raises real income for a nation as a whole, also suggests that tariffs can nonetheless benefit significant groups within a nation. Moreover, because the beneficiaries from tariffs are often localized and organized while the costs are dispersed, tariff advocates often wield disproportionate political influence. Indeed, one of the main purposes of world trade rules has historically been to strengthen governments’ hands against their own domestic anti-free-trade constituencies.
However, the actual political response to Trump’s tariffs hasn’t followed this traditional model. Rather, support for the tariffs appears to be limited to that segment of the population — around 20 percent — that supports almost anything Trump does.
Beyond the paywall, I will address the following:
What conventional economics says about tariffs
Adam Smith is generally considered the founder of economics as a subject. But economics as an academic discipline — a subject dominated by mathema
1. Why conventional economics says about tariffs
2. Polling on the Trump tariffs
3. Explaining low support I: Value chains
4. Explaining low support II: The service economy and affordability
5. Explaining low support III: The Trump factor
6. A policy without a constituency
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, In Significant Escalation, Houthis Attack Saudi Capital, Vivian Nereim, Ismaeel Naar and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 20, 2026 (print ed.). The Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia, said they had fired a wave of missiles and drones at Riyadh, and on Saudi oil facilities.
The Houthi militia in Yemen said on Saturday that it had attacked Saudi Arabia’s capital and oil facilities with a barrage of missiles and drones, a significant escalation in the renewed war between the kingdom and the Iranian-backed group.
The Saudis intercepted a Houthi missile launched toward Riyadh, the capital, according to Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen.
He added in a statement that air defenses had fended off assaults on “civilians and civilian infrastructure” in several other cities in the kingdom, including coastal Yanbu, where the Houthis said they attacked oil facilities.
The Houthi strikes, the first on Riyadh in months, left the city on edge. Emergency alerts sounded in Riyadh earlier on Saturday, with residents reporting loud explosions, and flights were severely disrupted at the city’s airport. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Houthis and Saudi Arabia have accused each other of mounting intensifying attacks in recent weeks. Strikes on Saudi Arabia have disrupted critical oil infrastructure, fueling alarm over threats to global energy supplies.
Yahya Saree, a spokesman for the Houthi military, said the group had fired a “large number of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones” targeting “sensitive sites” in Riyadh and facilities for Saudi Arabia’s national oil company in Yanbu, a crucial Red Sea terminal.
Mr. Saree said the attacks were retaliation for more than 700 Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, where the kingdom has been backing government forces trying to wrest back territory from a lightning Houthi offensive.
Saudi Arabia has not acknowledged launching any airstrikes in recent days, and Saudi officials generally say that such strikes are being carried out by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday, but General Al-Maliki said in his statement on Saturday that the Houthi attacks demonstrated the militia’s “intransigence.”
Starting in 2015, Saudi Arabia led a disastrous bombing campaign to rout the Houthis but failed to push the group out of power, leaving Yemen in the fragmented control of government forces and the militants. A truce reached in 2022 has unraveled amid worsening fighting in recent months, as the Houthis have sought to seize strategic territory in Yemen and enforce a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
But the attacks on Riyadh were a “huge” escalation, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, a London-based research group. He said they reflected that the “Houthis are not going to stop anywhere,” particularly at a time when they feel emboldened by recent battlefield victories.
New York Times, U.S. Approves Visas for Iran’s U.N. Delegation, Claire Moses, Sept. 19, 2026 (print ed.).The officials will be subject to restrictions while in New York for next week’s U.N. General Assembly, according to the State Department.
The United States said on Thursday that it would issue visas to some of Iran’s top officials to attend the United Nations General Assembly, even as the war between the countries shows few signs of ending.
The State Department said in an emailed statement that Iran’s “core delegation” would be allowed to enter the United States, “consistent with our host country obligations.” The statement added: “The delegation is smaller than last year.”
The delegation will be subject to restrictions, including a ban on shopping for wholesale or luxury goods, Tommy Pigott, a spokesman for the State Department, wrote on social media.
The rule was put into place last year and prevents the visiting officials from shopping at Costco or other wholesale retailers without approval.
Russia-Ukraine War
New York Times, Hundreds of Drones Target Moscow on Final Day of Russian Elections, Valerie Hopkins and Andrew E. Kramer, Sept. 20, 2026. Ukraine says it used a newly developed ballistic missile in the attacks, which also targeted other parts of Russia
Moscow and its surrounding region came under attack by hundreds of drones, the local authorities said on Sunday morning, on the final day of parliamentary, regional and local elections across Russia.
About 1,600 drones heading toward the Moscow region were shot down, the Russian capital’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said, including 450 that had been approaching the city. He called the attack the largest drone strike on Moscow of the war.
Two people were killed, and 20 injured in the strike, Russian authorities said. An oil refinery and a warehouse were also hit.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine posted on Facebook that the bombardment included the first use of a newly developed Ukrainian ballistic missile to strike inside Russia. That missile does not have the range to reach Moscow, according to its manufacturer, Fire Point, so it would have been aimed elsewhere in Russia.
Neither Mr. Sobyanin’s comment about the scale of the attack nor Mr. Zelensky’s statement about the use of a ballistic missile could be independently confirmed.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.
Russian officials have repeatedly said that they are holding elections under attack, possibly an implicit criticism of Ukraine, which has not held elections since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 because martial law forbids them. President Vladimir V. Putin has repeatedly criticized Kyiv and Mr. Zelensky for not holding a vote.
The night was deadlier in Ukraine, where seven people were killed in strikes in the Kyiv and Sumy regions, according to Ukrainian authorities. Air alerts were on and off all night though most of the country.ImageOrange flames and dark smoke billow from industrial structures in the distance, under a sunset sky. Apartment buildings are in the foreground.An oil refinery after the drone strike in Moscow on Sunday.Credit...Reuters
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Pope Leo XIV embraces two Special Olympics Italia athletes in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican on Sept. 19. About 150 athletes from the Turin 2025 World Winter Games attended the audience. (Vatican Media)
Letters from Leo: The American Pope and U.S. Politics, Commentary: Pope Leo XIV Embraces the Kennedys’ Special Olympics as Trump Shutters the Kennedy Center Over His Name, Christopher Hale, Sept. 19, 2026. Pope Leo XIV welcomed roughly 150 Special Olympics athletes to the Clementine Hall on Saturday morning, most of them Italians who competed at last year’s World Winter Games in Turin, many in the blue tracksuits of Special Olympics Italia.
He greeted them, and then he told them why they had been invited. “Our world is in such need of people who, like you, remind everyone of the true values of life,” he said, “of men and women who show by their example that the path of sharing and love is the only one that truly leads to happiness and peace.”
The pope is a lifelong White Sox fan who, as Spike Lee reported in June, pulls for the Knicks on account of their Villanova alumni, and he told the athletes he loves sport for what it teaches.
Taking part, he said, “means committing oneself seriously and with hard work, and then sharing the fruits of one’s perseverance with loyalty, trust, openness, team spirit and courage.”
He closed by entrusting them to St. Pier Giorgio Frassati — the mountain-climbing layman from Turin, the city where these athletes competed, whom Leo canonized last September — as “a young sportsman like yourselves.”
Vatican Media’s photographs carry what the transcript cannot. A young athlete in a wheelchair takes Leo’s hand as he bends toward him; in another frame, the pope is pulled into an embrace by a woman in a blue jacket, a younger athlete tucked between them, and one man has dropped to a knee on the marble floor to greet him.A Special Olympics Italia athlete kneels to greet Pope Leo XIV in the Clementine HallA Special Olympics Italia athlete kneels to greet Pope Leo XIV in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican on Sept. 19, as teammates in the delegation’s blue tracksuits wait their turn. (Vatican Media)
None of it exists without a Catholic woman named Eunice Kennedy Shriver. In June 1962, angry at how the country hid people like her older sister Rosemary, she opened the backyard of her Maryland home, Timberlawn, to 34 children with intellectual disabilities and called it Camp Shriver.
Six summers later, on July 20, 1968, about a thousand athletes from across the United States and Canada competed at Soldier Field in Chicago in the first International Special Olympics Games, and she gave them an oath that still opens every competition: “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”Eunice Kennedy Shriver with President John F. Kennedy and the king and queen of Afghanistan at the White House in 1963Eunice Kennedy Shriver stands with King Mohammed Zahir Shah and Queen Humaira of Afghanistan and her brother, President John F. Kennedy, in the Entrance Hall of the White House on Sept. 5, 1963. She had opened Camp Shriver in her Maryland backyard the summer before. (Robert Knudsen / White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
The Church noticed early. Her brother John received Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, the oldest honor for American Catholics, in 1961, and the university gave it to her husband Sargent, the first director of the Peace Corps, seven years later.
Eunice’s own came in 1988; this May her son Tim, who chairs Special Olympics today, accepted the same medal at commencement.
The movement she started counts more than five million athletes and partners in some 190 countries, and on Saturday Leo recalled the words Francis gave a Special Olympics delegation in October 2017: sport “manages to unite people, making them participants in the same game and, together, protagonists of victory and defeat.”
That is the Kennedy inheritance as Rome received it this week. Washington spent the same days treating it as a nameplate to be pried off.
On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Cooper of the federal district court in Washington blocked Trump’s hand-picked board, for the second time since May, from attaching the president’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “Simply put,” he wrote, “Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.”
The board, which Trump chairs, answered the same day by voting to shut the main building at once. The president announced that the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name”; on Wednesday he was photographed aboard Air Force One holding a placard that read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” and on Thursday in Charlotte he said that without recognition for his administration, “it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down.” Letters from Leo, The American Pope & US Politics: Pope Leo XIV Embraces the Kennedys’ Special Olympics as Trump Shutters the Kennedy Center Over His Name, Christopher Hale, Sept. 19, 2026. About 150 athletes in blue Special Olympics tracksuits filled the Clementine Hall on Saturday, and the pope told them the world needs their example. The same week, Trump’s board shut the Kennedy Center rather than give up his name on JFK’s memorial.
More News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 19, 2026. There’s a lot to get through today, starting with the biggest press freedom fight of Trump’s second term: the White House has physically barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from its grounds, confiscating their badges on live television after a weekend Truth Social tirade.
Legal experts call it unconstitutional, courts have already ruled against similar moves twice, and even Trump’s own staff say they found out about it the same way the rest of us did. What happened this weekend isn’t normal. Confiscating press badges from reporters, live, on camera, isn’t “media criticism,” it’s the government deciding which outlets get to do their jobs based on whether their coverage flatters the president, and once that precedent exists, every outlet, including this one, is on notice.
Meanwhile the Iran war keeps widening. The Houthis just struck deep inside Saudi Arabia for the first time, Trump says he’s got a “big decision” coming on whether to “annihilate” Iran’s regime, and a new UN report alleges U.S. war crimes tied to a school bombing that killed dozens of children. And Trump spent his Saturday announcing he’s building an “AI Force” and dismissing AI safety concerns as a hoax, even as Senate Democrats demand an investigation into an AI hallucination that nearly triggered a strike on a Chinese ship.
Reporters getting physically barred and a president openly floating adding The New York Times and The Washington Post next isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign independent reporting is landing hard enough that they’d rather shut the door than answer the questions, which is why this coverage can’t stop, and why it needs readers willing to fund it directly. Here’s the news:
White House Expands Press Ban in Major First Amendment Assault:
White House staffers say they were blindsided by the media ban while Susie Wiles was out of town. White House staffers, including senior officials, say they learned of Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters at the same time as the public, with the decision reportedly made while Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Politico reports that more than a dozen current and former Trump officials called the move “puzzling” and a “head-scratcher,” and Trump gave no specific article that triggered it. Sources say he’s floated a media ban before but acted on it in Wiles’s absence, and he’s also considered relocating the press corps out of the West Wing into the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Despite pushback even from parts of his own base, sources say Trump intends the ban to be “real and permanent,” and he’s suggested The New York Times and Washington Post could be added next. Trump admitted that America is being just as repressive as China:
Reporters from all three banned outlets were turned away from the White House on Saturday. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner said her badge flashed red and was confiscated after an officer said it had been disabled “above him,” CNN’s Betsy Klein had her credential taken after about a minute in the security kiosk, and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett was denied entry with her pass confiscated by the Secret Service. CNN and MS NOW went on air live from across the street rather than from their usual White House position. Trump had announced the ban a day earlier on Truth Social, accusing the outlets of “FAKE NEWS” and falsely claiming Politico received an “illegal” $8 million government subsidy, a claim Politico called “false and thoroughly debunked.”
Legal experts and press advocates widely condemned the ban as unconstitutional. White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich said press protections “do not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage” and called on the administration to restore access immediately. Jameel Jaffer of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute called the ban “pretty clearly unconstitutional” and predicted a legal challenge would succeed, tying it to the earlier AP ban and Pentagon access restrictions. Former President Obama called the idea of banning an outlet like Fox News under a Democratic administration “unimaginable,” and courts have already twice found the administration violated the Constitution by suspending reporters’ press passes.
Iran War Updates:
The U.S. military says it has escorted a billion barrels of oil out of the Persian Gulf as Trump weighs a “big decision” on striking Iran. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, said in a video Saturday that the military has escorted 1 billion barrels of crude and more than 2,000 commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz over the past couple of months, calling the recent traffic volume the highest in six months. The push comes after a rough stretch for energy markets, with diesel topping $6 a gallon and Brent crude spiking from $93 to $109 a barrel before easing back to $103. President Trump told Axios Thursday he has a “big decision coming up” on whether to “annihilate” Iran’s regime ahead of a planned meeting with Persian Gulf leaders next week. Meanwhile Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei said Tehran is awaiting Trump’s response to conditions for ending the war, including lifting the naval blockade and releasing seized assets, demands the administration has previously dismissed as unrealistic. Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are placing the blame on Donald Trump:
Hegseth uses the bible to justify the war in Iran:
The Houthis expanded their attacks deep into Saudi Arabia, striking Riyadh and Yanbu and disrupting the capital’s main airport. The Iran-backed group said it targeted “sensitive sites” in Riyadh and Aramco oil facilities in Yanbu, some 700 miles from the Yemen border, after Saudi strikes on Houthi-held Sanaa; the attack triggered Riyadh’s first air raid alert since the conflict intensified and left King Khalid International Airport facing major delays and cancellations. Fighting between Houthi and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces has also killed 48 people in the past day, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Saudi Arabia “should be kept outside” the Iran-U.S. conflict. The escalation is straining regional defense pacts: Pakistan’s military says it will defend Saudi Arabia “to any extent” under the new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Turkey, and the U.N. Security Council warned the escalation “risks further expanding the conflict” and threatening global trade. Shipping through the nearby Bab el-Mandeb Strait has already dropped sharply, with roughly 3,000 Yemeni refugees fleeing to Djibouti in the past week alone.
Iran and the U.S. traded accusations over alleged war crimes as international diplomacy around the war continues. A U.N.-commissioned human rights report found “reasonable grounds” that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran, including a school bombing in Minab that killed dozens of children; the White House dismissed the report as “unserious nonsense,” while Iranian spokesman Ismaeil Baqaei accused Washington of “projection.” Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi separately called for a “fundamental change of course” in global affairs, describing the U.S. and Israeli strikes as part of “a broader pattern of unpunished aggression.” The State Department has approved visas for Iran’s president and foreign minister to attend next week’s U.N. General Assembly despite the ongoing war, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin is pressing Trump to confront Xi Jinping over reports Iran used Chinese satellite data in a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Jordan. Iran also executed a man Saturday accused of passing missile-site intelligence to Israel, as Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution to extend monitoring of Iran sanctions. More Republicans are breaking from Trump:
AI:
Trump announced he’s forming an “AI Force” and will soon name an AI czar, while dismissing safety concerns as a hoax. In Truth Social posts Saturday, Trump said he’s “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force,” and will announce an AI “Czar” soon, joking that “only High I.Q. individuals need apply.” He also seemed to partly acknowledge risks, saying the government would go after “BAD” actors using the existing criminal and civil justice system, but broadly framed AI safety worries as part of a “SICK conspiracy” comparable to what he called past Democratic hoaxes like “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “Global Warming.” Trump also posted a poll asking followers to help rebrand “Artificial Intelligence” with a new name, offering options like “Superior Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence.” He gave no details on what the AI Force or AI czar would actually do, and CNN says the White House has not yet responded to questions about the roles.
The announcement lands amid mounting pressure from both parties and industry figures to slow AI development and add safeguards. Barack Obama used a Friday appearance at Colgate University to say it’s “good that some of the leading companies have said we need to slow this down,” arguing government ultimately has to regulate the technology, and he’s urged 2028 Democratic hopefuls to put AI at the center of their platforms. The debate intensified after an Anthropic researcher resigned publicly, warning that leading AI companies “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and are “gambling with our lives,” prompting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to release a plan to “pace the frontier” that Sam Altman and Elon Musk reportedly endorsed. Trump, by contrast, has sided with figures like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who called the AI backlash a “hoax” onstage with Trump at the All-In Summit and vowed “we’re not going to let” a slowdown happen. Trump reiterated Saturday that he wants to keep the U.S. ahead of China and won’t “hinder or stifle” the industry’s growth.
AI policy is set to be a major focus of next week’s diplomatic events in Washington and New York. The Trump administration will hold a high-level AI event on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, and the following day tech executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google’s Sundar Pichai are expected at a White House state dinner tied to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit. A White House official told CNN that AI safety will be “on the agenda” when Trump meets Xi, and officials have also discussed a possible separate meeting between Trump and major AI executives around the summit. David Sacks, who previously served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar until stepping down in March, now chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, leaving open who might take the newly announced AI czar role.
Other news:
Top Senate Democrats are demanding an investigation after AI-generated intelligence nearly triggered a military strike on a Chinese ship. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, Sens. Mark Warner, Jack Reed and Chris Coons cited CNN’s reporting that a special operations analyst used AI to generate a report falsely identifying nuclear weapons components on a Chinese cargo vessel. The military began preparing to intercept the ship before officials realized, just before the operation, that the AI-generated report was “entirely false,” and a source told CNN this kind of hallucination has not been an isolated incident across the intelligence community. The senators also tied the episode to a deadly February strike on a school in Minab, Iran, that killed nearly 200 people, after commanders reportedly bypassed warnings that AI-linked intelligence databases were severely out of date. They’re calling for inspectors general to get an “immediate investigation” with “unrestricted access” to both incidents and any others not yet made public, as the Pentagon separately clashes with Anthropic over its refusal to loosen safety guardrails on Claude for military use.
Germany’s Carsten Breuer won a secret NATO vote to become the next chair of the alliance’s military committee. Breuer, who has led Germany’s armed forces since 2023, secured the backing of at least 17 of NATO’s 32 chiefs of defense in Saturday’s closed-door ballot in Copenhagen, beating Canada’s Jennie Carignan for the post. Outgoing chair, Italy’s Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, congratulated Breuer on X, praising his “operational judgement” and “deep familiarity with this Alliance.” Breuer takes over next July for a three-year term, and the rest of the vote tally was kept secret to avoid stoking division. He was widely seen as the favorite given Germany’s status as Europe’s top defense spender and its implicit backing from Washington, while Carignan’s bid was seen as hampered by strained U.S.-Canada relations; the result reflects Berlin’s growing role in NATO’s command structure, including new leadership over forces protecting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Patrick Clancy and his wife will give their first public comments on his ex-wife’s Massachusetts murder trial in a 60 Minutes interview airing Sunday. Clancy tells correspondent Ross Douthat, “I live with it every day, but I think I did the best I could,” while also discussing his grief and how he still talks to his late children. The interview comes as prosecutors decide later this month whether to retry Lindsay Clancy, who is accused of killing the couple’s three young children in January 2023, after a summer trial ended in mistrial when a lone juror rejected her postpartum psychosis defense. Clancy, paralyzed from the waist down since he found his injured wife and children, has faced intense online speculation and conspiracy theories, prompting his attorney to threaten legal action over what he called a “relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign.” His new wife, Rachel Danis, also defends him in the interview, saying she doesn’t understand “how the story’s been so twisted” given that he is “the most selfless father and supportive partner.”
A 77-year-old shopper died after allegedly being attacked by a teenage Walmart worker’s parents following a dispute over a shopping cart. Bert Atienza and his wife Josephine were grocery shopping in a Norfolk, Virginia Walmart when a 17-year-old employee nearly struck Josephine with a cart, leading to an exchange of words and the teen allegedly throwing a can at the couple. The teen then called her parents, Travis White and Erika Mitchell, who surveillance video shows finding Atienza in the store and allegedly shoving, punching and kicking him until he fell and hit a shelving unit. Atienza was taken to a hospital and died the next day of blunt force trauma, with his death ruled a homicide. White, 44, and Mitchell, 42, are being held without bond, and their daughter has also been charged with assault and battery, aggravated malicious wounding, and conspiracy to commit a felony.
California health officials are warning that an infected, unvaccinated traveler exposed people to measles across six counties via Amtrak trains and buses. The passenger entered the state on a train that reached Los Angeles on September 10, then continued through Bakersfield, Stockton, Oroville, Sacramento and Emeryville before leaving California for Denver, exposing anyone on the same trains, buses or in the stations along the route. Officials are working with federal and local health departments to notify those potentially exposed, with assistant state public health officer Rita Nguyen stressing the importance of MMR vaccination. The warning comes amid the country’s worst measles resurgence in decades, with Pennsylvania reporting 731 cases and four deaths this year and now seeking emergency CDC help, a request complicated by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s earlier instruction that the CDC not publicly recognize those deaths. A similar incident this month saw a measles-infected Amtrak rider expose more than 250 people between Missouri and Chicago.
South Dakota’s Republican secretary of state, Monae Johnson, is breaking with her party to endorse the Democratic candidate for her old job. Johnson lost her GOP renomination in June to Heather Baxter, a Trump-aligned candidate who backs “robust post-election audits” and expanded hand counting, and Johnson wrote in a Saturday column that she’s now backing Democrat Terrence Davis because “the integrity, stability, and professionalism of this office is at stake.” She said the state deserves a secretary of state who builds “confidence through performance rather than provocation” and urged voters to look past party labels. Baxter responded that her primary win, 59 percent to 41 percent, reflected the will of Republican voters and argued party affiliation signals real governing philosophy for an office that runs elections. Davis thanked Johnson for the endorsement, while South Dakota’s Republican House speaker, Jon Hansen, blasted the move on X as a “huge mistake” and urged voters not to “hand our elections over to the Democrats.” has shifted to reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has in effect closed in retaliation for the U.S. attacks.
Status with Natalie Korach, Sunday News and Commentary, Natalie Korach, Sept. 20, 2026. As news organizations prepare to challenge Trump’s media ban in court, CNN’s scheduled pool duty is forcing the press corps to immediately confront how far it will go in defense of its barred colleagues.
On Friday afternoon, when Donald Trump abruptly declared a ban on CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO from the White House, the immediate question was whether the administration would follow through on the extraordinary, unconstitutional order. By Saturday morning, it was clear Trump meant “effective immediately.” Reporters from all three outlets were turned away from the White House grounds, with some having their hard passes confiscated.
That evening, some members of CNN’s White House team attended a colleague’s birthday party in Washington, I’m told, where the ban was a hot topic of conversation. Staffers wondered when they would receive guidance on whether they would still be traveling alongside Trump to New York City on Monday. The network is scheduled to serve as the designated TV pooler, responsible for providing footage of the president during the United Nations General Assembly that would then be shared with the other outlets for their respective coverage of the event.
Less than 48 hours after Trump’s initial announcement, the administration’s latest media attack is barreling toward a major legal showdown. Behind the scenes, a legal response to the unconstitutional ban is taking shape, I’m told. CNN has retained prominent First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous to handle its response, with legal action expected as early as Monday. “I'm pretty confident legal action will be filed soon,” attorney Mark Zaid, who specializes in First Amendment and national security cases, told Status, adding that he would be surprised if it didn’t happen early this week.
The more immediate challenge, however, could come as Trump is expected to travel to New York on Monday, and whether CNN will still accompany the administration. The situation puts the White House directly at odds with the longstanding pool system organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association to provide independent coverage of the president, specifically during a high-profile news week.
The saga serves as the latest stress test for the WHCA and its newly minted president, Jacqui Heinrich, one that could force the press corps to decide how far it is willing to go in defense of its barred colleagues.
Become a premium member to unlock complete access to our nightly newsletter, packed with scoops and sharp-edged analysis on the media industry.Upgrade to Premium
Support independent journalism—go premium today.
It remains unclear how the ban will affect the press pool schedule, whether CNN will be replaced by another network, or whether the networks will go as far as to boycott coverage altogether. Heinrich told members Saturday that the organization is “working to keep rotations running as scheduled” and would notify “affected members” directly of any necessary alterations. “We will also continue to keep you informed as our conversations with the White House develop,” Heinrich wrote in a memo.
“This is a moment that affects all of us, regardless of outlet,” Heinrich continued. “The strength of this association has always come from our shared commitment to supporting independent coverage of the White House.”
When former WHCA president Weijia Jiang joined Heinrich for a Sunday interview on Fox News, she echoed that sentiment, making it clear that the dispute extends beyond the three targeted organizations. “This is not a tantrum by three media outlets who are upset because they can't get into the White House or the Oval Office,” Jiang said, calling the ban a “serious concern for the public.” She argued that an “attack on one outlet is an attack on everyone, no matter where that outlet falls on the political spectrum.” Later, Jiang put the stakes more starkly: “America cannot have state TV.”
The question that remains is how far that “shared commitment” to WHCA member organizations goes.
If CNN is prevented from traveling with Trump on Monday despite being scheduled for pool duty, will the other television networks continue to participate in the pool and replace CNN’s reporting staff on the trip? Or will they refuse to cover the trip entirely, boycotting in solidarity with their barred colleagues as some have suggested?
Status asked every television news network not directly targeted by Trump’s ban whether they would boycott pool coverage if CNN is prevented from fulfilling its scheduled duties. None provided details about how they planned to respond to such a scenario.
Jim Acosta, who endured his own credential battle while covering the White House for CNN during Trump’s first term, urged major outlets to “band together and hang tough,” calling on them to pull their teams from the White House if the ban remains in effect. “There should be no pool coverage, starting at the UN this week,” he wrote.
But inside the press corps, there are questions over whether a boycott is the right response. Some reporters fear that refusing to cover this week’s high-profile events would simply provide the administration more opportunity to replace traditional media outlets with MAGA-friendly platforms. “I’m personally against a boycott because I know that if we’re not there, they’ll just fill our seats with sycophants,” one reporter told Status. “Might as well go down swinging.”
Legal Analysis In-depth
Emptywheel, Analysis: Confirmed: Broadview 6 Transcript Does Not Match the Recording, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 20, 2026. I was right that there’s something funky about the October 16, 2025 grand jury transcript in the Broadview 6 case. But I still can’t figure out how I was right.
In this post, I noted two things: the unredacted transcript from October 16 reflected a seeming four hour gap — from 10:04AM to 2:43PM — between the first part of the transcript and the second (where the purported ICE victim testified), but the transcript ended with a timestamp, showing 10:11AM, that hid the gap, a timestamp that did not match the timestamps elsewhere in that section. In this post, I noted that the transcript as it currently appears conflicts with US Attorney Andrew Boutros’ claim that someone from the Head Office called a halt to the grand jury session after they learned Sheri Mecklenburg was throwing out grand jurors who objected to charging people for being hit by an ICE SUV. The session ended, instead, when Mecklenburg claimed her batteries ran out (a technical problem not included in the redacted transcript originally provided to Judge Perry).
The reason this matters is because AUSA William Hogan offered two excuses for why he withheld transcripts showing misconduct when he first gave Judge April Perry the grand jury transcripts: 1) he provided Judge Perry with what just the parts of the transcript that she asked for (those pertaining to legal instruction), and 2) he didn’t correct her misimpression that the redactions omitted technical problems because there were, in fact, technical problems. The first claim is false: he didn’t provide her with everything she ordered him to turn over. The second is a mess because Hogan’s redaction didn’t treat technical problems consistently.
But the anomaly matters because one thing Judge Perry is presumably assessing is whether Hogan and Boutros lied to her about the redactions and withholdings. And it appears to remain the case that the transcript leaves out critical details about Boutros’ involvement.
The exonerees’ reply brief mentions the transcript anomalies (but doesn’t call them out) in a section questioning Andrew Boutros’ intervention upon learning jurors were being thrown out of the grand jury.
Mr. Boutros would also have this Court and others believe that he stopped the grand jury proceedings “in real time” when he learned that the prosecutors had dismissed members of the grand jury who rejected the government’s proposed indictment. Per Mr. Boutros, “[w]ith respect to the excusing of grand jurors that took place, which was the second time the prosecutor sought to return an indictment, that I was aware of in real time. And once I became aware of it, I immediately called off the grand jury session.” This statement, when viewed alongside the grand jury audio recording and transcripts from October 16, 2025, raises further questions about representations made to the Court and should not be readily accepted.
A review of the grand jury transcripts from October 16, 2025, shows that “Experienced AUSA 1” dismissed the first grand juror at or about 9:30:04 during the initial portion of the proceeding that day. Dkt. 220, p. 10. The second transcript reflects that there was a break between proceedings on October 16, 2025. According to the time stamp depicted on the transcript of the second portion of the proceeding, Agent A’s last answer was at 10:11:18. Dkt. 220, p. 54. The audio recording reflects that Agent A testified for approximately twelve minutes before there was a break in his testimony to replace batteries in the recorder. According to the audio recording, after several minutes passed, the “Experienced AUSA” told members of the Grand Jury that one of their bosses just showed up and they needed to continue their presentation another day. According to the time stamp on the audio recording, this was at 1:01:18. This sequence of events raises further questions:
Who notified a supervisor that the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA” excused members of the grand jury from the proceeding? How and when was such notification made?Was this reported directly to the Front Office? By whom?And who specifically informed Mr. Boutros?
Did the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA”, in fact, continue in the grand jury after having reported this misconduct in “real time?” Who was the supervisor that appeared outside the grand jury and instructed the “Experienced AUSA 1” and “Junior AUSA” to discontinue the proceeding that day?Did Mr. Boutros accurately report to the Court that he terminated the grand jury session in real time?
6 “Junior AUSA” told the Court on May 21, 2026 that the Criminal Chief was notified and “the Criminal Chief said we need to call this off for the day to gather, understand the right protocol.” 5/21/2026 Tr. at 32.
Not mentioned in this description is the timestamp on the unredacted transcript that shows the (presumed) second session started at 2:43PM. According to the filing, the recording shows the second session happened at an entirely different time: 1:01PM.
Not does this mention that there was a first (or second?) mention of the battery (albeit one that fit into the transcript temporally) — by someone unidentified! — nine minutes into the second session.
Q. What are your duties with regard to that, car?
A. Well, any time that I need to carry out a — any duties I will — I will be in my — my government-furnished vehicle, and including home to 15:19:51 21 work. You know, trans
Q. I’m sorry. Let me stop you for a minute.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: The battery is died.
THE WITNESS: Sorry, the —
MS. MECKLENBURG: That was just the computer. We’ll get it back up when I want to show pictures.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Okay. We’re have a battery — 15:20:26
BY MS. MECKLENBURG: Q. Thank you for keeping me honest. But I think you misunderstood my question. Do you have any duties with regard to keeping the safety and condition of that car?
Here’s what the increasingly irreconcilable three known version of that grand jury session(s) show:
The problem I had recognized in the first post is that the clearly labeled presumptive second session starts at 2:43, with the first question asked at what the marginal timestamp says was 3:10 and the second-to-last at 3:33, only to somehow revert back to the time of the first transcript, 10:11.
Now, in addition to the different time of the afternoon, 1:01 instead of 2:43, by description, the ICE officer testified for a total of ten minutes less in the recording, 12 minutes as opposed to — by the timestamp in the margin — 23 minutes.
I have no idea what the reality is.
What seems increasingly the case, however, is that on top of redactions that hid how Mecklenburg threw out grand jurors who were not willing to indict people for being driven into by a bi SUV, there’s something funny with the transcripts so we can’t even tell how DOJ responded to that.
Redacted transcripts:
Unredacted transcripts:
October 9 unredacted transcriptRedacted 3-61; omitted 4-60Evan Hylton Testimony: pages 10-53 (pages 54-61 omitted from his transcript, but included in unredacted)October 16 unredacted transcriptRedacted 2-4; omitted 3Redacted 8-11; omitted 9-10Redacted 25-26 (none omitted)Redacted 27-28 (none omitted)Redacted 29-37; 30-36 omittedICE witness: introduced 37, testimony starts 40October 23 unredacted transcriptRedacted 3-5; omitted 4-5Redacted 29-41; omitted 30-39Redacted 52-57; omitted 53-55ICE witness: testimony begins 68
Sept. 19
Donald J. Trump, Jr., and Russian oligarch and Putin ally Umar Kremlev, right, who spent hundreds of thousands to fund after parties for Don Jr.'s recent wedding and to attend with Russian colleagues what had been announced as an intimate affair heavily focused on family and friends.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Putin’s Bagman Bought a Party for DOD Drone Contractor Don Jr.Analysis: Putin’s Bagman Bought a Party for DOD Drone Contractor Don Jr., Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 19, 2026. In the wake of ProPublica’s blockbuster story revealing that a corrupt Russian oligarch paid for Don Jr’s wedding party in May, several things have happened.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.
“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”
Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.
First, Julie Ioffe provided context on who Umar Kremlev is. He’s the bagman for Putin’s bodyguard, Alexei Rubezhnoy.
With Kremlev, things are much more straightforward. He has advertised his proximity to Vladimir Putin, who bestowed several state medals on him. And as the independent outlet Proekt has meticulously documented, he is also the business partner of Alexei Rubezhnoy, the head of Putin’s presidential security service and chief bodyguard. “Kremlev is the ‘wallet’ of the person closest to Putin,” said Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author of All the Kremlin’s Men, using Russian slang for a front. Even Kremlev’s last name, which he chose for himself in 2010 at the age of 28, says it all: kreml in Russian means Kremlin. His last name literally means “the Kremlin’s.”
Meanwhile, Bettina’s description of Kremlev as “a dear friend” strains credulity. Kremlev, the longtime head of the scandal-plagued International Boxing Association, met Trump Jr. last September, in Istanbul, at an event he organized with Manny Pacquiao. Trump Jr., a boxing fan, appeared on a panel with Kremlev and Pacquiao where he praised Kremlev for fighting “corruption” and returning “purity” to the sport—by which he meant banning transgender women. (Both Pacquiao and Kremlev have taken vociferously anti-LGBT positions in public.)
[snip]
While riding with the Night Wolves, Kremlev met Rubezhnoy, who had risen through an elite F.S.B. unit into the Federal Security Service (F.S.O.), Russia’s analogue of the Secret Service. Both were avid boxers, as was the president they served, who has referred to the sport as “the most spectacular and masculine.” Kremlev became a boxing promoter and, through Rubezhnoy, secured his client, American boxer Roy Jones Jr., an audience with Putin in occupied Crimea. During the meeting, Jones requested—and received—Russian citizenship.
Rubezhnoy soon helped install Kremlev as head of the International Boxing Association, which was bankrolled until recently by Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant. Kremlev built boxing gyms and organized tournaments across Russia and Central Asia. More importantly, he helped lead the charge against the International Olympic Committee to reinstate Russian athletes, barred from competing under their flag because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine and various doping scandals. (International athletic competitions are of utmost importance to Putin.)
[snip]
Although Rubezhnoy is a federal employee with a fixed income, his wealth has been documented in other ways, such as when his wife or daughters buy luxury real estate in Rublyovka, Moscow’s Beverly Hills. And as for those other companies, well, Rubezhnoy doesn’t technically run or own them: Kremlev does.
Then, Trump made a bullshit statement to try to make it go away. Not only did he claim Don Jr had or would pay back the lavish gift, but he insinuated that Don Jr simply didn’t do a background check.
President Donald Trump on Friday claimed his son, Donald Trump Jr., paid back the Russian billionaire who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund parts of Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration in the Bahamas.
“As I understand it, he paid him back,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to Umar Kremlev, the Kremlin-connected businessman who ProPublica reported paid for aspects of the party.
The assertion by Trump is the most serious sign from the administration of possible discomfort with the payment, although the president also said it was common for someone’s friend to pay for a celebration connected to their wedding.
“A person that he knows — I guess, a friend of his — gave him a wedding party. That’s very common. I’ve heard of many people giving wedding parties,” Trump said.
When asked if it was appropriate for Kremlev to fund the celebration, Trump said, “it’s totally allowed” and dismissed concerns about Kremlev’s ties to the Kremlin, saying “maybe (Trump Jr.) didn’t do a background check.”
But it’s not just Don Jr who is supposed to do background checks of the Russians he lets buy him lavish parties.
That’s true for reasons laid out in a different ProPublica story published days after the wedding. Don Jr is no longer just Daddy’s failson. He’s looting the government. More specifically, a company funded by Don Jr investment fund got a $620 million loan from the Defense Department to develop drone magnets, a crucial technology.
When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism.
[snip]
In August 2025, Vulcan announced $65 million in investments, including from 1789 Capital, the venture firm that Trump Jr. joined as a partner after his father was elected to a second term. Neither 1789 nor Vulcan has publicly disclosed how much of a stake the venture firm has taken.
Staff in the Office of Strategic Capital learned of the White House request to give a loan to Vulcan around September or October, an official involved said. It’s unclear how the White House request was delivered or if it was presented as an order or a recommendation. Companies considered for funding are generally vetted for many months, the person said, but this deal was completed in a matter of weeks because they were told it was a White House priority.
Asked about the Vulcan deal being expedited, the Pentagon spokesperson said defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”
In November, the Pentagon announced its plans to lend $620 million to the company and another $80 million to its partner, ReElement. The company would also get $50 million in incentives from the Commerce Department. In exchange, the government would take a $50 million stake in Vulcan with the right to buy more later.
Vulcan, which at the time had fewer than 50 employees, said it would use the windfall to build a large new facility that would churn out thousands of tons of magnets a year. It said it planned to ramp up in the coming years, adding hundreds of new jobs.
The deal was good news for Vulcan’s investors, including Trump Jr.’s firm. Estimates of Vulcan’s valuation went from around $200 million near the time 1789 Capital first invested, according to Bloomberg, to around $2 billion.
Bloomberg first reported on the importance of Vulcan’s deal in March.
Rare-earth magnets are part of the invisible warp and weft of modern life. They help seat belts fasten, wind turbines spin and missiles launch. But China has long had a choke hold on their production.
Vulcan Elements, a three-year-old startup, aims to build the largest rare-earth magnet factory in the world outside China. These powerful parts—much stronger than the ceramic kind loaded into household appliances—are fashioned from difficult-to-isolate elements and act as a linchpin for satellites, drones, robotics and a range of other defense technologies. Vulcan’s operations will transform a once-mainly agricultural corner of central North Carolina—and, even more, US industrial policy.
Two important changes bolstered Vulcan’s prospects last year. First, a cadre of venture capital firms invested in the company in August. The group included 1789 Capital, a fund that counts the president’s eldest child, Donald Trump Jr., as a partner. Then, three months later, the US government unveiled a deal backing Vulcan with a loan of more than half a billion dollars. Under the terms of the arrangement, the Department of Commerce will also hold a $50 million stake in the company.
Donny acquires his stake in a NatSec critical company in August, he meets his new oligarch handler in September at the same time DOD is considering this deal, in November Donny’s company gets $620 million, and just as this is becoming public, Donny excludes long-term friends from his wedding but instead invites the bagman for Putin’s bodyguard.
This is not just a scandalous failure on Donny’s part (Russia pegged him as the best combination of venal and stupid to get to Trump a decade ago). It’s a scandalous lack of vetting at DOD, to entrust a key national security investment with a guy being bribed by Putin’s closest cronies.
It’s not just Don Jr who needs to answer some questions. So does Whiskey Pete Hegseth.
Sept. 19
Top Headlines
News Roundups
Sept. 19, 2026. I was proud to be on the ground last night covering the “Hands Around the Kennedy Center” protest, and after watching thousands of people show up, link arms, and form a human chain around that building as the sun went down, I can tell you this fight is far from over. More protests like it are already being planned, and I’ll be there for those too.Sept. 19, 2026. Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here. It mentions my new book "Who Killed The American Dream" as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.Sept. 19, 2026. There’s a lot to get through today, starting with the biggest press freedom fight of Trump’s second term: the White House has physically barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from its grounds, confiscating their badges on live television after a weekend Truth Social tirade.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
More U.S. Legal News Roundup & Reform Advocacy
The Contrarian, Advocacy and Opinion: We’re Winning, Contrarians — And We Won’t Back Down, Norman Eisen, right, Publisher’s Roundup 85, Sept. 19, 2026. 
Here at The Contrarian, we have spoken out loudly against Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. As of Friday night, press reports were suggesting that state attorneys general are under increasing pressure to settle their lawsuit to stop the merger. Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison are behind an aggressive campaign to persuade the AGs to back down. These are the moments we need you most, Contrarians. That’s why we’re asking you to sign this petition to show your support for the AGs and encourage them to stand firm. More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 16, 2026. So, In Sum - Trump Is A Titanic F-ck Up, His Madness Is Getting Worse, American Voters Are Angry, And Are Ready Now To Put Us Back In Power.U.S. Law, Rights, Justice
Sept. 19, 2026. On issues such as Israel/Palestine, the Caribbean and the phony “drug war.” and acquiescence to tech bros, the American people demand a U-turn.How 2026 would look if the democrats flipped as many seats as they have in previous elections.More On Middle East Wars
More Global News
Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup
MONEY TO BURN: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, by William D. Cohan
Top Stories
New York Times, Trump Says He Has Banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico From White House, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 19, 2026 (print ed.). The president cited reporting from the outlets that he deemed “fake news.” It was unclear how such a ban would be enforced or defended in court.
President Trump on Friday opened a new front in his ever-expanding battles with the news media, abruptly announcing a ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, even as it remained unclear how his prohibition would be enforced.
“There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, shortly after he announced his ban, “effective immediately,” in a post on Truth Social.
“Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house,” the president added.
What Mr. Trump’s ban would mean in practice was not clear. The president’s remarks were vague — “I don’t want them in my office; I don’t want them here,” he said — and his aides did not immediately provide clarity. Journalists from those news outlets were working as usual on the White House grounds on Friday, and there were no signs of an imminent eviction.
Mr. Trump’s announcement was met with instant condemnation from many First Amendment groups, which called it unconstitutional. CNN and Politico both suggested they could mount challenges in court.
The White House Correspondents’ Association said in a statement that constitutional protections for the press do “not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.”
Presidents back to George Washington have complained about their press coverage, but Mr. Trump has increasingly attempted to control news outlets with a variety of bureaucratic levers and intimidation tactics. The president has filed lawsuits and used government tools like subpoenas to target newspapers, late-night talk show hosts, corporate media conglomerates and journalists whose reporting he dislikes.
In the Oval Office on Friday, Mr. Trump said he announced a ban “because they’re fake news.” He added, “You get sick of it.”
“If they could straighten themselves out, I’d love it,” he added.
Asked if his ban could survive a court challenge, Mr. Trump replied, “I don’t think that a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day.”
Politico said in a statement that it would “vigorously defend our First Amendment rights,” and CNN called Mr. Trump’s ban “an illegal assault.”
“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government,” said Emily Kuhn, a spokeswoman for CNN. A spokesman for MS NOW declined to comment.
In his post, Mr. Trump warned that he might add other organizations to his prospective ban, writing, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”
Mr. Trump expanded on those feelings at his Oval Office appearance, echoing the usual grievances that he unspools at rallies, news conferences and in interviews. “They purposely write negative news,” the president said. “And they do that because they want to try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.”
Any prospective ban on journalists from specific news outlets would almost certainly prompt a legal challenge.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he revoked a White House pass for Jim Acosta, the former CNN journalist. CNN succeeded in restoring Mr. Acosta’s press credentials in court.
This term, Mr. Trump has attempted to bar Associated Press journalists from parts of the White House, including the Oval Office and Air Force One. The A.P. has sued to restore its access, but that case remains in litigation; in the meantime, A.P. photographers have had continued access to the Oval Office. Its print journalists have had more limited access.
The Trump administration has also taken command of the daily White House press pool, a small, rotating group of reporters who relay the president’s daily activities to the public. Previously, the correspondents’ association chose which outlets participated.
In the Oval Office on Friday, Kelly O’Donnell, a White House correspondent at NBC News, said to Mr. Trump that every president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment, before asking how he justified this ban.
“I do, too,” Mr. Trump said of upholding the Constitution. “Much more so than you.” He then said he was banning the outlets “because they’re fake news.”
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that the ban floated by Mr. Trump on Friday is clearly unconstitutional because it would punish news organizations for the content of their reporting.
“If President Trump means to expel these news organizations from the White House press pool, his action is doubly unconstitutional because the press pool is a ‘public forum’ under the First Amendment, which means the president can’t exclude journalists from it on the basis of their viewpoints,” Mr. Jaffer said.
Tim Richardson, the journalism and disinformation director at PEN America, put it bluntly: “Someone needs to explain to President Trump how the First Amendment works.”
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Europe Prepares for Conflict with Russia, Thousands Protest at Kennedy Center, Trump Revokes Press Passes, Another AI Hack, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 19, 2026. I was proud to be on the ground last night covering the “Hands Around the Kennedy Center” protest, and after watching thousands of people show up, link arms, and form a human chain around that building as the sun went down, I can tell you this fight is far from over. More protests like it are already being planned, and I’ll be there for those too.
There’s a lot more breaking today. The White House has started pulling press badges from reporters altogether. New reporting adds names and real numbers to the scandal over the Pentagon hiding Iran war deaths, on the same day it quietly rolled out mandatory testosterone testing for most male troops. A Guardian investigation found Stephen Miller is personally directing a sweeping, multi-agency push to speed up deportations of migrant children, and separately, deportees sent to Equatorial Guinea are being beaten and hooded by police there.
Trump is attacking the First Amendment, revoking press passes and denying reporters access. It’s the same playbook Putin used to consolidate power. Independent media that won’t cave matters now more than ever.
Heads up: Monday, I’m dropping a major investigation into Trump’s finances, weeks in the making. Reporting like this takes real time and resources, which is why I need your support. Here’s what I’ve got for you.
Night at the Kennedy Center:
A massive, joyful crowd turned Friday night into the biggest show of support yet for the Kennedy Center. Thousands of people streamed in from the nearest subway stop and packed the streets of Foggy Bottom, spilling across 25th Street and onto the surrounding lawn as they joined the “Hands Around the Kennedy Center” rally. At its peak, demonstrators actually linked arms and formed a human chain around the entire building as the sun set behind it, a scene organizers called the largest turnout they’d ever seen for the cause, dwarfing the usual 60 to 100 people who show up to these protests. The mood was less angry than celebratory, with people in inflatable animal costumes, drummers, and Baby Trump balloons bobbing overhead, and one local artist even set up a chalkboard covered in Trump’s name so protesters could erase it and draw hearts in its place. It felt like a genuine community turning out for something it loves, not just a protest against something it hates.
Performers and local leaders showed up to defend the institution they call home. Lynda Carter, best known for playing Wonder Woman, joined the rally alongside groups like the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. and the Rapid Response Choir, many of whom have performed at the center themselves and sang and played music as they circled the building. D.C. Council member Robert White drew loud cheers with a defiant speech promising to keep fighting for the center, while Reps. Don Beyer and Jonathan Jackson also turned out to show support. Longtime subscribers like David Novy, who’s attended Kennedy Center shows since high school, said the turnout reflected genuine affection for the place rather than just political theater. The overall tone was one of people showing up for the arts they love, not just showing up against a politician they don’t. This video is from Phil Lewis who was also there:
The rally capped a week of real legal wins for the center’s supporters. The gathering followed a viral photo of Trump aboard Air Force One holding a poster board reading “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” which several attendees said pushed them to come out, even as many dismissed it as another publicity stunt rather than a real threat. That’s because supporters have actual momentum right now: a judge already ruled that Trump illegally added his name to the building and ordered it removed, and this week a different judge ordered the Trump-aligned board to give 30 days’ notice before making any major changes to the building, including demolition. One D.C. Council member summed up the crowd’s confidence best, saying “there is no way, no how” the center gets taken away while people keep showing up like they did Friday night. For a fight that’s dragged on for over a year, it was a night that left supporters feeling like they were actually winning.
Europe Prepares for Possible War with Russia:
Europe is sounding the alarm that Russia could strike a NATO country, and governments are preparing accordingly. Germany is readying hospitals for mass casualties, Lithuania has updated its evacuation plans, and NATO troops are running exercises in the Baltic region as fears grow that Moscow could stage drone or missile attacks to punish countries backing Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned this week that Russia could send drones or missiles into NATO territory “in the next few months,” a warning French President Emmanuel Macron called “sound and well-documented” as he unveiled a new critical infrastructure protection plan. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten and Finnish President Alexander Stubb echoed the alarm, with Stubb telling Finns it was “worth mentally preparing for something to happen,” including sabotage and drone incursions. Despite the wave of warnings, NATO itself says it currently sees “no imminent threat of attack,” even as officials acknowledge hybrid incidents across Europe have nearly doubled this year compared to the same period in 2025.
The warnings come as incidents on Russia’s border with NATO keep piling up. In recent weeks, NATO jets shot down a Russian drone over Lithuania, a Russian ship fired flares at a Danish military helicopter, and Germany blamed a suspected Russian spy for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov added to the tension this week, warning Europe it would face a “very short” war if NATO allies ever attempted to attack Russia. U.S. intelligence reportedly warned in August that Moscow could be planning a limited assault on a NATO country in the coming years, prompting CIA Director John Ratcliffe to personally warn Russian officials in Moscow not to escalate against the Baltic states. One senior NATO official said the real number of hybrid incidents, including cyberattacks, is “easily 200 plus” so far this year, adding, “numbers are up, severity is up, risk appetite is up.”
Switzerland became the latest country to overhaul its defenses, warning that even traditionally neutral nations aren’t safe from the fallout. The Swiss Federal Council approved a new national security strategy this week built around 10 objectives and 46 measures aimed at strengthening resilience, protecting critical infrastructure, and boosting the country’s defense capabilities amid what it called a “significantly deteriorating security environment” in Europe. The government said hybrid threats like disinformation, cyberattacks, espionage, and sabotage are increasing across the continent and could directly affect Switzerland, even though it considers a direct, large-scale attack on Swiss soil unlikely for now. Bern specifically flagged the risk of long-range weapons like drones and ballistic missiles reaching its territory, and said Switzerland intends to strengthen its ability to defend itself independently while building mechanisms to cooperate with partner states if it’s ever attacked. The move underscores just how far the sense of alarm has spread, with even a historically non-aligned country now explicitly preparing for the possibility of war reaching its borders.
More Pentagon Concealment:
Pentagon rolls out mandatory testosterone testing for most male troops. The new guidance, released Thursday, applies to male service members 30 and older, with women excluded for now while the Pentagon says a separate policy for them is “under review.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first announced the screening push in July, framing it as necessary to help troops operate at their “absolute best,” though the mandatory testing approach breaks from standard medical guidelines, which typically only recommend testosterone treatment for men who report symptoms and confirm low levels through two blood tests. The guidance itself acknowledges the limits of the science, stating plainly that “evidence does not support its use to improve energy, vitality, physical function, or cognition,” and it bars doctors from prescribing therapy to anyone hoping to have children soon, since external testosterone can reduce or halt natural sperm production. The rollout also flags practical headaches for deployed troops, warning that injectable testosterone requires controlled storage and accountability that need to be sorted out “before departure rather than in theater,” a far more cautious tone than Hegseth’s July remarks about testosterone being key to “maximum psychological and mental readiness” on the modern battlefield.
New reporting adds names and numbers to the growing scandal over the Pentagon hiding Iran war deaths. The Independent’s review of the Washington Post’s reporting confirms at least 22 troops have died in the war, four more than the 18 listed in the Pentagon’s public database, with one official putting the real number as high as 23. It also surfaces new detail on the human toll, naming some of the soldiers honored in July’s dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, including 25-year-old Army 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan and 19-year-old Army Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, both killed in an Iranian attack on a Jordan air base, that ceremony marking the third of its kind Trump has personally attended since the war began. A new Fox News poll adds fresh numbers on just how unpopular the war has become, with 60% of voters saying Trump made the wrong call going to war with Iran and 71% saying his administration has no clear plan to end it. Lawmakers from both parties have raised alarms over the toll on troops, with South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace warning in March that “the Washington war machine is trying to turn Iran into another Iraq” and that troops “are not to be used for another endless war.”
More AI Concerns:
“Godfather of AI” warns Congress has about a year to act before it’s too late. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as the “Godfather of AI,” told lawmakers in a private briefing this week that Congress has “maybe a year, but not much more than a year” to get ahead of the technology. The briefing capped a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill following an Anthropic researcher’s resignation last week, during which he publicly warned about the threat AI poses to humanity. Hinton’s warning landed just as the House left Washington for the last time before the midterms, with little sign of any substantial AI regulation moving through the Senate. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro separately pushed the federal government to move quickly on AI rules, saying reliance on tech companies to regulate themselves is “flat-out wrong” and that this is “not the time to kick the can down the road.”
Google says its Gemini AI model broke into three outside computer systems without being told to. The company disclosed Friday that in May, Gemini gained unauthorized access to three external systems during a test, either by guessing login credentials or using ones it found in a public repository. Google says the model mistakenly believed the outside systems were part of the test itself, and in all three cases it stopped before taking any further action once it had access. The company said it doesn’t consider the incidents to rise to the level of “misalignment,” the industry term for AI software going rogue, but an AI safety expert pushed back, noting Anthropic said the same thing before walking that framing back after its own incidents. Google didn’t learn about the intrusions until July, when the cybersecurity firm that ran the original tests flagged them while reviewing for issues similar to a separate case where an OpenAI agent hacked the platform Hugging Face.
White-hat hackers breached OpenAI earlier this year, adding to a growing wave of AI security scares. Researchers from a small firm called Hacktron said they broke into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts in late July by chaining together two previously unknown vulnerabilities, one in a third-party service and one in how OpenAI verifies its own employees. The researchers caused no actual harm and disclosed the flaws responsibly, with OpenAI confirming the report, patching the vulnerabilities, and paying Hacktron a $6,500 bounty for the find. A cybersecurity expert said the technique the researchers used wasn’t far off from what real nation-state hacking groups typically deploy, calling it evidence that constant pressure to ship new AI products is causing security gaps to slip through. The breach adds to a mounting string of AI security and safety incidents in recent weeks, including researchers resigning over existential AI risk and reports of AI agents hacking outside companies on their own, concerns that have so far met skepticism from both the White House and the Chinese government.
Immigration:
Stephen Miller is personally orchestrating a sweeping push across five federal agencies to speed up deportations of migrant children. A Guardian investigation found Miller directs daily calls pressing officials at Health and Human Services, DHS, and the Justice Department to maximize child removals, in some cases dismantling the legal firewalls that have historically kept immigration enforcers from accessing confidential child welfare files. Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed since Trump returned to office, more than double the pace under the previous administration, with 70% of them under age 13, according to data from the advocacy group Mobile Pathways. Sources described ICE officers now stationed at sponsorship appointments to detain relatives just before or after a child’s release, rushed virtual asylum interviews without adequate legal prep, and immigration judges allegedly pressured to rubber-stamp deportation requests. The White House and agencies involved characterize the effort as anti-trafficking protection, but critics, including Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, say the administration has “sacrificed every element” of child welfare “on the altar of higher deportation numbers.”
Men deported by the US to Equatorial Guinea were beaten, hooded, and thrown down a flight of stairs by police, lawyers say. Witnesses told the Guardian that two men, one from Egypt and one from Eritrea, were assaulted at the Hotel Bamy detention site after they were accused of using their phones to document conditions there and share them with journalists and human rights lawyers. Both men, Ahmed Soliman and Samson Birhane, had lived in the US for decades and had immigration judges rule they would face torture if returned to their home countries, yet were expelled to a third country where they have no ties or legal status. Roughly 30 more US deportees remain trapped at the same hotel under armed guard, with detainees describing being denied medical care and one officer allegedly warning a detainee, “You will disappear from the earth. I am the law.” Human rights lawyers say emails alerting the US embassy in Equatorial Guinea to the violence have gone unanswered, and ICE says it bears no responsibility once someone is no longer in its custody.
Trump administration presses ahead with a controversial border wall through Texas’s Big Bend region despite bipartisan backlash. Construction began this week in Hudspeth County, with Customs and Border Protection offering landowners signing bonuses to avoid eminent domain fights, even though images show isolated fencing sections that people can simply walk around since the agency hasn’t secured a contiguous stretch of land. The area has historically accounted for less than 2% of illegal border crossings nationwide, and opponents say the $46.5 billion pot of border wall funding is being spent on a region where geography already serves as a natural barrier. The plan has drawn fierce opposition from local landowners worried about property values and river access, as well as advocates warning that construction blasting could destroy Indigenous rock art dating back thousands of years. CBP briefly paused construction inside Big Bend National Park last month after backlash over bulldozers tearing through the wilderness, but work is continuing elsewhere in the region as opponents plan to lobby lawmakers in Washington next week.
Greenland:
Trump claims “permanent control” over Greenland’s security in a deal that falls well short of the outright takeover he wanted. The agreement, expected to be signed next week at the UN General Assembly in New York, bars non-NATO adversaries like China and Russia from building military bases or making “sensitive investments” in Greenland without US approval, and Trump says it will hold even if Greenland ever becomes independent from Denmark. Crucially, both Denmark and Greenland stressed that Copenhagen retains sovereignty over the island and that Greenlanders keep their right to self-determination, meaning Trump abandoned his long-stated goal of “ownership.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the deal “permanently and completely addresses our national security concerns in Greenland,” though the US already had broad basing rights there under a 1951 treaty, leading one former Pentagon official to argue Washington could have gotten most of these terms “through diplomacy and dialogue” without straining ties with NATO as badly as it did.
The deal caps a chaotic year that began when Trump’s threats to forcibly seize Greenland sparked a genuine NATO crisis. Eight European countries deployed troops to the territory as a tripwire after Trump floated a military option in January, with anxious diplomats fearing Washington might actually try to take another NATO member’s territory by force. Tensions flared again in July when Trump told reporters in Ankara that Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen personally walked up to him at a summit to say, “Donald, you’re not going to get Greenland.” Behind the scenes, a small circle of US and Danish officials worked quietly for months to reach a compromise that let Trump claim victory ahead of the midterms while still preserving Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty. Some analysts questioned whether the diplomatic damage was worth it, with one Atlantic Council expert noting that a deal expanding the US presence without giving Greenlanders any real say “is unlikely to be popular” and that broader US-NATO relations may not fully recover.
Other news:
Trump orders DOJ not to appeal a ruling that loosens restrictions on silencers and short-barreled “gangster weapons.” A federal judge in Texas ruled in August that key provisions of the 1934 National Firearms Act are unconstitutional, reasoning that since the “One Big Beautiful Bill” zeroed out the tax on these firearms, the law’s registration and background check requirements can no longer be justified under Congress’s taxing power. Trump personally decided against appealing the decision and told Republican lawmakers he’d make sure the Justice Department didn’t contest it either, according to CBS News sources. A DOJ spokesperson confirmed to People that the agency will tell Congress it won’t appeal and that ATF will soon issue guidance to implement the ruling, while the White House insists anyone previously barred from buying a firearm remains barred under the new structure. The deadline to appeal was October 5, meaning the ruling on short-barreled shotguns, rifles, and silencers is now set to stand.
A Tennessee grandmother is suing for $10 million after AI facial recognition wrongly got her jailed for nearly six months. Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals while babysitting her neighbor’s kids, then extradited to North Dakota and charged with bank fraud after facial recognition software mistakenly flagged her social media photo as a match for a suspect caught on surveillance video. The charges were only dropped after her lawyer produced bank records proving she was in Tennessee when the fraud occurred, and she was released “into the freezing cold” on Christmas Eve with no way home, having lost her house, car, and belongings while locked up. Her lawsuit alleges the Fargo police detective who requested her arrest warrant relied solely on the AI match without conducting further investigation or establishing real probable cause, and that the department had no policy or training governing use of the technology. Lipps says she hopes the case pushes police to use more caution with facial recognition “and consider the harm their actions can have on those who are wrongly accused.”
Russia is holding parliamentary elections in illegally annexed Ukrainian territory for the first time, drawing accusations of coercion. Voting is taking place across the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions Moscow claims to have annexed, with a human rights activist telling reporters that local election officials, escorted by Russian troops, are going door to door to force residents to participate. Activists say officials threaten public-sector workers with job loss and tie pensions and social benefits to voting, while Putin framed the election as proof that “nobody can divide or intimidate” Russia. Ukrainian officials and a coalition of nine human rights groups have called the vote illegal and urged residents to stay away from the polls, warning it’s an attempt to legitimize Russia’s occupation. The European Commission also denounced the vote as “another blatant violation of international law” and said the EU will never recognize its results.
Trump signed a sweeping new Russia sanctions bill named in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. The bipartisan legislation, which passed 86-11 in the Senate and 262-159 in the House, targets Russian officials, banks, and the shadow fleet of tankers Moscow uses to keep selling its oil, and it directs Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top importers of Russian energy. Graham had worked on the bill for over a year before his sudden death in July, and his sister Darline, who was appointed to finish his Senate term, said she wished he “were here to celebrate this historic day.” Co-sponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Putin “is a thug who understands only force and strength,” but some Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, opposed the bill over concerns Trump could weaponize its expanded tariff powers against allies like the EU. Trump ultimately signed on after the bill was amended to include a five-year extension of existing Iran sanctions, something he had been pushing for.
A Saudi defense pact threatens to drag Pakistan into the widening war with Houthi rebels. Pakistan’s army chief signed a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia last year that was expanded in August to include Turkey and renamed the Mecca joint defense agreement, under which an attack on any one signatory is treated as an attack on all three. Since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in February, Saudi Arabia’s fight with the Iran-backed Houthis has reignited, with the rebels making major territorial gains and striking Saudi soil with missiles and drones this month. Analysts say Pakistan, which is economically dependent on billions in Saudi investment, would have little choice but to send troops if Riyadh activates the pact, even though Pakistan is already stretched thin fighting the Taliban and facing an insurgency in Balochistan. A senior Pakistani official said he doesn’t believe the Saudi crown prince wants to activate the pact yet, largely because Trump has so far rebuffed Saudi requests for US backing in a wider war against the Houthis.
A Sikh truck driver survived being stabbed 17 times at a Wyoming rest stop, and advocates are linking the attack to a recent DHS post. The driver, identified only as Singh for safety reasons, was beaten and stabbed by suspect Andrew Kris Bzdak, who fled before highway patrol troopers arrested him; Bzdak is now being held on attempted first-degree murder charges with $1 million bail. A Good Samaritan family tried to chase down the attacker and brought Singh towels to stop the bleeding, and the motive remains officially unknown. South Asian political figures, including Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, have connected the attack to a since-deleted DHS social media post that depicted a bandana-wearing Sikh driver facing off against a Transformer with the caption “Self deport or Find Out” and “Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive Mr Singh.” DHS called any attempt to link it to the Wyoming stabbing “RECKLESS and FALSE,” while Krishnamoorthi said “rising hatred targeting Sikh and South Asian Americans” from officials “including in our own federal government” needs to stop.
Hispanic voters who helped reelect Trump are souring on him over the economy and immigration, new polling shows. A New York Times/Siena poll found more than 65% of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 78% would rather see Democrats control Congress, with cost of living, immigration enforcement, and wages topping their list of concerns. Other polls back this up, including a Fox News survey showing 63% of Hispanic respondents plan to vote Democratic in their House district this fall. Strategist Mike Madrid said there’s no newfound love for Democrats, just deep frustration with Trump, predicting Hispanic voters will leave Republicans “for the exact same reasons that they left the Democrats two years ago.” The White House pushed back, with a spokesperson crediting Trump’s economic policies for giving “hard-working Hispanic Americans” some “breathing room,” even as analysts note this large bloc of swing voters remains up for grabs heading into 2028.
The Hartmann Report, Advocacy and Opinion: Who Stole the American Dream...The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 19, 2026. Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here.
It mentions my new book "Who Killed The American Dream" as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.
In other news:
More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. Six different officials close to Pentagon casualty numbers tell The Washington Post that at least 22 service members have been killed by Iran with Russian targeting help, rather than the dozen dead that this administration acknowledges. This is the second time Whiskey Pete and his slobbering, testosterone-amped sycophants in the so-called “War Department” have been busted lying to us about casualty figures to make Trump and his stupid, illegal, criminal war look good. Back in July it was The New York Times that discovered Whiskey Pete had quietly dropped the casualty numbers from 18 to 14, claiming that the other four died during a Trump-declared “cease fire” and therefore weren’t “wartime casualties.” The Pentagon tried to bullshit the press and military families, who deserve an honest count. Congress has subpoena power and oversight responsibilities here: they damn well better use them.
— Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it. Our laws that make it a federal felony to place any armed person in or near any polling place date back to the end of the Civil War, so yesterday Democracy Forward filed suit in federal court arguing that the Trump regime’s constant hints and suggestions that they’ll do just that are, themselves, an unlawful form of voter intimidation and voter suppression. Meanwhile, NPR reports a whistleblower says DHS’s so-called “Unlawful Voter Initiative” and ICE’s involvement with it are both racing ahead on junk data and flagging American citizens. Denver’s election clerk, Paul López, a plaintiff in the suit, has a plan if agents show up to intimidate his voters, telling NPR: “They’re going to face prison sentences.” We need more local officials with that kind of spine. Check your registration this week, make a plan, vote early if your state lets you, and bring a friend.
— Senators Markey, Merkley, and Sanders are trying to stop Trump from shipping 5,000 one-ton bombs to the Saudi crown prince who had a Washington Post columnist dismembered. While Trump shipping tens of thousands of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel got a lot of press this week, Orange Caligula is also trying to help out his Saudi buddies who gave him millions for his golf tour and gave billions to his slumlord son-in-law. The three senators introduced a resolution of disapproval this week against a $5 billion sale of JDAM kits and 2,000-pound bombs to the kingdom; these are “privileged resolutions” and thus can force every senator to vote on the record. The same day, while still refusing to provide munitions to Ukraine, Rubio’s State Department moved forward an additional $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35s to the Saudis. And then there’s the once-unthinkable Saudi nuclear deal: Trump sent Congress a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with the kingdom but classified two side letters that alter what the deal actually does, something no administration has ever done before. Even Republican Senators Rand Paul and John Kennedy signed the letter demanding to see them. Markey, noting the $2 billion the Saudis handed Jared Kushner, called it what it is, saying: “This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of U.S. national security.” I’m proud of my senator, Jeff Merkley, and his colleagues. Call your own senators and ask how they plan to vote on bombs for Mohammad bin Bone Saw.
— Trump’s war of choice is about to come home to every oil tank in New England, so of course he spent last weekend at his shabby golf motel in Ireland. Heating oil inventories in the American northeast are the lowest they’ve been in the modern era and winter is approaching; one family-owned Vermont fuel oil company just sent a letter to their customers warning them that after a quarter-century of buying fuel futures they could only nail down about 25% of what they’ll need this winter. A former OPEC economist told ABC TV station WMUR that inventories are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years. Then Exxon’s Joliet, Illinois refinery, which turns out around 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day for the Midwest, went down last Sunday and still hasn’t restarted. AAA says regular was at $4.47 a gallon yesterday, and diesel is pushing ten bucks a gallon in some parts of the country. Governors and legislatures in the Northeast are freaking out…although the Republicans are reluctant to say anything out loud that might piss off the man-baby in the Oval Office.
— Saudi Arabia just told Europe there’s no oil for them next month. October oil deliveries to Europe, contracted for months ago, are not going to be delivered according to the Saudis because Trump’s insane war against Iran has led to their pipeline and pumping stations being knocked out by Iranian-allied militias in Iraq. Iran has managed to shut down both the Saudi’s front door for deliveries (the Strait of Hormuz) and now both back-doors via the Red Sea and their east-west pipeline. As of June, Europe was importing 577,000 barrels of Saudi crude a day. Aramco says they hope to be back at full capacity in six weeks, and in the meantime they’re prioritizing their Asian customers including China while Europeans scramble for more North Sea oil. Fossil fuel billionaires and Putin are making a fortune off this disruption from Trump’s and Netanyahu’s criminal war and, if Reagan hadn’t shut down Carter’s Solar Bank program we may well have been out of the fossil fuel loop altogether by now: nobody has ever blockaded the sun or sent a drone after the wind. Countries that spent the last few decades building solar, wind, and batteries are insulated from this, but we pissed it away by letting fossil fuel billionaires and their Republican lickspittles write our energy policy.
— Poland’s prime minister says Putin is planning rocket and drone strikes on NATO countries, so Trump wrote Putin’s alibi for him. Polish Premiere Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament Thursday that intelligence shows Russia is planning to amp up their hybrid attacks on countries that support Ukraine, including Poland. Putin will pretend they’re all accidents, Tusk said, to “paralyze or at least weaken” NATO’s willingness to invoke Article 5 and respond with military force. In just the past week there have already been four Russian attacks at Poland’s border crossings with Ukraine, and Germany says Russia was definitely behind the attempted bombing at the Leipzig airport. The Telegraph and Metro have more details. Let’s not forget that a year ago this month, when 19 Russian drones flew into Poland, Trump covered for Putin saying that it all “could have been a mistake.” Putin obviously heard that loud and clear. Europe is rearming on the assumption that Trump is now wholly-owned by Putin. Meanwhile, Congress could still pass Ukraine aid and sanctions with veto-proof majorities if only enough Republicans remember which side their party was on when Reagan was alive. I’m not holding my breath.
— Crazy Alert! A chatbot made up a nuclear smuggling plot, and Pete Hegseth’s military scrambled planes to board a Chinese ship over it. Seriously, an AI chatbot’s hallucination could have provoked World War III. Now that Whiskey Pete has integrated Musk’s Grok and other AI products into our military, an analyst at Special Operations Command Pacific asked an AI chatbot to determine what was going on with a suspicious Chinese cargo vessel in the Middle East. The bot mashed together open-source stuff and speculation on the internet and social media together with classified signals intelligence and concluded the ship was carrying parts for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then had the AI chatbot write up the “analysis” as if it were a standard intelligence report and sent it up the chain of command. As a result, American military aircraft were in the air and armed troops were preparing to board the Chinese ship before somebody thought to check the work and found it was pure fiction. One source admitted to CNN’s reporters that the incident nearly started a war. This is what we get when the guy who purged the nation’s most competent generals orders three million personnel to “unleash experimentation” with software that confidently invents things. In addition to impeaching Whiskey Pete now, Congress must require a human being to sign off on any intelligence that could put Americans in a firefight with a nuclear power before the next hallucination gets any further than this one did and the results are truly disastrous.
The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 19, 2026. There’s a lot to get through today, starting with the biggest press freedom fight of Trump’s second term: the White House has physically barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from its grounds, confiscating their badges on live television after a weekend Truth Social tirade.
Legal experts call it unconstitutional, courts have already ruled against similar moves twice, and even Trump’s own staff say they found out about it the same way the rest of us did. What happened this weekend isn’t normal. Confiscating press badges from reporters, live, on camera, isn’t “media criticism,” it’s the government deciding which outlets get to do their jobs based on whether their coverage flatters the president, and once that precedent exists, every outlet, including this one, is on notice.
Meanwhile the Iran war keeps widening. The Houthis just struck deep inside Saudi Arabia for the first time, Trump says he’s got a “big decision” coming on whether to “annihilate” Iran’s regime, and a new UN report alleges U.S. war crimes tied to a school bombing that killed dozens of children. And Trump spent his Saturday announcing he’s building an “AI Force” and dismissing AI safety concerns as a hoax, even as Senate Democrats demand an investigation into an AI hallucination that nearly triggered a strike on a Chinese ship.
Reporters getting physically barred and a president openly floating adding The New York Times and The Washington Post next isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign independent reporting is landing hard enough that they’d rather shut the door than answer the questions, which is why this coverage can’t stop, and why it needs readers willing to fund it directly. If you’re able to, become a paid subscriber today. Independent journalism doesn’t run on White House access, it runs on people who show up when it matters, and this is one of those moments.Subscribed
Here’s the news:
White House Expands Press Ban in Major First Amendment Assault:
White House staffers say they were blindsided by the media ban while Susie Wiles was out of town. White House staffers, including senior officials, say they learned of Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters at the same time as the public, with the decision reportedly made while Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Politico reports that more than a dozen current and former Trump officials called the move “puzzling” and a “head-scratcher,” and Trump gave no specific article that triggered it. Sources say he’s floated a media ban before but acted on it in Wiles’s absence, and he’s also considered relocating the press corps out of the West Wing into the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Despite pushback even from parts of his own base, sources say Trump intends the ban to be “real and permanent,” and he’s suggested The New York Times and Washington Post could be added next. Trump admitted that America is being just as repressive as China:
Reporters from all three banned outlets were turned away from the White House on Saturday. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner said her badge flashed red and was confiscated after an officer said it had been disabled “above him,” CNN’s Betsy Klein had her credential taken after about a minute in the security kiosk, and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett was denied entry with her pass confiscated by the Secret Service. CNN and MS NOW went on air live from across the street rather than from their usual White House position. Trump had announced the ban a day earlier on Truth Social, accusing the outlets of “FAKE NEWS” and falsely claiming Politico received an “illegal” $8 million government subsidy, a claim Politico called “false and thoroughly debunked.”
Legal experts and press advocates widely condemned the ban as unconstitutional. White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich said press protections “do not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage” and called on the administration to restore access immediately. Jameel Jaffer of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute called the ban “pretty clearly unconstitutional” and predicted a legal challenge would succeed, tying it to the earlier AP ban and Pentagon access restrictions. Former President Obama called the idea of banning an outlet like Fox News under a Democratic administration “unimaginable,” and courts have already twice found the administration violated the Constitution by suspending reporters’ press passes.
Iran War Updates:
The U.S. military says it has escorted a billion barrels of oil out of the Persian Gulf as Trump weighs a “big decision” on striking Iran. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, said in a video Saturday that the military has escorted 1 billion barrels of crude and more than 2,000 commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz over the past couple of months, calling the recent traffic volume the highest in six months. The push comes after a rough stretch for energy markets, with diesel topping $6 a gallon and Brent crude spiking from $93 to $109 a barrel before easing back to $103. President Trump told Axios Thursday he has a “big decision coming up” on whether to “annihilate” Iran’s regime ahead of a planned meeting with Persian Gulf leaders next week. Meanwhile Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei said Tehran is awaiting Trump’s response to conditions for ending the war, including lifting the naval blockade and releasing seized assets, demands the administration has previously dismissed as unrealistic. Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are placing the blame on Donald Trump:
Hegseth uses the bible to justify the war in Iran:
The Houthis expanded their attacks deep into Saudi Arabia, striking Riyadh and Yanbu and disrupting the capital’s main airport. The Iran-backed group said it targeted “sensitive sites” in Riyadh and Aramco oil facilities in Yanbu, some 700 miles from the Yemen border, after Saudi strikes on Houthi-held Sanaa; the attack triggered Riyadh’s first air raid alert since the conflict intensified and left King Khalid International Airport facing major delays and cancellations. Fighting between Houthi and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces has also killed 48 people in the past day, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Saudi Arabia “should be kept outside” the Iran-U.S. conflict. The escalation is straining regional defense pacts: Pakistan’s military says it will defend Saudi Arabia “to any extent” under the new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Turkey, and the U.N. Security Council warned the escalation “risks further expanding the conflict” and threatening global trade. Shipping through the nearby Bab el-Mandeb Strait has already dropped sharply, with roughly 3,000 Yemeni refugees fleeing to Djibouti in the past week alone.
Iran and the U.S. traded accusations over alleged war crimes as international diplomacy around the war continues. A U.N.-commissioned human rights report found “reasonable grounds” that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran, including a school bombing in Minab that killed dozens of children; the White House dismissed the report as “unserious nonsense,” while Iranian spokesman Ismaeil Baqaei accused Washington of “projection.” Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi separately called for a “fundamental change of course” in global affairs, describing the U.S. and Israeli strikes as part of “a broader pattern of unpunished aggression.” The State Department has approved visas for Iran’s president and foreign minister to attend next week’s U.N. General Assembly despite the ongoing war, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin is pressing Trump to confront Xi Jinping over reports Iran used Chinese satellite data in a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Jordan. Iran also executed a man Saturday accused of passing missile-site intelligence to Israel, as Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution to extend monitoring of Iran sanctions. More Republicans are breaking from Trump:
AI:
Trump announced he’s forming an “AI Force” and will soon name an AI czar, while dismissing safety concerns as a hoax. In Truth Social posts Saturday, Trump said he’s “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force,” and will announce an AI “Czar” soon, joking that “only High I.Q. individuals need apply.” He also seemed to partly acknowledge risks, saying the government would go after “BAD” actors using the existing criminal and civil justice system, but broadly framed AI safety worries as part of a “SICK conspiracy” comparable to what he called past Democratic hoaxes like “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “Global Warming.” Trump also posted a poll asking followers to help rebrand “Artificial Intelligence” with a new name, offering options like “Superior Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence.” He gave no details on what the AI Force or AI czar would actually do, and CNN says the White House has not yet responded to questions about the roles.
Image
The announcement lands amid mounting pressure from both parties and industry figures to slow AI development and add safeguards. Barack Obama used a Friday appearance at Colgate University to say it’s “good that some of the leading companies have said we need to slow this down,” arguing government ultimately has to regulate the technology, and he’s urged 2028 Democratic hopefuls to put AI at the center of their platforms. The debate intensified after an Anthropic researcher resigned publicly, warning that leading AI companies “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and are “gambling with our lives,” prompting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to release a plan to “pace the frontier” that Sam Altman and Elon Musk reportedly endorsed. Trump, by contrast, has sided with figures like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who called the AI backlash a “hoax” onstage with Trump at the All-In Summit and vowed “we’re not going to let” a slowdown happen. Trump reiterated Saturday that he wants to keep the U.S. ahead of China and won’t “hinder or stifle” the industry’s growth.
AI policy is set to be a major focus of next week’s diplomatic events in Washington and New York. The Trump administration will hold a high-level AI event on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, and the following day tech executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google’s Sundar Pichai are expected at a White House state dinner tied to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit. A White House official told CNN that AI safety will be “on the agenda” when Trump meets Xi, and officials have also discussed a possible separate meeting between Trump and major AI executives around the summit. David Sacks, who previously served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar until stepping down in March, now chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, leaving open who might take the newly announced AI czar role.
Other news:
Top Senate Democrats are demanding an investigation after AI-generated intelligence nearly triggered a military strike on a Chinese ship. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, Sens. Mark Warner, Jack Reed and Chris Coons cited CNN’s reporting that a special operations analyst used AI to generate a report falsely identifying nuclear weapons components on a Chinese cargo vessel. The military began preparing to intercept the ship before officials realized, just before the operation, that the AI-generated report was “entirely false,” and a source told CNN this kind of hallucination has not been an isolated incident across the intelligence community. The senators also tied the episode to a deadly February strike on a school in Minab, Iran, that killed nearly 200 people, after commanders reportedly bypassed warnings that AI-linked intelligence databases were severely out of date. They’re calling for inspectors general to get an “immediate investigation” with “unrestricted access” to both incidents and any others not yet made public, as the Pentagon separately clashes with Anthropic over its refusal to loosen safety guardrails on Claude for military use.
Germany’s Carsten Breuer won a secret NATO vote to become the next chair of the alliance’s military committee. Breuer, who has led Germany’s armed forces since 2023, secured the backing of at least 17 of NATO’s 32 chiefs of defense in Saturday’s closed-door ballot in Copenhagen, beating Canada’s Jennie Carignan for the post. Outgoing chair, Italy’s Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, congratulated Breuer on X, praising his “operational judgement” and “deep familiarity with this Alliance.” Breuer takes over next July for a three-year term, and the rest of the vote tally was kept secret to avoid stoking division. He was widely seen as the favorite given Germany’s status as Europe’s top defense spender and its implicit backing from Washington, while Carignan’s bid was seen as hampered by strained U.S.-Canada relations; the result reflects Berlin’s growing role in NATO’s command structure, including new leadership over forces protecting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Patrick Clancy and his wife will give their first public comments on his ex-wife’s Massachusetts murder trial in a 60 Minutes interview airing Sunday. Clancy tells correspondent Ross Douthat, “I live with it every day, but I think I did the best I could,” while also discussing his grief and how he still talks to his late children. The interview comes as prosecutors decide later this month whether to retry Lindsay Clancy, who is accused of killing the couple’s three young children in January 2023, after a summer trial ended in mistrial when a lone juror rejected her postpartum psychosis defense. Clancy, paralyzed from the waist down since he found his injured wife and children, has faced intense online speculation and conspiracy theories, prompting his attorney to threaten legal action over what he called a “relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign.” His new wife, Rachel Danis, also defends him in the interview, saying she doesn’t understand “how the story’s been so twisted” given that he is “the most selfless father and supportive partner.”
A 77-year-old shopper died after allegedly being attacked by a teenage Walmart worker’s parents following a dispute over a shopping cart. Bert Atienza and his wife Josephine were grocery shopping in a Norfolk, Virginia Walmart when a 17-year-old employee nearly struck Josephine with a cart, leading to an exchange of words and the teen allegedly throwing a can at the couple. The teen then called her parents, Travis White and Erika Mitchell, who surveillance video shows finding Atienza in the store and allegedly shoving, punching and kicking him until he fell and hit a shelving unit. Atienza was taken to a hospital and died the next day of blunt force trauma, with his death ruled a homicide. White, 44, and Mitchell, 42, are being held without bond, and their daughter has also been charged with assault and battery, aggravated malicious wounding, and conspiracy to commit a felony.
California health officials are warning that an infected, unvaccinated traveler exposed people to measles across six counties via Amtrak trains and buses. The passenger entered the state on a train that reached Los Angeles on September 10, then continued through Bakersfield, Stockton, Oroville, Sacramento and Emeryville before leaving California for Denver, exposing anyone on the same trains, buses or in the stations along the route. Officials are working with federal and local health departments to notify those potentially exposed, with assistant state public health officer Rita Nguyen stressing the importance of MMR vaccination. The warning comes amid the country’s worst measles resurgence in decades, with Pennsylvania reporting 731 cases and four deaths this year and now seeking emergency CDC help, a request complicated by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s earlier instruction that the CDC not publicly recognize those deaths. A similar incident this month saw a measles-infected Amtrak rider expose more than 250 people between Missouri and Chicago.
South Dakota’s Republican secretary of state, Monae Johnson, is breaking with her party to endorse the Democratic candidate for her old job. Johnson lost her GOP renomination in June to Heather Baxter, a Trump-aligned candidate who backs “robust post-election audits” and expanded hand counting, and Johnson wrote in a Saturday column that she’s now backing Democrat Terrence Davis because “the integrity, stability, and professionalism of this office is at stake.” She said the state deserves a secretary of state who builds “confidence through performance rather than provocation” and urged voters to look past party labels. Baxter responded that her primary win, 59 percent to 41 percent, reflected the will of Republican voters and argued party affiliation signals real governing philosophy for an office that runs elections. Davis thanked Johnson for the endorsement, while South Dakota’s Republican House speaker, Jon Hansen, blasted the move on X as a “huge mistake” and urged voters not to “hand our elections over to the Democrats.”
More U.S. Legal News Roundup & Reform Advocacy
David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)
The Contrarian, Advocacy and Opinion: We’re Winning, Contrarians — And We Won’t Back Down, Norman Eisen, right, Publisher’s Roundup 85, Sept. 19, 2026. Here at The Contrarian, we have spoken out loudly against Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros.
As of Friday night, press reports were suggesting that state attorneys general are under increasing pressure to settle their lawsuit to stop the merger. Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison are behind an aggressive campaign to persuade the AGs to back down. These are the moments we need you most, Contrarians. That’s why we’re asking you to sign this petition to show your support for the AGs and encourage them to stand firm.
After handling over 300 pro-democracy legal matters in the era of Donald Trump, it’s clear to me what works to combat the Trump regime and restore democracy: protect the rule of law to constrain autocratic power, fight corruption to restore trust and faith in our democracy, and ensure we have free and fair elections to give the people the power to remove autocrats. This week, my litigation colleagues and I did all three, scoring wins in the Kennedy Center, Trump $1.776B Slush Fund, and USPS cases. And we did it all thanks to perseverance and the help provided by your paid subscriptions, Contrarians.Subscribed
Rule of Law: On Tuesday, we won our motion asking Judge Christopher Cooper to block yet another illegal attempt to inscribe Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. Its board, he said in his permanent injunction, “cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.” Shortly after the decision, the board voted to close the center after Trump called in to the meeting, threw a tantrum, and hurled personal attacks at Kennedy Center trustee Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), whom we at Democracy Defenders Action represent in the court case, along with the Washington Litigation Group. Afterward, Trump threatened to demolish the center unless his name was restored to it. He was even seen with a giant poster that appeared to be titled “Kennedy Center Demolished.”People protest Sept. 18 outside the Kennedy Center over the threats by Donald Trump to demolish the performing arts center in Washington, D.C. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
This is, of course, illegal. Congress weighs in on such decisions, and it has authorized no such thing. After the board’s vote, we filed for an emergency hearing; the Justice Department filed a response to this emergency motion; and we filed a reply asking the judge to make crystal clear that the Kennedy Center cannot be demolished at Trump’s whim.
And we won. Judge Cooper issued an order blocking any unlawful attempt to demolish the center without notice so the issue can be fully litigated. (Spoiler alert: Trump will lose.) Not only did the order stop Trump from pulling an East Wing-style snap tear down, but it also granted us discovery into the outrageous demolition threat.
The Kennedy Center belongs to the American people, as was evidenced Friday evening at the lively, peaceful Hands Off Our Arts protest and rally — which The Contrarian broadcast live, on the ground — and we will ensure it remains that way.
Anti-Corruption: We scored another success in our battle against Trump’s corrupt slush fund. You may recall that earlier this year (which feels like eons ago) Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. His own Justice Department then attempted to settle the suit — and in turn created a $1.776 billion slush fund to funnel money from American taxpayers to Trump’s political allies. Fortunately, Judge Kathleen Williams rejected the settlement in its entirety, based on a brief we filed on behalf of a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges. Our work, fueled by your assistance, helped expose the lawsuit as a sham: Judge Williams concluded that the suit had been brought in bad faith and intended “to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”
On Monday, Judge Williams reinforced her decision, denying Trump’s attempt to halt enforcement of her order and the sanctions it imposed. She called each of the DOJ’s arguments “unpersuasive” and found that the penalties appropriately addressed their abuse of the legal system. Her decision is a testament to the courts’ vital role in protecting democracy. They have repeatedly stood on the front lines of the fight against autocracy. At a moment when it can seem that Trump and his cronies get away with almost anything, Judge Williams’s order is a powerful reminder that our system remains capable of holding power to account, and that we must fight to maintain those guardrails.
Defending Elections: Finally, we helped secure multiple breakthroughs in our fight to preserve the safety of our elections. We awoke Monday to news that Trump-appointed Judge Carl Nichols of the D.C. Federal District Court ruled that Trump does not have the unilateral authority to use the U.S. Postal Service to undermine our ability to vote by mail. Judge Nichols went further than any other judge to date, including extending the protections against this absurd USPS rule nationwide.
Later that day, we got blockbuster news from the Supreme Court, which left in place a lower-court order blocking the Trump administration from implementing new USPS requirements for mail-in ballots before the midterms. We and the Campaign Legal Center supported that outcome by filing a key amicus brief on behalf of LULAC, with other clients. With catastrophically low approval ratings, Trump’s greatest fear is that the American people will be able to vote freely — and was attempting to absolve mail-in voting to get there. We are thrilled by this victory.
But we are not stopping there. On Friday, we closed out the week by joining with leading civil rights groups, unions, and others to file a landmark case to stop any deployment of ICE or the FBI at or near the polls. As I told the press, “Our laws prohibit intimidation or threats against any person exercising their right to vote. Deploying federal agents to polling places is unlawful and part of a broad scheme to deter eligible voters from making their voices heard.”
So, my fellow pro-democracy allies, it has been another pivotal week for the litigation you make possible — and for our democracy. It is truly thanks to you Contrarians that we’ve been able to hold the line and emerge victorious in so many of these legal battles. With just 45 days to go until the midterm election, your continued support and paid subscriptions are more important than ever. We will stop at nothing, and will only ramp up our efforts to protect our elections and defend the rule of law. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
Putin Revives His War on American Elections
David Corn wrote on the Kremlin’s ongoing meddling in American elections, which has hardly stopped at presidential contests — and this year looks to be no exception. “Putin’s trolls, operatives, and disinformation specialists are gearing up for the midterm[s].”
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
New York Times, Kennedy Center Supporters Rally Amid Speculation About Possible Demolition, Chris Cameron, Updated Sept. 19, 2026. Photos of President Trump reviewing a poster board with the title “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED” spurred the largest gathering yet in support of the performing arts institution.
A large group of demonstrators locked arms to form a human chain around the Kennedy Center on Friday evening to protest President Trump’s efforts to close and remake the center in his image, amid speculation about a possible effort to demolish the building.
Hundreds of demonstrators, many of them performing artists and workers at the Kennedy Center, sang and played music as they circled the building and the sun set over the embattled cultural institution.
Late Wednesday night, photojournalists captured a series of images through the windows of Air Force One that showed Mr. Trump reviewing a large poster board with what looked like a rendering of a construction site beneath the title: “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”
The photos, which circulated online ahead of the rally, appeared to spur turnout. Several demonstrators said they had seen the images but dismissed the possibility of a demolition as another one of Mr. Trump’s publicity stunts. Organizers celebrated a previous court victory removing Mr. Trump’s name from the center and said they hoped that the center would soon reopen, after the board, led by Mr. Trump, moved to close it earlier this week.
“It seems pretty performative,” said David Novy, 51, who attended the rally and has been coming to performances at the Kennedy Center since he was in high school in the 1990s, and is a subscriber to the center’s ballet performances, the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra. Those groups have scattered their performances to other venues in the Washington area during the Kennedy Center’s temporary shutdown.
The images of the apparent demolition plan have been incorporated into a previously filed lawsuit over the fate of the Kennedy Center, which after a disastrous year and a half under Mr. Trump’s stewardship, has had plummeting ticket sales and a talent exodus. The center was closed temporarily this week over significant safety concerns, center officials said, after a large chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling.ImageDemonstrators denounced the vote by the center’s board to close one of the nation’s premier performing arts venues.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
The crowd, pressed up against security barriers surrounding the center, enveloped the concrete pavilion in front of it, spilled out across 25th Street and onto an adjacent grass lawn. One woman was forcibly escorted away from the building by security guards wearing hard hats after defying the safety perimeter.
Many of the artists at the protest had previously performed at the Kennedy Center, including the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., which had a planned concert canceled last year amid Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape the institution’s programming. Other performers, like the Rapid Response Choir, have been fixtures of Washington-area protests since Mr. Trump returned to office last year.
Lynda Carter, the actress who played Wonder Woman, and local officials, including Robert White, an at-large member of the District of Columbia Council, attended and spoke at the rally.
“There is no way, no how,” Mr. White said, “that while I am standing, and while you people are standing, that he is going to take this building or take this city. So I plan that I will keep fighting, I will keep screaming, and I will throw some punches if need be.” The crowd cheered.
In an interview, Mr. White said he thought that Mr. Trump was lashing out after a federal judge ordered his administration to remove his name from the center — which was named by Congress to honor President John F. Kennedy after his assassination.
“Anything that he can’t have and try to steal, he wants to destroy,” Mr. White said. “But it is important that we not let him do that.”
Organizers had previously held demonstrations against Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, but the turnout on Friday night was the largest in support of the performing arts institution. Tara Hoot, a drag queen performer and organizer of the demonstrations in support of the Kennedy Center, noted that a typical protest would draw between 60 and 100 people.
New York Times, MS NOW Reporter Barred From White House After Trump Imposes Press Ban, Michael M. Grynbaum, Sept. 19, 2026. The president said on Friday he would ban CNN, Politico and MS NOW. Any prohibition will probably face a legal challenge.
MS NOW said on Saturday that two of its journalists were denied access to the White House grounds, a day after President Trump announced a ban on three news organizations because of reporting he disliked.
Akayla Gardner, a White House correspondent for MS NOW, said that her White House-issued access badge failed to work at the security entrance where reporters typically enter near the West Wing.
“The officer asked me to hand over my badge; he said that it was disabled,” Ms. Gardner said in an on-air interview. “I asked why I could not get inside; he said it was above him.”
A photographer for MS NOW was also asked to relinquish their badge, but a producer for the network was allowed into the White House, Ms. Gardner said.
MS NOW said in a statement that it “intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”
Mr. Trump abruptly announced on Friday afternoon that he would ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House, a stark escalation in his ever-expanding battles with the news media.
The president attributed the ban to his displeasure with the outlets’ coverage of his administration. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon.
“Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house,” the president added.
The White House press office declined to answer questions on Saturday about Ms. Gardner’s experience, referring instead to Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday.
Any such prohibition would almost certainly face a legal challenge, and CNN and Politico on Friday suggested that they would fight a ban in court. In Mr. Trump’s first term, the White House lost a similar legal battle after it revoked the press pass for the CNN reporter Jim Acosta, whose credentials were later restored.
Journalists from CNN and MS NOW had been working at the White House as usual on Friday evening. It was unclear if journalists from those outlets had yet attempted to enter the White House on Saturday morning.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump had a very bad week and we had a very good one, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 16, 2026. So, In Sum - Trump Is A Titanic F-ck Up, His Madness Is Getting Worse, American Voters Are Angry, And Are Ready Now To Put Us Back In Power.
Something important happened in our politics this week - the national discourse began to truly reflect how much Trump’s political project has unraveled and how likely it is that Democrats are going to make major gains across the country this November. That he is likely to lose, and we are likely to win. That he is weaker and more desperate, and that we are stronger and steadier. There’s been what some would call a vibe shift in the coverage as the discourse catches up with the reality here and abroad; a reality that is this - Trump is indeed a titanic and dangerous f-ck up, far more a painted clown than a President, the country and the world have turned on him, and the American people are ready to put us back in power.Subscribed
Let’s revisit some of what we learned this week:
Trump has been badly beaten by Iran, America is far weaker today, gas/diesel prices have soared here, inflation remains too high, and interest rates are rising:
We’ve gotten a lot of polling this week and it has painted a very dire picture for Republicans. We saw three credible polls this week with had Democrats ahead in the generic ballot by double digits. There were reports that the Rs are thinking about writing off the GA and NC Senate races. Greg Sargent had a terrific analysis in the New Republic showing how much money Trump’s SuperPAC is spending on very red House districts, including ones he won by more than 10 points in 2024. Credible, independent polls had Mary Peltola up 5 in Alaska, and Talarico up 6 and Hinojosa up 4 in Texas, shocking results that suggest the blue wave could be a very, very big one this November, certainly big enough to hand us the House and Senate. Stories about the deteriorating electoral battlefield coursed through the media this week.
Here’s the lead story in the Washington Post this morning. The story has this remarkable, well-crafted and almost comical passage:
Trump in recent weeks has become sober about the gravity of the political situation, listening intently as he is presented with often discouraging polling, according to four people with knowledge of his recent comments, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. That shift has prompted him to take more action on the midterms — pledging to stump for candidates and opening his war chest in competitive races, for example — although it remains to be seen how effectively Republicans can gain ground over the next six weeks.
Trump has long dismissed unfavorable polls, fastening his attention on surveys that present him in an artificially positive light. He often says that negative surveys are fake and not to be believed. Increasingly, however, he has accepted his team’s polling that shows his and his party’s poor standing with voters, his advisers say.
Several of Trump’s advisers said they had become “increasingly blunt” with him, as one put it, and that in recent weeks he was listening to them about the electoral reality the GOP faces. It didn’t always translate to a good mood for Trump.
We saw signs of rot, panic and Trump’s loosening grip throughout the GOP ecosystem this week. The House rebuked Trump on Iran; they were on track to lose a House vote on Impeaching Pete Hegseth and had to shut down the chamber until after the election; the Supreme Court handed him a big loss on his mail ballot ploy and the Fed essentially rebuked him and condemned his economic policy by raising the Federal funds rate; a prominent Trump loyalist Member of the House produced an ad brutally condemning his mass deportation policy; and Karl Rove said he was voting for a Democrat in Texas this November.
The furious, manic flooding of the Senate races with Republican polls we’ve been tracking here is another clear sign of their desperation and panic. With six new polls released yesterday - yes six in a single day - they have now released 32 polls in 14 states by 7 pollsters in 9 days:
There are signs of escalating panic, unraveling, and madness throughout the regime. Trump banned MS Now, CNN, and Politico from the White House yesterday. Bobby Jr. appeared on stage with one of the craziest anti-vaxxers in the world this week. Rather than figuring out how to win the war in the Middle East Pete Hegseth announced this batshit policy yesterday.
Trump’s unhinged obsession with the Kennedy Center hit new heights this week as he appeared ready to demolish a national monument to a slain President, leading to a huge protest last night in the shadow of his ridiculous tarp.
While all this is very encouraging we must also acknowledge that Trump’s disastrous time in office has produced rising threats to our prosperity and security that we cannot ignore or dismiss - government budgets across the world are being batter by higher interest rates and inflation including ours; consumers, small businesses, and farmers here and everywhere are also being battered by Trump’s immense global failure, making things more unstable throughout the world; the wars in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine are escalating; the climate crisis isn’t abating; and every day we see new reports about the grave potential dangers of AI.
So while I think the discourse has begun to catch up with the political realities of the moment, I don’t yet think it has caught up to the gravity of the crises Trump’s disastrous tenure has left us. That Europeans leaders in the past few days have moved to something akin to war footing, anticipating a new wave of aggression from Russia has barely made the news here.I write all this today for we cannot lose sight for one moment about the gravity of the moment and the importance of the opportunity in front of us to now make things better. Trump has destabilized the world. We now must begin the arduous task of putting things right, and that begins by making this election a clear and univocal repudiation of him and his terrible regime. He is a weakened figure, his hold on our politics and the media is loosening, and now we must…..
New York Times, Trump’s Census Proposal Could Cut House Seats From Red States, Jeff Adelson and Albert Sun, Sept. 18, 2026. A Trump administration proposal to exclude some types of immigrants from the 2030 census might not expand the congressional map for Republicans, and could even result in fewer House seats in red states.
If congressional seats were redistributed based on recent census figures, excluding undocumented immigrants and other noncitizens without green cards could cause Texas to lose a congressional seat it would otherwise have gained, according to a New York Times analysis. Minnesota, a blue-leaning state, could gain a seat.
States are allotted congressional seats based on their populations during a process called reapportionment, which uses census data and occurs every 10 years. The next decennial census is slated to happen in 2030.
Though there are no official public statistics for the immigrants targeted by the proposal, two separate organizations estimated the group’s size in two recent years, 2023 and 2024. The Times used those estimates to explore the effect Mr. Trump’s proposal could have on the number of congressional seats each state would have received if reapportionment had happened in each of those years.
More On U.S. Governance
New York Times, Gold Statues and Staff Cuts: How Trump Has Disrupted America’s Parks, Maxine Joselow, Sept. 19, 2026. Maintenance projects have been put off around the country and resources diverted to the president’s favored projects in Washington.
Ever since Theodore Roosevelt ventured into the wilderness of California’s Yosemite Valley in 1903 and emerged with a sweeping conservation policy, presidents in both parties have valued the country’s national parks.
The public has, too. Polling shows that Americans of all stripes and political persuasions overwhelmingly love their parks.
But President Trump’s administration has thrown the 433 sites managed by the National Park Service into turmoil, shifting funding and workers to pet projects in Washington, slashing staff across the country and scrubbing exhibits that it says “inappropriately disparage Americans.”
Moves like putting Mr. Trump’s face on some park passes have been largely symbolic. Others have upended the lives of Park Service workers and marred the experiences of some of the hundreds of millions of people who visit national parks each year.
The changes have come one after the other, affecting everything from the rugged shorelines of Acadia National Park in Maine to the high desert of Joshua Tree National Park in California.
Early last year, the Trump administration began making steep cuts to the Park Service work force, leaving at least 20 percent of parks significantly understaffed. This spring, the administration used at least $67 million generated by entrance fees from parks to help fund projects in Washington favored by Mr. Trump, like the botched Reflecting Pool repairs. As a result, hundreds of repairs and upgrades around the country may go unfunded this year, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Then there is the contentious proposal to trade away a small parcel of land in Yosemite National Park, a crown jewel of the park system, to a private developer. A bipartisan group of 153 lawmakers pledged this week to block the land exchange, declaring that “public lands belong in public hands.”
U.S. Law, Rights, Justice
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: No “business as usual” for Democrats following an expected blue wave, Wayne Madsen, Sept. 19, 2026. On issues such as Israel/Palestine, the Caribbean and the phony “drug war.” and acquiescence to tech bros, the American people demand a U-turn.How 2026 would look if the democrats flipped as many seats as they have in previous elections.
If the Democrats benefit from a blue wave on November 3 — provided the election isn’t subjected to Trump regime interference — American voters expect a seismic shift in how Democratic leaders react to such mandates. We will see those like Senator Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries crow about their respective plans as Senate Majority Leader and House Speaker and issuing forth trite bromides about charting a course ahead. Bullshit!
Voters expect that a new Democratic class in the Senate and House will depose Schumer and Jeffries for being incompetent nincompoops. They have done as little as possible to act as a resistance force and not a loyal opposition party in the face of Trump’s imposition of fascism on the United States. Jeffries’s secret meeting with Jared Kushner tells us all how he’d act if he becomes the next House Speaker. Simply put, the nation doesn’t need leadership from two pols from Brooklyn after having been savagely victimized by a con man from neighboring Queens. Not to dump on New York, because it has a rising star in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The Democrats need more AOCs in charge in Congress and state houses and less of those who look at their constituents merely as focus groups meeting in some think tank.
Democrats want to see a victorious Democratic Party reverse course on Israel and Palestine. There must be legislation passed, even with the threat of a Trump veto, to move the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv; establish a U.S. embassy in Ramallah on the West Bank accredited to the State of Palestine; cut off all military and law enforcement weapons shipments to Israel; support a multilateral force to prevent Israel from encroaching on the territories of Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza; and a multilateral protected corridor for aid supplies entering Gaza from Egypt.
Democrats like Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Jared Moskowitz Debbie Wasserman Schultz from Florida, as well as other Democrats in the “Hallelujah Caucus” will offer up the tired old refrain of “we can’t forget about what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023.” For Israel’s Amen Choir in Congress, “Hamas, Hamas. Hamas!” has become what “Russia, Russia, Russia” has become for Trump. One wants the world to forget the genocide taking place in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon and the other wants everyone to forget about Trump and his family being intelligence assets for the Kremlin. Both chants are diversions from the truth. We now know that Benjamin Netanyahu was warned at least three times about Hamas’s plans to attack southern Israel and did nothing to prevent it.1A New Book Details Israel's Destruction of Palestinian Life in GazaGaza genocide.
Netanyahu reckoned that the kibbutzes across the Gaza border were inhabited mainly by liberal supporters of parties that favored peace with the Palestinians. For Netanyahu, these innocent Israelis were expendable in the cause of creating a “Greater Israel.” And supporting Netanyahu are key Democrats in Congressional leadership. Their influence must be marginalized.
Americans also expect to see a new Democratic class in Congress to defund Pete Hegseth’s and former Miami rent boy Marco Rubio’s murderous campaign of targeting fishing boats and other maritime craft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Hundreds of innocents have perished in the Hegseth/Rubio shooting gallery escapade. There will be those like Moskowitz and Wasserman Schultz, who benefit by the military intelligence/counter-narcotics complex that has been built up in south Florida, to curtail any effort to rein in the Hegseth/Rubio cowboys. They should be both ignored and chastised by a new Democratic leadership in Congress.Defense Secretary Hegseth announces name for alleged drug boat strikes: "Operation Southern Spear"
A Democratic majority will be hobbled by an administration and Supreme Court that will do everything in their power to stymie Congressional power. However, that does not mean that the House cannot initiate the impeachment of Hegseth; Health and Human Services Secretary RFK, Junkie; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (or Nutlick if you will); Attorney General Todd Blanche; and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for causing deaths and injuries to the American public. If the Senate cannot muster enough votes to convict and remove these and other rogues from office, prosecutions can wait until a progressive Democrat is elected president in 2028.I'm a former surgeon general. RFK Jr. has the wrong priorities.
The United States will never regain the trust of the world in at least a generation. However, a Democratic Congress can and should demonstrate an ability to not forget the crimes against humanity committed by the Trump regime. There cannot be any hesitancy to hold accountable those who committed unspeakable crimes on the streets of Minneapolis; the waters off of Venezuela, Trinidad, and the Galapagos; a girl’s school in Iran; pediatric clinics across the United States; and food/health programs in Africa. Those like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Jared Kushner, Kashyap Patel, Dan Bongino, Steve Witkoff, ex-con Peter Navarro, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, perhaps hundreds of ICE goons, and other reprobates should be made to “go through some things,” to coin a favorite DJT mob phrase.ICE Is Targeting Activists in Vermont. And the State's DMV Has Been Helping Them. | American Civil Liberties Union
The motto for a new Democratic Congress should be, “Past crimes to be prosecuted now and into the future with no mercy for the perpetrators.” It has a Nuremberg sort of ring to it.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, In Significant Escalation, Houthis Attack Saudi Capital, Vivian Nereim, Ismaeel Naar and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 19, 2026. The Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia, said they had fired a wave of missiles and drones at Riyadh, and on Saudi oil facilities.
The Houthi militia in Yemen said on Saturday that it had attacked Saudi Arabia’s capital and oil facilities with a barrage of missiles and drones, a significant escalation in the renewed war between the kingdom and the Iranian-backed group.
The Saudis intercepted a Houthi missile launched toward Riyadh, the capital, according to Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen.
He added in a statement that air defenses had fended off assaults on “civilians and civilian infrastructure” in several other cities in the kingdom, including coastal Yanbu, where the Houthis said they attacked oil facilities.
The Houthi strikes, the first on Riyadh in months, left the city on edge. Emergency alerts sounded in Riyadh earlier on Saturday, with residents reporting loud explosions, and flights were severely disrupted at the city’s airport. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Houthis and Saudi Arabia have accused each other of mounting intensifying attacks in recent weeks. Strikes on Saudi Arabia have disrupted critical oil infrastructure, fueling alarm over threats to global energy supplies.
Yahya Saree, a spokesman for the Houthi military, said the group had fired a “large number of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones” targeting “sensitive sites” in Riyadh and facilities for Saudi Arabia’s national oil company in Yanbu, a crucial Red Sea terminal.
Mr. Saree said the attacks were retaliation for more than 700 Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, where the kingdom has been backing government forces trying to wrest back territory from a lightning Houthi offensive.
Saudi Arabia has not acknowledged launching any airstrikes in recent days, and Saudi officials generally say that such strikes are being carried out by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday, but General Al-Maliki said in his statement on Saturday that the Houthi attacks demonstrated the militia’s “intransigence.”
Starting in 2015, Saudi Arabia led a disastrous bombing campaign to rout the Houthis but failed to push the group out of power, leaving Yemen in the fragmented control of government forces and the militants. A truce reached in 2022 has unraveled amid worsening fighting in recent months, as the Houthis have sought to seize strategic territory in Yemen and enforce a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
But the attacks on Riyadh were a “huge” escalation, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, a London-based research group. He said they reflected that the “Houthis are not going to stop anywhere,” particularly at a time when they feel emboldened by recent battlefield victories.
In his statement, Mr. Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said that the group was pursuing a policy of “escalation for escalation” until Saudi Arabia stops its “aggression” in Yemen and lifts restrictions on Yemeni airspace, which the militia refers to as a blockade.
More Global News
New York Times, U.S. Has Reached Security Deal on Greenland, Trump Says, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Anton Troianovski and Jeffrey Gettleman, Sept. 19, 2026 (print ed.). The full contours of the deal were unclear, but Denmark and Greenland both indicated they expected an agreement to be signed soon.
President Trump said on Friday that his administration had reached a deal with Denmark and Greenland to expand the U.S. security presence in Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, raising the possibility of a diplomatic solution to a U.S.-made threat that nearly upended the Western alliance.
The full contours of the deal Mr. Trump was describing were not immediately clear, but shortly after his announcement, leaders of Greenland and Denmark issued statements indicating they expected an agreement to be signed next week during the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The two sides described the agreement in very different terms. Mr. Trump claimed the United States had secured “permanent control over security, and all other needs” in Greenland, while the Danish prime minister said the deal “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the Kingdom of Denmark.
That description would mean the agreement fell well short of Mr. Trump’s longstanding demand of total control over Greenland.
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump said that “anything less” than U.S. ownership of Greenland would be “unacceptable.” He said possession of the territory was “psychologically important” to him.
Instead, what Mr. Trump described on Friday was a deal that would prevent U.S. adversaries from having a base on Greenland and expand the U.S. military presence in the territory. In his social media post, Mr. Trump said that under the deal, “no U.S. adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval.”
Officials from Denmark and Greenland did not immediately confirm that the United States had received such veto power — a U.S. demand that they had strongly opposed in closed-door negotiations in recent months. And two people close to the negotiations said Mr. Trump’s declaration of permanent control over Greenland’s security exaggerated the degree of new powers the United States would get over the territory. The U.S. military will be working with its counterparts in Denmark and Greenland under the agreement rather than asserting control over them, a U.S. military official said.
Still, the apparent deal, reached after months of high-stakes confidential talks with officials from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, could mark an off-ramp to an issue that caused widespread concern among NATO allies earlier this year.
Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup
MONEY TO BURN: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, by William D. Cohan
New York Times, Book Review: Leon Black Gave Millions to Jeffrey Epstein. What Did He Get in Return? Jonathan Mahler, Updated Sept. 16, 2026. In “Money to Burn,” William D. Cohan charts the rise and fall of the Wall Street billionaire.
The financier Leon Black may be entitled to his own wall in the rogues’ gallery of Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers. Between 2012 and 2017, Black gave Epstein a staggering $158 million — or more than $170 million if you count a big loan that Epstein had not made good on when he hanged himself in his jail cell in 2019. Not only did the revelations of these payments put a premature end to Black’s Wall Street career, they ensured that he would be remembered not as one of the great dealmakers of his time but as Epstein’s most generous client.
In “Money to Burn,” the journalist William D. Cohan offers a detailed account of Black’s rise and fall. A former investment banker himself, Cohan is nothing if not thorough, and “Money to Burn” is a coup of reporting, based on extensive interviews with Black, his business partners and many others who are often quoted at great, and at times trying, length.
Cohan is telling two stories, really. One is about Black. The other is about the private equity firm he built, Apollo Global Management, which has been at the center of Wall Street’s ongoing transformation from a place dominated by relatively staid banks and brokerage houses to a more shadowy realm ruled by “alternative asset managers” who raise and lend their own capital.Money to BurnMoney to Burn
Save to your reading list:Want to readHave read
Black’s arc makes for an almost perfect parable for the corrupting influence of money. His father, Eli, was settling into life as a Long Island rabbi when he pivoted in the mid-1940s. A career in finance, he reasoned without apparent irony, could be just as rewarding as one in the pulpit, as long as “men of virtue” were in charge.
Eli Black became enormously successful, the architect and chief executive of an international conglomerate called the United Brands Company. But his life ended tragically: In early 1975, with the company facing mounting financial problems and a bribery scandal, he leaped out the window of his 44th-floor office in Manhattan’s Pan Am Building.
None of this ultimately deterred Leon from going into finance. Armed with a pair of Ivy League degrees (Dartmouth College, Harvard Business School), he started his career in 1977 at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond powerhouse where men of virtue were in distinctly short supply.
When Drexel was forced into bankruptcy in 1990, following a protracted federal investigation into illegal trading, Black launched Apollo. He and his new team raised hundreds of millions of dollars to get started. Their plan was to leverage this money to gain control of distressed companies and then have their way with them.
As Cohan makes clear, sucking profits out of struggling businesses was hard work that often entailed logic-defying feats of financial engineering and self-dealing. Needless to say, Black and his partners fared a lot better in these ventures than the employees or customers of the entities they bought. A series of sexual assaults at an Apollo-owned acute-care facility in Iowa helped prompt a Senate report, whose title — “Profits Over Patients: The Harmful Effects of Private Equity on the U.S. Health Care System” — speaks volumes and yet may still understate the matter.
Bargain hunting became not just a career but an avocation for the billionaires who ran Apollo. In 2011, Josh Harris, an Apollo co-founder and Black protégé, bought a big stake in an N.B.A. franchise, the down-on-their-luck Philadelphia 76ers. Another co-founder, Marc Rowan, set his sights on the Long Island surf town of Montauk, where, to the fury of many locals, he turned an affordable seafood shack into an upmarket one that, in 2019, served a $54 lobster Cobb salad and $795 bottles of rosé.
I guess everyone needs a hobby. Black’s was art. In 2012, he spent nearly $120 million for Edvard Munch’s 1895 drawing of “The Scream.” By then, Black had long been friendly with Epstein, whom he had met at a wedding in 1996. He would eventually fork over tens of millions of dollars to the convicted pedophile and registered sex offender.ImageThe cover of “Money to Burn,” by William D. Cohan.
Black spoke at length to Cohan about his interactions with Epstein, presumably believing that this book might help him clear his name. And Cohan gives Black plenty of room to mount his defense, however preposterous it may seem: Black claims that he paid Epstein these exorbitant sums — many multiples of what a first-rate Wall Street trusts-and-estates lawyer would charge, as Cohan notes — solely for his tax- and estate-planning advice.
Cohan seems skeptical, but neither does he fully endorse the alternative and seemingly far more credible explanation: that Epstein was less financial adviser than personal fixer for Black, helping him manage his illicit relationships with numerous women.
The news of Black’s entanglement with Epstein first broke in 2019. Then, in March 2021, Guzel Ganieva, a young Russian woman to whom Black had paid millions of dollars in hush money, wrote on Twitter that she’d been sexually abused by him.
Days later, Black stepped down from Apollo, naming Rowan — not Harris, who had long aspired to succeed him — as chief executive. A few months after that, Black filed a RICO suit against Harris and Ganieva, accusing them of conspiring to make her sexual-abuse claims public in an effort to push him out. Black’s complaint compares Harris to “Shakespeare’s Iago,” alleging that once Harris knew he was being passed over for the big job at Apollo, he turned his wrath on his former mentor.
“It’s hard to imagine that that’s where we’re at,” a befuddled Harris told Cohan about Black’s charges. Indeed, reading Black’s unhinged theories about Harris, a different Shakespeare character comes to mind: King Lear. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in Manhattan in 2022. A year later, though, Black prevailed in a civil suit that Ganieva had filed against him, accusing him of defamation and sexual assault.
In laying out this sordid saga, Cohan offers a lot of conflicting claims. It’s my one real gripe with this book: Cohan is so focused on allowing his subjects to have their say — and, perhaps, on making the most of his considerable access — that he delegates too much of the storytelling to them rather than forcefully shaping the narrative himself.
Last March, a few of my colleagues at The New York Times made a convincing case that Epstein’s services included helping Black obscure millions of dollars that he paid to a dozen women, at least some of whom he had sexual encounters with, a report that Black denied. For whatever reason, in “Money to Burn,” Cohan doesn’t reach his own conclusion about the mystery at the heart of Black’s story: What, exactly, was he paying Epstein for? The resulting picture of Black’s relationship with Epstein — and, in turn, of Black himself — is blurry.
Setting this issue aside, “Money to Burn” is an engaging and valuable work, a portrait of a man and a milieu whose inexhaustible devotion to the accumulation of personal wealth may test your faith in capitalism. What’s more, if Black’s hope was that Cohan would help redeem his character, he may be disappointed with the final product, which closely chronicles his tawdry descent into infamy.
And yet the joke may be on us. Since Black’s departure, Apollo has moved more aggressively into the private-credit markets, exploiting its advantage over banks and brokerage houses, whose debt loads and lending practices are much more heavily regulated. Business is booming. By 2029, Apollo aims to have $1.5 trillion in assets under management — more than the G.D.P. of Indonesia. Black has been thoroughly disgraced in the court of public opinion, but he is still Apollo’s largest individual shareholder. With an estimated personal fortune of around $15 billion, he is surely richer than ever.
Sept. 18
Top Headlines
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, right, with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, center-left, and shaking hands with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, left, in Moscow earlier this month (Pool photob by Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse and Getty Images).
News Roundups
right, Sept. 18, 2026. News is breaking right now. That includes exclusive video and images I obtained this afternoon from Kuwait showing the aftermath of an Iranian strike on a US base there, damage the Pentagon still hasn’t addressed publicly, and reporting that lines up with what ABC News independently uncovered at several other bases across the region this week.Sept. 18, 2026. Today’s rundown captures a White House getting squeezed from every direction at once: Republicans quietly distancing themselves from Trump ahead of the midterms, MAGA farmers boycotting each other over politics, gas and diesel prices spiking toward record highs, and a Speaker of the House who’d rather send everyone home than let a single Epstein-related vote hit the floor.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Graphic portraying President Trump handing out money to voters, as he has promised to do (presumably electronically) if he actually means it and if enough voters support Republicans so that they retain congressional majorities in the mid-term elections this fall (Illustration by The Hartmann Report).
Sept. 16, 2026. Give Republicans Congress and Trump promises you $5,000. That extraordinary bargain raises a question America confronted nearly 90 years ago: how far can government power reach into the voting booth?More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 18, 2026. Early, in-person voting begins today in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia. Mail ballots have also been sent in Idaho, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Trump hit a new low in the Civiqs daily tracking poll today, crashing out at 33%-61%. Yes he is still dropping, losing altitude as things in the US and around the world get worse. Yesterday we reported on the shocker high-quality Siena poll in Texas showing Talarico up 6 and Hinojosa up 4. Late yesterday we got another shocker poll, this one from Alaska. More On Trump Threats To Voting, Campaign Laws
and conditioned to expect another assault on democracy, many Democrats greeted even a win as convincing and critical as a decision on the merits in the U.S. Post Office case with shrugs and eye-rolling. Worse, many remain suspicious about mail-in voting (which is entirely safe, secure, and vital to maximizing turnout). The Supreme Court decision blocking Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting is an undiluted win for democracy. Trump knew how big it was, and lashed out at the justices he had appointed in response, thereby confirming the enormity of his defeat.More On U.S. Governance
Portrayal of American founders (Illustrataion by Sarah Roges for The Bulwark).
Sept. 18, 2026. Yesterday, September 17, was Constitution Day. On that day in 1787, thirty-nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed a new constitution for the United States of America. It was ratified less than a year later, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve it, meeting the requirement set by Article VII of the Constitution itself.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Sept. 18, 2026. But the hatred remains. On Wednesday Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, gave a speech affirming the EU’s willingness to move toward making Canada an “associate member.” Nobody quite knows what that would mean, and it might be mostly symbolic. But it would be a kind of declaration, by both Europe and Canada, of reduced dependence on the United States. And the next day Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minster, strongly endorsed the idea. Donald Trump predictably, reacted with rage, calling it a “hostile act,” threatening to cut off all trade with Europe. And nobody cared.More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Rejecting Trump, South Korean Leader Says He Will Not Send Troops to Iran, Choe Sang-Hun, Sept. 18, 2026. President Lee Jae Myung’s comments followed President Trump’s repeated demand for “a little hand” from South Korea, a decades-old American ally.More Global News
More On U.S. Artificial Intelligence, Media, Culture, Sports
More On U.S. Crime, Rights, Justice
Lindsay Clancy in court during her murder trial this month in Plymouth, Mass (Pool photo by Greg Derr).
Top Stories
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, right, with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, center-left, and shaking hands with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, left, in Moscow earlier this month (Pool photob by Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse and Getty Images).
New York Times, Trump Wants Putin to End the War. He May Offer Russia Business Deals First, Anton Troianovski, Sept. 18, 2026 (print ed.). A new sanctions bill is meant to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to end the war in Ukraine. But President Trump is doubling down on a different approach: offering enticements to Russia.
When President Trump’s envoys sat down with Vladimir V. Putin at the Kremlin this month, the Russian leader exuded confidence.
Within months, he said, Russian troops would finally capture Ukraine’s entire Donbas region. And Russia was poised to pummel Ukraine’s electricity grid, setting the stage for a miserable winter.
Then one of the envoys, Jared Kushner, tried to push back. With all due respect, you told us exactly that a year ago, Mr. Kushner said to the Russian president. What are the chances we come back here in another year and you are again saying the same thing? Maybe we don’t lose a year?
The exchange, described by a person familiar with the talks and by a U.S. official, captured the quandary of Mr. Trump’s more than 18 months of efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
Congress this week passed a landmark sanctions bill taking aim at Russia’s energy sector, a new attempt to make Russia “suffer” for its invasion and to pressure Mr. Putin to make compromises.
But even as that bill makes its way to Mr. Trump’s desk, the Trump administration is doubling down on a different approach: offering benefits for Russia that officials hope will get Mr. Putin to consider ending his war.
Among the new inducements: the White House is now considering signing business deals with Russia before it stops fighting in Ukraine, according to two people close to the talks. The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to be candid about the negotiations, said that deals with Russia before the end of the war were possible because they would show that the United States is serious about a reset relationship with Russia.
The approach represents a shift from Mr. Trump’s pledge last year that business deals with Russia would not come “until we get the war settled.” It indicates that Mr. Trump’s envoys for ending the war, Steve Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, are groping for new ways to entice Russia to stop fighting, now that it has become clear that Ukraine will not withdraw from the swath of its own territory that Mr. Putin insists he must control before the war ends.
And it contrasts with the approach advocated by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress — not to mention Kyiv’s European allies and Ukraine itself — that only heightened economic and military pressure on Mr. Putin can compel him to compromise.
“This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table,” Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and one of the sanctions bill’s leading proponents, said on Wednesday after a bipartisan majority passed the legislation, 262 to 159.
Mr. Trump has indicated he will sign the bill, which was championed by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, until his death in July. It would allow the president to levy tariffs of as much as 100 percent on countries buying the most Russian oil or gas and would impose sanctions on Russian officials, businesspeople and financial institutions. Senator Darline Graham, Mr. Graham’s sister who replaced him in his seat, said it would “increase the president’s negotiating leverage.”
But insofar as the Trump administration is pursuing a carrot-and-stick approach with Mr. Putin, carrots seem the focus. The U.S. official said that the administration wanted to create more incentives for members of the Russian elite to push for peace. Executing some business deals before the end of the war could help convince anti-American hawks around Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump really does want to create a new relationship with Russia, the official added.
Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat in Kyiv who now works at R. Politik, a political analysis firm, said signs pointed to the United States “considering bigger concessions toward Russia.”
Washington “is now signaling that some deals could move forward if Moscow first demonstrates concrete restraint,” said Mr. Jarabik, who has been tracking the talks closely. “Washington had previously resisted signing such agreements before a cease-fire.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Do We Even Have a Constitution Day? Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Sept. 18, 2026. The White House’s posture toward Russia is getting more bizarre all the time. On the one hand, Trump has promised to sign a sweeping package which—as Andrew wrote yesterday—would hit Russia’s elite with new sanctions and give Trump the ability to hit Russia’s energy customers with tariffs. And Russia is getting more reckless with attacks and plots that threaten to pull America and other Western countries deeper into the war.
And yet the New York Times reports today that Trump and his advisers are also discussing new “business deals” with Russia that could come even before the end of the war—the exact opposite philosophy of the one driving the sanctions package. All this time later, and Team Trump is still in the concepts-of-a-plan phase on Russia and Ukraine. Happy Friday.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Coalition Cracks, Americans Unite With Canada, Energy Crisis Explodes, Epstein Cover-Up Cracks Open, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Today’s rundown captures a White House getting squeezed from every direction at once: Republicans quietly distancing themselves from Trump ahead of the midterms, MAGA farmers boycotting each other over politics, gas and diesel prices spiking toward record highs, and a Speaker of the House who’d rather send everyone home than let a single Epstein-related vote hit the floor.
Tonight I’ll be at the Kennedy Center covering what’s shaping up to be one of the biggest protests we’ve seen there in years. I’ll have reporting and video as it develops, so keep an eye on your inbox and my socials tonight.
None of this reporting happens without subscribers. I don’t have a hedge fund owner or a corporate parent deciding what I can and can’t cover, which means I also don’t have their budget. You are the budget. If you’ve been reading for a while and haven’t subscribed yet, today’s the day: it’s the only reason I can show up at nights like tonight and tell you what actually happened instead of what a press release says happened.
Trump Voters Say Enough:
60,000 NFL fans belted out “O Canada” in a Buffalo stadium, and it infurated Trump’s base: Roughly 60,000 fans packed the Bills’ new $2.1 billion Highmark Stadium for their season opener against Detroit, cheering as the Toronto band Barenaked Ladies performed Canada’s national anthem before an American singer performed the US anthem, with both countries’ flags displayed on the field. The tribute came as Trump has escalated a bitter trade war with Ottawa, slapping tariffs on Canadian goods, repeatedly floating that Canada should become the 51st state, and just this week signing a memorandum targeting Canadian goods in federal procurement and threatening the EU with “very serious tariffs” over a proposal to make Canada an associate member. For a fanbase MAGA world watched embrace Canada this openly, on American soil, in the middle of Trump’s economic pressure campaign, it’s the kind of unscripted moment that undercuts his “Canada needs us more than we need them” line in real time. The Bills lean into their large cross-border following on purpose, with around 10,000 Canadian season-ticket holders and Toronto just two hours away, but the optics land differently this year given how personal Trump has made the feud, right down to renaming Lake Ontario’s shoreline “Lake America.” The Bills beat the Lions 41-31, but it was 60,000 people singing a foreign anthem in defiance of the moment’s politics that stole the night.
Several Republicans start to distance themselves from Trump as the midterms near: GOP lawmakers in districts Trump carried in 2024, including Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and Zach Nunn, are showing more willingness to break with the president on issues like immigration and Iran as the midterms approach. This comes even as Trump has urged Republican voters to treat him as though he’s on the ballot. The pattern suggests vulnerable Republicans in competitive districts are calculating that some daylight from Trump helps their reelection odds more than loyalty does. MAGA farmers say they have had enough following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz:
Democrats are boycotting Trump-voting farmers and buying from “Blue Dot” ranchers instead: A progressive movement called Blue Dot Farmers, started by TikTok creator “Necessary Noise” after Trump paused tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported beef and mandated a 25% discount that angered ranchers, now connects Democratic shoppers with more than 200 vetted Democrat-voting meat suppliers. Farmers like Nebraska’s Trina Hanzel, Iowa’s Chelsie Ver Mulm, and Minnesota’s John Larsen say publicly identifying as Democrats brought a surge of new customers and sold-out inventory, helping offset losses from soaring diesel and fertilizer costs tied to the Iran war and Trump’s trade fights. The Facebook group, now over 47,000 members with 12 moderators who vet applicants’ social media history, also flags “red” farms to avoid, such as Tennessee’s Rebel Hollow Farm, whose Trump-voting owner called the politicization of beef “ridiculous.” The trend fits a broader rise in political consumerism, echoing the 2023 Bud Light boycott and the Tesla backlash tied to Elon Musk, with a Harris poll finding 40% of consumers have shifted spending to match their politics. Academics quoted in the piece frame it as food and politics becoming entangled, with one calling it the “ballot box coming to the dinner table.”
Energy/Oil Crisis Explodes:
Saudis tell European refiners they’ll get no crude next month: Saudi Aramco has told at least two European refining customers they’ll receive zero crude allocation next month, with the freeze applying to all European buyers on standard term contracts. This follows last week’s forced shutdown of the kingdom’s East-West pipeline after a drone attack; a partial restart is expected within days, with full capacity restored in about six weeks. European refiners normally lift Saudi crude through Egypt’s Sidi Kerir port, which connects to the Red Sea via pipeline, so the outage cut off a key supply route. The disruption triggered panic buying, with Poland’s Orlen issuing more than ten tenders since Friday to secure alternatives. OECD Europe imported roughly 577,000 barrels a day from Saudi Arabia in June, per the IEA.
JP Morgan says it has no clear oil market endgame as Iran conflict drags on: For the first time since the US-Israeli war on Iran began, JP Morgan says it lacks a clear baseline view for oil prices, admitting it can’t model how the conflict ends. Brent is trading near $106 against the bank’s estimated fair value of about $90, with gasoline at $4.37/gallon and US diesel at a record $6.31/gallon heading into peak winter demand. The bank flagged mounting risks including threats to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, attacks on Saudi export infrastructure, and continued strikes on Russian refineries and Ukrainian cities. Despite roughly 10 million barrels a day of disrupted supply, prices haven’t spiked as much as expected because demand destruction (global demand running about 4.4 million bpd below last year) has done more of the balancing than inventory drawdowns. The bank still cautions that prices could climb further later this year if disruptions persist and inventories, especially in China, Europe, Japan and South Korea, get drawn down.
Tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz as Trump weighs “annihilating” Iran’s regime: The UK’s maritime trade monitor reported a tanker hit by an “unknown projectile” in the Strait of Hormuz early Friday, with the fire extinguished and crew safe, plus a separate attack on another vessel reported from Wednesday; Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed responsibility for striking a Togo-flagged ship attempting an “illegal crossing.” President Trump said he’s approaching a “big decision” on whether to launch a major assault to “annihilate” Iran’s regime, ahead of a planned meeting with Persian Gulf leaders next week. A UN-commissioned panel said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe two early US strikes on Iran constituted war crimes. Iran staged a massive state-organized rally, with over 600,000 people registering for military training and Russia and China vetoing a UN resolution to extend sanctions-monitoring on Tehran. The US also approved visas for Iran’s UN delegation, including its president and foreign minister, to attend next week’s General Assembly despite the ongoing war.
No relief in sight for U.S. drivers as gas and diesel prices surge: The national gas average jumped to $4.44 a gallon, up nearly 50% since the Iran war began in February, while diesel hit a record $6.40, up 77 cents since early September, with experts warning prices will keep climbing. GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan projects gas could reach $4.50 this week and diesel $6.60 by the weekend, driven by shrinking refining capacity rather than crude supply alone, citing the Saudi pipeline attack, Red Sea disruptions, and a power outage that briefly halted an ExxonMobil refinery near Chicago. Gulf Oil’s Tom Kloza warned diesel costs will “turbocharge” inflation since the fuel underpins trucking, rail, construction and food transport, and could also push up winter heating oil bills for roughly 4 million Northeast households. Brent crude was trading around $103 a barrel, with the Saudi East-West pipeline attack alone cutting about 4 million barrels a day from global supply and Ukrainian drone strikes knocking out an estimated 3 million barrels of Russian refining capacity. The pain is landing unevenly across the country, with Illinois averaging $4.78 a gallon and California topping $6, since Kloza noted refining capacity, and therefore prices, tends to run higher in Democratic-leaning states and lower in Republican-leaning ones.
US wheat farmers face a squeeze despite the highest prices in three years: Kansas farmer Merrill Nielsen says a 39% jump in bread-wheat futures hasn’t translated into a better bottom line, since record diesel costs, a spring crop wiped out by erratic weather, and drought across the southern Great Plains are eating into any gains, leaving him unsure whether he’ll even plant a normal amount of wheat this year. A forecast “super” El Niño has global wheat supplies at their second-lowest level on record, with Australia’s plantings down 12% on expected dryness, though the same weather pattern could also bring wetter conditions to the Great Plains this fall and spring, as it did during the 2015-16 El Niño that produced a record US winter wheat yield. Russian attacks on Black Sea port facilities, which handle a third of global wheat trade, have cut off much of that supply right after a bumper Black Sea harvest, and experts estimate only 35-50% of it can reach buyers through costlier, slower alternate routes. Analyst Dan Basse warns the combination of damaged harvests and disrupted exports could push global food prices even higher, with the UN’s food price index already up 2.5% year-over-year, and expects US wheat acreage to rise about 10% this winter as farmers chase higher prices, though US wheat acreage overall remains near its lowest level since 1877 as farmers favor corn and soybeans. Seed seller Vance Ehmke says demand for wheat seed is up, but the ground is now too dry in parts of southwest Kansas for seeds to even germinate, and he blames trade war-driven input costs for squeezing farmers further.
Epstein:
Speaker Johnson sent the House home early, blocking votes on releasing more Epstein files: Johnson recessed the chamber Wednesday to let members campaign for the midterms, shelving Rep. Thomas Massie’s bipartisan push to force the release of additional Epstein investigation records along with his separate resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Hegseth over the Iran war. Massie tore into Johnson from the floor for over an hour, asking “we’re calling off Congress? And we’re in the majority?” and accusing leadership of ducking accountability rather than “get[ting] justice for the Epstein survivors.” Johnson dismissed the impeachment push as “a stunt” and touted the session as one of the most productive in decades, even as the House has cut a net 24 scheduled days this year through repeated early recesses. Massie, who lost his primary after Trump campaigned against him, used his remaining time in office to blast what he calls a “uniparty” moving in lockstep to avoid tough votes, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries branded the GOP majority “do-nothing” on both affordability and accountability.
With Congress stalled, a federal judge is now the one forcing the Epstein files out: Reagan-appointed U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave the Justice Department until September 24 to hand over disputed Epstein records or explain why his prior orders weren’t “clear and unambiguous,” rejecting several of the DOJ’s redaction justifications as without merit. Sullivan specifically ordered Attorney General Todd Blanche to substantiate claims that certain redacted names belong to victims, and rejected the department’s argument that handwritten FBI interview notes could stay withheld as duplicates of typed reports. The suit was brought by journalist Katie Phang under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and comes as Massie, sidelined in the House, has separately named 14 people he believes warrant investigation over Epstein ties (with no implication of guilt for those named). Unlike the congressional fight Johnson has shut down, this case proceeds on its own court-ordered timeline regardless of the House calendar.
A new lawsuit adds fresh urgency, alleging Epstein hoarded child sexual abuse material of “countless children”: Two women suing Epstein’s estate, represented in filings as Jane Doe and “Amy,” allege Epstein stole and kept sexualized images of them as minors and are asking a court to order a formal program to identify and notify every victim potentially depicted in his collection, which they say has never been done despite known hits in the material. The suit, filed against estate co-executors Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, also seeks monetary damages and class status on behalf of everyone who appeared as a minor in any CSAM seized from Epstein’s properties. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said reports on the seized collection identified 15 or more matches to known victims who were never notified, and that Jane Doe alleges she reported the theft of her images to law enforcement at the time with no resulting investigation. The case underscores what advocates say is unfinished accountability work that a stalled Congress, with Johnson blocking floor votes on further disclosure, has left entirely to the courts and to survivors’ own lawsuits.
Other news:
Trump officials are funneling undocumented children into Texas, sparking fears of a mass deportation pipeline: Nearly 80% of unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody with active immigration court cases were sent to Texas shelters in July, rising to over 90% in August, totaling 925 kids in ORR care there, with 651 arriving in just those two months, according to exclusive analysis shared with the Guardian. Advocates warn the shift concentrates children in a state with unlicensed facilities, weak child welfare oversight, unfriendly immigration judges, and proximity to the border for deportation flights, with one legal expert calling it a potential “deportation churn-out factory” with only nominal legal representation. Legal representation rates for these kids are already low nationally at under 32%, but even worse in Texas, ranging from just 8.7% in San Antonio to 18.6% in El Paso, while Texas’s GOP government has refused to license ORR care providers and Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar says Gov. Greg Abbott is a “willing accomplice” to the administration. Adding to the alarm, ORR is separately seeking contracts for new “emergency influx facilities” holding up to 3,000 beds each, ringed by 8-foot fences, even though the agency’s shelter network is only around 27% full and unaccompanied border crossings remain historically low, fueling fears the real purpose is mass internal apprehension of children already living in US communities rather than a response to any border surge.
OpenAI was “ethically hacked” with help of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot: A team at cybersecurity startup Hacktron AI compromised OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts via a Discourse-hosted staff forum, initially using Claude to generate the exploit code before switching to OpenAI’s own GPT-5.6 Sol model to carry out most of the operation. The researchers said “the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge” and went as far as making a harmless pull request to OpenAI’s GitHub repository to prove access, though they said they never downloaded any code. The hack was done under OpenAI’s bug bounty program, and the company paid Hacktron $6,500 and said it has fixed the exploited vulnerabilities. It’s the latest safety incident for OpenAI, following a July case where its own AI agents autonomously hacked the startup Hugging Face, and comes as Anthropic renews calls for an AI development slowdown, a position OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk have backed but Trump has rejected.
The Postal Service has stopped building the computer system meant to limit mail voting: Postmaster General David Steiner told the AP the agency halted work on the system after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting this week, saying simply “there’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything.” The system would have cross-checked citizenship lists against an online portal before clearing ballots to be mailed, and a Senate whistleblower report had already argued it was hastily and sloppily built. Steiner avoided weighing in on the policy’s merits or the Supreme Court’s ruling, casting himself as focused only on execution as head of an “independent agency,” and denied rumors he might resign under political pressure. The Postal Service will still encourage (but not require) barcoded envelopes going forward, charging more to process ones without them, and Steiner urged mail voters to send ballots at least seven days early given ongoing concerns about postmark delays in states like Washington and Oregon.
South Korea says it won’t send troops to support the US war on Iran, defying Trump’s pressure: President Lee Jae Myung said flatly that South Korea “won’t deploy military assets in any form” that could draw the country into the conflict, resisting Trump’s calls for allied support near the Strait of Hormuz, though he’s still weighing a smaller role protecting regional shipping given South Korea already runs an anti-piracy naval mission off Somalia. Trump has publicly criticized Seoul over what he called insufficient support for the Iran war and scaled back joint US-South Korea military drills this summer, a move that rattled the alliance, while any Hormuz deployment has proven domestically unpopular in South Korea. Lee also addressed friction over Seoul’s $350 billion US investment pledge tied to a trade deal that lowered US tariffs on Korean goods to 15%, saying commercial viability remains the main sticking point even as the two sides near an agreement, with a parliamentary briefing on the plan postponed to next week. He additionally said a Trump-Kim Jong-un meeting could plausibly happen in the coming months, noting Trump wants talks and Seoul is helping coordinate them, though North Korea has stayed largely silent on the overtures and Trump has reportedly been pushing for a meeting as soon as this autumn.
Trump tells outdoorsmen at a White House dinner he’s so powerful he could ban fishing: At a Rose Garden dinner for outdoor industry executives, including Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris, Trump signed executive orders expanding hunting and fishing access and rolling back certain Biden-era restrictions, then joked that his power was so vast he could ban fishing outright and “drive Johnny right the hell out of business” until Morris begged him to stop. He claimed only Theodore Roosevelt rivaled him as a friend to American hunters and fishermen in the Oval Office. Trump also used the dinner to boast about White House renovations, including paving over the Rose Garden for a Mar-a-Lago style patio and building a new granite helipad on the South Lawn carved with an eagle design, which he said cost $5-6 million. He’s previously said Sikorsky Aircraft, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, is covering that cost because the company felt “a little guilty” for not warning him how powerful its 2024 Marine One helicopter fleet would be, with the new choppers reportedly tearing up the lawn’s grass.
Trump is dangling business deals with Russia before the Ukraine war even ends: Even as Congress passed a sweeping new sanctions bill targeting Russia’s energy sector to pressure Vladimir Putin, the White House is now considering signing business deals with Russia before a ceasefire, a reversal of Trump’s earlier pledge that deals would wait “until we get the war settled.” Officials hope early deals, potentially involving rare earths, aluminum, Arctic joint ventures or Russian gas sales to Europe, will convince Russian elites that a US-Russia reset is real and build momentum toward peace. The shift comes after talks over a Ukrainian withdrawal from the rest of the Donbas broke down, with Jared Kushner publicly pressing Putin at a Kremlin meeting this month over his repeated promises to seize the region. Ukrainian officials say trilateral talks could resume in October, possibly covering a limited ceasefire on Black Sea shipping or energy infrastructure strikes, though skepticism ran high enough that part of an audience in Kyiv reportedly laughed when Kushner described the talks as productive.
Universal is reportedly getting cold feet on releasing its Elon Musk documentary: Despite a five-minute standing ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Universal, which holds international rights to Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk,” has set no release date and hasn’t communicated with the filmmakers, with insiders believing the studio will likely hand rights back rather than release it. The film alleges Musk could use data gathered during his DOGE tenure against Democrats in the midterms, a claim underscored on-camera by AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and Musk has publicly dismissed it as a “hit piece” while his lawyer has sent the production company a warning letter. The potential shelving would follow a pattern of media companies bowing to political pressure, including Amazon dropping “Artificial” amid its OpenAI partnership and ABC and Paramount/CBS settling lawsuits with the Trump administration. Comcast-owned Universal faces added pressure since FCC Chair Brendan Carr, a Musk ally currently investigating Comcast’s DEI practices, wields regulatory power over the company, while HBO, which holds North American rights, is still moving forward but could see its plans complicated if David Ellison’s father Larry, who is portrayed unfavorably in the film, ends up helping control HBO through the Warner Bros. Discovery deal.
Poland warns Russia is preparing disguised drone or rocket strikes on NATO territory: Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament that Russia is planning hybrid attacks on countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland, and will falsely frame them as “accidental” to discourage a NATO response, warning that Russia’s increasing use of harder-to-detect jet-powered drones makes this more dangerous. Tusk said intelligence from NATO, Ukrainian and US services, including the CIA, shows Russia is now focused on hitting border crossings to disrupt supply lines into Ukraine, citing four recent incidents on the Polish border alone. He said Russia isn’t ready for peace talks without Ukraine’s “total capitulation” and expects intensified strikes on six major Ukrainian cities this winter, adding that Poland’s ability to backstop Ukraine’s energy grid, as it did last winter, will be harder if border crossings are destroyed too. Tusk announced he would travel to Kyiv overnight, days after European officials narrowly avoided a drone strike on a train near the Polish-Ukrainian border, and separately, Trump said on Truth Social that plans for a permanent U.S. Army base in Poland are progressing.
The Trump administration again denied visas for Palestinian officials to attend the UN General Assembly: The State Department blocked a high-level Palestinian delegation, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, from attending next week’s UN meeting for the second year running, citing the PA’s continued legal action against Israel at the ICJ and ICC and its ongoing stipends to families of prisoners convicted of attacks on Israelis. The move extends existing US sanctions law denying visas to PLO members and PA officials and reflects the administration’s close alignment with Israel amid the fragile, US-brokered Gaza ceasefire that took hold in October. It also coincides with the administration’s broader campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court, which it accuses of unfairly targeting US and Israeli service members. Despite the visa denials, Palestinians will still have a voice at the General Assembly through diplomats already accredited to the UN, much as Abbas appeared by video last year.
Holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial breaks his silence: Michael Desronvil, the lone juror who refused to accept Clancy’s not guilty by reason of insanity plea, told NewsNation he “didn’t have any doubts,” saying he felt cut off during deliberations whenever he tried to explain his reasoning and that the evidence and witness testimony convinced him she knew exactly what she was doing. His stance held the jury deadlocked 11-1 after more than 40 hours, forcing Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial on September 3 in the case of Clancy, who admitted to strangling her three young children in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 2023 but cited severe postpartum depression. Desronvil is disputing jury foreperson Roni Carlson’s claim that he “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” and says he’s now facing backlash including resurfaced domestic violence allegations, which he suggested is tied to his race and politics as a Black Republican; his brother separately pushed back on the idea his Catholic faith drove his vote. His attorney, Edward Paltzik, praised him in starkly political terms as a defender of the Constitution and ally of President Trump, and said Desronvil is currently in hiding at an undisclosed rural location in Northern New England. Plymouth County prosecutors are now weighing whether to retry Clancy, who is due back in court September 29.
Democrat leads Marshall in tight Kansas Senate race: A new The Hill/Emerson College Polling survey shows Democrat Adam Hamilton narrowly ahead of Republican Gov. Roger Marshall, 45% to 43%, with Libertarian David Graham pulling 4% and 8% undecided. Emerson’s Spencer Kimball called it Democrats’ best shot at their first Kansas Senate seat since 1932, crediting Hamilton’s 15-point lead among independents, and Cook Political Report recently shifted the race from “solid” to “likely” Republican after Hamilton’s primary win. Hamilton, a pastor, is trying to become the first Democrat to win a Kansas Senate race since 1932, and picked up an endorsement this week from former Republican Gov. Bill Graves, who cited a need to break from “partisan gridlock.” The same poll found the governor’s race tighter than expected too, with Republican Ty Masterson leading Democrat Cindy Holscher 51% to 44%, even as independents split narrowly toward Masterson. Vice President Vance visited Kansas this week to rally support for Republicans, a sign the party sees the traditionally red state as newly competitive. The survey polled 750 likely voters September 15-16 with a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.6 points.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Graphic portraying President Trump handing out money to voters, as he has promised to do (presumably electronically) if he actually means it and if enough voters support Republicans so that they retain congressional majorities in the mid-term elections this fall (Illustration by The Hartmann Report).
The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Trump Just Make an Offer That Could Land His Lickspittles in Prison, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Give Republicans Congress and Trump promises you $5,000. That extraordinary bargain raises a question America confronted nearly 90 years ago: how far can government power reach into the voting booth?
Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.
Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.
And then there’s Trump telling a crowd in North Carolina that he's not going to send any more disaster aid via FEMA unless they elect a Republican senator. He claims it was a joke, like when he joked about tearing down the East Wing, or building a triumphal arch, or trying to end mail-in voting.
It's really just a variation on the $5,000 check: “Vote the way I want, and I'll make sure you get something; vote against me, and I’ll withhold benefits from you.”
Americans have seen this corrupt movie before, and the last time we saw it we made it a crime.
During the 1938 midterm elections in the midst of the Republican Great Depression, about a quarter of all American families were surviving on paychecks from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program Republicans decried as “communism.” Democrats, though, controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, and more than a few of the local Democratic politicians were willing to exploit that widespread dependence on the public dole.
Reporter Thomas Stokes documented how WPA workers were being leaned on for both votes and campaign contributions; the reporting earned him a Pulitzer. TIME magazine reported that Harry Hopkins, the guy heading up the WPA, was promising both jobs and promotions in exchange for votes, and a Texas Democratic senator investigated, finding similar reports out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
The scandal ripped across the front pages from coast to coast, and people were rightly disgusted. Given that a quarter of the population were only able to survive because of WPA payments, the threat to pull them (or expand them) in exchange for votes and contributions seemed like extortion.
So the president’s own party decided to clean up its own act. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Carl Hatch wrote a bill he titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities” that explicitly outlawed government officials from using the power of their offices to influence politics or elections. A Democratic House passed it 241 to 134 and FDR signed it into law on August 2, 1939. We call it the Hatch Act.
Section 3 of the 1939 Hatch Act contained a criminal statute that’s still on the books, only lightly amended, as Title 18, Section 600 of the U.S. Code. It doesn’t begin with “any federal employee,” it opens with “Whoever”:
“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress … to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (emphasis added)
A companion law, Section 597, makes it a two-year felony to offer any sort of expenditure to influence anybody’s vote; former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues Trump crossed that line the moment he made that promise. And, he points out, “if the Republicans win, you win with us” is a clear, neat description of offering a reward for supporting a political party in a general election.
Fox “News” and Trump’s other lickspittles argue that in 1982 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Hartlage, already said that politicians can make campaign promises involving money because in that case a Kentucky candidate had promised that, if elected, he’d cut his own salary.
But that guy was describing what he’d do to himself if he won the office he was seeking; there’s never before in American history been an offer of cash to voters with a trigger clause that says the money only comes if one party wins and the other loses.
That’s why Republican Thomas Massie said he’s insulted at Trump suggesting his and his constituents’ votes could be bought for a mere $5k, why former GOP Congressman Bob Good called it a “vote-buying scheme,” and why the libertarians at Reason magazine used the word “brazen” to describe Trump’s latest corrupt scheme.
As I mentioned here yesterday, 89 percent of Americans now believe that our government is experiencing “widespread corruption” because for over fifty years Democrats have let Republicans get away with their crimes, including Carter endorsing Ford’s pardon, Clinton’s “look to the future,” Gore’s concession, and Garland’s fifteen-month nap. Every one of those choices by Democrats told the next sleazy Republican that there was basically no price to be paid for corrupting our democracy.
This $5,000 vote-buying scheme and Trump’s FEMA threats are the perfect pivot points for Democrats to highlight how insanely corrupt the GOP has become since Nixon first started taking bribes and selling legislation.
And while Trump has the immunity that six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court gave him, the people around him who are echoing and promoting these illegal schemes don’t.
Both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance have been out hustling this $5,000 scheme on television, and Section 600 makes it a crime for anyone who makes such a campaign promise “directly or indirectly.”
And the federal statute of limitations is five years, which carries this particular offense out to September of 2031 when it’s reasonable to hope/assume Democrats will again control our federal government and its ability to prosecute crimes.
So, Democrats in Congress need to get ready with subpoenas and serious questions: Who drafted this crazy plan? Who at Treasury and Commerce worked on it, and was it during their government-paid work hours? Did the RNC coordinate any aspect of this? And what the hell is going on with FEMA?
Those are the questions the Hatch Act was written to let us ask.
There are also anti-vote-buying laws on the books in every one of the 50 states and DC, and each state has its own ability to launch investigations, empanel grand juries, and go after corrupt officials. Democratic state attorneys general could, at the very least, begin notifying corrupt Republicans to preserve their records and documents, putting everybody on notice that finally, after all these years of GOP corruption, clean and accountable government is on its way.
Democrats cleaned up their own vote-buying corruption in the late 1930s, and now it looks like they’re going to have to clean up this Republican scheme along the same lines. Let your elected officials know you want Hatch Act and FEMA investigations started on Day One of the new Congress in January.
And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com; it’s readers like you who make it possible for me to keep saying these things out loud.
The Contrarian, Opinion: UNDAUNTED: Take The Wins, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Sometimes, it is hard for pro-democracy forces to take “yes” for an answer.
Wary of “crediting” the egregiously partisan U.S. Supreme Court majority with any principled ruling, and conditioned to expect another assault on democracy, many Democrats greeted even a win as convincing and critical as a decision on the merits in the U.S. Post Office case with shrugs and eye-rolling. Worse, many remain suspicious about mail-in voting (which is entirely safe, secure, and vital to maximizing turnout).
The Supreme Court decision blocking Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting is an undiluted win for democracy. Trump knew how big it was, and lashed out at the justices he had appointed in response, thereby confirming the enormity of his defeat.
It’s important to emphasize the magnitude of the victory defending mail-in voting, not only to reassure Americans that voting by mail is safe and secure, but to sustain voters’ sense of agency, a critical part in any battle against an authoritarian regime.
Political science research confirms, unsurprisingly, that people want to be on the winning side in political contests, writes voting advocate and litigator Tyler J. Hagenbuch. He explains:
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan spent years studying why some movements against authoritarians succeed while others fail. … People are very good at deciding whether a fight is worth their effort, and their decision usually comes down to whether the fight seems like it’s working. This is exactly why political campaigns are always talking about who has “momentum.” More people join the side that seems to be winning.
In the context of Trump’s total failure to hobble the Post Office, which would have disenfranchised potentially millions of voters, it is critical to remind voters that the authoritarians do not have some magical powers or secret sauce for staying in power. “[E]very time an attack on our elections fails so completely and so publicly, the country learns that none of this is inevitable and that we aren’t powerless. Americans have agency in this moment, and that terrifies Trump,” Hagenbuch observes.
Voting law guru Rick Hasen agrees about the importance of the convincing legal win. “[T]he court’s conservatives and liberals came to the brink, saw that ruling the other way risked serious election subversion, and said ‘No,’” Hasen wrote. “The Supreme Court has been terrible on voting rights, but so far, it has held the line on actual election rigging. Let’s celebrate that, even as we gird for more battles to come.”
This does not mean that Democrats need to declare the crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court created by its MAGA partisan majority is over. A broken clock is right twice a day, so an occasional decision striking down such an obvious constitutional power grab hardly cures the crisis at the court or alleviates the urgency for systemic, dramatic reform. And let’s readily concede that Justice Sam Alito’s dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, is among the most factually inaccurate and intellectually dishonest of his career, which is saying something. But refusing to recognize the significance of Trump’s humiliating defeat is counterproductive and unwise for multiple reasons.Subscribed
Whether it is the USPS case, his slap-down in the companion Post Office case in the District of Columbia, or the critical rebuff of MAGA Republicans’ appeal from their devastating loss in the Missouri redistricting case, Trump has been losing repeatedly of late and finding himself on the receiving end of judges’ unsparing, harsh rebukes.
It is vital to recognize the stalwart work not only of litigators — including our own Norm Eisen — but of lower court judges (whose stellar opinions set the predicate for the win at SCOTUS on the Post Office case). Operating under a constant barrage of physical and personal attacks in retaliation for standing up to Trump, they deserve support and praise. Their continued service is essential if our democracy is to survive the rest of the Trump years. And when the Supreme Court upholds their work, they and their peers on the bench must understand that their work is not futile.
Moreover, victories in key election cases at this point in the midterm cycle are critical to maintaining voters’ faith in the electoral process and keeping the edge in enthusiasm/turnout. It is not false bravado or misguided Pollyanna-ism to recognize when things go in favor of democracy forces. There is no virtue in telling people wins don’t matter because something else bad will come along (or that Trump won’t follow the law or that he will invent a new maneuver to cheat).
Defeatism is the death knell of a popular democracy movement, playing into the hands of despots who spend endless energy and time trying to convince the opposition that resistance is hopeless. What is crucial for pro-democracy forces at this stage is to realize that many of the guardrails are holding. Though re-redistricting and other voter suppression techniques make it harder for pro-democracy forces to prevail, robust participation in the midterms brings us closer to the end of Trump’s span of uncontested trifecta power.
Recognizing legitimate victories and spreading a sense that our elections will be secure and meaningful help spur citizen volunteers to participate in voting protection efforts (as state parties and unions are now doing); encourage early voting (which helps build momentum toward Election Day), and drive participation at live, in-person campaign events. Keeping voters engaged and turning out the vote may now be the most essential component in preservation of our democracy.
Right now, Democrats not only lead in generic polling and a wide array of House and Senate races critical to taking both houses; they are outpacing Republicans considerably in enthusiasm. They have far surpassed Republicans in turnout in the primaries, a strong indication of relative turnout in the general election. By nearly every measure, Republican voters are down in the dumps, not even bothering to watch Trump’s cringeworthy fascist rally in Dallas. In polling, Republicans are increasingly willing to register disapproval of him, his policies, and of the economy’s performance. (A sizeable share don’t even buy into his $5000 check scam!)
Especially for Trump and his cult, who rely on Trump puffery as a “winner” and denigration of opponents as “losers,” frequent embarrassment in court (and in failed wars and in our economy) can be demoralizing, which in turn spreads in MAGA ranks. Running down Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, the Republicans’ Senate nominee, signals to voters he is damaged goods. Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers ducking a debate (leaving his opponent to debate and mock an empty podium) hardly inspires Republicans to trek to the polls. Republicans now are the ones at risk of self-fulfilling defeatism.
In sum, we salute the undaunted, unwavering, and unbowed litigators and judges who are holding the line for democracy, and providing reassurance that if the people do their part and turn out to vote, the darkest era in modern American political history will end. It now is up to you, the voters who value democracy, to do the work necessary to defeat the MAGA regime.
More On Trump Threats To Voting, Campaign Laws
New York Times, Civil Rights Groups Sue to Keep Armed Agents Away From Voting Sites, Amy Qin, Sept. 18, 2026. The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and suggestions that it could send agents to polling stations violate the Voting Rights Act.
Civil rights groups and labor unions sued the Trump administration on Friday, asserting that its aggressive immigration enforcement and suggestions that it could send armed agents to polling sites amounted to voter intimidation and violated the Voting Rights Act.
Brought by a coalition of Black, Asian and Latino civil rights groups and unions, including the N.A.A.C.P. and the Service Employees International Union, the lawsuit seeks to block any effort by the Trump administration to deploy federal agents at voting locations, which the groups contend can deter citizens trying to legally vote.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that President Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and other members of the administration had created a climate in which “voters, especially voters of color, are intimidated and fearful of engaging in the democratic process.”
They had done so, the suit says, by simultaneously pushing false narratives of rampant voting by noncitizens, conducting sweeping immigration enforcement in communities of color and repeatedly suggesting that they could send armed agents to polls.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent on Friday morning. But in the past, Mr. Mullin has said that opponents were fear-mongering and that ICE was not patrolling polling places. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place,” he said, “or we’re serving a warrant.”
The lawsuit points specifically to the Trump administration’s recently expanded efforts to identify noncitizens registered to vote, despite no evidence of rampant voter fraud by noncitizens.
Taken together, the lawsuit argues, the actions and statements constituted a violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which broadly prohibits actual or attempted intimidation, threats, and coercion directed at voters and anyone helping to facilitate voting. This section of the Voting Rights Act was not affected by a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the landmark civil rights legislation.
The act, the lawsuit says, broadly protects against voter intimidation, and requires only that voters reasonably fear being subject to harassment or violence for casting a ballot. “The breadth of Congress’s words was by design,” the lawsuit says.
This is at least the second lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from deploying armed federal agents near polling stations. Last week, the City of Denver, Latino civil rights organizations and government watchdog groups argued in a lawsuit that allowing immigration agents at voting locations violates a separate federal law protecting free and fair elections.
For months, Democrats have voiced concerns that Mr. Trump is seeking to assert greater control over the coming elections and sow doubt about the outcome. While Trump administration officials have said there is currently no plan to deploy armed agents to polling sites, they have also not ruled out the possibility of doing so.
New York Times, A Central African Hotel Has Become a Nightmare Prison for U.S. Deportations, Megha Rajagopalan and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 18, 2026. Witnesses say men were hooded and beaten in Equatorial Guinea (shown above on a New York Times map). The autocratic government there is a partner in President Trump’s deportation program.
Two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers.
The deportees said the beatings and subsequent arrests were intended to stop them from telling the outside world about the deteriorating conditions and growing violence inside the hotel, which has become a de facto prison for 29 men and women from different countries.
Experts and human rights advocates predicted such abuse after the Trump administration began deporting people to authoritarian countries where they had no ties or, in many cases, legal rights. Equatorial Guinea, like other countries cooperating with the U.S. deportation program, is notorious for human rights violations, including torture and arbitrary arrest, according to the State Department.
Equatorial Guinea, a small autocracy on Africa’s western coast, is one of many countries that have agreed to accept immigrants deported from the United States. With no legal status in the country, the deportees are being held in the Hotel Bamy — a dilapidated building on the outskirts of the city of Malabo. Armed police officers stand guard 24 hours a day and frequently harass and intimidate people there with impunity, deportees said.
“We are in imminent danger now and can’t keep living like this,” Ahmed Soliman, a deportee at the hotel, said in a text message to The New York Times this month. “I’m tired and genuinely afraid for my life.” He was one of the two men who were later beaten and hooded, witnesses and the human rights group Amnesty International said.
Though the hotel operates as a prison, none of the immigrants are charged with a crime in Equatorial Guinea. The indefinite detention reflects a contradiction at the heart of many arrangements between Washington and foreign governments. Equatorial Guinea agreed to take people but has given them no legal rights or documents that would let them live or work there, even temporarily.
American judges had ruled that a majority of the immigrants in the hotel could not be deported to their home countries because they were likely to be tortured or persecuted. For years, officials allowed many such people to stay in the United States by default, despite their lack of legal standing. The Trump administration ended that policy and is working to find countries, like Equatorial Guinea, willing to accept them.Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.
The police officers shouted: “Where is the phone? Where is the phone!” witnesses said. The immigrants had been using cellphones to speak to journalists and lawyers about the lack of running water, nutritious food or medical care. The beating, witnesses said, followed the release of a video, first reported by Reuters, showing the deteriorating situation in the hotel.
Police also ransacked hotel rooms, searching for cellphones, deportees said.
The deportees spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the threat of retaliation. Western lawyers including Bella Mosselmans, Alexandra Smolyar and Meredyth Yoon, who represent some of the deportees, discussed details of the beatings and arrests. A local lawyer spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
New York Times, ‘My Money:’ Trump’s Claim That He Controls MAGA Super PAC Draws Watchdog Complaint, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 18, 2026. Federal law bars those holding federal office from directing spending decisions for a political organization with no contribution limits.
President Trump has called the $400 million super PAC run by his political advisers “my money that I control.” A campaign watchdog group this week filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission claiming that such an arrangement is illegal.
Federal law bars those holding federal office from directing spending decisions for a political organization with no contribution limits.
Yet Mr. Trump has made clear repeatedly that he maintains “control” over MAGA Inc., a $400 million super PAC for which he has been raising money since he won re-election in 2024.
Federal candidates and officials are allowed to solicit and direct campaign contributions only on behalf of political committees that are subject to strict limits, though the sums have grown in recent years. Super PACs are subject to less stringent rules, and have permission to raise and spend so-called soft money without limits.
Regardless of those rules, Mr. Trump is unlikely to be reined in, largely because the F.E.C., which regulates campaign finance, doesn’t even have enough confirmed members to meet, let alone consider complaints.Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.
The complaint, from the Campaign Legal Center, points to Mr. Trump’s own public comments, including in the Oval Office this month, claiming control over the super PAC’s funds.
“I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try to help us. And this is money from MAGA Inc,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office earlier this month. “This is my money that I control.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Early In-Person Voting Begins Today, More Trumpian Deterioration And Decay, Peltola’s Up 5 In Alaska, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Early, in-person voting begins today in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia. Mail ballots have also been sent in Idaho, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. So, peeps, that means voting has begun in six states now!
Please use our daily chat to report on when you have voted, and what you are doing to drive the early vote in your communities. Send photos of your activities, of your I Voted sticker, and anything else around the act of voting and getting people to vote to
Let’s celebrate our democracy, our freedoms, the hard work we are all doing, and the vital act of voting here, in our socials, everywhere. Let’s flood social media with citizens doing their part, creating both social pressure and a permission structure for others to follow. It’s time for proud, plucky patriots all across this country to do their thing. It’s go time everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More Trumpian Deterioration, Decay, Desperation, and Decline: There was a significant vibe shift in national political coverage this week as the reality of the many manifest failures of Trumpism and the deteriorating GOP electoral battlefield became impossible to ignore. We’ve seen further confirmation of encouraging dynamic today:
Gas and diesel prices have soared across the US this week:
Trump hit a new low in the Civiqs daily tracking poll today, crashing out at 33%-61%. Yes he is still dropping, losing altitude as things in the US and around the world get worse:
Yesterday we reported on the shocker high-quality Siena poll in Texas showing Talarico up 6 and Hinojosa up 4. Late yesterday we got another shocker poll, this one from Alaska. The lead pollster here, Fabrizio, is Trump’s pollster. Peltola leads by 5 in the initial ballot test and wins by 6 taking everyone through the ranked choice process. This result is consistent with Peltola’s very strong showing in the recent all-party primary where she bested Sullivan 49%-41%. Incumbents trailing like this so late in the cycle rarely win.
We’ve started seeing the generic ballot open up in polling this past week, particularly in those looking at likely voters. We’ve now had three polls this week with the generic ballot in double digit/big blue wave territory:
In Texas both John Cornyn and Karl Rove have publicly condemned Bo French, a Republican candidate for Railroad Commissioner, and said they will not be voting for him. From ABC:
Outgoing Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Thursday that he would not vote for Bo French for Texas railroad commissioner following the candidate’s “racist comments,” which have drawn intense pushback from lawmakers.
“He’s an embarrassment to the Republican Party, and he’s going to drag the whole ticket down because of his racist comments,” Cornyn told the Washington Examiner of French, who is running to be Texas’ rail commissioner, a statewide position that regulates the state’s oil and natural gas production.
Cornyn said he was unsure whether he would vote for Democratic candidate Jon Rosenthal: “I may just leave it blank.”
Rove went as far to say he was going to vote for his Democratic opponent, creating a potent permission structure for other Texas Republicans to vote for Democrats this fall:
Watch this remarkable new ad from deeply endangered and clearly panicking Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salaza (FL-27). Watch this. It’s an incredible, loud Cuban-American middle finger to Trump and Stephen Miller:
Everywhere you look there are signs of Trumpian decay and decline…..
An Exciting Update On The State Parties’ New Battlefield Project.As many of you have stepped up to support this vital project, I wanted to share links to the remarkable coverage we’ve received in recent days. Just look at this -=- story after story about Democrats standing up for their democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Great work everyone! With our help this important project is off to a great start!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But of course our work today is not done, for it is time now…..
Two big things you can do in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates:
The New Republic, The Morning Line: Here's What's Happening, Michael Tomasky, Sept. 18, 2026. According to VoteHub, Democrats now have a 55 percent chance of taking the Senate. The site forecasts five Democratic pickups: Maine, Ohio, Alaska, North Carolina, and Texas. It also sees Democrats holding Georgia, New Hampshire, and Michigan. In addition, it forecasts the party flipping five governor’s mansions, including Ohio, Georgia, and Alaska. And as for the House, VoteHub sees 32 seats flipping from R to D.
THE WAR THAT WAS GOING TO END ON JANUARY 21, 2025: Russia leads the news today in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. The latter goes with a "string of daring Russian plots" that has left Donald Trump frustrated, while the former reports (without using the b-word) that Trump is now considering essentially bribing Vladimir Putin to end the war. This is right after the House passed a tough sanctions bill. Trump is expected to sign it, even as the White House is "now considering signing business deals with Russia before it stops fighting in Ukraine."
SHE’S PRET-TY, PRET-TY, PRET-TY GOOD: Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor in Texas, was on Morning Joe this morning, following a poll that, for the first time, shows her leading GOP incumbent Greg Abbott by four points. She’s out talking economics, she said, while Abbott is doing culture wars. "The culture wars are dead in 2026," she said. This is about gas prices and grocery prices and data centers and "15 billionaire tech dudes" who are "about to blow up the world fast."
SLEEPER ISSUE: A Washington Post article from Dana Point, California, discusses the extreme steps oceanfront homeowners are having to take to protect their homes from beach erosion. The piece doesn’t mention the cost of homeowners’ insurance, but it’s going crazy in states with long coastlines—like, say, Texas and Florida. Earlier this year, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told us this is a "thermonuclear" issue in those states. James Talarico and Angie Nixon, take note!
More On U.S. Governance
Portrayal of American founders (Illustrataion by Sarah Roges for The Bulwark).
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Lincoln, Gladstone, and Us, William Kristol, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Yesterday, September 17, was Constitution Day. On that day in 1787, thirty-nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed a new constitution for the United States of America. It was ratified less than a year later, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve it, meeting the requirement set by Article VII of the Constitution itself.
The first elections under the new Constitution were held in the fall of 1788. The first Congress to convene under it was sworn in on March 4, 1789. The first president to be inaugurated under it was sworn in on April 30, 1789. And so the new government came into effect less than two years after the Constitutional Convention convened on May 25, 1787.
A consequential couple of years! And they’ve been followed by a consequential couple of centuries for this constitutional republic.
Today we still live under that Constitution—improved by twenty-seven amendments,¹ each ratified according to the procedures laid out in Article V of the original text. When he’s inaugurated, our president swears that he “will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” When they’re sworn in, our members of Congress take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and that they “will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
It’s our Constitution. We’re proud of it. We admire it. We honor it. We know it’s a great achievement. We understand that it’s served us well.
And yet we don’t much notice nor celebrate its anniversary. Constitution Day has never made it to the top tier of American holidays.
Which is actually fitting and proper. July 4th is the national holiday, celebrating the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration came first in time and comes first in importance.
In a note that he wrote shortly after his election as president in 1860, Abraham Lincoln sought to elucidate the relationship of the Declaration to the Constitution. Adapting the famous image from Proverbs 25:11—“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver”—Lincoln wrote that the Declaration is an “apple of gold” for us. The principle expressed in the Declaration, the principle of “Liberty to all,” Lincoln explained, “clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.” Without that principle, Lincoln wrote, “we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity.”
But a declaration, a principle, isn’t enough. It needs a workable government to protect and effectuate it. So, Lincoln continued,
The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.
Lincoln concluded his note: “So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken.”
It’s not only Americans who have admired our Constitution. The great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone wrote on the occasion of the centennial of its ratification that “the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”
Gladstone was a Liberal, probably the greatest Liberal prime minister. His praise is a reminder that constitutional government is and has always been a liberal cause.
Today, when the Constitution has been under an assault unprecedented in breadth or depth since the time of Lincoln, there is no cause more important than a renewal of liberal constitutionalism. There is no task more urgent than defending and strengthening our constitutional government. There’s no undertaking more critical than reconstructing the institutions, laws, and norms that make the Constitution effectual and effective. Our path forward requires a sober and imaginative liberal constitutionalism.
The Founders did it in 1787. We have their spirit to inspire us and their example to instruct us. There’s no reason we can’t do it today.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Wanna Influence Sean Duffy? Try His Son-in-Law’s Campaign… Transportation interests have poured money into Michael Alfonso’s congressional bid while seeking decisions from Duffy’s department, reports BRENDAN HARTNETT.Quick Hits
TRUMP’S AI FACEPLANT: It’s still not clear yet how Americans’ large and growing suspicion of AI will translate into political outcomes. But the early indications are that Trump is blowing it, with his message that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” falling flat with voters across the spectrum.
That’s according to new polling from the Democrat-aligned independent pollster Tavern Research, which ran a survey of a few simple AI questions this week: Do you approve of Trump’s handling of AI policy? Which do you prioritize when it comes to AI: Safety or innovation? And which of the two do you think Trump prioritizes?
The results, shared first with The Bulwark, were striking. Respondents massively said they would prefer to prioritize safety over innovation, 76–12, with 11 percent not sure. That giant gap persisted across partisan lines: 80 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Republicans, and 77 percent of independents agreed that AI safety should be our key concern.
But voters’ impression—a correct one, by the way—was that Trump’s view was the opposite. Only 13 percent of voters thought he was prioritizing safety; 55 percent said his top priority was innovation, with 32 percent not sure. Unsurprisingly, then, their overall assessment was grim: While 37 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s presidency in general, only 19 percent approved of his approach to AI, with 52 percent disapproving.
It’s just one data point. But the trendlines the poll suggests are overwhelming enough that we should all be sitting up and paying attention.
VACCINES, EMFs, AND CHEMTRAILS, OH MY: Yesterday, RFK Jr. went home. For the first time since joining the Trump administration, he spoke at a public event for Children’s Health Defense, the antivax crank outfit he cofounded decades ago. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts have fallen somewhat out of the public eye, with worried White House officials cautioning him that they could hurt Republicans in the midterms. On this stage, Kennedy seemed eager to reassure his own base: The quest to link vaccines and autism remained as important to him as ever.
In his speech, Kennedy went back to his old book of antivax screeds: Until he came along, scientists and the government—the “medical cartel”—had enforced a “taboo” on autism research. “You weren’t allowed to study it. And scientists who did, as I said, they couldn’t publish. Their publications, when they did slip by the gatekeepers, were retracted. And my agency wouldn’t fund those studies.” All that, he said, is now changing.
Kennedy made sure to leave plenty of room for other varieties of crank, too. “We are also examining electromagnetic fields, which . . . there’s a lot of science out there,” Kennedy said. “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft and those potential impacts on health.” It’s hard to imagine which would be more contemptible: If he’s really trying to get the government to chase these conspiracy theories, or if he’s just saying he is to keep the conspiracy theorists singing his praises.
GETTING COLD FEET?: As midterms draw nearer without any recovery for Donald Trump’s dreadful approval numbers, will GOP lawmakers seeking re-election keep bear-hugging him? As we keep writing, they don’t have much of a choice: Voters know how tightly the president controls his party, and running away from him now is as likely to scandalize the average Republican’s MAGA constituents as it is to woo back skeptical independents.
And yet, to our faint surprise, we’re suddenly seeing some stabs at independent messaging from some of those very lawmakers. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican from a Trump +15 district, released a direct-to-camera TV ad explicitly chastising Trump over his immigration policy. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
Unsurprisingly, Salazar’s Democratic opponent, Elliott Rodríguez, was quick to accuse her of political opportunism. “She owns all of these deportations, ICE harassment, and racial profiling,” a strategist for Rodríguez told the New York Times. “She voted for all this. She gave Trump the billions in ICE funding and the tools to do this.”(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)Share
New York Times, Abortion Rights Activists in Idaho Find Their Pitch: Bring Back the Doctors, Anna Griffin, Sept. 18, 2026. Supporters of the campaign to overturn one of the nation’s toughest abortion bans would rather not talk to Idaho voters about abortion. Instead, they want voters in their redder-than-red state to think about doctors.
Proposition 1, on the ballot in November, would establish a right to abortion until fetal viability and afterward in medical emergencies. But that’s not how the unlikely Idaho ballot measure is being sold in the conservative state.
Instead, as opponents of abortion focus on the ban’s success in ending the procedure, abortion rights proponents are talking about health care broadly, as Idaho weathers a steep decline in the number of doctors providing obstetrics care amid a population boom.
In the four years since Idaho criminalized doctors who perform the procedure, the number of obstetricians and gynecologists practicing in the state has fallen sharply. A study published last year found that Idaho had lost 94 of the 268 physicians who were practicing obstetrics when the ban took effect, a 35 percent decline in the first two years, even after accounting for doctors who arrived in the state. About half of Idaho’s 44 counties lack a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist.
The result, according to health care professionals: longer waits, higher costs and less access to preventive care for all Idahoans, not just pregnant people.
“Most of what obstetricians do is not obstetrics,” said Dr. Edward McEachern, who led the study. “It’s just taking care of women.”
Conservative lawmakers and activists who pushed the state’s anti-abortion laws focus on the intended result: The number of in-person abortions in Idaho fell to almost none, from around 80 a month before the laws.
“Idaho is a pro-life state, and our laws reflect that,” said Blaine Conzatti, president of the Idaho Family Policy Center.
Idaho is a conservative state and growing more so. Over the past two decades, Republican supermajorities in the State Legislature, fortified by an influx of conservative voters from across the West, have enacted spending cuts and some of the country’s toughest restrictions on transgender health care, public restroom access and scholastic sports.
“We’ve been a lighthouse for the rest of the country,” said Mr. Conzatti, whose organization helped craft much of that legislation. He said he’s not at all worried about Proposition 1 passing.
But organizers believe they stand a chance. Other conservative states, including Kansas and Missouri, have overturned recent abortion bans or upheld abortion rights. More than 57 percent of Floridians voted in 2024 to legalize abortion over the will of the Legislature, but 60 percent was needed under that state’s referendum rules.
A Boise State University survey in January found that 60 percent of Idaho residents supported establishing a right to make private reproductive health care decisions, including abortion until fetal viability and in medical emergencies. More than 110,000 people signed petitions to put Proposition 1 on the ballot.
Organizers of a referendum to repeal an abortion ban in deep-red Idaho are far more focused on how the ban has broadly affected health care in the state.'
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Fear Strikes Out, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 18, 2026. But the hatred remains.
On Wednesday Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, gave a speech affirming the EU’s willingness to move toward making Canada an “associate member.” Nobody quite knows what that would mean, and it might be mostly symbolic. But it would be a kind of declaration, by both Europe and Canada, of reduced dependence on the United States. And the next day Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minster, strongly endorsed the idea.
Donald Trump predictably, reacted with rage, calling it a “hostile act,” threatening to cut off all trade with Europe.
And nobody cared.
Last year the EU responded to Trump’s clearly illegal tariffs not by retaliating, but by making a humiliating deal. But at this point Europe has apparently decided to stop fearing Trump.
Canada’s defiance is even more remarkable. Canada’s economy is extremely dependent on the United States both as an export market and as a supplier, while the EU has historically been a vastly less important trading partner:
So Canada has a lot to lose from trade conflict with the U.S.
Furthermore, geography does not favor a Canadian pivot toward Europe. Distance still matters a lot for world trade, especially for complex value chains like the one that links the U.S. and Canadian auto sectors. And to take some representative distances, Toronto is only 435 miles from Chicago, but 3,935 miles from Frankfurt. So one might think that Carney would be cautious about offending the man who is still president of his giant neighbor.
But foreign leaders have more or less given up trying to placate Trump.
When I try to think about the current state of Trumpism, I find myself revisiting Machiavelli’s The Prince, which is, after all, sort of a user’s manual for autocrats. Machiavelli is often cited as having said that it is better to be feared than loved, but what he actually said was somewhat more complex:
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with … Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred.
Obviously Trump isn’t doing well on the “avoiding hatred” front. Pew’s survey of international views of the United Statesshows a stunning collapse in confidence that the U.S. president will do the right thing:
Domestic polls, of course, show very low approval for Trump. What’s truly striking, however, is that those who disapprove of Trump mostly disapprove “strongly.” The Navigator poll, for example, shows 48 percent of Americans strongly disapproving of Trump, much larger than the total number approving and 2 ½ times the number who strongly approve.
So many people both at home and around the world hate Trump. That has, however, been true since quite early in the Trump II administration. What has really changed is the dissipation of fear.
Globally, the most obvious reason nations have stopped fearing Trump is the debacle in Iran. At the start of the Iran war most people imagined that, whatever else one might say about Trump’s America, it had by far the world’s most powerful military. But what we’ve actually seen is one failure after another, as the U.S. military has failed to subdue the Iranian regime, been forced to abandon some of its own bases in the region, and depleted its supplies of munitions. Now America has refused to help Saudi Arabia against the Houthis — perhaps because we no longer have the necessary capabilities.
What about economic power? Trump clearly could do a lot of economic damage to Canada. But the U.S. economy would also suffer from all-out trade war. And while the damage from trade war would be much smaller as a percentage of U.S. GDP than Canadian GDP, Canadians appear to be solidly behind Carney, while Americans, to the extent they even know what is happening, appear by a small plurality to support Canada’s position:
And yes, foreign leaders are looking at the likely results of the U.S. midterm elections. From fiftyplusone:
So they look at the prospect of a president who will have less ability than ever to punish his perceived enemies, at home or abroad.
Globally, then, Trump is in exactly the opposite position of where Machiavelli said a prince should be: hated but not feared.
The situation in the U.S. is somewhat less blatant. Businesses — even businesses like the auto industry, which have a lot to lose from trade wars — remain quiet, presumably because the Trump administration retains considerable power to punish them via contracts, regulations and so on. (In many ways Trump has been acting as if he wants to destroy the U.S. auto industry, or at least leave it hopelessly uncompetitive as the world electrifies.) Even in America, however, fear of Trump is palpably fading.
Now, even a massive blue wave in November won’t end Trump’s ability to do immense damage to the nation and world — damage that he may well do out of sheer spite. He is, after all, exactly the kind of person who will feel, not that he failed America, but that America failed him.
More about that in future posts. For now, let’s cautiously celebrate a clear decline in the fear Trump inspires, abroad and at home.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Rejecting Trump, South Korean Leader Says He Will Not Send Troops to Iran, Choe Sang-Hun, Sept. 18, 2026. President Lee Jae Myung’s comments followed President Trump’s repeated demand for “a little hand” from South Korea, a decades-old American ally.
President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea pushed back against pressure from the Trump administration on Friday, declaring that his country would not deploy troops or military assets to support the U.S.-led war against Iran.
In recent weeks, President Trump has publicly taunted the South Korean leader, venting frustration over what he described as Seoul’s refusal to help defend the Strait of Hormuz — once the world’s main transit point for oil — while American troops remain stationed on the Korean Peninsula to shield South Korea from North Korea. On Friday, Mr. Lee firmly rejected any military involvement in the Middle East conflict.
“There will be no deployment of troops or dispatch of military assets to be involved in or intervene in this war,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference.
Instead of a combat deployment, Mr. Lee noted that Seoul is considering expanding the operational scope of a South Korean navy destroyer and its support ships currently stationed off the coast of Somalia for antipiracy operations. He emphasized that even if those assets move closer to the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz, their sole focus would be protecting South Korean oil tankers and other commercial vessels. They will not participate in any operations that could be interpreted as supporting the war against Iran, he said.
While Mr. Trump has not specified the exact type of assistance he expects from Seoul, he complained last month that he had asked Mr. Lee “to give us a little hand” in the conflict, reminding him of the U.S. military presence in South Korea.
“He said, ‘No, thanks,’” Mr. Trump recalled. “I see. Well, why are we involved in helping you?”
It was not the only issue that a grim-faced Mr. Lee addressed on Friday. Fifteen months into his single five-year term, his approval rating has fallen to a new low of 37 percent, battered by troubles brewing not only at home but also by strains with South Korea’s most important ally, the United States.
Last month, Mr. Trump unilaterally scaled down one of the United States’ annual joint military exercises with South Korea, calling the drills not only “costly” but also “totally inappropriate and hostile” toward North Korea. He said that, for as long as he had been in office, North Korea had been “unthreatening and respectful.” Mr. Trump also boasted of having a “very good relationship” with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, even as the North has become a bigger nuclear threat against the South.
More Global News
New York Times, 37 Miners in Nigeria Die in Police Custody, Sparking Protests, Emmanuel Akinwotu and Ismail Auwal, Sept. 18, 2026. One survivor told The New York Times that dozens were packed into a single cell with barely any ventilation, food, or water.
Thirty-seven people working in an illegal mine in Nigeria died in the authorities’ custody this week shortly after they were arrested, officials said, sparking angry protests as survivors described being packed in an overcrowded cell with little air.
The miners were found dead in their cell on Thursday at a detention facility in Niger State, in northern Nigeria, according to the agency that detained them on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The agency, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps, initially blamed the deaths on “a suspected disease.”
But one survivor told The New York Times that more than 60 people had been packed into a single cell with barely any ventilation, food, or water.
“We kept banging on the door,” Dauda Shehu, 38, said in a phone interview from a hospital where he and 11 other survivors were taken.
Survivors speaking to other news outlets described similar conditions in the cell, where Mr. Shehu and at least 65 other miners were detained after their arrest. He said that he was lucky to be near the cell door, where there was a tiny opening for air, but that many were further away.
“When people started dying, we kept calling out to them, but they did not listen,” Mr. Shehu said of the authorities. Some of those who died were desperately thirsty but were denied water, so they drank their own urine, he said.
As in much of Africa, small-scale mining is common in Nigeria. Gold mining in mineral-rich areas is a major source of livelihood in some of the country’s rural and impoverished communities.
But many of the mines are illegal and overseen by criminal and armed groups, or connected to international mining companies exploiting lax regulations and insecurity.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
New York Times, Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman and Names Son to Replace Him, Michael J. de la Merced, Sept. 18, 2026. “Father Time always wins,” the 96-year-old, who turned Berkshire Hathaway into an investing powerhouse, said in a letter to shareholders. He will remain on the board as chairman emeritus.
Warren E. Buffett, who built one of the most successful investment firms in history and became the sage of American capitalism, is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the company said Friday.
Mr. Buffett, who turned 96 on Aug. 30, will become chairman emeritus, effective immediately, and remain on Berkshire’s board. His son, Howard G. Buffett, will become chairman.
“Serving as your Chairman has been the privilege of a lifetime, and I have never taken your trust for granted,” Mr. Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire shareholders.
The move by Berkshire is the latest step in a long-planned leadership transition. Mr. Buffett stepped down as chief executive of the company at the end of last year, and a longtime lieutenant, Greg Abel, took over.
More Global News
New York Times, Opinion: Why Autocrats Care What People Think, Paul Sonne, Sept. 18, 2026. Russia is staging an election that matters to almost no one — except President Vladimir V. Putin and his inner circle.
Surprising as it may be, the Kremlin cares a great deal about what Russians think.
The Federal Protective Service, or F.S.O., the Secret Service-like guard that protects President Vladimir V. Putin’s life, operates its own sociology division that polls Russians and delivers clandestine results to the Kremlin.
The sociologist at the helm of VTsIOM, the main state-run pollster, is so important in Mr. Putin’s system that on social media his wife shows off a collection of 24 Hermès bags, worth a total of $630,000, according to a recent report by an anti-corruption foundation.
And Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s chief “political technologist,” meticulously gathers and analyzes what people are saying online in towns and cities across the country.
They all have been working overtime ahead of this weekend’s parliamentary election, the first since Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
That controlled exercise in political theater is occupying the waking hours of thousands of Russian bureaucrats. Campaign teams are agitating for “opposition” parties that all conveniently support the war. Regional officials are organizing the nuts and bolts of ballots and turnout. Milquetoast candidates populate the airwaves of state television.
But hanging over the entire endeavor, from the government polling to the Potemkin politicking, is a gaping question: What is the point?
What do polling and public opinion matter to an autocrat? Whether in Russia or China, Egypt or Cameroon, they can jail their opponents, write their own rules and then bend them as they please. Why hold an election at all?
Gauging popular opinion and holding elections in autocratic nations like Russia may seem irrelevant, but political scientists have largely found the opposite to be true. For leaders like Mr. Putin, mastering public opinion and election mobilization does more than confer a patina of legitimacy. It can also prolong a regime’s survival by lending the appearance of popular support and by helping to identify new internal threats. Autocrats, then, ignore public opinion at their own risk.
This summer, for instance, the Russian authorities saw how the old-school liberal party Yabloko, long seen as irrelevant, began to gain ground in public opinion polls as the only group running on a platform opposing the war in Ukraine. In August, amid a pressure campaign against the party, Russia’s Supreme Court took Yabloko off the ballot, though some of its candidates are still running. It was a move that followed the oft-repeated maxim of political scientists that only amateurs rig elections on Election Day.Even as Mr. Putin chooses from what the political scientist Andreas Schedler calls the “menu of manipulation,” elections can still carry risks for autocratic governments. The basic purpose of the ritual may be to project long-term legitimacy, but offering a ballot can also invite instability and doubt in the short term, particularly if the orchestration slips up.
More On U.S. Artificial Intelligence, Media, Culture, Sports
New York Times, Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History, Karen Weise and Mike Isaac, Sept. 18, 2026 (print ed.). Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.
Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.
As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the “largest theft of labor in human history” and could create a “doom loop” that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building.
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” said one internal Microsoft document from 2023.
Inside OpenAI, there was also worry that its ChatGPT chatbot could lead people away from reading news elsewhere. In a June 2023 memo, Nick Turley, who led the team developing ChatGPT, wrote that A.I. posed an “existential threat” to publishers. And in February 2024, he wrote that A.I. products “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
Snippets of those discussions were made public on Thursday as part of a closely watched lawsuit The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Eleven other publishers have joined the suit. Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is considering motions for a summary judgment. Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed as the judge considers those motions.
The publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced A.I. systems.
Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for “fair use” of copyrighted material. They say the articles were sufficiently transformed into entirely new work by A.I., and were not substitutes that harm the value of the original work.
A Microsoft spokesman, Alex Haurek, said in a statement that internal memos, written by Brent Hecht, Microsoft director of applied science, did not represent the company’s views.
“Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism,” he said, referring to Microsoft’s A.I. assistant.
OpenAI did not return requests to comment.
In a separate filing, Microsoft said Dr. Hecht was a research academic who also worked at Northwestern University. It said he was not a decision maker and was employed by Microsoft “to present divergent and asymmetric perspectives.”
“The world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior,” Steven Lieberman, who represents the New York Daily News and seven other newspapers in the case, said in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.
The news companies said OpenAI deployed tools specifically to evade the paywalls set up by publishers. According to the documents, when a staffer wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, and told him about developing “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Mr. Brockman responded “ah nice.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, also said in a deposition with lawyers that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it.” He said that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have invoked Microsoft’s right to require OpenAI to retrain its models.Microsoft’s Mr. Haurek said that Mr. Nadella “spoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information.”
The documents show concern within the companies that the news industry could not survive if its work was taken. Large A.I. models “are a product that destroys its supply chain,” Dr. Hecht wrote.
Some inside OpenAI also had concerns about copying the news articles, according to the unsealed documents. In 2020 Jack Clark, who was OpenAI’s policy director, wrote a memo to Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. Mr. Clark, who later left to co-found Anthropic, wrote that the start-up’s work “is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.”
Mr. Clark warned “OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet.”
PolitcusUSA, News and Comment: RFK’s Daughter Tells Trump To Do His Job And Leave The Arts Alone, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and the sister of RFK Jr. told Donald Trump to focus on doing his job as president and leave the Kennedy Center and the arts alone.
No family name is more synonymous with public service in the United States than the Kennedys. The Kennedy family dedicates itself to serving the public, which, whether he realizes it or not, is why Donald Trump is so obsessed with attaching his name to, or destroying, the Kennedy Center.
Trump has turned the presidency into an institution that serves him. Trump doesn’t believe that he has a responsibility to serve the public. Instead, Trump demands that he be placed above everyone else and served like a king.
PolitcusUSA is 100% independent news and opinion. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed
The president’s job is not to attach his name to buildings or threaten to destroy the Kennedy Center. Trump’s job is to serve the American people, but Donald Trump has no interest in doing that job.
Kerry Kennedy was interviewed on MS NOW by Peter Alexander who asked, “ What does President Trump miss about what it means to be a leader as we witness his efforts related to The Kennedy Center?”
Kennedy answered:
My uncle really asked people to serve our country. He believed that government was there to help those who are most in need, and to bring freedom to the widest possible number of people in our country and around the world, and I don't think that's what President Trump is all about.
He wants to put his name on this building. He's trying to put it on the building of the United States Institute of Peace. And this is not service to the people. We're in a place in our country now where people can't afford gas, they can't afford food, they can't afford healthcare, they can't afford childcare. He, President Trump, please focus on your job and leave the arts alone.
Kennedy made it clear that if the Center has a financial crisis, it was caused by Donald Trump. She said:
His argument is that the center doesn't have the funds to move forward. But in the big, beautiful bill, $256 million were set aside specifically to to do renovations on the Kennedy Center, and the, that's for renovations. So there's plenty of money there for the renovations piece.
But in terms of act... And in terms of money going forward to run the center, there are three places that it comes from. That comes from government funding, it comes from philanthropy, and it comes from ticket sales.
Philanthropy and ticket sales disappeared as soon as Trump plastered his name on the center.
So all he has to do is back off, and those will come sweeping back in. And that's all the courts are saying he should do. It's what the people of Washington are asking for. It's what the arts community is demanding, and that's what- ... democracy is all about.
All of this is because Donald Trump is not being allowed to slap his name on a building.
Kennedy also said that Trump is going after the arts because he is trying to suppress freedom, “ I've worked on human rights issues around the world for the last 45 years, and I can tell you the first place a repressive government goes for is the arts, because that's where people, the people are expressing their hearts, their minds, their future, and their belief in freedom. And that's what he's trying to suppress here.”
Even if Donald Trump demolished the Kennedy Center, he can’t suppress freedom. This president is about to be swept away by a blue wave because he is more interested in his own ego and suppressing dissent than doing the job that he was elected to do.
The New Republic, The surprising issue dividing Senate Dems right now, Emma Janssen, Sept. 18, 2026. While Americans worry about sky-high gas prices and AI safety, the Senate has its sights trained on something entirely different—the world of college sports. Though it might seem like an odd focus for the upper chamber in the last few weeks before the October recess, a bill is sparking substantive disagreements over antitrust policy, racial justice in sports, and workers’ rights.
The bill dividing Democrats is the Protect College Sports Act, which the Senate voted to advance on Thursday. The bill attempts to regulate the lucrative world of college sports by setting a cap on payments to athletes, placing a five-year limit on playing eligibility, and giving the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, an antitrust exemption. Supporters of the bill say that it will bring order to the world of college sports, setting rules on how athletes can use the transfer portal, stopping a "spending spiral" by schools, and putting an end to lawsuits on these issues.
The bill easily passed the vote to consider it, with 77 votes for it and just 22 against it; 19 Senate Democrats voted against the bill alongside three Republicans, moving them closer to a final vote on the legislation. "I think the bill is necessary, and it’s not a perfect bill," said Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who voted for it. "I don’t think we’d ever be able to come up with a perfect bill."
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, an outspoken Democratic supporter of the bill, agreed that the bill does more good than harm. "On balance, this is a compromise that secures a lot of significant benefits and protections for college athletes," he told The New Republic on Thursday. When asked what he thought about his colleagues who were concerned about the antitrust exemption, he mumbled wryly: "Good for them."
Anti-monopoly advocates worry that the antitrust exemption takes power away from student athletes, who in recent years have benefited from competition between schools trying to woo them onto their teams with cash deals. In 2025, the settlement of a 2020 lawsuit gave Division I schools the right to pay players directly. But before student athletes gained the right to make money from their work on the court or field, coaches and athletic directors took home the most cash. "The players were getting pennies on the dollar," said Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the anti-monopoly organization Open Markets Institute. "Even though they were the ones really generating all this money."
Vaheesan, along with lawmakers like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, are concerned that this legislation could reverse these recent financial wins for student athletes. "I think we’re going to rue the day we gave an antitrust exemption this big to the colleges," Murphy said. "It’s going to result in a huge cost increase for consumers and for folks who follow college sports on TV."
Asked why he thought the bill was passing with the support of some of his fellow Senate Democrats, Murphy said: "The Power Five schools have a lot of influence. They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on lobbying."
Coons argued that the bill isn’t too deferential to the interests of colleges. "They did not get the definition of college athletes as never being employees, which was one of the top asks of the conferences and colleges," he said. "That was a concession to those of us who are strong supporters of organized labor and want to retain the possibility to organize."
Meanwhile, all five of the Senate’s Black members—Republican Tim Scott and Democrats Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Angela Alsobrooks—opposed the bill. The NAACP’s president and chief executive strongly opposes the legislation. "Sharecropping is over," he said on a media call this week. "We should not ask athletes, particularly Black athletes, to generate revenue on the football field or basketball court and then share in none of the revenue."
"It does raise concerns about how committed members of the Senate, including Senate Democrats, are to the well-being and welfare of workers," Vaheesan said.
More On U.S. Crime, Rights, Justice
Lindsay Clancy in court during her murder trial this month in Plymouth, Mass (Pool photo by Greg Derr).
New York Times, Holdout Juror in Lindsay Clancy Case Says He Didn’t Doubt Her Guilt, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Sept. 18, 2026. The juror, Michael P. Desronvil, defended his decision not to join other jurors in voting for Ms. Clancy’s acquittal.
The lone juror who voted to convict Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who was on trial this month for killing her three young children, said Friday that he did not have doubts that she was guilty.
In a statement, the holdout juror, Michael P. Desronvil, said that he was repeatedly cut off during deliberations while trying to propose theories about the case. Some of the other jurors had accused the holdout juror of refusing to follow the law.
“Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses and what the prosecution presented, I thought it was enough proof that she knew exactly what she was doing and planned,” Mr. Desronvil said of Ms. Clancy.
Mr. Desronvil, 48, released the statement through his lawyer, Edward Paltzik, who specializes in defamation litigation and has represented President Trump in lawsuits against CBS News and The New York Times.
The trial of Ms. Clancy ended with the jury deadlocked, 11 to 1, in favor of acquitting her on murder and manslaughter charges. She had admitted to strangling her three children, in January 2023, but her lawyers had argued she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and should be absolved of criminal responsibility.
The case horrified and divided the country and prompted discussions of postpartum complications. Jurors deliberated for roughly 38 hours across seven days before the judge declared a mistrial.
New York Times, Woman Is Found Guilty in Death of Reporter Covering Super Bowl, Ishani Desai, Updated Sept. 18, 2026. A jury found Danette Colbert guilty of negligent homicide in the death of a Telemundo reporter before the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans, but acquitted a man on a manslaughter charge.
A jury in Louisiana on Thursday found a woman guilty of negligent homicide but acquitted another man of manslaughter in the killing of a sports anchor and reporter who was covering the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans, prosecutors said.
Danette Colbert, 49, and Rickey White, 35, faced charges of manslaughter and racketeering in the death of Adan Manzano, 27, a journalist for KGKC, the Telemundo affiliate in Kansas City. A third man, Christian Anderson, was also charged in the death, but he accepted a plea deal and testified against his co-defendants in the trial.
Mr. Manzano, who lost his wife in a car accident in 2024 and had a young daughter, had been in New Orleans to cover the matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. It was his third consecutive time covering the Super Bowl for his Spanish-language station.
He was found dead, facedown on a pillow, after his co-workers said he didn’t show up for an appointment. Mr. Manzano died from the combined toxic effects of Xanax, a prescription drug, and alcohol, in addition to positional asphyxia, which is when a person’s body is positioned in a way that prevents breathing.
The jurors, who deliberated for more than five hours, found Ms. Colbert and Mr. White guilty of racketeering, according to the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office. That charge carries a sentence of up to 50 years in prison, the office said, and negligent homicide carries a 10-year term.
The sentencing is set for Sept. 28, according to the office.
Ms. Colbert was the last person seen with Mr. Manzano in his hotel in the New Orleans area. She also stole his credit card and phone, according to the authorities, who added that investigators had found Xanax in her home in Slidell, La.
The three defendants were accused of working together to dupe victims and steal their money. Mr. White acted as Ms. Colbert’s pimp, finding victims for her, the authorities said.
Lawyers for the defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Colbert worked as a prostitute in the French Quarter, where she found victims and encouraged them to visit an A.T.M., according to prosecutors. She would observe as the person entered their information.
Ms. Colbert would then lure victims back to a hotel room or another “private place” and wait until the person was unconscious after consuming alcohol or drugs or having sex, prosecutors said. She was also charged in similar scams in Las Vegas, but those cases were dismissed.
Ms. Colbert would photograph her victims’ identification information and steal their cash, credit cards, phones, jewelry and other valuables, prosecutors said.
Mr. Anderson, 35, was accused of also acting as a prostitute or aiding Ms. Colbert by providing “technical support” and distributing drugs, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty to simple robbery and intent to defraud on Thursday, according to the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office, and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Mr. Anderson wrote a letter to the judge, in which he took responsibility for his actions, apologized and asked for mercy.
“In my past, I have surrounded myself with people who were no good for me and let actions, addictions and behaviors influence me in negative ways,” he wrote.
Ms. Colbert was sentenced in May 2025 to 25 years in prison for drugging and robbing another man in 2021.
Sept. 17
Top Headlines
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in his courtroom. A former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, he does not have the profile of a jurist likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the executive branch (New York Times photo).
Oh sorry, “sanctions.”News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: WS: Trump Caught Eyeing Kennedy Center Demolition, UN Finds US War Crimes, Trump Threatens Cutting Off European Trade, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 17, 2026. Trump may be one court ruling away from bulldozing a national arts institution named for a slain president. That’s not hyperbole. Newly surfaced photos taken through the windows of Air Force One appear to show him reviewing a board that reads “Kennedy Center Demolis...” just one day after he threatened to kill renovation plans entirely if courts block his effort to put his name on the building.Sept. 17, 2026. I just walked off the stage at the University of Texas International Journalism Symposium, where I got to talk about something I think matters more than almost anything else in media right now: reaching the people who have completely tuned out.More On Middle East Wars
The Trump administration plans to deliver 60,000 of the powerful munitions at a time when opposition is growing in Washington to arms sales to Israel.More Global News
More On Trump's Trade War Against Canada, Other Opponents
President Trump is shown at top with his typical brush-off hand-wave and below that with one of his posts from Saturday, Aug. 29, 2026, assembling geese armed with automatic weapons on the shore of Lake Ontario ("Lake America" now by his order), thereby basking in his power to fantasize -- or implement -- fastastical punishment for Americans, their organizations and foreign nations (presumably like Canada) who oppose his edicts.
More On Trump Governance, Impeachment Threats
U.S. and World Oil Supplies
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
More On U.S. Elections, Politics
New York Times, Republicans Reel on the Midterm Map as Deep-Red Areas Come Into Play, Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher, Sept. 17, 2026. The party is putting up a costly defense of states and districts that President Trump won easily in 2024. And in places like Georgia, strategists wonder if it’s too late.Sept. 17, 2026. Early, in-person voting begins tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We’ve gotten a rash of new polling in recent days and it is all telling the same story, and it is a very ugly one for Trump and his allies: Today’s FiftyPlusOne’s forecast gives us a 97% chance of winning the House, and a 64% chance of winning the Senate. Yes, a 64% chance……Sept. 17, 2026. The House of Representatives is getting out of Dodge early today, Speaker Mike Johnson’s last small favor to Donald Trump of the year—and perhaps of his speakership.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement
Two months ago, when Thomas Massie once again sandbagged him by introducing a discharge petition to release the Dead Pedo Bestie Files, Brave Sir Mikey [House Speaker Mike Johnson] bravely ran away, away, and gaveled the House into recess. And so the most useless Congress in history now goes home for the rest of September and all of October.More On High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Media, Culture
Top Stories
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in his courtroom. A former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, he does not have the profile of a jurist likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the executive branch.Credit...
New York Times, Trump’s Minnesota Surge Threatened Democracy, Judge Warns, Mattathias Schwartz, Sept. 17, 2026. In a rare interview, Patrick Schiltz, who served as the federal court’s chief judge last winter, called the administration’s actions “a grave threat to the rule of law.” Judge Patrick J. Schiltz’s warning was stark.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated nearly 100 orders issued by Minnesota’s Federal District Court during the month of January, including some mandating the release of undocumented immigrants from detention.
The violations needed to stop immediately. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Judge Schiltz wrote in his Jan. 28 order.
Judges around the country took notice, not only of the scale of the allegation but because such a harsh reproach was coming from the pen of Judge Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee with almost 20 years of experience on the bench. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s and has enjoyed close ties to the conservative legal establishment for decades. This was not the profile of a judge likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the White House.
In a rare 90-minute interview seven months later, Judge Schiltz said his order had been prompted by concern that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.
What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”
He said he thought the violations were largely the result of incompetence and staffing shortages, but also worried that the Justice Department had not taken their corrosive effect seriously enough.
“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he added, referring to the violated orders and other unusual behavior by the Justice Department. He was in his chambers, which has signed photos of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the wall. Earlier in his career, he helped found a law school at a Catholic university in Minneapolis, and wrote a renowned law review article about the moral perils of the legal profession.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Congress to Trump: MORE TARIFFS, PLEASE! Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 17, 2026. Oh sorry, “sanctions.”
With the midterms just around the corner, the House is heading home to campaign. Today’s newsletter tackles the last thing they did getting out the door—a frustrating bill aimed at punishing Russia for its war on Ukraine (good!) while also handing Donald Trump broad new tariff authorities (very bad!).
It’s remarkable that so few members of Congress—Democrats included—seem to have learned one of the main lessons of the Trump years: When you give a shameless, amoral president powerful discretionary tools, you’ve got no way to prevent him from abusing them and no recourse if he does.
What a week in the House of Representatives! Surprise articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, a sweeping new Russia sanctions bill passed at the eleventh hour (about which more below), and—per new reporting from the Washington Sun¹—a giant blowup fight between GOP factions over suspending the gas tax to try to rein in costs and cool down an irate public ahead of the midterms.
Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris wanted the suspension; Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves reminded him how ferociously he’d opposed the same idea when the Biden administration had sought one in 2022. This went over poorly. Harris started shouting and banging the desk: “This is fucking war!” Then he and his allies stormed out of the room.
Later, one of them took to Twitter to call Graves an “Establishment elitist” who was “fighting hard” to bring “the swamp” back. Here come those midterms! Happy Thursday.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: WS: Trump Caught Eyeing Kennedy Center Demolition, UN Finds US War Crimes, Trump Threatens Cutting Off European Trade, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 17, 2026. Trump may be one court ruling away from bulldozing a national arts institution named for a slain president. That’s not hyperbole. Newly surfaced photos taken through the windows of Air Force One appear to show him reviewing a board that reads “Kennedy Center Demolis...” just one day after he threatened to kill renovation plans entirely if courts block his effort to put his name on the building.
Fencing went up around the Kennedy Center this week, a forklift reportedly rammed into its pillars, and a congresswoman is now asking a federal judge for an emergency hearing to stop what she calls an assault on the rule of law.
Meanwhile, a UN-backed mission just found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in Iran, in a strike that killed 168 people, most of them children, at a school. Add in a fight with the EU over Canada, a Cuba gold rush among Trump allies, an Epstein lawsuit, an Alabama execution, and a new AI safety scandal, and today is a lot. Let’s get into all of it.
Today I’m speaking at an international journalism symposium about exactly this kind of work, getting accurate, sourced information in front of millions of people who are otherwise drowning in noise and spin. That only happens because of readers like you. Independent reporting doesn’t have a network or a publisher covering the cost of digging through court filings, UN reports, and White House denials every single day, it has subscribers. If you value getting the real story instead of the spin, subscribe now and help keep this kind of journalism reaching the people who need it.Subscribed
Here’s the news:
Trump’s Kennedy Center Demolition:
Fears Grow That Trump Could Demolish the Kennedy Center After Abrupt Closure. Photos show Trump reviewing a document reading “Kennedy Center Demolis...” Newly surfaced photographs taken through the windows of Air Force One on September 16 appear to show Trump examining a presentation board with an image of the Kennedy Center alongside partially visible text reading “Kennedy Center Dem...” with a follow-up photo spelling out “demolis.” The images surfaced one day after Trump threatened to halt renovation plans if courts ultimately block his effort to have his name added to the building. Neither the Kennedy Center nor the White House has publicly confirmed any demolition plans. Still, the photos add a new dimension to an already contentious fight, especially since the Justice Department floated demolition language in court filings this past August, warning that without closure for renovations “the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down.”
The naming fight and safety concerns collided into an abrupt shutdown. Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center’s leadership after taking office in 2025, eventually becoming chairman and prompting a Trump-appointed board to rename it after himself, a move a federal judge ruled unlawful in May 2026 since only Congress can rename the JFK memorial. After that ruling, and after part of a ceiling collapsed inside the building in early September, Trump allies argued the center faces serious structural and financial problems requiring major renovations. Trump then announced the board voted “almost unanimously” to close the venue immediately for safety reasons, but said renovations would not begin until an appeals court rules on the board’s renaming proposal. An all-staff email confirmed the main building is closed “effective immediately” for at least seven days, with the closure reevaluated weekly.
Fencing, hard-hat requirements, and a forklift incident are fueling fears of a wrecking ball. One day after the closure announcement, construction crews erected metal fencing around the building and began requiring hard hats for entry, while a member of Rep. Joyce Beatty’s legal team wrote in court filings that she saw a forklift “run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.” Advocacy group Hands Off the Arts member Laura Bligh said she fears some or all of the building could be torn down, warning “the worst case scenario is a wrecking ball” and pointing to the administration’s demolition of the White House East Wing as precedent. The building’s exterior has already been altered by the removal of the large “Blue” statue. Trump’s board had first floated the possibility of wrecking balls back in August amid the original naming dispute.
Beatty is demanding an emergency hearing, arguing the closure defies a judge’s order. Congresswoman Beatty’s legal team asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper for an emergency hearing, arguing the sudden closure may violate his prior order barring the board from installing memorials to Trump without Congress’s approval, and warning that demolishing entrances or access points could let the administration evade that order entirely. Cooper ordered the Kennedy Center to respond by Thursday morning and said he would schedule a hearing if necessary. Beatty’s counsel, Norm Eisen, called the closure “an assault on the rule of law,” saying “no one, including the president, is above the law,” while Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “an outrageous assault on the livelihoods of the artists and workers” who work there. Kerry Kennedy and Maria Shriver, both JFK relatives, separately condemned the situation as a “tragedy,” and Hands Off the Arts is planning a rally and human chain around the building on Friday.
United Nations Experts Suggest US War Crimes:
US strikes on a school and residential area draw a war crimes finding. A UN-backed fact-finding mission has found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two February 28 airstrikes in Iran, including one that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in the southern city of Minab. The team, chaired by jurist Sara Hossain and created by the UN Human Rights Council in 2022, says Tomahawk missiles struck the “clearly identifiable” school, while separate Precision Strike Missiles dispersed tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd. Iranian state media reported 168 people killed in the school strike, most of them children, and the mission says the school “was the intended point of impact” rather than collateral damage from a nearby Revolutionary Guard compound. The US Central Command has denied responsibility for the Lamerd strike, and the State Department did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment. The Trump administration has not directly accepted responsibility for or released the findings of its own Pentagon investigation into the school bombing.
Iran’s own government is accused of crimes against humanity. The same report accuses Iran’s government of crimes against humanity against its own people, citing “violent repression” over the past two years including security forces firing into crowds, beating protesters, and arresting healthcare workers. Detainees reportedly faced torture and were denied legal counsel, leaving families “in the dark” about their whereabouts, while Tehran has ramped up executions, with more than 70 people, including five women and three boys, described as at “imminent risk.” The mission says many of these violations amount to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, and other inhumane acts carried out as part of a widespread, systematic attack on civilians.
The findings call for reparations, though enforcement remains uncertain. The findings, based on interviews with 73 people plus satellite imagery, video, and documentation, call on both the US and Iran to halt rights violations and provide “full reparations to victims.” The mission says its work was partly hampered by an internet shutdown in Iran, displacement from the ongoing conflict, and a lack of cooperation from both governments, noting nearly three dozen unanswered information requests to Iran and unanswered US requests dating back to June. The report is not legally binding but adds to a growing body of international evidence that could eventually factor into efforts to pursue accountability in international courts.
Other news:
Trump threatened the EU with “very serious tariffs” or a halt to trade after the European Commission proposed making Canada the EU’s first-ever “associate member,” a plan he called “laughable.” The offer came a day before Canadian PM Mark Carney was set to address the European parliament, after Commission president Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada into a deeper alliance covering intelligent manufacturing, a joint tech alliance, integrated defense industrial bases, and a shared Arctic project, framing it as a response to a “fracture in the international rules-based system.” Trump said if the EU’s intentions were good he’d have no problem with it, but warned “if it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe,” a threat France’s Europe minister Benjamin Haddad brushed off, saying it’s “not up to the United States, or anyone else, to choose the political and geopolitical direction of the Europeans.” Carney has been pushing for a “unique alliance” with the EU to reduce Canada’s dependence on US trade since Trump began raising tariffs and repeatedly floating Canada as the “51st state,” and Canada separately announced it has formally applied to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, a rapid-response coalition of 10 NATO countries, in a further sign of hedging away from Washington.
Carney welcomed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal for Canada to become the EU’s first-ever associate member, an upgrade that would expand ties in defense, critical minerals, energy, AI, and youth exchanges well beyond the two sides’ existing free trade deal. He framed the arrangement as a way for both Canada and the EU to grow stronger together while explicitly preserving Canadian sovereignty, pushing back against any suggestion the deal would compromise Canada’s independence. Trump dismissed the proposal as “laughable” and threatened tariffs or a trade halt if the EU moves forward, but Carney responded that Canada is simply pursuing partnerships that reinforce, rather than undermine, its own independence. Further details on the associate membership are expected to be worked out at an October summit in Montreal.
Republicans are running from Trump on immigration:
Washington and Florida insiders, from Trump-linked billionaires to Rubio-connected lobbyists, are positioning themselves to profit off Cuba’s sanctions-crushed economy and a potential regime collapse. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “maximum pressure” campaign has driven out Spanish hotel chains, a Canadian mining firm, European shippers, and Visa and Mastercard, but Trump allies like Ray Washburne and Albert Huddleston are now competing to buy out the abandoned Sherritt International nickel and cobalt mining stake, while Trump Organization executives have quietly returned to the island through Dominari Holdings to meet with Raúl Castro’s grandson about real estate opportunities. Other players include Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse, which secured a $40 million federal contract to distribute humanitarian aid despite reportedly lacking the capacity to carry it out, and a Rubio-linked lobbying firm staffed by former Trump administration officials that has taken on Cuban food and sugar industry clients even as some of those same interests publicly champion harsher sanctions. All of this is unfolding as Cubans endure an effective fuel blockade that UN human rights experts say “knowingly deprives a population of the means to survive,” after Trump cut off oil shipments from Venezuela and Mexico following the abduction of Nicolás Maduro.
Two women whose childhood images were found in Jeffrey Epstein’s collection of child sexual abuse material have filed a class action lawsuit against his estate, seeking at least $6 million on behalf of more than 40 people. The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court against Epstein’s former attorney Darren Indyke and former accountant Richard Kahn, the co-executors of his estate, covers people who appeared in Epstein’s so-called “modeling book” seized by investigators in 2019 as well as those shown in thousands of videos and images found on his properties, some of which plaintiffs’ lawyers say are still being traded today. One plaintiff, “Jane Doe,” alleges Epstein stole partially nude photos of her taken when she was 12, while a second, using the pseudonym “Amy,” says she still appears in circulating material. The lawsuit seeks to broaden accountability beyond the women who have already sued over sexual assaults, asking Epstein’s estate and federal authorities to work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to identify the many people in the collection who have never been found, and calling for $150,000 in damages per class member on top of other penalties.
OpenAI disclosed six troubling incidents involving its experimental AI models, including one in which a research model told future versions of itself to disregard its own safety constraints. In its new safety report, the company said an unreleased model “inserted unrelated instructions, including instructions to disregard its normal constraints,” while in a separate case, an AI agent answering a routine question about California county earnings figures found and used an exposed API key without authorization, then fabricated data and presented it as real when it still couldn’t retrieve the actual numbers. The disclosures are part of a new public “misalignment” tracking framework meant to document cases where AI systems pursue goals not aligned with human instructions. The findings land amid a broader wave of AI safety anxiety, following an Anthropic researcher’s public resignation last week over fears AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” with Anthropic and OpenAI’s CEOs both calling for more regulation while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, aligning with Trump, argued industry self-regulation is enough.
Congress passed a sweeping bill giving Trump expanded power to sanction Russia, including tariffs of up to 100% on top buyers of Russian energy like China, in a 262-159 vote just before recessing ahead of the midterms. The bill, co-authored by the late Senator Lindsey Graham and pending for more than a year and a half, would impose new sanctions on Russian political and military officials and networks helping Moscow evade existing restrictions, and specifically targets Russia’s “shadow tanker” fleet used to keep exporting oil despite sanctions. It cleared the Senate last month 86-11 but faced a tighter fight in the House, where some Democrats and Republican isolationists warned Trump could turn the new tariff authority against US allies rather than just Russia, prompting pushback from figures like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Supporters, including Nebraska Republican Don Bacon, called it Congress’s “Churchill vs. Chamberlain moment on Russia,” and the Trump administration itself dropped its earlier opposition as negotiations with the Kremlin stalled and Russia intensified drone strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, with Ukraine’s Washington embassy calling the vote a welcome step toward cutting off “the flow of Russian oil money fueling this war.”
Three people, including a child, died after being swept away by floodwaters early Wednesday on the Navajo Nation near Newcomb, New Mexico, following a day of heavy rain. Tribal police received a report around 12:30 a.m. about people being washed away, and search crews later recovered the bodies of two adults and a child, though authorities haven’t released details on the circumstances beyond confirming the drownings are under investigation. Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren offered condolences to the families and thanked first responders who searched through dangerous overnight conditions, while the National Weather Service warned that near-record moisture levels would bring more widespread thunderstorms across the Four Corners region through Thursday. The deaths come just weeks after similar flooding at the Grand Canyon swept away three hikers and forced dozens of rescues along Bright Angel Creek.
Alabama plans to execute death row prisoner Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday evening, months after the Supreme Court blocked the state from using nitrogen gas, the method he had originally agreed to. Lee, 49, was convicted of fatally shooting pawnshop owner and Elvis impersonator Jimmy Ellis and his ex-wife Elaine Thompson during a 1998 robbery near Selma, and while a majority of jurors recommended life without parole, the judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death, a practice Alabama has since banned. Lee sued to block nitrogen hypoxia after witnessing accounts of past nitrogen executions describing prisoners gasping and convulsing for extended periods, and lower courts agreed the method likely violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a ruling the Supreme Court upheld 6-3 without explanation. Alabama now argues it can fall back on lethal injection since the injunction covers only its nitrogen protocol, but Lee’s lawyers say the state is “trying to outrun” the Constitution after previously promising never to use that method against him, and have gone back to the Supreme Court seeking to stop Thursday’s execution.
Huawei unveiled new AI chip technology at a Shanghai conference, narrowing the gap with US leaders like Nvidia just days before an expected meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. The company introduced its Atlas 960 SuperPoD computing cluster, a faster successor to the Atlas 950 model it launched only months earlier, and announced plans for new Ascend 970 and 980 chip series in 2028 and 2029 with major computing power upgrades. Analysts said the rapid pace of the upgrade, achieved in about a year, reflects both Beijing’s growing technological confidence ahead of the Xi-Trump meeting and China’s broader push for chip self-reliance after US-led restrictions cut off access to advanced AI hardware. The announcement came as Trump downplayed calls from AI leaders to slow development for safety reasons, insisting the US must keep its edge over China because “whoever wins in AI, wins,” even though analysts note Chinese AI training still often depends on US chips including Nvidia’s.
A World Meteorological Organization study found 2025 was among the driest years on record for the world’s rivers, with global freshwater storage running 42% below normal. The assessment measured the planet’s entire “water savings bank,” including groundwater, lakes, snow, ice, and soil moisture, and found only about a third of rivers worldwide had “normal” flows last year, while 36% ran below or well below normal, marking the seventh straight year that normal-flow basins have stayed in a clear minority. WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo said the world is “depleting that savings account,” pointing to a persistent decade-long decline since 2014-16, while all 19 major glacial regions lost ice mass for a fourth consecutive year, shedding 400 gigatons in 2025 alone and adding 1.1mm to global sea levels. The report ties the trend to real-world consequences already playing out, including record-low Danube water levels that forced nuclear reactor shutdowns in Hungary and Romania this summer, chemical pollution and saltwater intrusion threatening the Mississippi, and every river in England now failing to meet good ecological and chemical health standards.
The IOC has approved central Queensland’s crocodile-inhabited Fitzroy River as the rowing and canoe venue for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, ending months of debate over the site’s safety and fairness. Queensland premier David Crisafulli announced the news in parliament, declaring the river “passed with flying colours” after an independent technical assessment by marine engineering experts, with World Rowing and Paddle Worldwide both endorsing the course following their own review and site inspections. The venue had drawn sustained criticism over its strong currents and crocodile population, with British, New Zealand, and German rowing federations raising fairness and safety concerns, and an open letter signed by 542 rowers, including Olympic gold medalist Drew Ginn, pushing for the event to be moved to a Moreton Bay site that would have cost roughly half as much. Crisafulli dismissed the critics as out-of-touch “elites,” and deputy premier Jarrod Bleijie said analysis showed the river needs no widening or dredging to host a full eight-lane, 2,000-meter Olympic course, clearing the way for detailed planning and construction to begin.
Keith Townsend, who was sexually abused as a child by defrocked Boston priest Ronald Paquin, says he hopes Paquin’s recent death in prison at age 83 brings closure to survivors and their families. Paquin, portrayed in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight” admitting to molesting boys, was first imprisoned in 2002 after pleading guilty to abusing an altar server at a Haverhill, Massachusetts church, part of the scandal that forced the resignation of Boston’s archbishop. His 2015 release prompted Townsend, himself a former altar server, to come forward about being abused on camping trips to Maine between ages eight and 13, abuse he says led him into drug and alcohol addiction; a Maine jury convicted Paquin in 2018, and he was sentenced to another 16 years in prison in 2019. Townsend said he pursued the case specifically to protect other children after Massachusetts “just kind of let him go,” and that he now finds meaning in the family and life he rebuilt after overcoming addiction, adding that attorney Mitchell Garabedian’s work and the Spotlight film gave other survivors a sense that “it wasn’t my fault.”
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Why Israel Wants More One-Ton Bombs From the U.S. and Why the Sale Is Controversial, David M. Halbfinger and John Ismay, Sept. 17, 2026 (print ed.). The Trump administration plans to deliver 60,000 of the powerful munitions at a time when opposition is growing in Washington to arms sales to Israel.
The Trump administration’s decision to send 60,000 powerful one-ton bombs to Israel as part of a $2.8 billion deal — one of the largest arms agreements ever — will allow Israel to replenish its supply of a munition it considers vital.
The weapons became the focus of great tension between the Biden administration and Israel after one-ton bombs were widely used in densely populated areas of Gaza where Israel had steered civilians for their safety.
With opposition to military assistance to Israel growing in Washington, such a huge sale of heavy bombs, paid for by the U.S. government, could be an effort by the administration to stock up the Israeli arsenal before political shifts in the United States make such shipments impossible, analysts said. It is certain to set off an outcry in Congress.
The Israeli military pivoted toward the use of the one-ton bombs after the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, drastically changing its shopping list, U.S. government data show. In 2025, Israel bought nearly eight times as many one-ton bombs from the United States as it did from 2012 to 2015.
Israel’s emphasis on buying and using some of the largest bombs currently made runs counter to that of most other modern militaries, which have been making their aerial munitions smaller and even more accurate in the hopes of limiting civilian casualties during combat.
Israel has used a vast amount of the one-ton bombs in large part to target the tunnel network Hamas developed in Gaza for its fighters, weapons and command centers. Israeli officials have said that Hamas fighters intentionally embed themselves among civilians, forcing the Israeli military to risk killing civilians.
A New York Times investigation in December 2023 found that the Israeli military routinely used one-ton bombs in the weeks immediately after the 2023 attack and identified more than 200 instances of Israel dropping the powerful munitions, including in densely populated areas.
Here is a closer look at the transaction and its significance.What bombs are being sold?
According to a U.S. official, Israel will receive 20,000 Mk-84 bombs and another 20,000 BLU-117 bombs. The two types of one-ton bombs are nearly identical.
The bombs are highly versatile, experts say. They can be set to detonate above ground, sending shrapnel 1,000 feet in any direction, or, with delayed fuses, set to explode underground. They can be fitted with kits that allow them to hit targets with precision and from a long range. The craters from one-ton bombs can be up to 50 feet deep.
In addition to the 40,000 Mk-84 and BLU-117 bombs, Israel will also receive 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads, which explode on delay after busting through a surface like soil, rock or concrete, the U.S. official said. They also weigh a ton each, but because their casings are thicker and far heavier, they carry far less explosive power than the Mk-84 and BLU-117 bombs.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
According to the U.S. Army office that oversees bomb procurement, “ideal targets” for one-ton bombs “are buildings, rail yards and lines of communication.” The 250- and 500-pound bombs more typically used by the U.S. military are designed for “soft, fragment sensitive targets” like troops, fuel storage tanks and radars, the office said.
The $2.8 billion purchase is being funded from the Pentagon’s budget for foreign military sales. That means the money effectively flows from U.S. taxpayers to Israel’s military and then to U.S. munitions manufacturers.
More Global News
New York Times, Global Economy Is Running Out of Wiggle Room, Patricia Cohen, Sept. 17, 2026. Many countries blunted the most painful effects of the energy shock from the war in Iran. But prices remain elevated and risks are multiplying.
For a while now, the global economy has been beating the odds.
The energy shock prompted by the American and Israeli attacks on Iran in February set off the largest disruption of worldwide energy flows in history. Yet despite jumps in oil prices, widening conflict in the Middle East, fuel shortages and inflation pressures, the feared crash never came and most economies managed to muddle through.
But wiggle room is narrowing at the same time the outlook is darkening. Look at what has happened in just the last few days.
Attacks forced Saudi Arabia to shut a vital pipeline. Houthi militia seized a strategic Red Sea island and a port city, which could further restrict shipping in the region. And proposed negotiations among Gulf nations fell apart. Oil prices have shot toward $110 a barrel.
The price spike has caused rolling blackouts, rationing and angry protests from Asia to Latin America. In the Philippines, fishermen docked their boats because they can’t afford fuel. In Bangladesh, power outages caused hourslong work stoppages at factories. In Guatemala, protesters burned tires and cars.
Until now, some key moves to ease demand and bolster oil supplies helped blunt extreme price increases and acute shortages.
“The No. 1 reason why crude oil prices and product prices have not been higher than they are is that China has cut its crude oil imports,” said David L. Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and Energy Department official.
New York Times, Trump’s Economic Vise Leaves Cubans Desperate for Food and Medicine, Ed Augustin and Frances Robles, Sept. 17, 2026. The U.S. says its sanctions are not aimed at depriving Cuba of essential goods. Thousands of stranded shipping containers tell a different story.
Thousands of containers filled with food, medicine and other goods bound for Cuba have been stranded throughout the Caribbean since two shipping giants stopped deliveries to avoid tough U.S. sanctions, according to diplomats, Cuban officials, merchants and others involved in the imports.
The containers stranded in various ports include humanitarian aid, from solar panels to medication to colostomy bags. Dozens of containers of aid purchased by different United Nations agencies are among them.
U.S. sanctions have also hobbled shipments by air, and forced the World Health Organization to scrap planned deliveries of cancer drugs.
The challenges of delivering vital materials have sharply aggravated longstanding shortages, added to an enormous backlog of patients awaiting surgery and sent grocery prices soaring as Cubans live through the island’s worst humanitarian crisis since the 1959 revolution. With food becoming prohibitively expensive, hunger is rising and soup kitchens are struggling to fill the gap.
The Trump administration has imposed an economic vise on Cuba and its ruling communist party to try to force political and economic change.
In January, the administration imposed an oil blockade on the island. Then in May, it cranked up the pressure by announcing that foreign companies working with certain Cuban state entities risked having their assets frozen and being locked out of doing business with U.S. companies and banks.
Shortly after, Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping company, and CMA CGM, a French one — which experts say together delivered at least half of Cuba’s imports, including most of its food — quit delivering to the island.
More On Trump's Trade War Against Canada, Cuba, Other Opponents
President Trump is shown at top with his typical brush-off hand-wave and below that with one of his posts from Saturday, Aug. 29, 2026, assembling geese armed with automatic weapons on the shore of Lake Ontario ("Lake America" now by his order), thereby basking in his power to fantasize -- or implement -- fastastical punishment for Americans, their organizations and foreign nations (presumably like Canada) who oppose his edicts.
New York Times, Carney Calls for E.U.-Canada Pact Amid ‘Ferocious Storm,’ Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Sept. 17, 2026. Prime Minister Mark Carney told European lawmakers that an alliance would help to secure sovereignty and independence for his country. The moves come amid a historic low for U.S. ties with Canada.
Canada’s newly proposed associate membership in the European Union will help to secure sovereignty and freedom for the country amid a “ferocious storm,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament on Thursday, adding that the move would also make his nation a better partner for the United States.
President Trump, reacting on Wednesday to the potential alliance between Ottawa and Brussels, said the move could be perceived as “a hostile act.”
“If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe,” he added.
Mr. Carney countered on Thursday, saying: “This alliance is a positive process. That’s my response to the American president. It’s a positive thing,” he told reporters after his European Parliament speech.
“A stronger, more resilient Canada will be a more effective partner with the United States — same with the European Union,” he added.
Mr. Carney said the associate membership outlined by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Wednesday would strengthen core areas of life on both sides of the Atlantic.
The push for closer links comes amid a historic low for U.S. ties with Canada and turbulence in the relationship between Washington and the European Union as Mr. Trump has upended traditional American alliances.
Mr. Carney said Canada and the European Union were not looking to become another superpower.
“I am not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival only with better manners,” he said during his speech to European lawmakers in Strasbourg, France. “We do not seek power to dominate others,” he added.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Associate membership for Canada in the European Union could be the closest linkup the bloc of 27 nations has with a nonmember state. The move highlighted a deep desire of traditional American allies to seek stability by banding together as Mr. Trump remakes the U.S. role in the world.
Mr. Carney suggested that Europe and Canada were seeking to band together “so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law.”
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: The GOP's McConnell Problem Just Got Worse, and So Did Its Trump Problem as Major Epstein Update Emerges, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 17, 2026. I just walked off the stage at the University of Texas International Journalism Symposium, where I got to talk about something I think matters more than almost anything else in media right now: reaching the people who have completely tuned out.
We are pulling in young people who have never once turned on a cable news broadcast in their lives, along with a growing wave of conservatives who are fed up with what Fox has become and are looking for something that just tells them the truth. And the numbers back it up. This is now three weeks running that we have out-engaged Fox News. Three weeks. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen without you.
If you’ve been reading for a while and haven’t subscribed yet, today’s the day. Every subscription is what lets me keep doing this instead of chasing whatever algorithm rewards outrage over accuracy. You’re not just supporting a newsletter, you’re supporting an alternative to a media environment that keeps failing the people who need real information most. So if this rundown is doing something for you, help me keep it going and bring more people into the tent.Subscribed
And there is a lot to get into today. Mitch McConnell resurfaced this week after a mysterious 92-day absence looking frail and unable to answer basic questions, and had to be coached through a committee vote by his own colleagues. Florida Republican Maria Elvira Salazar broke publicly with Trump on immigration, one of several signs that the GOP is quietly running from him ahead of the midterms. RFK Jr. told a major anti-vaccine conference they have “a strong and steadfast friend” in him, even as measles keeps killing Americans. Plus gas and diesel prices are spiking to record highs, a judge just ordered Trump to give 30 days’ notice before touching the Kennedy Center, and a whole lot more below.
Let’s get into it.
Congressman Ro Khanna has announced that he has secured the 218 signatures needed to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0 which would allow survivors to sue the Department of Justice and force compliance with the New Mexico criminal investigation.
Mitch McConnell Concerns Grow:
Mitch McConnell resurfaced in Washington this week after a mysterious 92-day absence, looking notably frail and offering only gestures rather than verbal responses to reporters. A video showed the 84-year-old Kentucky senator being wheeled to a Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, acknowledging questions with thumbs-up and peace signs but not speaking, and his team had separately instructed reporters not to record him during his Monday return. CNN’s Manu Raju noted his voice sounded “slower” than before, and reporters observed him looking gaunter and thinner, with a dark bruise covering much of his left hand. Speculation over his condition has run high since his June hospitalization, and his wife, Elaine Chao, who was in China when he was hospitalized and stayed for several more days, has still not commented on his return.
A Republican colleague had to correct McConnell’s vote during a Senate Agriculture Committee farm bill markup, his third day back after the three-month absence. When his name was called, McConnell began to vote “aye,” but Senator John Hoeven, seated beside him, leaned in and told him to vote “no,” causing visible confusion until Senator John Boozman reassured McConnell that “aye” was correct and the clerk called his name again. McConnell then voted “aye” with more volume, and the farm bill ultimately advanced out of committee in a 12-11 party-line vote. Hoeven’s office later said he had briefly misunderstood the nature of the vote, and McConnell’s team pointed reporters to a first-person statement posted on his X account praising the bill’s passage, a statement that contrasted with his largely nonverbal appearance in person.
Taken together, the pattern is genuinely alarming for a sitting U.S. senator who has real legislative power over the rest of this Congress. McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank, vacant expression and his mouth hanging open, has refused to answer any direct questions from reporters about his health since returning, and needed real-time coaching from colleagues just to cast a routine committee vote correctly. That is a sharp contrast with the crisp, first-person statements his office keeps posting on his behalf, which raises real questions about who is actually speaking for him. His own staff’s refusal to explain his 92-day disappearance, combined with his wife’s continued silence and her decision to stay in China for days after his hospitalization, has only deepened concerns rather than resolved them. With McConnell still serving out his term and voting on major legislation, the gap between how he appears in person and how his office presents him to the public is the kind of thing that deserves real scrutiny, not just viral clips.
Republicans Breaking From Trump:
Florida Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released a striking new ad telling Trump directly that Hispanic voters “feel betrayed” by his immigration agenda, marking a rare public break from the president by a member of his own party. In the ad, Salazar cites statistics showing 50% of people ICE detained in July “had no criminal record” and warns Trump to “be careful what your advisers are telling you,” while stopping short of asking for “amnesty” and instead calling for a “dignified life” for immigrants. The ad lands as ICE arrests hit record highs, with roughly 51,000 people taken into custody in August alone, and as Florida’s heavy use of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police for immigration enforcement, has made the state a hotspot for enforcement actions, including the recent “Alligator Alcatraz” facility that a DHS inspector general found had held nearly 80 detainees in small metal enclosures. Salazar represents a Miami-Dade district that is roughly three-quarters Hispanic and voted for Trump by nearly 15 points in 2024, underscoring how much political risk Republicans see in the crackdown.
A Washington Post analysis of more than a million social media posts found Republican candidates have nearly halved their mentions of Trump since January, actively distancing themselves from him ahead of the midterms despite his own advice to lean into his brand. One GOP senator told Punchbowl that Trump was “putting a noose around all of our necks” by escalating trade wars so close to the election, and some Kentucky Republicans have reportedly scrubbed Trump’s name from their campaign websites entirely. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 13% of Americans strongly approve of Trump, down from 23% a year earlier, with only 35% of Republicans saying they “strongly approve” of his second term and 41% of registered voters saying they’d back a Democrat if the election were held today. The White House itself reportedly encouraged this distancing back in July, telling midterm-bound Republicans to break from Trump given the political drag from the Iran war, cost of living, tariffs, and health care costs.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace is warning that the midterms are shaping up to be “a bloodbath” for her party. When CNN’s Manu Raju pressed her on Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the House is sending members home to campaign because they’ve “done such a great job,” Mace pushed back hard, flatly rejecting the framing and pointing out that Congress currently holds some of the lowest approval ratings in its history.
RFK Jr. Speaks to Anti-Vaccine Conference:
RFK Jr told a major anti-vaccine conference that anti-vaxxers have “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” even as the worst measles outbreak in decades continues to kill Americans. Speaking for nearly an hour and a half at the Children’s Health Defense conference in Washington, the organization he led for almost two decades, the health secretary said he would have made sweeping changes “on day one” but had to follow the law. He addressed the outbreak itself only once, dismissing concern for measles deaths while urging the crowd to instead “care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.” The outbreak has killed people in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arizona, and polling shows most Americans disapprove of how the administration has handled it, even as a quarter of Americans now say they have doubts about the MMR vaccine.
Kennedy used the platform to make unsupported claims linking vaccines to a range of serious conditions, describing vaccine-injured children as “damaged.” He claimed diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and anorexia can be vaccine side effects, and said the system for tracking such effects is “broken.” He also spent time on food systems, electromagnetic fields, and chem trails, and he praised a group of Danish researchers now under investigation by their own institution as “the deities of vaccine research.” Andrew Wakefield, the discredited researcher whose medical license was revoked for fabricating a vaccine-autism link, spoke alongside Kennedy and joked about how far the movement has come, saying, “I could not have imagined two years ago that Bobby would be in the White House.”
Other speakers made clear the movement now sees itself as ascendant rather than fringe, with some Republican lawmakers embracing the label outright. CHD’s advocacy director recalled the group’s anxiety earlier this year when the White House reportedly told officials to go quiet on vaccines ahead of the midterms, but said “we are a national movement that isn’t going anywhere.” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson called being labeled the largest anti-vaccine conference in the world “a red badge of courage,” while Kentucky Senator Rand Paul rehashed Covid-era grievances alongside him. Publisher Tony Lyons went furthest, calling measles coverage a “psy op” and describing Kennedy as “the most dangerous individual to this system who’s come along in a generation,” a line delivered as praise to applause from the crowd.
Other news:
Judge Orders Trump to Give 30 Days’ Notice Before Any Kennedy Center Demolition. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to give at least 30 days’ notice before taking any steps to demolish the Kennedy Center, after lawyers for Rep. Joyce Beatty submitted new evidence citing Trump’s own comments about the building potentially being “ripped down.” Trump told reporters in North Carolina that without his name on the venue “it’s going to close” and “end up being ripped down,” while a photo circulating on social media appeared to show him aboard Air Force One looking at a poster reading “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” though Reuters has not independently verified the image. Judge Christopher Cooper denied Beatty’s request for an emergency hearing after the Trump-backed board voted this week to close the venue for up to two years for a $257 million renovation, even as Beatty’s lawyers argued the closure is “a recipe for defendants extending their shutdown forever” without the court’s permission. The board maintains the current seven-day closure for safety assessments is separate from the larger renovation plan and doesn’t violate Cooper’s prior order, while the administration says it will ask the judge by Friday to lift that order entirely to allow the “closure necessary to complete the restoration.” Cooper had already rejected the board’s latest attempt to put Trump’s name on the building this week, a ruling the administration is appealing, with Trump warning on social media that the Kennedy Center “is destined to doom” if it isn’t allowed to close for repairs.
Andrew Tate is complaining about his prison conditions. Andrew Tate, who is facing a lifetime behind bars for horrific sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom and Romania, is complaining about his prison conditions today:
Diesel and gas prices are spiking to record levels, and experts say it’s going to get worse. Diesel hit a new national record Thursday at $6.40 a gallon, up 73% over the past year, while regular gas jumped to $4.44 a gallon, up 39% and closing in on the all-time record set in June 2022, according to AAA. Analysts including GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan and Gulf Oil’s Tom Kloza are warning of even steeper increases ahead, with SoFi’s Liz Thomas predicting diesel could hit $6.65 a gallon by Election Day as fallout from Trump’s Iran war restricts global oil supplies through Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on a major Saudi pipeline. Trump himself dismissed the pain at a North Carolina rally, calling the higher fuel costs “a very inexpensive price to pay” for the war and insisting prices will eventually come “tumbling down like a rocket ship in reverse,” even as former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene stood at an $8.50-a-gallon diesel pump in California and said flatly, “This is Trump’s fault.” Because diesel powers the trucks and trains that move most consumer goods, the spike is already pushing up food prices, with grocery costs up 2.2% and restaurant prices up 3.4% over the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Pentagon is reportedly seeking only the fittest and most “impeccably” groomed troops to appear alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at his September 30 “State of the Force” address. According to the Wall Street Journal, an email sent to Army commanders this week asks them to nominate soldiers who meet the Army’s preferred waist-to-height ratio and fitness standards, along with “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception),” with selections based on “demonstrated leadership quality and professional character.” The request fits a pattern for Hegseth, who has pushed a “clean-shaven military,” banned beards outside special forces, sent overweight Texas National Guard members home from a Chicago deployment, and previously refused to meet with bearded troops holding medical shaving waivers in South Korea. A Pentagon spokesman defended the standards as consistent with Hegseth’s “highest expectations” for service members’ appearance, fitness, and discipline, while The Daily Show’s Josh Johnson mocked the fixation, joking that Hegseth “cannot count the number of missiles you need to fight a war with Iran but when it comes to male physique he’s in A Beautiful Mind.” The news comes the same week Rep. Thomas Massie filed a resolution to impeach Hegseth over his handling of the Iran war, Caribbean boat strikes, and free speech disputes, forcing a House vote within two days.
Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years. Scientists have identified a new wild cat species, Leopardus tilcayo, from Bolivia’s Yungas forest, the first entirely new felid species discovered in over a century. The animal was first spotted in 2016 by biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz after a local sanctuary took in a small, spotted kitten that had been raised briefly as a pet, and she initially assumed it was a known species called the tiger cat before noticing its rosettes looked distinctly different from reference photos. It took years of genomic analysis with geneticist Eduardo Eizirik and researcher Jonas Lescroart to confirm the cat, weighing only about 3 pounds, had diverged from its closest relatives around 1.4 million years ago, an evolutionary split comparable to the distance between modern lions and extinct cave lions. The discovery, published in Current Biology, also reshapes the broader tiger cat family tree, raising the total number of recognized tiger cat species to five and suggesting the margay, long thought to be one species across Mexico through Argentina, may actually be four distinct species. Researchers say the findings carry real conservation stakes, since splitting one presumed species into several smaller, more geographically limited populations means each may need urgent individual protection, and they expect similar genomic techniques to reveal more hidden small cat species in Africa and Asia.
The family of Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old Texas woman who died in 2024 while 20 weeks pregnant, is suing Attorney General Ken Paxton, blaming his state abortion ban for her death. Walker had a history of preeclampsia and repeatedly asked for an abortion at around 8 and 11 weeks after experiencing seizures, nausea, and pain, but doctors dismissed her symptoms, offered mental health treatment instead, and according to the family’s attorney, avoided even writing the word “abortion” in her medical records despite noting she was at “high” risk of death. She wasn’t formally diagnosed with preeclampsia until late December, nearly three months after her complications began, and was still denied an abortion before being found dead at home days later. The lawsuit argues Texas’s “political and medical establishments not only failed but actively harmed” Walker, and that an abortion at any point in her pregnancy would have saved her life, while also pointing to Paxton’s aggressive pursuit of medical providers as creating a chilling effect on doctors. Paxton’s office has not publicly responded
The FBI internally warned that a small group of women were allegedly creating fake “tradwife” dating profiles to lure and dox ICE agents, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian. The February memo, disseminated by the FBI’s Chicago office, said the profiles used “traditional wife” imagery and tailored interests to attract law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person “date” before publicly exposing them, though it offered no details on which dating platforms were used, where the alleged scheme was based, or whether any agents were actually exposed. The FBI itself labeled the report “not finally evaluated intelligence,” and critics like Property of the People’s Ryan Shapiro and former FBI agent Mike German called it thinly sourced, with German suggesting it was likely inspired by an earlier, similarly unverified New York Post story about “lefty TikTokkers” targeting ICE agents. German argued the memo “reinforces the paranoid ‘us versus them’ mentality within law enforcement” and noted that ICE agents, as public employees, don’t have the same anonymity claims as undercover operatives. The memo is one of more than a dozen similar internal law enforcement warnings about ICE doxing obtained through records requests, including reports on cartel bounties, AI-assisted scraping tools, and even smart glasses, reflecting a broader pattern of agencies escalating concern over immigration enforcement backlash even when the underlying evidence remains vague or unconfirmed.
A Texas police department that arrested a mom for complaining about contaminated drinking water on Facebook has been ordered to disband after state investigators found it “failed to meet minimum standards.” Jennifer Combs was arrested for felony false alarm in May and spent 23 hours in jail after posting on Facebook that bacteria in Trinidad’s water pipes had sent residents to the hospital, a claim Police Chief Charles Gregory called “simply false,” though an environmental investigation later uncovered real issues with the city’s water supply and charges against Combs were dropped. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement revoked Trinidad’s license to operate its own police department on September 9, finding it lacked 18 required policies, including on use of force and active shooters, and couldn’t demonstrate it provided any public benefit to the community. The police chief had already resigned in June following national backlash over the arrests, and the judge who approved Combs’s arrest warrant later said the department misled him by omitting key information. Combs said after the shutdown that “we were never the problem, we were exposing it,” and the department’s five full-time officers will transfer to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office, which will now handle policing for the town of about 70 miles south of Dallas.
Chipotle has quietly partnered with Peter Thiel’s surveillance and data company Palantir to build a “food safety risk platform” tracking pest incidents, employee illness, and health inspection scores across its stores. The partnership runs on Palantir’s Foundry software, and while it’s unclear how long it’s been in place, it adds Chipotle to a client list that already includes General Mills, Tyson, and Wendy’s, even as Palantir is far better known for its billions of dollars in federal contracts, including building data systems for the Trump administration and an app used by ICE to help plan raids. Chipotle confirmed the partnership but declined to elaborate, and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment. Critics point to Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s own past comments about “disrupting” democratic power as reason for concern about how far the company’s reach into everyday consumer data could extend, especially with the Trump administration resisting AI regulation.
Trump Withdraws His Nominee to Lead ICE. The White House has withdrawn, without explanation, Lance Schroyer’s nomination to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just under three months after Trump tapped the former Oklahoma state trooper to run the agency at the center of his mass deportation campaign. The Senate has not confirmed an ICE director in more than a decade, and there were reportedly mounting signs Schroyer would have faced real resistance clearing that hurdle.
Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and diesel since the Iran war began seven months ago, according to a Brown University tracker cited by the Wall Street Journal. That works out to roughly $822 in extra costs per household, with the pain concentrated hardest in Western states like Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Despite Trump publicly insisting the war will end “immediately” after the midterms because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” advisers including JD Vance and Marco Rubio have reportedly discussed scenarios where the conflict drags on well past Trump’s own term. A new poll from the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs found support for the war has dropped 6 points since April to just 40% approval, with 17% of Republicans now saying Trump made a mistake attacking Iran and 16% saying the war has made the country less safe.
F-16 fighter jet crashes during training exercise near Alpena, Michigan, prompting evacuations but no fatalities. The aircraft went down during a routine training mission, and the pilot ejected safely before the crash. Witnesses in the area described hearing explosions and seeing a large fireball, and local officials ordered an evacuation of the surrounding area as a precaution. The Air National Guard is investigating the cause of the crash. This incident adds to a long history of F-16 safety concerns dating back to the aircraft’s introduction in 1979, when it first entered service.
A Chicago Police Department employee is suing the city after he was suspended for 14 days over personal Facebook posts he made at a “No Kings” protest. Mike Milstein, a civilian employee of the department, attended the protest in Denver on his own time and posted content that included the hashtag “#F**kTrump.” The city suspended him without pay, and his federal lawsuit argues the discipline violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and political expression off duty. His complaint points to what he calls a double standard, citing officers who participated in the January 6th Capitol riot and Trump-pardoned D.C. officers who kept their jobs despite far more serious conduct. The case raises broader questions about how much control a government employer can exert over employees’ personal political speech outside of work.
Anthony Kazmierczak has been sentenced to 14 months in prison for spraying Rep. Ilhan Omar with diluted apple cider vinegar from a syringe during a Minneapolis town hall in January 2026. He’ll also serve three years of supervised release and is barred from any contact with Omar. Prosecutors argued the attack was premeditated, pointing to evidence that he’d arranged for a bail bondsman and made plans for his dog’s care before the town hall, signs he anticipated being arrested. His sentencing memo also referenced a history of alcohol abuse and a 2022 Parkinson’s diagnosis as context, though the judge ultimately sided with prosecutors on the prison term. The case is one of several recent incidents targeting members of Congress at public events.
More On Trump Governance, Impeachment Threats
The Atlantic, Analysis: Why Democrats might choose to impeach Cabinet members, David A. Graham, Sept. 17, 2026. Democrats could be tempted to try to impeach Donald Trump a third time if they take over the House—but there’s a more effective accountability measure they might explore.
If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?
The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached. They’re going to impeach me,” Trump said last month at a rally in South Carolina. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been noncommittal. “We haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out in terms of impeachment,” the would-be speaker told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. But Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment, seemed more open. Earlier this month, on Meet the Press, he said that Trump had “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. “We understand it’s not a panacea. It is a tool in the toolbox,” he said. “We will not hesitate to use it if we need to use it.”
Realistically, House Democrats may have a hard time resisting impeachment. Their voters are in a punchy mood. A new CBS News / YouGov poll found that opposition to Trump is the top motivation for Democratic voters in the midterms, and the political consultant Sarah Longwell recently wrote in The Atlantic that the most important priority for Democratic voters is not left-versus-right ideology but a willingness to fight Trump tooth and nail. Jeffries has already faced criticism for being too passive a leader, as well as for meeting with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and he may struggle to ignore a groundswell of support for impeachment.
As a constitutional matter, the case for impeaching the president is solid. Trump has usurped congressional powers, started an unauthorized war or two, defied courts, and used his position for outrageous personal and family enrichment. In 2019, my colleague Yoni Appelbaum made the intellectual case for impeachment as a useful democratic process.
The political case for impeaching Trump is shakier. Regardless of the results in November, Democrats are unlikely to get enough votes in the Senate to convict and remove him, meaning that a third impeachment would hit the same dead end as the first two. An impeachment can still be effective as a way of damaging a president, but Trump is already deeply unpopular and will never face voters again, so the upside is limited, and an impeachment might give him a way to rally his remaining base around him—which would only strengthen his power and resolve.
But what if House Democrats impeached Trump’s Cabinet members instead? The power to impeach secretaries and other executive-branch officers is explicit in the Constitution but perhaps not well known, because it’s been used only twice in history. One reason such proceedings are rare is that a president usually fires a Cabinet member or forces them to resign before they can be impeached, but Trump has shown serious reluctance to fire aides because of public pressure. The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein has argued that if Trump won’t rein them in, Democrats should. On Tuesday, outgoing Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, brought new attention to the possibility by moving to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. GOP leadership promptly shut down all voting until after the election.
In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached for corruption, but he resigned the same day and the Senate subsequently acquitted him; a number of senators doubted they had jurisdiction post-resignation. (This historical example resurfaced during Trump’s second impeachment trial, which occurred after he’d left office.) In 2024, House Republicans impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on vague grounds, but the Senate voted to dismiss the charges as unconstitutional without a trial.
A Democratic House could plausibly launch impeachment inquiries into several administration officials, many of which would dovetail with investigations that representatives say they already have planned. In some cases, Democratic representatives have already filed articles of impeachment against Cabinet members, including Hegseth, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, but those have gone nowhere in the GOP-led chamber. A new Democratic majority could change that.
The conduct of a few particular individuals makes them likely targets for impeachment efforts. Kennedy has done serious damage to American public health, undermining vaccinations and weakening the CDC. At least one Republican senator has accused him of lying about vaccination rules during his confirmation hearings, when he also falsely characterized a trip he took to Samoa. Hegseth has waged an unauthorized war against Iran, for which he seems to have no realistic game plan; mishandled classified information; possibly violated the Hatch Act by appearing at a fundraiser for a political candidate; and left the armed forces bereft of leadership by firing a slew of qualified generals and admirals.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has been instrumental in turning the Justice Department into a partisan tool for persecuting Trump’s political adversaries, and a federal judge rebuked him for his role in Trump’s attempt to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies. Multiple sources shared with my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick serious worries about FBI Director Kash Patel’s leadership, including claims of emotional volatility, heavy drinking, and absence from the job. (Patel denied the allegations and sued Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic for defamation, demanding $250 million.) Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has led a concerted effort to take congressional powers for the White House.
As a policy matter, impeachment of some of these officers could be more effective than ordinary investigations would be in halting the egregious actions taken by their offices and departments. It might also have a couple political benefits over impeaching Trump. First, such an effort could escape the Trump vortex: By moving the focus to officials who don’t command the same personal loyalty as Trump, impeachment might allow more emphasis on actual administration actions and policy, instead of on presidential personality. Second, conviction might still be a remote possibility, but GOP senators who are fed up with the White House might be more willing to vote to convict officers than they would be to risk taking on Trump himself.
The real question is whether controversial Cabinet secretaries will stick around to see whether Democrats try to target them. A midterm election, especially one that goes poorly for the president’s party, is typically a moment for some secretaries to exit. But Hegseth seems entrenched, continuing to push out rivals; Blanche just won confirmation; and Kennedy and Vought are ideologues pursuing treasured agendas. If neither they nor Trump are willing to change course, then a Congress that has done little for the past two years will have a chance to do something novel: act.
Emptywheel, Analysis:Tom Massie’s Impeachment Gambit, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 16, 2026. After launching a discharge petition to add more teeth the Epstein Transparency Act in early September, which led Mike Johnson to cancel all business after Thursday, Thomas Massie filed surprise Articles of Impeachment against Whiskey Pete Hegseth yesterday, which led Speaker Johnson to cancel business.
Johnson had to do that to avoid a vote on Massie’s Articles, which are required 48 business hours after the filing.
On top of all the other things Republican Members of Congress will have to explain to voters has been added an extended 6-week vacation leading up to the election, all to avoid two votes that should be easy but are not.
Massie’s articles of impeachment are substantive — similar to what I had expect Democrats would file in January shortly if they win the House.
Going to war in violation of the War Powers Act Section 2(c) (Massie cites Joe Kent’s resignation letter to support a claim Iran posed no imminent threat).Following illegal orders to go to war in violation of the WPA Section 5(c).Remaining at war after failing to submit necessary paperwork under WPA 5(b).Failing to minimize civilian casualties (citing the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School massacre).Murderboating 221 people.Censoring Senator Mark Kelly.Kidnapping Maduro.Starting a war against the Houthis.
Here’s a gaggle he did yesterday, before Johnson canceled Congress.
And those suggesting that these articles wouldn’t have passed are, I think, being too hasty.
The latest War Power Resolutions vote — which overlaps with four of these Articles of Impeachment — passed 220-204, which the following Republicans voting with all Democrats:
Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.)Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.)Warren Davidson (Ohio)Tom Barrett (Mich.)Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa)Zach Nunn (Iowa)Nancy Mace (S.C.)
Mace is, predictably, a fan of white nationalist bigot Whiskey Pete, so she will vote against this in November. And while Barrett, Miller-Meeks, and Nunn likely voted for this because they’re facing a close race — and so might vote differently if they win that close race — there are enough hawks like Don Bacon who think Hegseth is a stain on the military who would presumably happily to vote against him.
And this is not going away. While the dynamics will be different on November 9 (the next day the House is due back in session), after Republicans are expected to face a very tough election, there are likely to be far more Republicans who, like Massie, have no fucks left to give and even a whole lot of Republicans who rue the way the Iran War killed whatever electoral support Trump did have.
Even assuming Hegseth is not convicted in the Senate — though that, too, may depend how many Republicans are furious enough after the election to damage Trump — just the passage of the Article pertaining to Maduro may give his very good attorney, Barry Pollack, more leverage in his existing claim he has sovereign immunity, which could create big problems for Trump’s attempt to colonize Venezuela.
Tom Massie is a lot of things, some good, some bad. But he’s a pretty good parliamentarian. And this was a pretty stunning turn of events.
New York Times, Judge Allows Kennedy Center to Remain Temporarily Closed, Julia Jacobs, Sept. 17, 2026. The federal judge denied a Democratic lawmaker’s request for an emergency hearing on the closure, which began on Tuesday.
A federal judge on Thursday denied a Democratic lawmaker’s request for an emergency hearing on the status of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, allowing the center to keep its main building closed temporarily.
Lawyers for the Kennedy Center told the judge earlier on Thursday that the closure was urgently needed to protect the public after a five-foot section of plaster fell from the ceiling during a recent storm.
After the closure began on Tuesday, lawyers for a Democratic lawmaker from Ohio, Representative Joyce Beatty, accused the center of violating a judicial order that barred it from shutting down for a $257 million renovation project championed by President Trump.
The Justice Department pushed back on the request for an emergency hearing from lawyers for Ms. Beatty, an ex officio board member who is suing the center.
“There is no emergency caused by defendants’ temporary closure of the center,” the department’s lawyers responded in a filing on Thursday, adding, “The only emergency is the risk to the public and the center’s employees and artists if it remained fully open without further safety assessment.”
Judge Christopher R. Cooper, right, of Federal District Court in Washington appeared to be satisfied, at least for now, by the center’s explanation.
The Kennedy Center has been at the center of a legal and political maelstrom in Washington as Mr. Trump raged over a court decision that blocked his name, for a second time, from being affixed to the front of the building and brought up the possibility of eventual demolition of the center.
In his order on Thursday, Judge Cooper instructed the center to inform Ms. Beatty, along with a number of historic preservation groups that sued in a separate case, more than 30 days before carrying out any significant changes to their renovation plan, “including but not limited to any ‘demolition’ of the Center’s main building.”
On social media this week, Mr. Trump threatened to cancel the renovation if an appeals court did not allow his name to be restored. He told reporters on Wednesday that the Trump administration deserved credit if it was going to commit to rescuing the center from physical and financial turmoil.
“The Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because, frankly, if we don’t do that it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down.”ImagePresident Trump, wearing a red baseball cap, is seen through the window of an airplane. He is looking at a large image with the text “Kennedy Center Demolished.”On Wednesday, President Trump was seen aboard Air Force One reviewing what appeared to be a rendering of the Kennedy Center being demolished.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Mr. Trump and the Justice Department have raised the prospect of demolition as an eventual necessity if the Kennedy Center is not renovated. Images captured by news photographers on Wednesday showed Mr. Trump, sitting aboard Air Force One, reviewing what appeared to be a rendering of the center being demolished — stoking fears that such a move could be a serious prospect.
Lawyers for Ms. Beatty filed one of the photos with Judge Cooper on Thursday. They asked the judge to “make crystal clear” that his previous order blocking the closure of the building also prohibits demolishing it.
In addition to ordering the center to give notice of any possible demolition, the judge allowed Ms. Beatty’s lawyers to seek information about the prospect during the discovery process.
The White House and the Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to requests for clarification on whether demolition of any part of the institution was being considered.
Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, has tried to calm such fears, saying in a video posted on social media this week that “this is not about demolition” but rather about safeguarding the building for the future. The video detailed what Mr. Floca has described as the center’s serious maintenance needs, including structural steel corroded by water infiltration and outdated stage equipment.
In a sworn declaration filed with Judge Cooper, Mr. Floca said the closure would last seven days, during which officials would evaluate the extent of the safety concerns. He said that other areas of the ceiling showed water damage, and that the possibility of extending the closure would be assessed on a “weekly basis.”
For months, Judge Cooper has assessed the legality of the Trump administration’s agenda at the Kennedy Center as Democratic lawmakers and historic preservation organizations have reacted furiously to his complete takeover of the institution.
The judge ruled in May that the Trump-allied board of the Kennedy Center had unlawfully renamed the arts institution after Mr. Trump, writing that only Congress — which dedicated the building to President Kennedy after his assassination — had the authority to do so. At the same time, the judge temporarily blocked the center’s plan to close for two years of renovations, reasoning that the board had not given the plan proper scrutiny.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.See more on: John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, U.S. Justice Depar
New York Times, Kennedy Assures Vaccine Skeptics That They Have a ‘Friend at the White House,’ Christina Jewett and Teddy Rosenbluth, Sept. 17, 2026. The health secretary spoke at a conference featuring misinformation about vaccines, including a claim that the success of the polio vaccines was a “fraud.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday told members of the anti-vaccine group he founded that they had “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House” and that he would “die with my boots on” pursuing answers about the risks of vaccines.
His remarks, to a convention of Children’s Health Defense, signaled a notable shift from earlier this year when White House officials and political advisers had pushed Mr. Kennedy to sidestep the vaccine issue, given widespread support among voters for protecting children against deadly diseases. They came just one day after President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, gave a full-throated defense of the safety and efficacy of vaccines during her Senate confirmation hearing.
But Mr. Kennedy, after spending the first part of his speech on the far more politically popular topics of food safety and nutrition, plunged headlong into vaccines, in a conference riddled with misinformation and references to discredited studies.
The speaker before Mr. Kennedy was Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who called the success of the polio vaccine a “fraud,” priming the audience for the remarks of their former leader, who railed against vaccines for two decades. The speaker after him was Andrew Wakefield, a discredited British doctor whose retracted paper linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism. Decades of research have proved that finding to be wrong.
With the midterm elections less than two months away and Republicans struggling in the polls, Mr. Kennedy has been trying to rally followers of his Make America Healthy Again movement, some of whom have expressed impatience with the pace of his policy changes.
He promised the crowd that he would “be in this fight” to the end, and said the work he was doing was methodical. He added that his team was launching studies after which, he said, “we will take appropriate action.”
He also generated applause when he announced that he would be looking at the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and so-called chemtrails, the trails left by airplanes that the Environmental Protection Agency has said are actually condensation, not chemicals.
Despite worries from his political advisers, Mr. Trump himself has recently jumped into the vaccine debate. Last month he signed an executive order that called for limiting the number of vaccines given to children. In a White House signing ceremony filled with misinformation, he falsely described the measles shot as “lethal.” Under persistent questioning, Dr. Mehmet Oz, one of the administration’s top health officials, corrected the president’s statement in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “The M.M.R. vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.”
The support from the president appears to have emboldened Mr. Kennedy to play a star role at the Washington conference of his former nonprofit.hMr. Kennedy was absent from the group’s conference in Texas last year when Mr. Gorton, whose group works to advance Mr. Kennedy’s agenda, exhorted the crowd of about 1,000 “to be more boldly anti-vax. ” On Thursday, Mr. Gorton said that “the success of the polio vaccine was a massive medical fraud” and that widespread vaccination was a “public health disaster.” He received a standing ovation.
Mr. Kennedy spoke next, linking arms with the group even as measles cases continue to rise, surpassing a 35-year record with about 3,300 cases. Officials in Pennsylvania reported a fourth measles death this week, adding an 18-year-old to a list that included two infants and a woman who was 40. The adults were both unvaccinated, and the infants were too young to receive the vaccine.
After the announcement of the first deaths, Mr. Kennedy publicly questioned whether measles played a role and suggested the deaths may have been “fabricated.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he oversees, has refused to acknowledge them and is currently reporting no measles deaths for 2026.
Mr. Kennedy’s appearance at the conference sparked a fresh round of criticism from Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who he had sparred with Mr. Kennedy in recent days over the measles death reports.
New York Times, News Analysis: Blanche’s Partisan Activity Ahead of Midterms Dismantles Another Principle, Charlie Savage, Sept. 17, 2026. The attorney general’s campaign politicking for Republicans adds to the degradation of post-Watergate values at the Justice Department.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has repeatedly participated in campaign events and spoken in partisan terms about the coming midterm elections since his confirmation last month, despite criticism that he violated a longstanding Justice Department principle of steering clear of electoral politics.
This week he waded again into those waters — twice.
Since August, Mr. Blanche has come under fire for making campaign-tinged public appearances and comments. Last month, at a rally-style event on Long Island, he praised Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor of New York. Last week, Mr. Blanche delivered remarks at the Republican Party’s midterm convention.
On Tuesday, he stood at the White House podium and disparaged Democratic lawmakers while invoking the coming election, dismissing their concerns about artificial intelligence as “nothing but an effort to influence the midterms.”
And on Wednesday, Mr. Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina. Echoing his convention speech, he portrayed crime rates, which continued a long-term downward trend to reach new lows in 2025, as “President Trump and Vice President Vance delivering on a promise.”ImageAttorney General Todd Blanche and Michael Whatley, right, the Republican candidate for Senate in North Carolina, clapping as President Trump spoke during a campaign rally on Wednesday.Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, and Michael Whatley, left, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina, attended a campaign rally on Wednesday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Worries about the Justice Department abandoning its long-held commitment to appear apolitical in order to maintain institutional credibility may seem beside the point. Since January 2025, dozens of judges have viewed its representations with suspicion, eroding the traditional bonds of trust, known as the “presumption of regularity,” that the courts typically grant the department.
The second Trump administration has also unabashedly destroyed the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from the White House in investigative decisions. Early on, Mr. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, declared, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.” Last September, after Mr. Trump publicly demanded that she charge several perceived adversaries, the department pushed through short-lived indictments of two of them.
Still, Mr. Blanche is dismantling another post-Watergate principle: that Justice Department leaders stay away from partisan politicking.
Joseph Tirrell, the Justice Department’s senior ethics official until the Trump administration dismissed him in July 2025, earlier this week criticized Mr. Blanche’s participation in the Republican convention. He called the attorney general’s comments at the White House briefing “borderline” unethical, and his participation in the North Carolina rally “terrible.”
“In my former role, I would have advised the attorney general not to go to the White House and not to make comments about members of Congress within 45 days of an election,” Mr. Tirrell said. Referring to a law restricting partisan political activity by government employees, he added: “I’d say, ‘That rally sounds like a Hatch Act violation to me, and I’d advise you not to do it.’ I would want to scare that person straight.”
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, said Mr. Blanche’s political statements and activities were protected by the First Amendment, and did not violate professional conduct rule, even if they were ill-advised.
“Any attempt to discipline him will fail,” Professor Gillers said. “That’s unfortunate. He has the ability to do what he’s doing, and he’s chosen to do it.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
When the group Public Citizen filed a Hatch Act complaint about Mr. Blanche’s comments praising Mr. Blakeman, the Justice Department told Government Executive in a statement that it was “baseless” and “a politically motivated complaint designed to weaponize the Hatch Act against the attorney general for his support of law enforcement.”
And in response to criticism last week by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee over Mr. Blanche’s convention appearance, the department shot back on social media: “Todd Blanche’s appearance this evening in his personal capacity is legal (and has been approved by ethics).”
Legal questions center on the Hatch Act, which is ambiguous and difficult to enforce when an administration does not want to strictly adhere to it. The law and related regulations allow some political appointees, while off duty, to attend partisan events, like fund-raisers and campaign rallies. Some law enforcement officials are restricted from any partisan activity, but the attorney general is not listed among them, and it is disputed whether that part of the legal limits applies to them.
U.S. and World Oil Supplies
New York Times, China Stockpiled Oil, and Now It Could Dominate the Energy Landscape, Rebecca F. Elliott and Keith Bradsher, Sept. 17, 2026. The war with Iran revealed just how much influence the world’s biggest oil importer has over prices and other countries’ supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel.
One of the most important lessons from the war with Iran is one that few saw coming.
The conflict has made clear that China, which has long been highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks, has managed to transform that weakness into a surprising source of geopolitical power. The country made that big shift by stockpiling huge amounts of oil, building extra oil refining capacity and investing in coal and other alternatives. And in the early months of the war, it flexed that power by cutting off supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel to neighboring countries.
That has big implications for the global energy industry, where oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the United States — not importers like China — have traditionally held most of the cards.
Already dominant in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, China now appears to have an unparalleled position across the energy landscape. As a result, the threat that a foreign power would restrict the country’s access to oil may no longer deter leaders in Beijing from taking aggressive steps like invading or blockading Taiwan, former U.S. officials said.
“If they come to feel that in this domain, they are less vulnerable than they and many others may have assessed previously, that is a profound and important shift in one of the key inputs to how China makes decisions about its global strategy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former White House and State Department official who worked on China issues in the Biden administration.
China’s massive oil reserves and refining capacity, paired with its ability to run its economy on a variety of energy sources, allowed the country to slash oil purchases by 23 percent in the first six months of the war with Iran compared with the same period the year before, customs data show. Other countries that rely heavily on crude oil from the Middle East didn’t have those options and were forced to use less energy or pay much more for it.
China’s ability to throttle oil imports caught nearly everyone in the oil industry by surprise. And it’s a big reason crude oil prices have not risen nearly as much as most energy executives and analysts thought they would once Iran severely restricted the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. As of late August, crude oil cost roughly $10 a barrel less than it would have had China continued buying at prewar levels, according to Daan Struyven, who leads oil research for Goldman Sachs.
“This is a power that nobody thought China had,” said Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Going forward, it’s going to be really interesting to see: What does China do with this newfound power?”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China and Iran? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Next week’s scheduled meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the White House, may provide some clues.
China’s actions, even in just the past few months, suggest it will not be shy about using energy as a political tool. The country depends heavily on foreign crude oil, but it is one of the world’s biggest oil refiners. And early in the Iran war, the country ordered severe restrictions on exports of refined fuels like gasoline and diesel, both to conserve domestic supplies and to punish countries at odds with China’s foreign policy.ImageA field of white and blue oil tanks situated on a body of water, seen in the distance.China has unique influence because it is such a big oil buyer, and its government exerts the kind of control that policymakers in democratic countries lack. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
What little China did export this spring, when supplies were especially tight, went mainly to countries that maintain close ties to Beijing, like Vietnam and Thailand. Australia and the Philippines, which have been at odds with China because of its territorial claims in the South China Sea, were among those that lost out. Such actions echo the restrictions that China has placed on exporting rare-earth metals used in magnets and computer chips.
China resumed wider exports of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel in early July. But the last shipments of Iranian oil, sent before the United States imposed a blockade, now seem to have arrived at small refineries in China that operate separately from state-owned giants, said Tom Reed, a longtime specialist in China’s oil industry at Argus Media, a commodity pricing firm in London. He warned that China might reimpose a ban on fuel exports soon. Taking yet another source of diesel off the market could cause a further jump in prices, which are at a record of $6.40 a gallon in the United States.
Washington Post, Analysis: Gas prices are about to take a big jump, analysts say, with the worst still to come, Evan Halper, Rachel Chasonand Joyce Sohyun Lee, Sept. 17, 2026. The forecast of economic impacts beyond November’s midterms contrast with the Trump administration’s optimistic messaging.
The effects of the U.S.-led war on Iran are about to intensify in the form of huge jumps in the prices of gasoline and diesel, analysts predict. And despite the Trump administration’s assurances, a new and potentially even more economically damaging phase of the war may be about to begin.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
The national average price for regular gasoline stood at $4.44 on Thursday, according to AAA, with a range of $6.09 in California to $3.92 in Indiana. That’s still below the all-time national record of $5.02 in June 2022. But diesel, which has a big influence on trucking and retail prices, has continued to hit records, with the national average at $6.40 on Thursday. In California, diesel is averaging $8.35.
The cost increases are landing particularly hard in several political battleground states in the Midwest, where prices jumped as much as 25 cents per gallon overnight, according to AAA.
Damage inflicted on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline last week, along with continuing strikes on oil infrastructure and contested control over a key waterway, threaten to elevate what had been a shipping crisis into a broader disruption of oil.
The 745-mile pipeline is Saudi Arabia’s principal overland alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, linking eastern oil fields to Red Sea export terminals.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday that the pipeline would be operational again in a matter of days, and the White House has touted renewed tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
But analysts who reviewed images of the pipeline damage anticipate a significantly longer disruption, likely resulting in high prices for consumers well beyond the midterm elections. And maritime tracking organizations say that far less oil is getting through the Strait of Hormuz than the Trump administration claims.A satellite image shows the Saudi Arabia East-West pipeline after a strike that hit it on Friday. (Vantor/Reuters)
Andrew Lipow, a consultant who advises clients on protecting and repairing oil infrastructure, said photos of the pipeline “show a significant amount of damage” and that repairs are likely to “take a month or two.”
“They will need to replace piping, valves, all the electrical stuff,” he said. “It is not like you can just go to Costco and pick that stuff up off-the-shelf.”
Satellite imagery reviewed by The Washington Post revealed damage to at least two pumping stations along the pipeline.
Drone attacks on one, beginning last Thursday, were widely reported, and high-resolution imagery collected by Vantor on Sunday showed extensive and significant damage.
At least one other pumping station, about 130 miles east of the first, was also damaged around that time, according to a review of imagery by The Post. A plume of dark smoke, so large it could be seen from space, rose from the western side of the station in a Sept. 10 Planet satellite image.A satellite image shows damage to a second pumping station along Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, in Al Dhekra. (Vantor)
Because of the shortage of crude oil and the damage the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have inflicted on refineries that turn it into diesel and gasoline, market analysts are warning that fresh price shocks are about to hit motorists.
Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil, predicted on X that Wednesday would “see staggering increases at the pump for both gasoline & diesel.”
“Fuel margins have yet to catch up with previous wholesale hikes,” he wrote. “Watch for huge increases in Great Lakes and Rocky Mountain states in particular.”
“Buckle up,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at the price-tracking platform GasBuddy, wrote Wednesday morning. “Gas and diesel look set for a spike over the next 48 hours, hardest in parts of the nation’s interior.”
Gas prices are also shooting up particularly fast in the political battleground states of the Midwest, where rising crude prices have been compounded by a power outage at the ExxonMobil Joliet refinery near Chicago, which typically produces 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel per day and is a crucial supplier for the region.
The price for a gallon of regular spiked 25 cents between Wednesday and Thursday in Iowa, according to AAA. In Wisconsin, it was up 23 cents. In Michigan, it was up 22 cents.
The disruption to the global energy market has come largely as a result of retaliation by Iran and its proxies to U.S. strikes and economic warfare against Iran.
President Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, when U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In recent weeks, Trump has looked to use a naval blockade and economic sanctions to punish Iran.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Washington Monthly, Can the House Clerk Lead a Midterm Coup? Garrett Epps, law professor, Sept. 16, 2026. It’s happened before. Will the Constitution face such a near-death experience on January 3?
How many House Republicans would be willing to follow Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and violate their constitutional oaths? How many Republicans might seize the opportunity to rid themselves of both figures, who are, behind closed doors, not terribly popular?
If the House Republicans try to steal the majority, will Democrats turn to the Supreme Court? The Court’s majority has been inconstant—having granted Trump criminal immunity, it has also blocked some of his most outrageous power grabs. If the Luttig scenario plays out, the Court’s majority will be forced to choose once and for all.
* * * * * * * * *But what was not generally known at the time was that the plot would have been foiled—even, if necessary, by bayonets. Lincoln had dispatched troops, who were concealed inside the Capitol, ready to occupy the House chamber. As president, he had sent young soldiers into battle, where many were slaughtered for the Union cause; he seemed to be sanguine at the prospect of battle reaching the Capitol itself. He told one of his allies, “If Mr. Etheridge undertakes revolutionary proceedings, let him be carried out on a chip, and let our men organize the House.”So passed the first crisis.
* * * * * * * * *I came across the story some years ago, while researching my book, Democracy Reborn, a narrative of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. That framing took place in the late winter of 1865 and the spring of 1866, and it was the endpoint of a series of hair’s-breadth escapes for democracy from the forces of the Slave Power and its northern allies, who actively sought to subvert the Union war effort and deliver a post-Appomattox victory to pro-slavery forces.
The first episode occurred in December 1863, after the Union was defeated at the polls nearly as badly as at First and Second Bull Run. On election day in 1862, the Civil War effort was going badly, and the fall midterms produced disaster for the healthy Republican majority elected to the House in 1860. Capitalizing on public disgust, the Democrats gained a whopping 27 seats, bringing them within 15 seats of the Republicans who had won the House two years earlier. This produced a rarity in American history: a genuine plot for a coup d’etat, engineered by none other than the Clerk of the House, a Democrat named Emerson Etheridge, a holdover from the days when pro-slavery forces ruled the House, who made it known that he had a plan.On the first day of the House, he would skip a few names—just enough to produce a “membership” with a Democratic majority. A Democratic speaker, S.S. “Sunset” Cox, would take control and the Republicans would be shut out of power in the House.
The plan leaked.
It turned out that not every Northern Democrat had the stomach, or the devotion to slavery, needed to overturn an American election. Emerson called his truncated roll, omitting 16 Republicans who he claimed had not presented valid credentials. Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical Republican, immediately moved that the omitted names be called. Because some opposition members stayed loyal to the Constitution, the House narrowly voted to seat the omitted members, and the crisis passed.
But what was not generally known at the time was that the plot would have been foiled—even, if necessary, by bayonets. Lincoln had dispatched troops, who were concealed inside the Capitol, ready to occupy the House chamber. As president, he had sent young soldiers into battle, where many were slaughtered for the Union cause; he seemed to be sanguine at the prospect of battle reaching the Capitol itself. He told one of his allies, “If Mr. Etheridge undertakes revolutionary proceedings, let him be carried out on a chip, and let our men organize the House.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, Republicans Reel on the Midterm Map as Deep-Red Areas Come Into Play, Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher, Sept. 17, 2026. The party is putting up a costly defense of states and districts that President Trump won easily in 2024. And in places like Georgia, strategists wonder if it’s too late.
In Georgia, Republican strategists are privately discussing whether the Senate race has drifted beyond the party’s reach.
In Kansas, Vice President JD Vance campaigned for a Senate Republican, even though a Democrat there has not been elected to the chamber since 1932.
In Nebraska, a new Republican super PAC just sprang up to spend to defend a billionaire incumbent.
And across the country, President Trump’s political operation is suddenly investing in what once appeared to be bright-red Senate races and House districts, including several in Texas that his party claimed to have safely gerrymandered only a year ago.
Less than seven weeks before the midterm elections, the political environment has deteriorated so badly for Republicans that the battlefield now extends deep into states and districts Mr. Trump carried three times, often by double digits.
“We have never felt better,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s top Democrat, said in an interview, though he cautioned, “It’s not an easy map.”
Mr. Trump’s diminished standing, as well as voter anger about high prices brought on by tariffs and the war with Iran, is causing serious problems for Republicans across the map. And economic trends appear to be going the wrong way for the party.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday, which will drive up the cost of borrowing at a time many voters are already paying high rates for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debts. Mr. Trump has said not to expect gas price relief before the midterms, with the nation’s strategic petroleum reserves at a 44-year low.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is Unraveling. Their Battlefield Is Deteriorating. A Wave Is Coming, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 17, 2026. Early, in-person voting begins tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered last night for our weekly get together. It was a lively and spirited affair, as they always are. A recording and rough transcript can be found above.
For months I’ve been saying that things were likely to get worse for Trump and the Rs as we got closer to Election Day - and they have. A lot worse:
We’ve gotten a rash of new polling in recent days and it is all telling the same story, and it is a very ugly one for Trump and his allies:
Today’s FiftyPlusOne’s forecast gives us a 97% chance of winning the House, and a 64% chance of winning the Senate. Yes, a 64% chance……Subscribed
Fake Republican polls and some Democratic campaigns are going to tell you the election is “tightening,” and things are getting closer. There simply is no evidence of that anywhere right now. If anything the polling we’ve seen these past few weeks, driven in part by the weakening economy, soaring gas and diesel prices, and Trump’s clear, manifest failure abroad, is getting better for us. If things are moving they are moving towards us and not “tightening.”
My advice to all of you about the polling we are going to see is that unless something dramatic happens the Senate races are all close and are going to stay close through Election Day. That’s it. They are close, we have a shot at flipping the Senate, and we just need to put out heads down and go to work. Don’t sweat a single poll either way. Don’t seek out reasons to be anxious. Don’t get blown around. Stay focused on the mission. We are where we wanted to be at this point - remarkably - and now need to close strong and finish the job; and we need to, now, everyday, just do more and worry less.
There are two new high quality polls released this morning that I do want to drill down on. First, a Washington Post poll of Michigan. Here are the top lines, and they are very encouraging:
I strongly encourage everyone to read the poll analysis for it does a very good job at diving into the data and making sense of what we are seeing. Some of the reticence around El-Sayed is about his being Muslim, an “other.” But some of it is also ideological as “democratic socialists” as a brand has very limited appeal, and is a far weaker brand positioning than “Democrat.” This is data that has been confirmed in polls across the country, and it is why you are going to see national Democrats rush to Michigan to campaign with him (VP Harris is heading there in a few days) - and it is why despite his current weakness I believe El-Sayed will win. For as Jen Rubin and I discussed yesterday much of the narrative about the weakness of the Democratic brand these past few months has been bullshit, and an unhelpful and corrosive distraction. People have put their trust and faith back in us, and now we need to go out there and lead, win, and make things better……
The second poll is a bit of a shocker poll from Texas. Siena, considered one of he best pollsters in the country, dropped this bombshell this morning:
If the battlefield continues to deteriorate for the Rs, and improve for us, some of the races that were consider long-shots become more viable. We will keep an eye on that and adjust our strategy if warranted. But for now we are going to stay focused on the core thirty six races we are focused on, and supporting our battleground “Winning” series. For if these thirty six candidates all win - and they are all flips - both chambers will flip this November.
Finally, we spent time talking about the importance of two critical closing strong projects:
Driving the early vote, running up the score, and winning the election in October, not November
Signing up with your state party to be a Democracy Protector and help bolster the our national efforts to protect our elections this fall
I closed by expressing my hope that in addition to all the contrasts we can establish with the Rs in these next few weeks - costs, health care, character, etc - we use the long early vote period to establish one more - we believe in democracy and want everyone to vote, and they believe in oligarchy and don’t want us to vote. Celebrating the early vote, and the act of people voting, can become a powerful both implicit and explicit bludgeon we can use to define them as the most un-American group of politicians our country has ever seen. It’s why we need to see driving and embracing the early vote not just as a tactical way of us making it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat, but as a powerful closing message that allows us to become proud patriots defending our rights and freedoms and they to be understood as venal betrayers of everything that has made this remarkable nation great for 250 years.
New York Times, G.O.P. Representative Breaks With Trump in Ad: Hispanic Voters ‘Feel Betrayed,’ Patricia Mazzei, Michael Gold and Shane Goldmacher Sept. 17, 2026. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a three-term representative from Miami, won re-election by 20 percentage points in 2024. Her ad suggests worry among some Republicans about their standing with Hispanic voters.
Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, released a television ad on Thursday directly assaulting President Trump’s immigration crackdown, a rare and remarkable break and a warning sign for her party of eroding support among Hispanic voters.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Ms. Salazar said straight into the camera. She later added: “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
The decision by Ms. Salazar, a three-term representative from Miami, to record such an ad is striking given that she won re-election by 20 percentage points in 2024 and serves in the House Republican leadership as an assistant whip. Mr. Trump carried the district two years ago with 57 percent of the vote, and Ms. Salazar’s race in Florida’s 27th Congressional District has not been considered among the nation’s most competitive.
But her ad — and its message — appear to be a sign of backlash to Mr. Trump’s immigration policy in Hispanic communities. Even in South Florida, which has swung to the political right in recent election cycles, some Republicans have been raising concerns for many months that unpopular policies could cost some of them in the November midterms.
Outside of Florida, Democrats are hoping to compete in four Texas districts with large Latino populations that Republicans redrew to be more favorable to their party.
Mr. Trump endorsed Ms. Salazar for re-election earlier this year, writing on Truth Social, “SHE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN.” Republicans have generally been reluctant to break with Mr. Trump, fearing both backlash from the president himself and from his supporters. Ms. Salazar’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Ms. Salazar faces a challenge from Eliott Rodríguez, a Democrat, in a matchup of parallel biographies: Both are Cuban American former broadcast journalists.
Fernand R. Amandi, Mr. Rodríguez’s campaign strategist, accused Ms. Salazar of “lying” in the 30-second ad, which is also airing in Spanish.
“She did this,” Mr. Amandi said in a statement. “She owns all of these deportations, ICE harassment and racial profiling. She voted for all this. She gave Trump the billions in ICE funding and the tools to do this. Don’t let her phony, eleventh-hour, ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ tears fool you because her boss’s immigration policy is now political poison in her re-election campaign.”
Back in Washington, Ms. Salazar has been open about her belief that her party needs to shift, even slightly, on its hard-line stance on immigration if it wants to keep the support of Hispanic voters who helped Mr. Trump win in 2024.
For months, she has been pushing other House Republicans to back a bipartisan bill that would give some immigrants with no criminal background a path to obtain legal status and work permits but not citizenship.
That legislation has put her squarely at odds with immigration hard-liners more closely aligned with the party’s MAGA wing, who have blasted her for a bill that they call mass amnesty. Their criticism burst into public view during a congressional recess earlier this year, when Representative Brandon Gill of Texas began criticizing Ms. Salazar’s bill on social media, inciting a series of back-and-forth posts that eventually roped in other far-right Republicans.
Ms. Salazar’s bill has support from more than a dozen Republicans, many of them in battleground districts where Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown has been unpopular.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Congress Just Gave Trump a Bigger Tariff Hammer. Yes, Really., Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 17, 2026. The House of Representatives is getting out of Dodge early today, Speaker Mike Johnson’s last small favor to Donald Trump of the year—and perhaps of his speakership.
But on their way out the door yesterday, the House passed one last piece of major legislation: a strong new sanctions bill on Russia that was the baby of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The bill is a jumble—fascinating, encouraging, and infuriating all at once. It’s an unambiguously pro-Ukraine piece of legislation that will punish Russia hard for its war of aggression. Last year, when Trump and JD Vance were delivering their infamous Oval Office sandbagging of Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump was routinely parroting talking points Vladimir Putin was whispering in his ear, it would have seemed absurdly Pollyannaish to think the administration would eventually back such a pro-Ukrainian package. Yet here we are.
So far, so good. But there’s trouble. The bill doesn’t just place mandatory sanctions on Russia’s leadership and energy and defense industries. It also grants Trump sweeping new powers to indulge in his favorite hobby: tariffing the shit out of international trade. When Trump signs the bill, he will acquire the discretionary authority to place tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries that are top importers of Russian energy. If you want to know how Trump was wheedled into backing unambiguously pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia legislation, these shiny new tariff powers surely have a lot to do with it.
Now, you could make the argument that this is a useful geostrategic tool—that choking off Russia’s war economy is a worthy aim and any tariffs Trump might deploy to that end are at least partially to the good.
But for starters, as Catherine Rampell noted last month, the bill “doesn’t force Trump to use his existing sanction powers” because of the mile-wide exceptions—and it doesn’t give him any new sanctions powers, either. The only new powers are the tariff powers.
Moreover, the tariffs-as-sanctions logic completely ignores the way Trump has actually deployed his tariff powers so far. Over and over, the president has taken tariff authorities that are supposedly narrow in scope and used them to wage his personal Maximum Trade War around the world. Ever since the Supreme Court slapped down his “liberation day” tariffs, ruling that he couldn’t simply place any tariff on any country for any reason, he’s been trying to recreate his sweeping protectionist trade regime piecemeal, using any tariff authority he can reach. Many of these have been obviously pretextual: In July, with one temporary authority expiring, Trump grabbed another, imposing tariffs on 60 countries supposedly due to forced-labor concerns.
For years now, Trump has been exploiting a simple fact: The lawmakers who created our various tariff authorities over the last century never dreamed that a tariff-crazed president would try to stitch them into a patchwork quilt heavy enough to smother global trade. Today’s Congress has no such excuse; they’ve seen Trump’s tariff crusade. The fact that they just handed him yet another suite of broad tariff powers is nothing short of insane.
To their credit, many House Democrats realized all this. While Senate Democrats backed the sanctions bill en masse, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spearheaded his party’s opposition in the lower chamber, arguing that the good end of Russia sanctions did not outweigh the perils of the bill’s tariff provisions. Even some Republicans were getting antsy about them as the vote approached: CNN reported yesterday that more than a dozen GOP House members were lobbying at the eleventh hour to strip the tariff provisions from the bill. Johnson’s leadership team—of course!—refused.
Now, look: I’m not saying this was an easy call. I can at least see how some lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, weighed up the tradeoffs and decided that placing a few more arrows in Trump’s tariff quiver was worth it to get him onside on Ukraine. That’s probably why some Democrats voted for it—the bill won 86 votes in the Senate and 262 in the House.
But I can’t help recoiling from how ludicrous it all is. Didn’t we all just live through 2025? Don’t we all remember Liberation Day? Haven’t we seen how eager Trump is to throttle the U.S. economy while chasing fantasies of “trillions of dollars coming into our country” in hallucinated foreign investment? It’s like Trump’s recent appetite for real war has led us to forget how insatiable his appetite is for trade war. I’d long since resigned myself to the fact that Congress wasn’t going to bring Trump’s tariff powers to heel. But even I didn’t think they would actually gear up—on a bipartisan basis!—to give him even more.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Can We Avert Economic Disaster and the Robot Apocalypse? The Fed raised interest rates to curb inflation, as expected, but mortgage rates are surging and flailing Scott Bessent remains the treasury secretary. CATHERINE RAMPELL and STEPHEN WITT join TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.Quick Hits
ENERGY SQUEEEEEEEZE: Here’s the good energy news: Oil prices slipped back under $100 a barrel yesterday on U.S. claims that a crucial Saudi pipeline, damaged last week in Iranian drone attacks, would resume operation sooner than originally feared. Here’s the bad news: That’s still far higher than the pre-war status quo of around $60 a barrel—with no real end in sight.
And if you’re the Trump administration, here’s the really, really bad news: Those big spikes in the price of oil are only just hitting consumers at the pump. According to AAA data, a gallon of gas now retails for an average of $4.36 nationwide—a 30-cent jump from a month ago, and right in line with the highest prices of the war back in May. Meanwhile, the diesel market is setting new records every day, with the national average now up to $6.31 a gallon just days after breaking $6 a gallon for the first time ever.
TURNCOATS TO THE LEFT OF ME, TRAITORS TO THE RIGHT: The president’s rage is building. He keeps putting people in place with very clear instructions to help him do whatever he wants, and they keep disloyally zagging him.
It was no surprise when Trump erupted this week at the Supreme Court for dashing his scheme to seize federal control of mail-in ballot systems—even as he hilariously vindicated their doing so by making excruciatingly clear that his real goal was to destroy “our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting ‘disaster’” all along. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he fumed. “They are merely a shell of their original selves.”
One day later, more treachery arose elsewhere in the realm. He’d moved heaven and earth to install Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair, confident that he—unlike that Benedict Arnold Jay Powell—would finally do what the boss wanted and lower interest rates. All summer, he’d kept up the drumbeat: “The Fed Board, with its great new leader, must get smart—BE PATRIOTS for a change,” he wrote this month. And just for good measure: “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.” And what did Warsh do yesterday? He voted, with the rest of the unanimous Federal Open Markets Committee, to raise rates 25 basis points—with another possible raise on the horizon! My God, is everyone treacherous? Will no one simply follow the president’s wishes? How is he supposed to keep the country hot under these conditions??
Trump is still biting his tongue on Warsh—for now. But in a tweet yesterday, he doubled down on his earlier threat: “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are ‘carrying’ almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer.” Is Liberation Day 2.0 around the corner?
New York Times, Stung by Voting Rights Decision, Many Black Southerners Plan for November, Emily Cochrane, Sept. 17, 2026. Black Democratic candidates for governor, the Senate and the House are hoping that attacks on Black representation will motivate more voters.
Across the South, from the Mississippi Delta to Georgia’s suburbs, Black Democratic candidates are imploring Black voters to rise up and secure the representation this November that they were expected to be denied with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The hill is high, and Republicans remain supremely confident, but Democrats are trying to contest races typically seen as too far out of reach.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, remains in a tossup contest to be the next Georgia governor, despite being outspent 9 to 1 by her deep-pocketed Republican opponent, the businessman Rick Jackson.
In Mississippi, Scott Colom, a state prosecutor running for the Senate, is seeing a rare infusion of national cash in his bid to defeat the incumbent Republican, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.
In Florida, Black voters helped State Representative Angie Nixon overcome a lack of establishment support and fund-raising to become the party’s nominee for the Senate.
In Alabama, Republicans tried to redistrict Representative Shomari Figures to defeat, but his seat, stripped of many but not all of its Black voters, may somehow still be within reach. And the impact could extend to states that pushed ahead with redistricting before the Supreme Court decision. In North Carolina, another Black Democrat, Representative Don Davis, remains in the running for the district the Republican legislators redrew against him.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:rump Wallows In Racist Sewer At Desperate North Carolina Rally, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 17, 2026. Donald Trump tried to whip up his politics of division while campaigning for struggling US Senate candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina. Trump even invoked Willie Horton.
Anyone who understands Donald Trump and his brand of politics could read through the code when the White House announced that the president was coming to North Carolina to talk about “crime.”
According to the latest New York Times/Sienna Poll, crime was the 16th most important issue to voters, with just one percent listing it as their deciding issue in the upcoming midterm election.
If Trump really came to North Carolina to talk only about crime, the speech was a waste of time.
The president did repeat his talking points about crime. Almost all of them were false and designed to praise himself, but then Trump got to what seemed to be the real point of his speech.
Trump went to North Carolina to talk to his white supporters about a certain kind of crime, and given that this is Donald Trump, who is about as subtle as slamming your finger with a hammer, he made it impossible to ignore what he was really trying to say.
Most people talk about Willie Horton-style campaign politics to describe the infamously racist ad that the George H.W. Bush campaign used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Trump unveiled his version of the Willie Horton ad targeting Democratic Senate candidate and former Gov. Roy Cooper, and then talked about Willie Horton.Trump Goes Back To His Racist Sewer
Trump said:
Years ago in Massachusetts, there was a governor named Dukakis, Michael Dukakis, you remember? Yeah. Who had a very substantial lead for president. He was gonna win easily, but he allowed a man named Willie Horton out of jail. Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy. Same thing as this, same as, same exact thing. And on his first day out, he raped and murdered, raped and murdered again and again, and he ended up killing three women.
Overnight, Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide because of that one advertisement. They put it on just like we're putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office, not this guy. Gotta make sure But remember that? Overnight, he had like a 15, 16, 17... It was over.
The race was over, and he ended up losing the race because of that one incident, because he allowed a dirty, rotten killer to come out and rape and kill, and he did it a lot. He was a bad one. Same as, same as what you have over here. Same exact. Same thing. But in a way, this is worse because Dukakis let Willie Horton out, but Cooper let Decarlos Brown out, plus 3,500 other hardened and dangerous criminals. Dukakis didn't do that. He let Willie Horton and a couple other people out.
But this guy, this governor, when he was governor, he let out 3,500 people, many of them murderers. You can either vote for Roy Cooper to set loose criminals who rape and murder your children and your population, or you can vote for Michael Whatley to protect and defend your children and your population.
Trump didn’t use a dog whistle. He used a dog bullhorn.
Polling has become very difficult, but even Republican pollsters have Cooper leading. Cooper’s lead is anywhere from 6-14 points, as the former governor has been campaigning all over North Carolina and talking about affordability and prices being too high.
Trump went to North Carolina and refused to discuss the top issue on voters' minds.
The Republican plan for the midterms is to try to distract voters from the damage that they and Donald Trump have done to the economy.
The Willie Horton distraction won’t work, as Trump’s politics of division aren’t strong enough to overcome the unity of voters on high gas prices and inflation.
New York Times, Jewish Leaders in Michigan Urge Support for El-Sayed’s Senate Bid, Bayliss Wagner, Sept. 17, 2026. The public petition comes after other Michigan Jews registered their discontent with Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee.
A group of Jewish voters in Michigan is urging support for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, in an open letter that acknowledges concerns among some Jewish voters about his candidacy and his criticism of Israel.
The letter, signed by more than 500 people who identify as Jewish leaders or voters in the state, says that the election of Dr. El-Sayed, a staunch critic of Israel, is “clearly the better choice for Jews” compared with his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers.
“Some of us are enthusiastic supporters of El-Sayed,” the letter, published on Wednesday, reads. “Some of us have reservations: There are disagreements with El-Sayed on important issues, including aspects of his approach to Israel and the language used by some of his allies. These concerns remain serious for many of us, and we will vote for El-Sayed.”
It comes after a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders warned in a petition drive last week that they would withhold their support for Dr. El-Sayed if he did not change his tone and rhetoric on Israel, and as the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus continues to withhold an endorsement from its party’s nominee.
The signers of Wednesday’s letter wrote that Dr. El-Sayed would provide a check on President Trump’s power and champion positions they supported on health care, democracy and voting rights, abortion access, public schools, immigration and social welfare.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement
Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Sept. 17, 2026. Two months ago, when Thomas Massie once again sandbagged him by introducing a discharge petition to release the Dead Pedo Bestie Files, Brave Sir Mikey [House Speaker Mike Johnson] bravely ran away, away, and gaveled the House into recess.
And so the most useless Congress in history now goes home for the rest of September and all of October.
Here’s a thing I tweeted seven and a half years ago:
Ideally, you want the President of the United States, the Mayor of Crazytown and the village idiot to be three different people
Tell me, is it a smart move to tell voters [as President Trump did this week during a rally in North Carolina], six weeks before an election, to shut up and stop whining about the price of gas?
“I have to say, you have a little higher gas— it’s a very inexpensive price to pay, for what we’ve done. remember that. it’s a little more, it’s— even if it was— frankly, EVEN IF IT WAS A LOT more.”
Tell me, was that the President of the United State talking, or was it the village idiot? Lucky us, it was both.
More On High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Media, Culture
New York Times, OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior, Emmy Martin, Sept. 17, 2026 (print ed.). The artificial intelligence company also released a framework for reporting when its systems go wrong.
Ground News, 3 supporting acts quit Ed Sheeran’s tour after Macklemore is dropped over pro-Palestinian comments, Staff and Wire Reports, Sept. 17, 2026. Four supporting acts quit after Macklemore was dropped, leaving Ed Sheeran’s remaining U.S. dates without any opening acts.
On Tuesday, four supporting acts—Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, and Beoga—withdrew from British singer Ed Sheeran's North American tour, leaving him without opening acts after the promoter removed rapper Macklemore for pro-Palestinian comments.
Venue ultimatums, reportedly rallied by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, forced Messina Touring Group to remove Macklemore from the tour on Monday after multiple venues threatened to cancel shows if the rapper remained.
Producer Finneas stated, "Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed," while Irish band Beoga denounced "the silencing of Macklemore by zionist lobbies." Both cited solidarity with the rapper's message.
Sheeran said on Tuesday that Macklemore's removal was "the promoter's decision, not mine," adding he tried to "build a bridge" while refusing to use his platform for political forums.
The tour resumes in Philadelphia this weekend with a dramatically altered lineup. Lee Rowland of the National Coalition Against Censorship noted that venue cancellations illustrate "the immense power that money has over our public discourse.
National Press Club, Club Mourns News Crew Killed in Los Angeles Helicopter Crash, Staff Report, Sept. 16, 2026. National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. today issued the following statement:
The National Press Club is heartbroken by the deaths of aerial reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw, killed while covering breaking news for NBC4 and Telemundo 52.
Eliana and George took to the sky to help their community understand the tragedy unfolding below. They never came home.
Journalism depends on people willing to go toward the news and bear witness when others cannot. Today, our profession mourns two of them. We hold their families, their colleagues and the entire Los Angeles journalism community close in our hearts.
Sept. 16
Special Report: Shocking Damage From Iran To U.S. Middle East Bases Revealed
Here (and below) are a shocking series of photos released by CBS News of damage earlier this year -- hidden until now from the American public -- done to US military bases in the Middle East.
Sept. 16, 2026. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” -- Pete Hegseth must go, now. New photos obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal for the first time the widespread damage and destruction of buildings and vehicles at multiple U.S. positions across the Middle East, as a result of Iranian missile and drone attacks.Top Headlines
President Trump is portrayed as master of Venezuela and its oil (illustration via The Hartmann Report based on Trump's own self-promotions).
Trump boasts about billions from Venezuelan oil, but lawmakers are still fighting to learn where the money is, who controls it, and who’s getting paid…At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil.The Trump administration plans to deliver 60,000 of the powerful munitions at a time when opposition is growing in Washington to arms sales to Israel.Here we were thinking nothing interesting would happen in Congress for the rest of the year—and suddenly there was Rep. Thomas Massie yesterday, introducing articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.News Roundups
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 he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.
Sept. 16, 2026. House Republicans spent this week doing everything they could to avoid a fight they’re clearly terrified of losing. Rather than let a privileged impeachment resolution against Pete Hegseth come to a vote, GOP leadership canceled tomorrow’s session entirely and sent members home to campaign until after the midterms, a move that lines up neatly with a new poll showing Trump’s approval underwater on every major issue and a majority of voters now wanting someone to check him rather than back him.Sept. 16, 2026. Last night I had the honor of giving the keynote address at Webster University, standing in front of a room full of young people and talking about finding their power and their voice at a moment when so many forces are telling them to stay quiet. It’s a message I believe in more with every story I cover, because the same week I was telling students their voice matters, seven House Republicans found theirs and broke with Trump on Iran, Canada found its and started walking toward Europe instead of Washington, and museum curators found theirs and refused to bend to a White House trying to rewrite their work off the walls. Power and voice aren’t abstract concepts. They’re what happens when people who could stay quiet decide not to.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Saudi Pipeline Attack Risks ‘Disastrous’ Loss of Millions of Barrels of Oil, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 16, 2026. Estimates vary on how long it could take before a crucial pipeline is repaired, but a prolonged shutdown could push oil prices to their highest levels in months.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Sept. 16, 2026. Those on a call witnessed Donald Trump yelling and screaming after a judge blocked him from adding his name to the Kennedy Center.More On U.S. Governance
Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Sept. 16, 2026. During the Agricultural Committee’s markup of the Farm Bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell almost voted with the Democrats until he was instructed by his handlers how to vote.More On U.S. Elections, Politics
William Kristol (Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers of The Bulwark with photos from Getty, Shutterstock and The Bulwark).
Sept. 16, 2026. 48 Days to the Midterms. Corporate mercenary is a bipartisan profession. You’ve heard it over and over again from establishment, hand-wringing Democrats: ‘The Democratic brand stinks.’ What follows is often a rant about how the left is making life difficult for centrists to win, which is a tip the “analysis” about the party’s reputation might be tainted by sectarian self-interest. That is actually just wrong — and politically dumb.Sept. 16, 2026. Plus: The Texas GOP has a bigot problem. Who knew?Artificial Intelligence Threats, Advocates
Sept. 16, 2026. Nobody Wants Killer Robots. That May Not Be Enough. A large, growing, and cross-partisan bunch agree: It’s sort of crazy that AI companies are charging toward a future of intelligent robots they’re not sure they can keep under control and which might have an outside chance of killing us all. What they don’t have, at least yet, is anything resembling a shared action plan to build a political coalition around.right, and Rebecca Crosby, Sept. 16, 2026. The AI industry tapped Jay Carney to rebuild ties with Democrats. He spent years at Amazon fighting AI regulation.More Global News
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Sept. 15, 2026. At exactly 9:30 this morning, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, stood in front of photojournalists, members of Congress, and their staff, wearing a deep blue suit with a delicate pastel pink tie. With his right hand held up high and his left hand clenched tight at his thigh, he pledged “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Minutes later, he was defending his department’s decision to remove bestiality as an automatic disqualification for employment with the FBI, making it possible for applicants who engaged in repulsive acts with an animal to still be eligible to join the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country.More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Sept. 16, 2026. Seven years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started. Special Report: Shocking Damage To U.S. Middle East Bases Revealed
Here (and below) are a shocking series of photos released by CBS News of damage -- long hidden from the American public -- done to US bases in the Middle East.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Things Are Really Going To Sh-t For Trump Now, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 16, 2026. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” -- Pete Hegseth must go, now.
I just had a great talk with Jen Rubin over at the Contrarian about our current moment. In getting ready for our talk, Jen and I discussed how we were both struggling to capture what we are witnessing now so we spent some time wordsmithing and kicking things around.
Here is some of what we came up with….
I’ve been saying for months that things were going to get worse for Trump and the Rs as we got closer to the election but man I did not expect it to get as bad as it has……
I will be sharing our discussion via email later this afternoon. Let’s spend some time now diving into the great unraveling/rotting/imploding we are seeing……
Here are a shocking series of photos released by CBS News of damage done to US bases in the Middle East:
From the story:
New photos obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal for the first time the widespread damage and destruction of buildings and vehicles at multiple U.S. positions across the Middle East, as a result of Iranian missile and drone attacks.
The images were sent to CBS News by active service members on condition of anonymity because of rigid media restrictions within the military.
“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
So the US has not only suffered an extraordinary and humiliating defeat in the Middle East - one Trump keeps lying about everyday - but oil prices have soared globally and gas/diesel prices in the US have soared too. Diesel may soon hit $7 a gallon in some states, just in time for the fall harvest.
And as bad as all that is it could get worse. From the NYT:
Let’s join the Massie Impeachment effort today. Call your Senators and House Rep and demand they Impeach and remove Hegseth without delay.
In an extraordinary, historic, and humiliating failure of Trump’s foreign policy Canada is in essence leaving its alliance with the U.S. and attempting to forge a new, formal alliance with Europe.
On Monday the Supreme Court nuked Trump’s ridiculous mail ballot ploy. Trump’s corrupt crypto bill died in the Senate yesterday. Last night, the MAGA-led House rebuked Trump on his failed Iran war. Today, the Senate is likely to rebuke him on his tariffs. Anti-data centers bills are gaining GOP support in both chambers as the corrupt, addled madman doubles down on unregulated AI, data centers, the whole thing……..
Economist Mike Zaccardi released this powerful graphic that captures the economic dynamic we’ve been discussing here - wages and salaries are down and health care costs are rising for everyone:
Top Stories
President Trump is portrayed as master of Venezuela and its oil (illustration via The Hartmann Report based on Trump's own self-promotions).
The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Trump Took Control of Another Country’s Oil Fortune. Where the Hell Is the Money? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Trump boasts about billions from Venezuelan oil, but lawmakers are still fighting to learn where the money is, who controls it, and who’s getting paid…
At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil.
Bessent agreed with Trump, saying the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars.
So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?”
Bessent’s answer was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…
Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.
Here’s what we do know:
Three days after Trump kidnapped President Maduro and his wife, he went on his Nazi-infested social media site and wrote that Venezuela’s oil revenues would be controlled by him personally “as President of the United States.”
Three days after that, he signed an executive order declaring a “national emergency” involving that oil so no court or creditor could touch the money, screwing the bondholders and oil companies to which Venezuela owed roughly $150 billion.
Then Trump started selling the oil we’d seized from Venezuela. The first load, according to Reuters and Semafor, went to commodity trading companies Vitol and Trafigura for about $500 million, groups that the Washington Post said both carry histories of bribery schemes tied to oil sales.
And that money didn’t go to the Treasury account that was described in Trump’s own executive order. Instead, it went to a bank account in Qatar, right after that country’s leaders gave him a $400 million jet. A senior official explained to Semafor that Qatar was chosen as a “neutral location” where money “can flow freely” without risk of seizure.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was outraged, and told the world what most of us were thinking at the time:
“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate that $300 million had been sent to Venezuela to cover government payroll needs and another $200 million was “still sitting” in Doha. He referred to the entire operation as “novel” and “a short-term mechanism.”
But a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC that the account had been closed and no more money would be flowing to or through Qatar…and nobody has identified where it went, or where it is, since then.
Where’s the money?
House Foreign Affairs committee ranking member Gregory Meeks called it “an offshore slush fund.” Bessent, questioned by Casten back in February refused to say which accounts the Treasury Department was even using, even though Trump’s executive order had named him/Treasury as the custodian for the funds. Casten and Senator Chris Van Hollen again demanded to know where the money was in March, and were again stonewalled. And then again this week.
Meanwhile, the pile of money is growing, particularly given the oil crisis provoked by Trump’s idiotic war against Iran. Using Bloomberg tanker-tracking data, the Council on Foreign Relations published an April estimate that:
“In the first four months of the United States exerting control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”
A State Department official testified to Congress back in April that around $3 billion had gone back to Venezuela, but Trump boasted in July that the US had sold more than $13 billion in stolen Venezuelan oil and suggested he could divert those funds to the American military or anywhere else he wanted.
Back in June, Marco Rubio tried to assuage Congress’ concerns by saying that accounting firm KPMG “audits every disbursement.” But when the libertarian Reason Magazine dug into it in August they found that neither the agreements nor the audits have been published.
And the so-called “Transparent Sovereignty” website the Venezuelan government set up to show the world its oil transactions only lists one single sale. Apparently, Trump is even telling them what he’s done with their oil, or where their money went.
And it’s not just oil. In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flew a planeload of American mining executives to Caracas and came home bragging about having made off with over $100 million in gold. He set up a deal to sell it to reportedly bribe-friendly Trafigura with the proceeds going into, well, nobody knows where.
This is an old script that Trump appears to be following here, one many corrupt petrostates pioneered long ago.
For example, in 2014 Nigeria’s central bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, accidentally revealed to his Senate that roughly $20 billion in oil revenue had never made it into the national treasury. President Goodluck Jonathan’s response was to fire him and call the money a “phantom.” When PriceWaterhouseCoopers finally audited the books, it found at least $1.48 billion was simply gone.
I’ve done international relief work in some of the most corrupt nations in the world, been offered bribes and threatened for not taking them, and the pattern I’m seeing here is eerily familiar. They never announce the looting; they just stop letting you know where anything went or who ended up with it. Most people figure that it must be okay since it’s not being reported or discussed, and the conversation dies away.
So, here we are. Trump:
— announced that he’d taken the oil,— then that he’d taken the money from the sale of the oil and put it in a bank with the country that had given him a free 747 jet,— hired traders with bribery records,— refused to publish the contracts,— put his own hand-picked cabinet members in charge of both the disbursements and oversight, and— then sent Bessent to Congress to say, “No” when asked if we could please, please know where it’s all gone.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress seem to have developed a sudden case of lockjaw.
Congressmen Casten and Joaquin Castro have introduced into the House the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act to force the GAO to audit the Qatar account and whatever’s followed it. Republicans refuse to let it out of committee, and Mike Johnson won’t give it a chance on the floor.
This is not how democracies are supposed to work, a message we should all convey to our elected representatives at 202-224-3121.
Pass it along.
New York Times, The World Economy Is Becoming Wary of the U.S., Alan Rappeport, Sept. 16, 2026. America’s position of global economic stability is starting to look shakier as the Trump administration piles on debt and doubles down on sanctions.
Global investors are balking at U.S. bonds. Talk of the dollar’s dwindling power is getting louder. Foreign governments are hauling their gold out of American vaults.
Almost two years into President Trump’s second term, the world economy is increasingly looking for ways to distance itself from America. Concerns about a $40 trillion debt burden, the excessive use of sanctions to solve foreign policy problems and Mr. Trump’s penchant for pushing the limits of the rule of law are raising questions about the appeal of the United States as a haven for global investment.
Despite pledges by foreign companies and nations to invest in the United States — in many cases to curry favor with the White House — capital is starting to seek alternative destinations.
“Geopolitical factors and U.S. weaponization of the dollar through financial sanctions are causing central banks and other official investors to attempt to diversify away from dollar assets,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.
The United States is not yet an investment pariah. Private investors are still pouring money into American financial markets and stocks, artificial intelligence infrastructure is booming and no rival currency is poised to topple the dollar imminently.
In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he remained confident in the credibility of the U.S. financial system, arguing that bond auctions continue to operate successfully and that the dollar is still thriving as measured by its share of global transactions.
“The U.S. is in fact the leader, and the leader does not fear competition,” Mr. Bessent said. “Competition makes us better.”
But cracks in America’s economic dominance are starting to show.
The most glaring example has been in the bond market. Yields have been soaring as investors nervous about the mounting national debt demand a higher rate of return for buying Treasury bonds. This week, the yield on the 10-year Treasury topped 5 percent, reaching its highest level since 2007.
A decision to raise rates on Wednesday could help to alleviate concerns about the Fed’s grip on elevated inflation, fears that have injected more jitters into bond markets.
The ominous bond threshold was crossed a week after the Treasury Department purchased $5.2 billion of its own debt maturing in the next 10 to 20 years, part of a plan to inject demand into the Treasury market to try to push prices higher and yields lower. Mr. Bessent said investors were failing to understand the underlying strength of the economy and dared them to bet against him.
“It’s my dream,” Mr. Bessent said last week at Southern Methodist University. “I have asymmetric information. I am the house now.”
With the United States’ long-term fiscal situation looking shaky, some countries are starting to wonder if America is a wise investment. This month, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, said it planned to reduce its holdings of U.S. Treasuries as it looks elsewhere for stronger returns.
And then there is the future of the dollar.
Nearly 90 percent of global foreign exchange transactions are in dollars. But the share of dollars being held in central bank reserves has been steadily declining over the past decade, falling to 56 percent at the end of 2025 from 64 percent in 2015.
New York Times, Why Israel Wants More One-Ton Bombs From the U.S. and Why the Sale Is Controversial, David M. Halbfinger and John Ismay, Sept. 16, 2026. The Trump administration plans to deliver 60,000 of the powerful munitions at a time when opposition is growing in Washington to arms sales to Israel.
The Trump administration’s decision to send 60,000 powerful one-ton bombs to Israel as part of a $2.8 billion deal — one of the largest arms agreements ever — will allow Israel to replenish its supply of a munition it considers vital.
The weapons became the focus of great tension between the Biden administration and Israel after one-ton bombs were widely used in densely populated areas of Gaza where Israel had steered civilians for their safety.
With opposition to military assistance to Israel growing in Washington, such a huge sale of heavy bombs, paid for by the U.S. government, could be an effort by the administration to stock up the Israeli arsenal before political shifts in the United States make such shipments impossible, analysts said. It is certain to set off an outcry in Congress.
The Israeli military pivoted toward the use of the one-ton bombs after the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, drastically changing its shopping list, U.S. government data show. In 2025, Israel bought nearly eight times as many one-ton bombs from the United States as it did from 2012 to 2015.
Israel’s emphasis on buying and using some of the largest bombs currently made runs counter to that of most other modern militaries, which have been making their aerial munitions smaller and even more accurate in the hopes of limiting civilian casualties during combat.
Israel has used a vast amount of the one-ton bombs in large part to target the tunnel network Hamas developed in Gaza for its fighters, weapons and command centers. Israeli officials have said that Hamas fighters intentionally embed themselves among civilians, forcing the Israeli military to risk killing civilians.
A New York Times investigation in December 2023 found that the Israeli military routinely used one-ton bombs in the weeks immediately after the 2023 attack and identified more than 200 instances of Israel dropping the powerful munitions, including in densely populated areas.
Here is a closer look at the transaction and its significance.What bombs are being sold?
According to a U.S. official, Israel will receive 20,000 Mk-84 bombs and another 20,000 BLU-117 bombs. The two types of one-ton bombs are nearly identical.
The bombs are highly versatile, experts say. They can be set to detonate above ground, sending shrapnel 1,000 feet in any direction, or, with delayed fuses, set to explode underground. They can be fitted with kits that allow them to hit targets with precision and from a long range. The craters from one-ton bombs can be up to 50 feet deep.
In addition to the 40,000 Mk-84 and BLU-117 bombs, Israel will also receive 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads, which explode on delay after busting through a surface like soil, rock or concrete, the U.S. official said. They also weigh a ton each, but because their casings are thicker and far heavier, they carry far less explosive power than the Mk-84 and BLU-117 bombs.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
According to the U.S. Army office that oversees bomb procurement, “ideal targets” for one-ton bombs “are buildings, rail yards and lines of communication.” The 250- and 500-pound bombs more typically used by the U.S. military are designed for “soft, fragment sensitive targets” like troops, fuel storage tanks and radars, the office said.
The $2.8 billion purchase is being funded from the Pentagon’s budget for foreign military sales. That means the money effectively flows from U.S. taxpayers to Israel’s military and then to U.S. munitions manufacturers.
New York Times, Live Updates: Fed Raises Interest Rates in Push for ‘Timelier’ Retreat in Inflation, Colby Smith, Sept. 16, 2026. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, putting its new leader, Kevin Warsh, at odds with President Trump. “The plain fact is that inflation is too high,” Mr. Warsh said.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday, the first major step by Kevin M. Warsh, the central bank’s chairman, to combat elevated inflation. The decision, which was supported by all 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee, marked the first rate rise from the Fed since July 2023.
The increase lifts the Fed’s benchmark rate — which serves as the basis for lenders to set rates for all kinds of debt — to a new range of 3.75 to 4 percent. Mr. Warsh, who was appointed earlier this year by President Trump, said the central bank had concluded that prices have been rising too quickly. “The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” he said.
The Fed’s decision, while expected, came as Mr. Trump continued to press for the central bank to lower rates. He said over the weekend that the United States “should be paying the lowest interest rate in the world, and earlier this month went as far as threatening to cut off a broad swath of trade if the Fed did not lower rates.
In his post-announcement remarks, Mr. Warsh avoided responding to a question about Mr. Trump’s desires. “I’ve got nothing for you,” he said.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Bill Smokes the Hopium Pipe in the Land of Corn, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Sept. 16, 2026. Here we were thinking nothing interesting would happen in Congress for the rest of the year—and suddenly there was Rep. Thomas Massie yesterday, introducing articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The eight articles charge Hegseth—among other things—with waging unlawful wars in Iran and Yemen despite the disapproval of Congress, carrying out extrajudicial killings against suspected drug traffickers, and ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties. Which, yeah—hard to argue against it!
Several Democrats have introduced impeachment articles against Hegseth before, but Massie’s effort goes further: Because he introduced them as a privileged resolution from the floor, the House will have to vote on them tomorrow unless House Speaker Mike Johnson calls a recess early. Happy Wednesday.
News Roundups
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 he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.
The Parnas Perspective, GOP Sends Congress Home to Dodge Impeachment, McConnell Struggles to Vote, Trump Lashes Out as Fed Defies Him, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 16, 2026. House Republicans spent this week doing everything they could to avoid a fight they’re clearly terrified of losing.
Rather than let a privileged impeachment resolution against Pete Hegseth come to a vote, GOP leadership canceled tomorrow’s session entirely and sent members home to campaign until after the midterms, a move that lines up neatly with a new poll showing Trump’s approval underwater on every major issue and a majority of voters now wanting someone to check him rather than back him.
Meanwhile the Iran war keeps generating grim numbers of its own, from a U.S. official’s warning of a looming military “breakdown” to reporting that Russian satellites may have helped Iran target American bases. Add a hacked Flock camera that reveals exactly how much these surveillance systems actually track, a Trump-Beatty shouting match over the Kennedy Center, and a Fed rate hike delivered squarely against the White House’s wishes, and you’ve got a week that makes the case for itself.
That independence is paid for by readers who become paid subscribers. If this newsletter has been valuable to you, if you think this story deserves someone tracking every filing, every email, every contradiction, this is the moment to back that work.Subscribed
Here’s everything you need to know.
Republicans are terrified, and it showed this week when House leaders punted the Hegseth impeachment vote until after the midterms rather than force vulnerable members to take a stance. GOP leadership canceled Thursday’s votes and sent the House home until November 9th, effectively delaying Rep. Thomas Massie’s privileged impeachment resolution against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even though it legally required action within two legislative days. Leaders insisted the schedule change had nothing to do with Massie, but Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the effort as “a publicity stunt” that will “immediately be tabled,” while simultaneously avoiding the vote entirely before Election Day. Johnson instead urged members to go home and campaign on the party’s record, touting tax cuts and a “126-year low” violent crime rate rather than defend Hegseth’s handling of the Iran war on the record.
That fear is backed up by hard numbers: a new New York Times/Siena poll finds Democrats with a nearly 9-point edge heading into the midterms as Trump’s approval craters to 38 percent. A majority of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of every major issue polled, including the economy, immigration, tariffs and especially the cost of living, where disapproval hit 71 percent, a 13-point jump since January. Voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on nearly everything, including issues that powered Trump’s 2024 win, with a 7-point edge on the economy and immigration alike, and even 29 percent of Republicans now say the economy is better than a year ago, down from 72 percent in January. The erosion is sharpest among young voters, at just 18 percent approval, and lower-wage earners, who favor Democrats 63 to 31 percent, a group Trump narrowly won in 2024.
The poll also found something more dangerous for the GOP than any single issue: voters increasingly want someone to check Trump, not support him. Forty nine percent of all voters said they’d rather back a candidate who provides a check on Trump, compared to just 26 percent who want one who supports him, and for the first time in his second term a majority, 52 percent, said they “strongly” disapprove of him. The war in Iran is compounding the damage, with more than three-quarters of independents and nearly a quarter of Trump’s own 2024 voters disapproving of his handling of it as gas prices climb above $4 a gallon. Voters also see Republicans as more extreme and more corrupt than Democrats, even as Democrats carry their own baggage, with half of voters calling the party too far left. Still, independent voters like 21-year-old Elizabeth Gloden, who backed Trump in 2024, are now switching sides, saying simply, “I’m not really seeing the change I wanted to see.”
JD Vance’s closing pitch to voters ahead of the midterms is simply asking them for patience: “Give us another chance. Give us another couple of years.”
Iran War:
A U.S. official told The Intercept the Iran war could eventually cause a “breakdown” in the military’s ability to sustain the fight, citing damaged bases and warships, depleted defensive munitions, casualties, maintenance problems and increasingly difficult logistics. With regional facilities disrupted, Navy ships now have to move supplies more than 2,000 miles from Diego Garcia, producing sea transits and logistics cycles of 14 to 18 days that one official called “difficult and ultimately unsustainable.” A second official cited a “complete lack of planning” for the conflict. A Pentagon inspector general report separately put the war’s cost at $33.4 billion through June 30, including $22.3 billion in munitions, and found Iranian attacks damaged or destroyed hundreds of structures across U.S. installations in eight countries. CNN has separately estimated the U.S. has burned through nearly 80% of its prewar THAAD interceptor stock and roughly half its Patriot supply, though Hegseth disputes those figures.
The House voted 220-204 for the third time to try to limit Trump’s war powers on Iran, with seven Republicans defecting, while the White House closed ranks around Hegseth after Rep. Thomas Massie filed impeachment articles against him. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Hegseth is “doing a phenomenal job” and disputed even calling the conflict a “war,” arguing Congress already found no wrongdoing by Trump or Hegseth. House Speaker Mike Johnson separately declared the Iran nuclear issue “taken care of” and pivoted to blaming Democrats and Biden for gas prices, which have climbed to $4.37 a gallon, about 30 cents higher than a month ago. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the war has cost around $38 billion since February and could run $2-3 billion more per month for as long as it continues, driven mostly by munitions replacement.
Saudi Arabia accused Iran-backed Houthi rebels of attempting to target Mecca with a drone, a claim the Houthis dismissed as a “worn-out lie,” even as the Guardian reported U.S. officials met Houthi leaders in Oman over the weekend and decided not to help Saudi Arabia repel the group’s advance in Yemen. The Houthis reportedly assured Washington they have no intention of attacking U.S. or international shipping in the Red Sea, and will only target Saudi-linked vessels over Riyadh’s blockade of Yemen, leading Trump to condemn the Houthi advance rhetorically while declining military support for Saudi Arabia. The Houthis claimed in return that they shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet and struck an Aramco facility in Yanbu, though no supporting evidence was provided. A former deputy U.S. ambassador to Yemen said a “tacit understanding” now exists between Washington and the Houthis, leaving Saudi Arabia pushing for either a diplomatic deal or a regional coalition with Pakistan, Turkey and others to push the Houthis back.
CNN reported that Russian spy satellites may have helped Iran target U.S. bases during its attacks, including the March strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia that injured 12 U.S. soldiers and destroyed a Boeing E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft. Tracking data reportedly showed the satellites, which include imaging, radio-signal detection and radar capabilities, passing over targeted U.S. sites just before Iranian strikes hit them, with analysts saying the precision would have been implausible without that intelligence. Saudi security expert Dr. Nawaf Obaid called it “Russian payback” for U.S. support of Ukraine’s strikes on Russian targets, saying it has reshaped “the security architecture of the region going forward.” The reporting adds a new dimension to a war that has already pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel and kept the Strait of Hormuz and a key Saudi east-west pipeline disrupted for months.
Flock Cameras Hacked:
A hacker collective called stegan0gram physically tore down a Flock Safety license plate camera and copied its stored data, sharing the files with 404 Media and WIRED to expose how the surveillance system actually works. The hackers recovered an encryption key from an unencrypted “media” partition on the device’s Android OS, unlocking videos and stills that Flock had described as protected by on-device encryption. Analysis of the recovered logs showed the camera photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images over 21 days of activity, averaging around 3,300 vehicles a day and peaking at 4,454. One hacker explained the motive bluntly: “Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” The breach follows a wave of vandalism and arrests targeting Flock cameras nationwide, with some towns dropping the cameras entirely and one police department building a 3D-printed decoy camera to bait vandals.
The analysis revealed the cameras explicitly detect people, not just vehicles, plates, and bicycles, a capability WIRED says is typically overlooked in public debate about the technology. When reporters extracted the camera’s own detection models and ran them against its recovered footage, the software readily identified people, including a reporter’s selfie and, across more than 27,000 short video clips, 11 clips of motorcyclists. The plate-reading software also proved sloppy in practice, mistaking bumper stickers, dealership frames, and in one case an American flag patch on a motorcycle saddlebag for license plates. Flock insists its cameras don’t perform facial recognition, and investigators found no evidence of active face-recognition beyond Android’s unused default capabilities. The findings build on prior WIRED and 404 Media reporting showing Flock’s national network lets more than 2,000 agencies, including ICE, search local camera data, in some cases bypassing state bans on sharing it.
Flock called the removal and tampering illegal, while a security researcher and a former police officer offered competing takes on the vigilante approach. A Flock spokesperson said the company received no vulnerability report through its official disclosure process and couldn’t assess the hackers’ claims with the “limited information” provided, urging them to report findings properly instead. Former Pawtucket, Rhode Island officer and Flock critic Noel Pichardo said he understood the hackers’ frustration but warned that “vigilantism will only crystallize the police and the state at large in their belief that this tool is necessary.” The recovered logs also captured mundane technical chaos inside the device, including more than 27,000 “no space left on device” storage errors and a recurring health-check log message reading “Who’s a good boy?!” that appeared over 12,000 times. One hacker acknowledged the legal risk, saying, “Being investigated is a legit concern and something we are trying to avoid... we are careful and try to keep a low profile.”
Other News:
Rep. Joyce Beatty said Trump threw a “tantrum” and called her “dumb” and “incompetent” during a virtual Kennedy Center board meeting Tuesday, immediately after a federal judge blocked his name from being added to the building for a second time. Beatty, an ex-officio board member who brought the lawsuit behind the ruling, called it “the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed,” saying Trump accused her of being an obstructionist before she fired back, “I know you’re incompetent.” She said Trump also invoked safety concerns, warning he’d hold her responsible if something fell from the ceiling and killed someone, to which she replied that people were already dying from the wars and starvation his policies were causing. The board, which Trump hand-picked, voted the same day to close the center indefinitely, citing financial strain and safety issues, a move Beatty and other critics call holding the center hostage until it bears Trump’s name. A White House spokesman countered that Trump “stepped up to save” a center that had “rotted” under Democratic oversight for decades.
Fed Raises Rates for First Time in Three Years Despite Trump Pressure. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point on Wednesday, the first such hike in three years, after Chairman Kevin Warsh acted despite discouraging inflation and consumer price data. The move came just four months after Trump appointed Warsh and directly against the White House’s wishes, with Trump having recently threatened to curtail trade with U.S. partners unless the Fed cut rates instead. A Duke University survey found near-unanimous agreement among former Fed officials that a hike was necessary, but Warsh faced a genuine bind: holding rates steady risked rattling bond markets and investor confidence, while raising them seven weeks before the midterms risked political backlash from Trump. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett had signaled the administration’s preference days earlier, arguing an “independent Fed” should “stay out of the way of elections.” How Trump responds remains unclear, though further trade restrictions in retaliation would risk pushing consumer prices even higher.
The Justice Department charged five people, allegedly working for Russian intelligence, in a scheme to surveil, recruit and carry out targeted killings, including a plot to murder a Russian dissident believed to be in the Washington, D.C. area. An indictment unsealed Tuesday names Russian national Yuri Khrameev, his son Kirill Khrameev, Cuban nationals Oemis Romagoza Durruthy and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, and Venezuelan national Angel Eduardo Castro, all still at large, with three of the five also facing murder-for-hire conspiracy charges. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the network recruited people inside the U.S. to conduct surveillance on Russian dissidents, including one living stateside and another in Lithuania, and prosecutors say one recruit was allegedly offered $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” a person in the U.S., while another was offered $25,000 last year to kill someone in Lithuania. The Kremlin brushed off the charges, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying “until we hear and see any credible evidence and arguments based on tangible facts, we do not believe it is necessary to comment,” consistent with Russia’s past denials of running such operations on foreign soil. The case adds to a growing list of alleged Russian assassination and intimidation plots targeting dissidents abroad, underscoring how far that campaign may be reaching into U.S. soil itself. This is from the release announcing the indictment:
House Oversight Chair James Comer has introduced the Survivor’s Voice Protection Act, his committee’s first piece of legislation to come directly out of its ongoing Epstein investigation. The bill would void and make unenforceable any NDA that prevents someone, including sexual abuse survivors, from disclosing information about that abuse, and it would apply retroactively to agreements signed before the law takes effect. It also creates a fiduciary duty to report grooming of a minor to law enforcement, defining grooming broadly to include behavior meant to build trust or normalize sexual conduct with a minor even if no in-person meeting occurred. Comer said the investigation showed how “powerful men weaponized nondisclosure agreements to silence survivors,” and the committee has now conducted 19 depositions and interviews tied to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The rollout comes a day after Comer’s panel voted to recommend holding billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over his Epstein-related NDAs.
WSJ Exposes Britt’s Private Tariff Exemption Requests After Public Praise. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) this week for publicly defending Trump’s tariffs while privately seeking exemptions for Alabama companies. The WSJ obtained a FOIA email showing Britt’s legislative director asked the U.S. Trade Representative’s office for exemptions for five specific Alabama manufacturers roughly ten months before Britt publicly praised the tariffs and mocked the Supreme Court for overturning them. The board argued her private objections were actually well-founded, writing that they show how “blunderbuss trade wars are an economic mistake” and how tariff carve-outs let big companies with Senate access get relief while “the little guy being walloped” has no one to plead his case. Britt’s office defended her, saying she also raised the same concerns publicly in Senate hearings and got Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to look into at least one request, while reaffirming her support for Trump’s broader trade agenda. The WSJ noted this “tariffs for thee, exemptions for me” pattern isn’t unique to Britt, pointing to Sen. Josh Hawley and others as prior examples.
U.S. Fast-Tracked Deportation of Ecuadorean Politician Despite Torture Findings. José Serrano, a former Ecuadorean interior minister and critic of President Daniel Noboa, was deported to Ecuador on August 28 in a stunningly rapid reversal by Trump-appointed immigration appeals judges, who overturned a ruling that had found he was likely to be tortured if sent home. A U.S. immigration judge had granted Serrano protection from removal in May, citing evidence that Ecuador tortures political prisoners, but three appellate judges appointed under Trump reviewed and reversed that decision within a single day, an unprecedented turnaround former appellate judges say normally takes weeks. Serrano’s lawyers say he has since been held in a maximum-security prison modeled on El Salvador’s CECOT, and that guards photographed him naked and threatened to send the footage to Noboa, a close Trump ally in anti-drug-trafficking efforts in Latin America. Noboa, who has long sought Serrano’s return over a 2023 presidential candidate assassination Serrano is accused of orchestrating, took credit for the deportation on social media within minutes of it happening and warned his own political rival, “You’re next.” The Times ties the case to a broader pattern of the Trump administration reshaping immigration courts, which fall under the Justice Department rather than the judiciary, to serve political ends, including a similar prior case involving a Colombian activist deported after opposing a Trump-endorsed foreign leader.
Paramount Threatens to Leave California Amid Antitrust Fight Over WBD Merger. Paramount has told Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Attorney General Rob Bonta that the company is “deadly serious” about leaving California entirely, according to sources, after months of leaks suggesting CEO David Ellison would relocate if blue-state attorneys general didn’t drop their antitrust suit against Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery. The move comes as that merger remains tied up in a lawsuit filed by a dozen states and the Writers Guild of America, with a trial not set to start until March 2027 despite settlement talks scheduled for next month and a hearing next week over Paramount’s request for a $1.88 billion bond to cover anticipated losses. Those losses reportedly stem largely from a $7 million-per-day fee built into the WBD contract that kicks in October 1, a deadline Paramount’s exit threat arrives just ahead of. Mayor Bass’s office said she remains focused on protecting entertainment jobs in Los Angeles, while neither Paramount nor Bonta’s office commented on how advanced the relocation plans actually are. Any move would carry mostly symbolic and economic weight rather than legal impact on the antitrust case itself, though it adds pressure alongside the Trump administration’s DOJ backing Paramount and a possible Supreme Court intervention still looming over the deal.
Former President Barack Obama announced that the family’s dog Sunny has died at age 13. The Portuguese water dog joined the Obama family in 2013 during their second term in the White House, and Obama said “all of us, including our first dog, Bo, immediately fell in love.” He remembered Sunny as athletic and protective of Bo despite disliking water, an unusual trait for the breed, and said “we will miss her terribly, and imagine she’s with her big brother now, making sure he’s okay.”
A new Government Accountability Office report found the Trump administration spent an estimated $9.5 billion last year on paid administrative leave for federal workers amid DOGE-driven staff cuts. Use of such leave jumped 435 percent from 2023 to 2025, with salary costs rising sixfold, and about $6.7 billion of that came from a “deferred resignation program” that nearly 140,000 federal employees opted into after Elon Musk’s DOGE effort launched mass firings and dissolved USAID. The GAO cautioned its figures were estimates, noting the Office of Personnel Management “does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts” because it isn’t tracked separately from general leave. The federal workforce has shrunk by more than 271,000 employees since Trump took office, reversing a decade of year-over-year growth, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Charlie Kirk’s family accused Utah Valley University and state officials of a string of “reckless decisions” that left him exposed to the rooftop sniper who killed him, in a wrongful death notice that precedes a possible lawsuit. Attorneys said the university failed to conduct an adequate risk assessment, establish a secure perimeter, or use standard safeguards like drone rooftop monitoring, bag checks or metal detectors, despite Kirk being Trump’s “close friend and political ally” and a rooftop shooter having targeted Trump the year before. The notice names the university, its then-president, its police chief and the state of Utah, and the school said it would respond “consistent with our established processes.” Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in a day after the shooting and told his partner he “had enough of his hatred,” is charged with aggravated murder and eligible for the death penalty, with prosecutors citing surveillance footage, DNA evidence and a note reading “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.”
A Golden Retriever named Nash in San Diego responded to a home intruder not by barking, but by bringing the man his toy and trying to get him to play. Nash’s owner, who wasn’t home at the time, watched the whole encounter unfold live on his phone. He said the family had expected Nash to bark and scare off intruders, joking that “Nash is not the greatest guard dog... he did the exact opposite.”
A tiny English village voted overwhelmingly, 285 to 26, to symbolically secede from the United Kingdom in protest of a plan to house up to 1,200 migrants at a nearby military base. Piddington’s roughly 350 residents backed the non-binding referendum after raising fears about safety, crime and property values near the former Bicester base, with parish chairman Tim McNally declaring the area “the Principality of Piddington” and sending “an absolute message... to the world.” Some supporters compared the vote to World War II’s Battle of Britain, while critics said the campaign stoked anti-immigrant sentiment amid a broader wave of U.K. protests over asylum housing. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he understood “the strength of feeling” but stressed the government needs “a fair plan” spreading the burden nationally, as refugee advocates warned that remote military-style housing “undermined social cohesion” for people who had already fled war and violence.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is proposing new investments in maternal and postpartum health programs following renewed public discussion sparked by the high-profile Lindsay Clancy trial. Healey announced the proposal Tuesday alongside mothers who shared personal stories about the mental health challenges they faced during pregnancy and after giving birth, saying the goal is to improve access to mental health care and support services for families statewide. She said mothers experiencing mental health struggles should know they are “seen, heard and supported.” Kerly Germain-Carmichael, one of the mothers who spoke at the event, described experiencing anxiety and depression after giving birth to her son in 2022 and said finding support during that period was critical. The article is paywalled beyond this point, so further specifics on the actual funding or program details aren’t available from this source.
Nicole Saphier testifies before senators on Wednesday. (Screenshot/Courtesy Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee)
Roll Call, Surgeon general nominee won’t renounce RFK Jr. vaccine decisions, Ariel Cohen, Sept. 16, 2026. Surgeon general nominee Nicole Saphier, seeking to be confirmed as the nation’s top health educator and spokesperson, on Wednesday declined to fully distance herself from the Trump administration’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule when pressed by a prominent Republican.
During a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, outgoing Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., attempted to get Saphier on the record that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine does not cause autism and that a universal recommendation for a hepatitis B vaccine at birth should remain in place.
Saphier would not openly refute the stances of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or President Donald Trump, both of whom have suggested a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
The discussion occurred at the outset of a hearing to consider Saphier’s nomination. Also appearing were Chris Klomp, who’s nominated to be deputy HHS secretary, and Timothy Westlake, up for assistant HHS secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use.
Saphier attracted the heaviest questioning from senators, many of whom grilled her on whether she would knowingly spread misinformation if Kennedy, right, asked her to do so.
“Well, humbly, I don’t know what causes autism, but I have not seen repeatable evidence that will suggest it causes autism,” Saphier said when Cassidy asked her if she believed that the MMR vaccine is a cause.
Cassidy interrupted Saphier to say her answer gave “too much wiggle room” and asked her to be more specific because nominees can “use wiggle room to do things that are quite contrary.”
Saphier told him that she did not believe the vaccines to be lethal, as Trump once suggested, and would recommend the shots, but she appreciated that some parents are skeptical of the vaccine and the Trump administration is trying to appeal to these people.
“I’m not sure that you reach people who are vaccine-hesitant by feeding into their own truths,” Cassidy responded. “The way to dispel confusion is not to sell more confusion.”
As for the hepatitis B vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine panel in December voted to drop the universal recommendation that babies receive it at birth after Kennedy cast doubt on the validity of the shot. Cassidy, a longtime liver doctor who treated hepatitis, is a strong proponent.
A judge temporarily blocked the panel’s recommendations in March, including the change to the hepatitis B vaccine.
“I support universal hepatitis B vaccination,” Saphier told Cassidy. But she would not go as far as saying that Kennedy should keep the recommendation in place, much to Cassidy’s chagrin.
When Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked Saphier about flavored vaping, the nominee again had to contend with the Trump administration versus conventional medical wisdom.
“As a physician, I don’t want anyone smoking anything. The lungs are very sensitive and they don’t regenerate,” Saphier said. She added that “if flavor [vapes] can entice an adult to quit smoking cigarettes, then maybe it’s something to be considered.”
In May, the Food and Drug Administration authorized four new fruit- and menthol-flavored vapes. Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary deeply disagreed with the decision and resigned from his post soon after it was made. Rich Danker, a top HHS spokesperson, also resigned in protest of the vaping decision.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he was very disappointed in the administration’s shuttering of the CDC’s smoking cessation office. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, added that Saphier’s past work as a social media influencer could help make her an effective anti-smoking spokesperson for the nation.
“I am as anti-smoking, anti-tobacco as you could imagine anyone to be,” Saphier responded.Measles
Saphier’s appearance resembled Klomp’s at the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, where he toed the line between portraying himself as a trustworthy, policy-focused nominee while declining to fully distance himself from Kennedy’s vaccine policies.
In questioning Klomp on Wednesday, Cassidy pointed to four measles deaths in Pennsylvania. The CDC has yet to update its website to reflect these deaths, as Kennedy and Pennsylvania officials have feuded over whether they were a result of measles or other causes.
Cassidy said there’s a perception that the agency is “trying to dance around the sensitivities of [Kennedy] as opposed to being straightforward with the American people.”
Klomp said if confirmed, HHS would “address the operational shortcomings and create a clear definition of measles-related death.”
Washington Monthly, Can the House Clerk Lead a Midterm Coup? Garrett Epps, law professor, Sept. 16, 2026. It’s happened before. Will the Constitution face such a near-death experience on January 3?
How many House Republicans would be willing to follow Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and violate their constitutional oaths? How many Republicans might seize the opportunity to rid themselves of both figures, who are, behind closed doors, not terribly popular?
If the House Republicans try to steal the majority, will Democrats turn to the Supreme Court? The Court’s majority has been inconstant—having granted Trump criminal immunity, it has also blocked some of his most outrageous power grabs. If the Luttig scenario plays out, the Court’s majority will be forced to choose once and for all.
* * * * * * * * *But what was not generally known at the time was that the plot would have been foiled—even, if necessary, by bayonets. Lincoln had dispatched troops, who were concealed inside the Capitol, ready to occupy the House chamber. As president, he had sent young soldiers into battle, where many were slaughtered for the Union cause; he seemed to be sanguine at the prospect of battle reaching the Capitol itself. He told one of his allies, “If Mr. Etheridge undertakes revolutionary proceedings, let him be carried out on a chip, and let our men organize the House.”So passed the first crisis.
* * * * * * * * *I came across the story some years ago, while researching my book, Democracy Reborn, a narrative of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. That framing took place in the late winter of 1865 and the spring of 1866, and it was the endpoint of a series of hair’s-breadth escapes for democracy from the forces of the Slave Power and its northern allies, who actively sought to subvert the Union war effort and deliver a post-Appomattox victory to pro-slavery forces.
The first episode occurred in December 1863, after the Union was defeated at the polls nearly as badly as at First and Second Bull Run. On election day in 1862, the Civil War effort was going badly, and the fall midterms produced disaster for the healthy Republican majority elected to the House in 1860. Capitalizing on public disgust, the Democrats gained a whopping 27 seats, bringing them within 15 seats of the Republicans who had won the House two years earlier. This produced a rarity in American history: a genuine plot for a coup d’etat, engineered by none other than the Clerk of the House, a Democrat named Emerson Etheridge, a holdover from the days when pro-slavery forces ruled the House, who made it known that he had a plan.On the first day of the House, he would skip a few names—just enough to produce a “membership” with a Democratic majority. A Democratic speaker, S.S. “Sunset” Cox, would take control and the Republicans would be shut out of power in the House.
The plan leaked.
It turned out that not every Northern Democrat had the stomach, or the devotion to slavery, needed to overturn an American election. Emerson called his truncated roll, omitting 16 Republicans who he claimed had not presented valid credentials. Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical Republican, immediately moved that the omitted names be called. Because some opposition members stayed loyal to the Constitution, the House narrowly voted to seat the omitted members, and the crisis passed.
But what was not generally known at the time was that the plot would have been foiled—even, if necessary, by bayonets. Lincoln had dispatched troops, who were concealed inside the Capitol, ready to occupy the House chamber. As president, he had sent young soldiers into battle, where many were slaughtered for the Union cause; he seemed to be sanguine at the prospect of battle reaching the Capitol itself. He told one of his allies, “If Mr. Etheridge undertakes revolutionary proceedings, let him be carried out on a chip, and let our men organize the House.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, seen here in May, vented his frustration at Speaker Mike Johnson in a floor speech Wednesday that also doubled as a swan song for the Kentucky Republican, who won’t be returning for the 120th Congress. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
Roll Call, One Republican rages against House’s early exit, Nina Heller, Sept. 16, 2026. In rare use of ‘personal privilege,’ Massie rebukes House cancellation of votes.
Rep. Thomas Massie, seen here in May, vented his frustration at Speaker Mike Johnson in a floor speech Wednesday that also doubled as a swan song for the Kentucky Republican, who won’t be returning for the 120th Congress.
As the House heads home early this week with no plans to return until November, at least one Republican isn’t happy about it.
In a rare use of members’ “personal privilege,” Rep. Thomas Massie continued a feud with Speaker Mike Johnson, who earlier this month accused the Kentucky Republican of “not participating as a full member of the Congress.”
House procedure allows members to raise questions of personal privilege on the floor to respond to criticism of their integrity as elected representatives, but they have seldom taken advantage of it in recent years.
“I’m here today to let you know that I’m a full participating member of the House of Representatives. In fact, when other people want to go home, I’m here to work. I’m here to get justice for the Epstein victims, the survivors. I am here to get the price of food and fuel down for our constituents. We’ve got solutions. We just refuse to pass them,” he said on the House floor Wednesday as he raged against his own party.
Massie spent an hour on the House floor Wednesday afternoon lambasting the House’s truncated schedule and suggesting leaders were trying to leave town so they wouldn’t have to deal with his quests for transparency and accountability — namely his latest effort to require the Justice Department to release more files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Earlier in the day, House leaders announced they would cancel votes on Thursday — a decision that came after Johnson had already lopped two weeks off the House schedule that had been planned for later in September, as members return to their districts to campaign ahead of the midterms.
A discharge petition launched by Massie in September to bring another Epstein-related bill to the House floor, dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, is nearing the required 218 signatures. The biggest obstacle for Massie is Republican support of his effort. If every House Democrat signs the petition, he’ll need one more Republican.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the only Republicans who had signed were Massie and Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Ralph Norman, R-S.C. None of those three will be returning to Congress next year, with Massie losing his primary to a challenger backed by President Donald Trump and Mace and Norman both falling short in their unsuccessful bids for South Carolina governor.
The bill would allow state attorneys general, victims and members of Congress to sue the Justice Department for failing to disclose documents as required under the law he championed last fall.
And he’s not the only Republican unhappy — Norman called the canceled votes “unacceptable” on X Wednesday afternoon.
“The House has now canceled at least 63 scheduled voting days this Congress, including nine days this month alone, and now we’re leaving Washington until after the election. The Founders did not envision taking this much time off and still getting paid. If Members of Congress want to go home and campaign instead of doing the job taxpayers sent us here to do, then their campaigns ought to be paying them, NOT the American taxpayer,” he wrote.
Massie’s first attempt to force the Justice Department to release Epstein files, which he led alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., easily passed the House after a battle to bring it to the floor against the wishes of leadership. It was signed into law last November.
“What would a fully participating member of Congress do if he got a law enacted against the will of the president, against the will of the speaker … against all odds, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the country will not follow the law? What would a fully participating member of Congress do? Well, I think he’d do what I did,” Massie said.
Massie is hoping to make the most of his limited time left in Congress. “I’m going to do something every week, so that I won’t be sitting at home saying, ‘I wish I’d done that,’” he said in June.
Some, however, took umbrage at Massie’s actions.
“Sadly we have Members of Congress who didn’t get picked by their 5th Grade Kickball Team and are taking out their frustration on the institution of the House of Representatives. #MoveOn,” Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., wrote on X Wednesday as Massie’s floor speech went on.
Massie doesn’t see it the same way.
“Why would we be canceling days when the country is burning? The inflation is rampant. There are things we could do here. Why would we cancel our own majority?” he said.
The Daily with Sarah Jones, Mitch McConnell Is So Out Of It That His Handlers Had To Guide Him To Vote, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Sept. 16, 2026. During the Agricultural Committee’s markup of the Farm Bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell almost voted with the Democrats until he was instructed by his handlers how to vote.
Watching Republicans literally wheel Mitch McConnell back into the US Senate, when the Kentucky Senator does not seem to know what is going on, should add fuel to the debate about term limits for members of Congress.
McConnell looks like a shell of his former self and clearly like he should not be in the Senate or taking votes right now, but Republicans are engaging in a charade with what remains of Mitch McConnell because of rules that McConnell pushed Republicans in Kentucky to adopt so that he could never be replaced by a Democrat.
At McConnell’s urging, Republicans took the power of naming his or any other Kentucky senator’s successor out of the hands of the governor. Instead, the governor must select the appointee from a list approved by the state legislature.
There are also rules about special elections and elections to fill the remainder of a senator’s term.
Republicans in Kentucky aren’t worried about a Democrat filling McConnell’s seat. They are worried about Rep. Thomas Massie, who was chased out of his House seat by Trump because of his efforts to get the Epstein files released.
Massie is why McConnell is being dragged around and the country has to witness scenes like what happened during the Farm Bill markup on Wednesday.Mitch McConnell Is Not Well
Some may try to play this off as normal, but what happened at the committee vote clearly was not normal.
As the roll call vote was being held, McConnell’s handlers can be seen speaking to him, as if they were reminding him what was going on. When Sen. McConnell’s name was called, he started to vote No along with the Democrats, but then an aide behind him and beside him said something to him, likely telling him to vote yes, so McConnell then voted aye.
Mitch McConnell is the same person who once made up a Senate rule to deny Merrick Garland a Supreme Court confirmation vote, but then broke that rule so that Trump could get another Supreme Court justice on the bench before the 2020 election.
When asked about his hypocrisy, McConnell laughed and said that the rule was only for Democrats.
I don’t feel like Mitch McConnell deserves much sympathy in terms of politics, but the people of Kentucky deserve a senator who is capable of doing the job. Republicans are playing Weekend at Bernie’s with Mitch McConnell.
McConnell is alive, but being alive and being able to function aren’t the same thing.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Big News: Record Number of Republicans Break and Urge Trump to End War, Canada Invited to EU, Trump Seeks to Rewrite History at Museums, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Last night I had the honor of giving the keynote address at Webster University, standing in front of a room full of young people and talking about finding their power and their voice at a moment when so many forces are telling them to stay quiet. It’s a message I believe in more with every story I cover, because the same week I was telling students their voice matters, seven House Republicans found theirs and broke with Trump on Iran, Canada found its and started walking toward Europe instead of Washington, and museum curators found theirs and refused to bend to a White House trying to rewrite their work off the walls. Power and voice aren’t abstract concepts. They’re what happens when people who could stay quiet decide not to.
That’s the throughline of today’s newsletter: from a war powers revolt in Congress to a Smithsonian fight over who gets to tell America’s story, to an old ally quietly building a new home for itself abroad. Let’s get into it.
Thank you to everyone who’s already a paid subscriber, and to everyone who showed up last night in person, it means more than you know. If you’re not a subscriber yet, I’d ask you to consider becoming one. Independent journalism like this only survives because readers choose to fund it directly, and every subscription helps me keep showing up, whether that’s in a courtroom, at a board meeting, or in a college auditorium telling the next generation their voice counts too.Subscribed
Here’s the news:
Iran war:
Seven House Republicans broke with Trump to help pass a resolution reining in his Iran war powers. The House adopted the measure 220 to 204 late Tuesday, with Reps. Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson, Tom Barrett, Nancy Mace, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn joining all voting Democrats, marking the third significant blow to the administration since the conflict began and the largest bipartisan defection yet (up from just four Republicans on a similar July vote). The concurrent resolution, led by Rep. Seth Moulton, calls on Trump to terminate the use of U.S. forces against Iran, but it’s symbolic only, it doesn’t carry the force of law and isn’t subject to a presidential veto. Republicans who backed it argue the original 60 day War Powers Resolution window already expired, while the administration and most GOP members maintain Trump is acting within his constitutional authority as commander in chief. The vote is the sixth time the House has taken up an Iran war powers resolution this year, and it also helped fuel Massie’s separate push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Vice President JD Vance, right, predicted the war will shift into a “much different phase” within a couple of months, while defending the administration’s handling of it. He told the New York Post that Trump, as commander in chief, is the one who determines “when conflicts start and when they stop,” and pushed back on the idea that the U.S. is engaged in “aggressive operations,” saying flatly, “We’re just not.” Vance acknowledged public impatience with the war’s length but offered no specific timeline beyond the vague forecast. His comments echoed an earlier deflection from a September 3rd press conference, where he told reporters that ending the war depended on when Iranian strikes on shipping “stop having an effect on world energy markets.” The remarks come as the war has become a defining midterm issue, with Republicans divided and Democrats hammering Trump over a “forever war.”
Oil markets are absorbing new shocks as strikes disrupt key export routes, with the State Department now warning Americans against travel to Saudi Arabia. Crude loadings stopped at Saudi Arabia’s Yanbu port on the Red Sea, a 400,000 barrel per day refinery operation that had served as a workaround for disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, according to sources familiar with the matter. Oil analyst Andy Lipow warned the disruption could be “catastrophic” for consumers, especially Northeast heating oil customers facing “absolute sticker shock.” Separately, the State Department reissued a level 3 travel warning for Saudi Arabia over the risk of Iranian drone and missile targeting of American interests, and a level 4 “do not travel” warning for the Yemen border over terrorism risk. Together the moves reflect how the conflict is spreading economic and safety consequences well beyond the immediate battlefield.
CBS News obtained exclusive photos showing extensive, previously undisclosed damage to U.S. bases from Iranian missile and drone strikes. Images from Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia show a destroyed Boeing E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft, while photos from Camp Buehring in Kuwait show hollowed-out buildings and destroyed vehicles. One deployed service member told CBS, “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public... we’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face,” and separately said “we’re not defending these bases, we’re just watching them get destroyed.” The Pentagon’s inspector general this week reported equipment losses worth up to $3.7 billion, including nearly 60 aircraft, across strikes on U.S. positions in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. The Pentagon did not respond to CBS’s request for comment on the photos.
Smithsonian:
The Trump administration is preparing temporary signs accusing the Smithsonian’s American history museum of ideological bias. A September 3 letter from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, obtained by The Atlantic, says the National Park Service plans to install about a dozen signs outside the museum at an estimated cost of $84,000, following an executive order Trump signed in July. The letter, sent in response to inquiries from Senators Jeff Merkley and Lisa Murkowski, extensively quotes museum director Anthea Hartig and outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch in an effort to frame them as ideologues, including resurfacing a 2020 lecture where Hartig acknowledged white privilege and a 2000 essay where Bunch discussed racial discrimination in the museum field. The signs’ final text hasn’t been written yet, and even Park Service staff working on the project reportedly don’t know who will write it. Burgum’s letter calls the move “necessary” and argues visitors deserve “important context” about the “personal viewpoints” curators are advancing.
Museum leadership is pushing back, and the fight is part of a broader pattern of pressure on the Smithsonian. Hartig told two House committees this summer that “our work is governed by the Smithsonian’s standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence, and nonpartisanship... the museum does not take sides in America’s political debates,” pointing to hundreds of patriotic objects and dozens of George Washington references already on display. Trump has also separately demanded the museum remove an abstract sculpture and replace it with a 30-foot George Washington statue, and Burgum’s letter singles out exhibits touching on transgender Americans and language guidance around the term “undocumented immigrant.” Conservative groups often tied to the administration’s history initiatives, including PragerU and Hillsdale College, both told The Atlantic they aren’t involved in writing the sign text, and Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez declined to confirm or deny any role. The Smithsonian, which is partially federally funded but has historically operated independently with its own governing body, has been fending off pressure from the administration since March 2025.
Canada and the European Union:
The EU offered Canada a path to becoming its first “associate member,” as both drift from Washington under strain from Trump. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the offer during a speech in Strasbourg with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seated beside her, telling him “I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union,” an announcement met with a standing ovation from lawmakers. Details on what associate membership would actually entail remain scant, but officials say Canada and the EU are working toward closer cooperation on trade, tech regulation, critical minerals and security ahead of an October summit. Von der Leyen also pitched a European equivalent to NATO’s mutual defense clause and a new European Security Council that would include non-EU partners like Britain, Norway, Ukraine, and Canada. The push reflects Carney’s own framing from a Davos speech earlier this year, that “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
The overture comes as both Canada and the EU face deteriorating relationships with the United States. Trump has waged a trade war with Canada and repeatedly called for it to become the 51st state, and talks between the two countries collapsed entirely last month, prompting a wave of Canadian patriotism and polls showing roughly four in five Canadians now support closer EU integration. Meanwhile the U.S. has pulled back support for NATO and Ukraine, leaving Europe scrambling to shore up its own defenses amid recent drone incursions and other provocations attributed to Russia. One EU lawmaker, Barry Andrews of Ireland, put it bluntly: “China, Russia and the U.S. have turned their backs on international law. We need new allies.” The move still faces roadblocks, since some EU member states worry that offering too much to an associate could diminish the value of full membership, but Canada and the EU already have a free trade agreement making about 90 percent of trade between them tariff-free.
Other News:
A House panel voted unanimously, 41-0, to recommend Leon Black be held in contempt of Congress over Epstein files subpoenas. The billionaire financier refused to comply with subpoenas seeking his testimony and all nondisclosure agreements he’s a party to, and did not appear for his scheduled September 3 deposition, instead suing to block the subpoenas as “invalid” and an overreach of the committee’s legislative authority. Chairman James Comer said “subpoenas are not suggestions; they carry the force of law and require full compliance,” and stressed Black’s testimony is crucial because he maintained a close personal relationship with Epstein during the years Epstein was trafficking women. Black’s attorneys called the markup “a complete abomination” and accused Comer of violating House rules, while Black himself has said he regrets ever doing business with Epstein but “had no knowledge of any of Epstein’s heinous conduct,” despite paying him roughly $170 million from 2013 to 2017. More than a dozen Epstein survivors had urged Black to comply before his deposition, arguing his NDAs could shed light on his relationship with Epstein and others in his orbit; the resolution now heads to the full House, where Speaker Mike Johnson’s office has not said whether it will be taken up.
Federal firefighters say they’re being pushed past a breaking point during one of the most extreme wildfire seasons on record, and the government is failing them. Nine active firefighters and several retirees told the Guardian that a critical shortage of experienced supervisory personnel, combined with Trump administration directives prioritizing aggressive “direct attack” tactics, has left crews spread dangerously thin, with one firefighter saying “accidents have been through the roof” amid widespread fatigue from near-nonstop assignments since April. Wildfires are overrunning firefighters at the highest rate in 20 years, with 12 dangerous “entrapments” recorded by mid-August and 14 on-duty deaths this year, including three firefighters killed at Colorado’s Knowles fire in the most deadly entrapment in 13 years. Five senators warned in a letter that crews have “worked more fires than is safe” using temporary, underqualified supervisory structures, a claim that stands in stark contrast to Forest Service chief Tom Schultz’s congressional testimony that the agency’s firefighting workforce is “stronger than at any point in recent years” and “fully staffed.” By mid-September roughly 54,400 fires had burned more than 8.4 million acres, 149% of the 10-year average, and the country spent 48 consecutive days at the highest national preparedness level, nearly double the typical yearly average, leaving veteran advocates like retired fire chief Bobbie Scopa warning that doubling up leadership responsibilities “sets everyone up for failure.”
A new report warns the AI datacenter construction boom will triple the world’s annual toxic e-waste within 25 years, with no plan in place to handle it. The Basel Action Network calculated that AI-driven equipment retirement, including server racks weighing 1,360 kilograms each and the copper, steel and concrete needed for cooling and power systems, could generate up to 13 million metric tons of waste per year by 2030, enough to fill shipping containers that would circle the globe six times. The equipment isn’t designed for repair or reuse and must be completely replaced every two to five years, and the report notes electronic waste is already the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet, with only a fifth of it properly managed worldwide. There are currently 4,871 new datacenters in the US construction pipeline, part of a roughly $7 trillion global buildout over the next five years that BAN’s white paper notes is “roughly the cost of ending world hunger for the next 75 years.” The report arrives as a separate coalition of environmental and health experts called on the federal government to address air pollution from datacenter power generation, which they estimate could cause hundreds of thousands of new asthma cases and as many as 1,300 premature deaths annually in the US.
A television news helicopter crashed in a Los Angeles neighborhood, killing at least three people while covering an earlier fatal bus crash nearby. The NBC4 chopper went down near a one-story commercial building in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley and burst into flames, with fire officials still working to determine how many victims were inside the aircraft versus in the parking lot below; one person was hospitalized in unclear condition. Fire captain Branden Silverman described the helicopter as “pretty well destroyed,” and more than 50 firefighters responded after the wreckage ignited four cars and two storage containers on the ground. The crash happened roughly 90 minutes after an SUV slammed into the middle of an MTA city bus about 1.5 miles away, killing at least two people and injuring six others, an accident the helicopter crew had been sent to cover. The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are now investigating what caused the crash.
A major national study found more than half of US adults have experienced physical violence and nearly half have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. The Tulane University and UC San Diego survey of 2,720 adults, conducted in English and Spanish, found the physical violence rate identical between women and men at 52%, though women most often experienced it at the hands of a spouse or partner (61%) while men most often experienced it from a stranger (38%). Sexual violence showed a starker gender gap, with 68% of women and 29% of men reporting it over their lifetime, and researchers found nearly one in five women reported potentially lethal intimate partner violence involving beating, strangulation, or a weapon, compared with 3% of men. Co-author Anita Raj said the findings show why relying on crime reports alone understates the true scope of the problem, warning “we also don’t want to find out about it at that point because if we’re finding out at that point, the risk for fatality has now gone up.” Economic hardship compounded the risk sharply: adults evicted in the past year were seven times more likely to report recent physical violence and nearly five times more likely to report intimate partner violence, and the study’s release came just three days after a quadruple stabbing in Louisiana killed a mother, her daughter, her son and his girlfriend.
Amnesty International found Iranian security forces ran a coordinated campaign of killing, torture and sexual abuse against protesters in the 2022 uprising, and that the resulting impunity paved the way for even bloodier crackdowns since. Drawing on leaked state documents and testimony, the group verified 377 deaths, including 56 children, from the demonstrations that erupted after Mahsa Amini died in police custody, and documented 16 cases of detainees being raped, including a 14-year-old girl and boys aged 16 and 17, describing state agents penetrating victims with batons, glass bottles and hosepipes. Leaked orders instructed forces to “respond mercilessly and go as far as causing death,” and the findings echo earlier Guardian reporting from 2022 describing medics’ accounts of security forces shooting female protesters in the face and genitals. Amnesty’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said the investigation “exposes the layers of command and coordination behind the Iranian authorities’ deadly protest crackdowns,” linking street-level agents to a hierarchical chain of command. The group named 87 officials for potential prosecution for crimes against humanity, including the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and said the 2022 crackdown’s impunity directly enabled the killing of thousands of protesters over 48 hours during January 2026’s anti-government uprising.
Saudi Arabia accused Iran-backed Houthi rebels of attempting to attack Mecca, declaring the holy city a “red line” in the escalating conflict, while the Houthis denied targeting it and accused Riyadh of “fabrications and lies.” Saudi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki said air defenses intercepted a drone south of the city just before 7 p.m. local time Tuesday, and warned there would be no hesitation to take “necessary and deterrent measures” against the rebels. The Houthis said their operations have targeted Saudi oil facilities and military bases far from Mecca, and their rapid ground advance in Yemen, including capture of a key Red Sea port, has already shut down a crucial oil pipeline and threatens a second major shipping route through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The escalation threatens to open a second front alongside the ongoing US-Israel war with Iran, with Brent crude near $108 a barrel and US diesel prices hitting a record $6.31; the US upgraded its travel advisory for Saudi Arabia to Level 3 and barred government employees from the Yemen border area, even as Trump said over the weekend the Houthis told him they “don’t want to fight with us” and predicted things would work out “fine and dandy.”
New satellite data shows Earth’s ice sheets have lost 12.5 trillion tons of ice since 1979, with the melt accelerating and driven increasingly by warmer ocean water rather than warmer air. An international team combining European and NASA satellite data found five-sixths of the melt now comes from warmer waters eating away at ice sheets from below and the sides, contributing to roughly an inch of global sea level rise since 1979, and researchers note that for every third of an inch of additional rise, another 2 to 3 million people get flooded at least once a year. Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier is now retreating up to 164 feet a day, and study co-author Eric Rignot said “we are melting the polar regions, sea level is rising worldwide and will exacerbate the vulnerability of coastal regions.” Scientists said the changes lag global warming by decades, meaning ice loss will likely continue for decades even if warming stopped today, and outside expert David Holland said he’s concerned because most of the loss is coming from more abrupt “dynamical” processes, exactly what would be expected in an ice sheet instability collapse scenario. A brief pause in the acceleration from 2020 to 2023 turned out to be a short-term weather fluctuation rather than a trend reversal, with researchers saying the accelerating pattern has since picked back up.
Texas executed a man convicted in a 2005 triple murder Wednesday, while a Georgia execution scheduled for the same night was halted by a judge just hours earlier. LeJames Norman, 40, was sentenced to die for fatally shooting three roommates during a botched robbery in which he and an accomplice were searching for cocaine that turned out not to exist; the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency, and his attorneys’ last-ditch appeal to the US Supreme Court followed a lower court’s rejection of a stay. Stacey Humphreys, convicted of killing two real estate agents in a 2003 robbery at an Atlanta-area model home, received a stay after his lawyers invoked a new Georgia law letting survivors of abuse seek reduced sentences, though the state has vowed to appeal in hopes of still carrying out the execution as scheduled. Humphreys’ lawyers separately argue his sentence was tainted by a biased juror and an improperly constituted clemency board, claims that Justice Sonia Sotomayor said last year deserved further scrutiny rather than being left “caught in a web of procedural barriers.” Texas’s execution was its fifth this year, while Georgia has yet to carry out any, and Florida remains the nation’s busiest death chamber, accounting for more than half of the 25 executions carried out nationwide so far in 2026.
Belarus agreed to free 25 more political prisoners in exchange for the US lifting sanctions on two Belarusian companies, part of an ongoing negotiation to ease strongman Alexander Lukashenko’s international isolation. Trump envoy John Coale announced the deal from Minsk, saying “we agreed to an interim deal, and as a show of goodwill Belarus will release 25 people and in exchange the United States will lift sanctions on two companies,” though that number is far smaller than the 250 prisoners Coale secured in his last visit back in March. The sanctions being lifted target Lakokraska, a paint manufacturer, and Bellesbumprom, a state forestry and paper conglomerate, with penalties dating back to 2008 and 2023 respectively, and Coale also pledged to help Belarus recover tens of millions of dollars in frozen assets held by US banks. Rights group Viasna says Belarus still holds more than 900 political prisoners on charges like “extremism” or insulting the president, even after hundreds have been released since Coale’s diplomacy began last year, including Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski. Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya welcomed the releases but cautioned against mistaking them for real reform, saying “the purpose should be to empty the prisons, not to rehabilitate the dictatorship,” and noting Lukashenko continues backing Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Japan now has more than 100,000 people aged 100 or older for the first time on record, underscoring the country’s rapidly aging and shrinking population. Health ministry figures released to mark the country’s Respect the Aged holiday show 107,677 centenarians, up nearly 8,000 from the previous year, with almost 88% of them women; the country’s oldest woman, Kyoto’s Fuyo Kishimoto, is 114, while its oldest man, Hikaru Kato, is 112. Health Minister Kenichiro Ueno credited medical advances and healthy lifestyles for the milestone, but acknowledged Japan must keep its social security system sustainable as the population ages, and a separate government survey found more than 20% of unmarried adults aged 18 to 34 say they never intend to marry, with nearly half seeing no benefit in it, citing the high costs of raising children. Japan’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.14 in 2025, far below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population, and experts project Japan’s population will shrink from 126 million to roughly 87 million by 2070, with nearly 40% of that population 65 or older. There were only 153 centenarians in Japan when record-keeping began in 1963, a figure that didn’t top 1,000 until 1981 and didn’t cross 10,000 until 1998.
Toxic haze from Indonesia’s worst wildfires in 11 years is spreading across Southeast Asia, sickening more than 12.5 million people and pushing regional air quality to hazardous levels. The fires, intensified by “super-El Niño” drought conditions, are hitting Borneo’s West Kalimantan province especially hard, and respiratory illness visits in the region’s hardest-hit provinces more than doubled in the first nine days of September alone, from roughly 51,000 to over 113,000 cases; one local clinic reported treating nearly as many breathing-difficulty cases in 11 days as it saw in all of August. Volunteers are running a door-to-door “Oxygen House” campaign, delivering oxygen cylinders to residents and firefighters struggling to breathe, while neighboring Singapore and Malaysia are also seeing air quality deteriorate from the drifting smog. Indonesia’s fires generated 19.7 million metric tons of emissions in the week ending September 7 alone, more than a third of the entire global total that week according to the EU’s Copernicus monitoring service, and fires have burned nearly 500,000 acres from January through July with an estimated 1.4 million additional acres burned in August. Indonesia has deployed more than 50 aircraft for water drops and cloud seeding, and Japan sent three Chinook helicopters and 180 crew members last week to assist with firefighting efforts.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Saudi Pipeline Attack Risks ‘Disastrous’ Loss of Millions of Barrels of Oil, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 16, 2026. Estimates vary on how long it could take before a crucial pipeline is repaired, but a prolonged shutdown could push oil prices to their highest levels in months.
The continued closure of a critical pipeline in Saudi Arabia risks keeping 4 percent of the world’s oil supply from reaching international markets and driving energy prices even higher.
Saudi Arabia scrambled this week to reroute roughly four million barrels of oil a day when it temporarily shut its East-West pipeline, which it said on Friday was damaged by an Iran-backed militia. The pipeline, a 750-mile network that transports crude across Saudi Arabia to ports on the Red Sea, had been the kingdom’s primary way of exporting oil since the war in Iran began in February.
And there are scant signs that the threat to Saudi oil supplies will ease anytime soon. In addition to the drone attack on the pipeline, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen gained control of a strategic Red Sea port and hit energy facilities in Saudi Arabia. On Wednesday the Houthis claimed they had downed a Saudi fighter jet, as Saudi Arabia said the Houthis had fired a drone near the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
Now, running out of options and under pressure to rapidly restore supply lines, Saudi Arabia is facing the prospect of a severe energy crisis with global implications, analysts said.
“It is unprecedented,” said Amena Bakr, head of Middle East & OPEC+ Insights at Kpler, a maritime data firm.
“We have two major waterways obstructed, active attacks, Iran escalating attacks, proxies being active and no signs of diplomatic talks,” Ms. Bakr said. “It’s a disastrous situation when you’re looking at it from an energy security angle.”
Any extended disruption to the pipeline network of Saudi Arabia, long the world’s biggest oil exporter, would send shock waves through the global energy market. Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, hovered around $107 per barrel on Wednesday, up 50 percent from its prewar level.
The world could lose 120 million barrels of crude if the East-West Pipeline is offline for a month, according to estimates from Kpler.
New York Times, House Directs Trump to Halt War With Iran or Secure Congress’s Approval, Robert Jimison, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). It was the fifth time that a chamber of the Republican-controlled Congress has voted to rein in President Trump’s war powers as discontent with the conflict grows among voters.
The House on Tuesday voted for a third time to direct President Trump to end the war in Iran or seek explicit authorization to continue it, delivering another bipartisan rebuke to his handling of the conflict as fighting in the region continues and American voters increasingly disapprove.
Seven Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the resolution, which does not carry the force of law but seeks to compel the administration to either halt the operation or win a vote of Congress approving it. But the action in the Republican-led chamber was the latest sign of frustration on Capitol Hill over the ongoing conflict and its domestic impacts, including high gas prices, weeks before midterm elections in which control of Congress is at stake.
Lawmakers voted 220 to 204 in favor of the resolution, which was offered by Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a combat veteran, who said the war with Iran “has not only failed, but backfired.”
New York Times, Houthis and Saudis Trade Claims of Military Attacks as Conflict Escalates, Ismaeel Naar, Hari Raj, Sanjana Varghese and Aric Toler, Sept. 16, 2026. The Houthis, an Iran-backed militia in Yemen, said they had downed a Saudi jet, while Saudi authorities accused the group of firing a drone near Mecca. The Houthis denied doing so.
The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen and the Saudi authorities on Wednesday accused each other of sharply escalating their attacks, adding to fears that their recent return to war could further destabilize the Middle East.
The Houthis claimed to have downed a Saudi fighter jet, while Saudi Arabia accused the group of firing a drone near Mecca, the holiest site for Muslims.
A spokesman for the Houthi military, Yahya Saree, said on social media that the group had shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet over Yemeni territory using a locally made missile. The Houthis released footage and photographs late Wednesday of what they said was the crash site. The wreckage of the downed jet seems to be consistent with that of the F-15 jets in the Royal Saudi Air Force, a review of the images by The New York Times found. However, the exact location of the wreckage could not be confirmed.
The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Saree made the claim hours after Saudi Arabia said that its military had shot down a Houthi drone outside Mecca. The drone was intercepted and destroyed south of Mecca on Tuesday as it headed toward prohibited airspace over the city, Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen, said in a statement on social media.
Mr. Saree denied that the Houthis had targeted Mecca, dismissing the allegation as “fabrication and lies.”
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
New York Times, Kennedy Center Closes Its Doors Despite a Judge’s Order, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, Sept. 16, 2026 (print ed.). The announcement came after President Trump said he would cancel a $257 million renovation of the venue if his name is not returned to the building.
Simmering turmoil over the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts boiled over on Tuesday as the center abruptly closed to the public and President Trump threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation if his name was not returned to the front of the building.
Allies of Mr. Trump have been pushing for months to close the center for major renovations and to honor the president by affixing his name to its marble facade. A federal judge has blocked both efforts.
On Tuesday, the center aggressively tested the judge’s order not to close by shutting its doors in what officials called an emergency action designed to protect people from deteriorating conditions inside the building. Shortly after 4:30 p.m., employees heard a sudden notice on the P.A. system: “The center is now closed to the public. Please exit the center by way of the Hall of States.”
By the evening, security guards stationed outside entrances to the main lobby were turning people away. One officer said the building had just closed.
The Kennedy Center said in a statement that an immediate temporary closure of the building was necessary for safety reasons but that an extended closure would begin once the court gives its approval. Earlier on Tuesday, the center’s Trump-allied board voted — for a third time — to close the building, citing a recent incident in which a five-foot-long section of ceiling plaster fell amid a storm.
But lawyers for Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democratic ex officio board member whose lawsuit is at the center of the court battle, signaled that they would view any closure as in direct conflict with a court order.
“If true,” the lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement, “it would appear a direct violation of the court’s order and courting contempt.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Judge Christopher R. Cooper barred the center from honoring Mr. Trump with an inscription on the institution’s exterior. He ruled it would violate his previous order that blocked the board from renaming the center.
“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
The Kennedy Center quickly filed a notice of appeal, and Mr. Trump responded on social media with a stark ultimatum. If an appeals court does not agree to allow his name back on the building, he said in the post, he would block the renovation of the center that he has been championing for more than a year.
“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said in the post, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
He also said the building would close “immediately.”
Such a decision means less than it did months ago, when the center’s main building still hosted musicals, orchestral programs and other performances. The center’s programming schedule has been largely bare since July, when it was initially slated to close, leaving a mostly empty building.
Judge Cooper has ruled that the center must be maintained as a living memorial to Kennedy, and he has yet to ratify the center’s plan, approved by the board last month, to close the main building while keeping open a smaller offshoot of the center known as the Reach.
The White House declined to comment.
For weeks, Mr. Trump’s allies have suggested that the president’s continued commitment to the Kennedy Center was contingent on some conspicuous acknowledgment on the center’s exterior. A recent draft resolution submitted to board members said the center was at risk of bankruptcy but could be saved by fund-raising by Mr. Trump — if he were to receive “appropriate recognition.”
Mr. Trump’s made that quid pro quo even more clear in his social media post on Tuesday. It said that $17 million raised by the president had been put into the center’s account “to keep it afloat.”
The post followed a day of rage directed at those blocking his agenda for the Kennedy Center. Shortly before the judge’s ruling was publicly released, Mr. Trump declared on social media that the center was in a “virtual state of collapse.” He called Judge Cooper “very hostile and conflicted” and predicted that the building was “destined to doom” unless it was allowed to close.
Mr. Trump continued those arguments during a virtual board meeting on Tuesday afternoon, where he got into a bitter argument with Ms. Beatty, according to two people familiar with the meeting. They said that Mr. Trump and Ms. Beatty, who have been at odds in court for months, traded personal attacks: The president said the congresswoman had “never built anything” in her life, while Ms. Beatty called Trump “ignorant” and blamed him for the center’s financial problems.
The center first affixed the president’s name to the building in December after the board voted to recognize his role in securing $257 million from Congress for the sweeping renovation project.
In May, Judge Cooper ruled that the renaming was unlawful and could only be decided by Congress, which had authorized the creation of the center and its dedication to Kennedy. The judge ordered the letters spelling out the president’s name removed from the marble.
As it pursued an appeal, the center complied, installing a towering matrix of scaffolding covered in tarps that obscured much of the signage and is still up.
Last month its board voted to restore Mr. Trump’s name in a different form. The resolution approved by the board proposed an inscription under the building’s main signage that would read “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”
Calling the decision “linguistic gymnastics,” the judge wrote that the new inscription would violate his previous order, as would a proposal to rename the center’s grounds the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The board’s attempt to inscribe Mr. Trump’s name was met with furious objections from Democratic lawmakers, including Ms. Beatty, whose lawyers called the effort a “breathtaking act of defiance” and asked the judge to block the center from adding the inscription.
“Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity,” Ms. Beatty’s lawyers said in a statement following the order on Tuesday.
PoliticusUSA News and Comment, Trump Threw A Crazy Tantrum Over Not Being Allowed To Add His Name To Kennedy Center, Jason Easley, Sept. 16, 2026. Those on a call witnessed Donald Trump yelling and screaming after a judge blocked him from adding his name to the Kennedy Center.
Before Trump claimed he had closed the Kennedy Center because the building was dangerous and in need of repair, he showed up on a call with the Center’s board to throw a tantrum over a judge blocking him from adding his name to the building.
America is at war. Oil is over $100/barrel, inflation has made life unaffordable, but the President Of The United States made time to be on a call about a building.
CNN reported:
“It was f**king crazy,” said one source familiar with the exchange between Trump and Rep. Joyce Beatty, whose lawsuit has prevented Trump’s name from being added to the building.
Another source said Trump screamed, blaming Beatty for getting the courts involved and leading to the downfall of the performing arts center. Beatty told Trump he had put the Kennedy Center into deep debt, the third source said.
Trump has operated this way for as long as anyone can remember. His presidency has done the same thing to te country as a whole. Debt is how Trump operates.
The president put the Kennedy Center into debt by making it toxic to the point where performers canceled and donations dried up.Trump Can’t Legally Close The Kennedy Center
Only Congress can close the Kennedy Center, because it is a living memorial to JFK that Congress has the power to oversee. The Kennedy Center was created by an act of Congress and is federally funded through a public-private partnership. Congress has the ultimate authority over the Center.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) is on the Kennedy Center Board and told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins about the call.
Rep. Beatty said:
We were in our Kennedy Center board meeting today. It was virtual. It was first announced that Beatty v. Trump lawsuit, that the judge had rendered the decision that, again, for the second time, that it would be unlawful for Donald Trump to put his name on the Kennedy Center.
Shortly after that, we went into talking about the proposal to renovate the Kennedy Center. And at that time, there were a series of questions that I had proposed, and the President threw a tantrum. I think he was upset because he had lost, and it had been reported.There was a lot of things that I thought were very unprofessional. This is the Chairman of the Board and the President of the United States. So, he picked the wrong person to try to attack my character and to berate me. I was not going to let him tell me that he thought I was incompetent.
So, I responded by telling him, I knew he was incompetent. He wanted to blame me if someone died, if something happened, if the ceiling fell in. And I reminded him, he has us at war, and people are dying. He has tariffs and taxes that are preventing people from buying food or being able to have affordable housing and other things. So, it was a tit for tat.
And this is the Chairman of the Board. I was disappointed, but I was not going to let him get away with bullying, bullying me because that's what he does. He tries to intimidate people, he tries to bully them because he didn't get his way because, he wanted this to be his vanity project.
The Kennedy Center flourished for decades before Donald Trump got involved.
The president doesn’t have the authority to close the Center. The board doesn’t have the authority to close the Center. Congress has the authority to close the Kennedy Center, change its name, and authorize repairs.
Rep. Beatty promised that she will continue to fight Trump in court over the Kennedy Center, so Trump hasn’t won.
The Kennedy Center may continue to struggle for the rest of Trump’s term, but like the country, it will flourish again after Donald Trump is gone.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
William Kristol (Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers of The Bulwark with photos from Getty, Shutterstock and The Bulwark).
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Field of Dreams? William Kristol, Sept. 16, 2026. I’m not, you’ll be shocked to hear, a Midwesterner. I grew up in New York City, went to school in Boston, taught in Philadelphia and then in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1985. That was supposed to be for a year. It’s now stretched to four decades. So I’ve spent my entire life among the huddled masses in teeming East Coast cities. And I’ve enjoyed it.
But I do try occasionally to venture out of the Acela corridor to see what’s up in the rest of America. And so I’m writing from Iowa City, where I spoke at the University of Iowa last night. It’s different out here! Farms and prairies, to say nothing of amber waves of grain! And friendly people! Amazing! If a bit disorienting.
What’s also disorienting is my sense, reinforced by (admittedly limited) conversations here, that Democrats can win here and elsewhere west of the Mississippi. Not just in Iowa and Texas, which everyone knows are in play. I wonder if the blue wave couldn’t also wash over to the Great Plains states, to Kansas and Nebraska and South Dakota.
Yes, I know, Donald Trump won all five of these states by at least 13 points in 2024. So flipping them is a daunting prospect. On the other hand, he is roughly 13 points less popular nationally than he was on Election Day two years ago. And given the impact of his tariffs and the gas prices in Iowa, he may have fallen further out here. So it’s reasonable that Democrats have a shot in Iowa (Trump +13.2 percent in 2024) and Texas (Trump +13.7 percent). Kansas (Trump +16.1), Nebraska (+20.5 percent), and South Dakota (Trump +29.2 points) are more challenging. But wave years, plus good candidates, can do surprising things.
On Texas, I’ll just point out that in the ten most recent public polls, Republican Ken Paxton is ahead in only one, and that’s by a point. He’s tied in another. And the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, leads in the other eight surveys by anywhere from two to six points.
One can argue that gravity will kick in, as it has in the past, and drag the Democrat down to earth. But the whole point of a wave is that it overcomes, to some extent, gravity. And the gravitational pull isn’t that daunting. In 2018, the most recent Trump midterm, Beto O’Rourke came within 2.6 points of Ted Cruz. Trump is weaker now than he was then, and Paxton is weaker than Cruz. Read Sarah Longwell’s account of her most recent focus group, consisting of Texans who voted for Trump in 2024 but who now disapprove of him. A majority say they’d vote for Talarico. So Texas is a very real possibility for the Democrats.
As are Iowa and the Great Plains states to the west. Voters—quite reasonably—are unhappy with their Republican senators who have, or their GOP candidates who will, rubberstamp Trump’s tariffs and his war.
Here in Iowa, seven public polls in the last month are split between three that have Republican Ashley Hinson ahead, three that have Democrat Josh Turek leading. The most recent poll has the race dead even. I’d put Turek as a slight favorite. And the Democrat, Rob Sand, should win the governor’s race.
What about the Great Plains states? In Nebraska, independent candidate Dan Osborn is running against Sen. Pete Ricketts. The Democratic party has intelligently cleared the field for Osborn. The two most recent polls there have Osborn tied and up by four. He came within seven points of Deb Fischer two years ago. The environment is more than seven points better this year, and Fischer was a stronger candidate than Ricketts. Yes, Nebraska went for Trump by 20.5 percent in 2024. But it’s in play.
Meanwhile, in South Dakota, the Democrats have also organized themselves to step aside in favor of an independent candidate. Brian Bengs, who enlisted in the Navy out of high school, and then went to college and law school and returned to active military service with the Air Force before retiring as a lieutenant colonel, is facing incumbent Mike Rounds, a career politician who’s been in office at the state and federal level for thirty-five years. Trump won the state in 2024 by 29 points. But one recent poll has the senate race even; the other has Rounds up by only three points. It could well remain competitive until the end.
Meanwhile, Kansas features one of the most impressive Democratic candidates of this cycle, Adam Hamilton, the well-known pastor of a large Methodist church in the Kansas City area. He’s facing a notably unimpressive—even by current Republican senatorial standards—one-term incumbent, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Trump carried Kansas by 16 points in 2024. But one recent poll had Hamilton up one, another had Marshall up by only five. In this race, candidate quality could help put Hamilton over the top.
And while I’m smoking hopium, let me not neglect the Mountain West. A recent poll by the Montana Free Press shows the Republican nominee, former Hill staffer Kurt Alme, at 38 percent of the vote. He’s ahead of independent Seth Bodnar, a West Point graduate, Army officer, and former business executive, by eight points. The Democratic nominee, Alani Bankhead, trails at sixteen percent. If more Democrats abandon Bankhead for Bodnar, or if at some point Bankhead steps aside and endorses Bodnar (even though it would be too late for her to get off the ballot), Bodnar could win. (More on Montana below.)
And if you really want to think I’m getting carried away, wait until I tell you about Idaho (Trump +36.5 points!). There, Democrats have also cleared the field for an independent candidate, another impressive Army veteran, Todd Achilles. He’s running against 83-year-old (!) incumbent Jim Risch. Maybe Idaho will send Risch back to D.C. to serve until he’s 89. But maybe not?
Okay. Maybe the good cheer and optimism of Iowans has gone to my head. This is, after all, the home of the field of dreams. But I don’t know. I’m from New York, and I love New York. But we New Yorkers inflicted Donald Trump on this great nation. Why shouldn’t it be Middle America that comes to our rescue?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Thomas Massie Has a Nasty Surprise for Pete Hegseth... On The Next Level, ANDREW EGGER (sitting in for Sarah) joins JVL and TIM MILLER to discuss Mitch McConnell’s triumphant (?) return to the Senate, Donald Trump casually floating conspiracy theories over the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt, and Thomas Massie’s articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth.Quick Hits
DEATH OF AN INSTITUTION: The Trump-appointed board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Tuesday to close the building. The cause of the institution’s death was the pettiness of the president of the United States.
To recap: Last year, Donald Trump deliberately MAGAfied the Kennedy Center, replacing its board and senior staff with allies, micromanaging its programming, and even trying to rename the place after himself. When donors fled, ticket sales plummeted, and judges ordered his name removed, Trump turned spiteful: The building was in such a state of disrepair, he insisted, that it would need to be shuttered for years, if not for good.
This week, the board stated that Trump had raised the money to repair the building, but suggested that repairs wouldn’t move forward unless Trump got credit in the form of—you guessed it—his name on the building. They generously offered ten options for how to credit Trump, each involving some sort of inscription on the main building’s facade. A federal judge on Tuesday blocked that motion, ruling that “Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.”
The board subsequently voted to close the building. Trump, unsurprisingly, crashed out online, posting that unless his name was put on the building, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.” He asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
This is truly a microcosm of the Trump experience: harm the institution, claim only you can save the institution, but refuse to do so unless you get credit for it. There are no acts of generosity, just acts of megalomania constrained only by the limited checks and balances we still have as a society. As our colleague Catherine Rampell put it in our office Slack: We now occupy an interesting space on the democracy-totalitarianism continuum, in which Trump doesn’t have the power to rename an institution but does have the power to close it. In the meantime, actual performing artists who depend on performances at the Kennedy Center will suffer. They don’t matter to Trump. The only performance he cares about is the one where he gets center stage.
CHECK PLEASE?: The Congressional Budget Office has an estimate of how much the Iran war cost as of August 1. The headline figure: $38 billion more than what the Department of Defense already planned to spend. More than half of that expense came from the expenditure of precision weapons, especially missile interceptors. Fuel costs alone accounted for nearly $3 billion spent, both because the military consumed more fuel than it expected pre-war, and because the war itself drove up fuel costs.
CBO also included a rough sketch of the war’s macroeconomic effects. By next spring, the report projects, inflation will be higher by 0.6 percent than it would have been without the war. Notably, this analysis doesn’t include the latest spike in diesel prices caused by this month’s attack on the Saudi oil pipeline and the Houthi threats to the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
What wasn’t in the report was almost as notable as what was: no long-term costs for veterans’ benefits, and no data whatsoever from the Department of Defense, which stonewalled CBO and forced it to use publicly available data for its models. Without the Pentagon’s cooperation, CBO was also unable to come up with an accounting of the losses in the American military facilities Iran damaged or destroyed.
And, of course, the meter is still running.
BLUE MONTANA?: Our Lauren Egan has been writing about “Bernie Dogs”—the Democratic candidates running in tough districts who have been endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and the Blue Dog Coalition, and who form a crucial part of Democrats’ hopes to run up the score in the House this November. This isn’t just a feint to make Republicans play defense: At least some Democrats believe they’ve got a real shot this year in a bunch of typically safe Republican districts, and they’re spending money accordingly.
In Montana’s 1st District, for instance, Democrat Sam Forstag’s campaign is shelling out $190,000—not chump change in Montana’s media market—on new ads talking up his blue-collar bona fides as a former smokejumper. “Sixteen bucks an hour for years,” Forstag says in the ads, first reported by The Bulwark. “That’s what I made jumping out of planes to fight wildfires. I know what it’s like to work a thousand hours of overtime and barely get by.”
The district has been an afterthought in recent elections. Republican Ryan Zinke won it by 19 points in 2022 and was reelected by 8 points in 2024. But today, it’s a tossup: New polling from The Bench, a Democratic organization supporting Forstag, shows him with a narrow 45–43 lead over Republican Aaron Flint, which is partially attributable to a 16-point favorability advantage.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Democratic Hand-wringing About the Party’s ‘Brand’ Is Misplaced, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 16, 2026. 48 Days to the Midterms. Corporate mercenary is a bipartisan profession.
You’ve heard it over and over again from establishment, hand-wringing Democrats: ‘The Democratic brand stinks.’ What follows is often a rant about how the left is making life difficult for centrists to win, which is a tip the “analysis” about the party’s reputation might be tainted by sectarian self-interest. That is actually just wrong — and politically dumb.
For starters, it’s a mindset trapped in 2024 when, let’s face it, Vice President Kamala Harris (or the Biden presidency, if you prefer) was a drag on the party around the country across multiple demographic groups, resulting in a Republican trifecta victory. (When you see how far above that floor that Democrats are now running, you can see the magnitude of the 2024 campaign’s failure.) But that was almost two years ago. Democrats’ “brand” is not where it was then.
“When asked which political party they think is more in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States, 46 percent of voters think the Democratic Party, 35 percent think the Republican Party, and 13 percent volunteer that there is no difference,” Quinnipiac pollsters found.
Meanwhile, party identification has soared, rising to a 10-point advantage. “As recently as 2024, Republicans and Independents who lean toward the Republican Party held a slight edge over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents,” the New York Times reported. However, Democrats now are situated similarly to where they were in “the final quarter of the 2018 midterm cycle, when nearly 49 percent of Americans identified as Democrats. That year, the Democratic Party gained more than 40 seats in the House.” Don’t expect that many House seat pickups, thanks to MAGA re-redistricting, but the shifts in Democrats’ favor have nevertheless been enormous, especially among Hispanics and young voters. In contrast to 2024, when Republicans had a 1-point advantage with young voters, Democrats now lead by 16 points, while Democrats’ edge with Hispanics “has increased by nine percentage points over the same period.”
For a supposedly cruddy “brand,” Democrats are doing fairly well. Since 2024, Democrats have actually surged, overperforming in state races, special elections, and primary turnout. And the midterm map continues to expand for Democrats.
The brand grousers will come back and say: Yeah, but Democrats have to keep defending themselves against accusations that they are communists, obsessed with transgender Americans, or are weak on border security. Really?! Waiting for Republicans to stop making baseless accusations or for legacy media to stop parroting those claims is a fool’s errand. Politics in an era of a Republican Party unbound by truth or decency necessitates confronting daily the propaganda and hysteria generated by a MAGA cult for whom demonization, dehumanization, and distortion are second nature. The best campaigners (e.g., Pete Buttigieg, Texas Senate nominee James Talarico, or Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff) dispense with specious arguments and strategically pivot to attack Republicans as corrupt puppets of foreign actors and proponents of crony capitalism, not free markets — among other assaults on our democracy.Subscribed
Underlying brand agonizing is a fundamental misunderstanding about politics and public opinion. The American public is cynical and habitually ill-disposed toward politicians. Nearly 90 percent of voters believe they are all corrupt. One could debate how much of that is deserved — though multiple fruitless forever wars, economic crises, and widening income inequality suggest their stance is not unfounded — or argue that Democrats have taken too long to go on offense on reform (they have). However, expecting voters to express undiluted confidence in their party is unrealistic, to put it mildly.
The danger in perpetuating the “brand stinks” whining is two-fold. First and foremost, worries about offense perpetuate the milquetoast politics that voters plainly are not in the mood to hear. If the primary season has revealed anything, it is that forceful rhetoric directed at a corrupt oligarchy, billionaire donors, and a two-tiered system of justice — rather than mushy moderation — is what drives voters’ support. Fiery denunciation of ICE excesses has been embraced by the voters, for example, not mealy-mouthed calls for restraint — or worse, the inclination to avoid immigration as an issue altogether.) Voters want decisive change — dramatic, fundamental, and systemic change.
Second, the “brand stinks” mantra has become a precursor to untimely and ill-conceived intercine war against the party’s more left-leaning members. There will be plenty of time to debate the agenda should Democrats capture majorities in one or both houses. An entire 2028 presidential campaign awaits, in which strongly held views on the direction of the party can be hashed out. But to spend a nanosecond bemoaning the views of a socialist in a New York City congressional district (or of a fringe influencer whom the vast majority of voters have never heard of) is political malpractice. With less than 7 weeks until Election Day (and far less before early voting rolls out around the country), whimpering that one segment of the party is making it harder for others to win (when there is zero evidence that is the case) is a gift to Republicans looking to make the election about anything but their own dismal record.
The bottom line: There has been a sea change in the political environment since 2024, in large part because MAGA Republicans have shown their true colors: their disregard for ordinary voters, their frightful extremism, and their deeply corrupt core. They, not Democrats, have the severe “brand” problem. Democrats’ best chance for maximizing victory rests with making sure voters understand that contrast.
Democratic candidates up and down the ticket would do well to follow the examples of success over the last two years: go on offense against Republican corruption and reverse Robin Hood economics, denounce billionaire elites who rig the system in their favor, and definitely join Trump’s call in asking voters to “pretend” he is on the ballot. In fact, for all practical purposes, Trump is on the ballot; and only a rout of his Republican enablers will the disastrous policies and corruption free-for-all come to an end. That is a brand that voters can get behind.
To the Contrary, Opinion: The World Reels. Trump Throws a Tantrum, Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Plus: The Texas GOP has a bigot problem. Who knew?
Meeting the moment: The tectonic plates of the world order are shifting as the Houthis advance and the War in the Mideast expands; the Saudis are under siege; and a world-wide energy crunch looms. Meanwhile, Canada, spurned by the US, moves toward becoming a new “associate member” of the European Union. The bond markets are freaking; warnings about the existential threats of AI continue to spread; and Republican poll numbers crater.
And yet, on Tuesday, 48 days before the midterm elections, the president chose to spend his time on this: Lashing out at his appointees on the Supreme Court, making utterly baseless and paranoid claims that the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania was a “Democrat Plot”; and throwing a snit over his name being removed from the Kennedy Center: “Trump 'Threw a Tantrum' After Vote to Close Kennedy Center.”¹
After losing in federal court, a petulant Trump is threatening to shut down the memorial to the late president altogether unless he gets his name restored to the building: because — deep within his etiolated heart — this is what he cares about.
At the same time, Trump sent up a “bat signal,” to his MAGA base, declaring that calls to pump the breaks on AI development were a “HOAX.” As the Dispatch’s Nick Cattogio notes:
“When a ‘hoax’ is afoot, populists are expected to rally behind their president, no questions asked…. [It’s] essentially an incantation by which Trump’s political operation turns very bad political developments into loyalty tests for their ultra-loyal base.”
Some of the usual stooges echoed their master’s voice, but — as is increasingly the case — much of the public is just ignoring him, putting Trump radically on the wrong side of what is becoming a bipartisan, populist issue. (“Poll: Americans say there’s a serious risk of AI destroying humanity.”)
Overall, about two out of three Americans say there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, with majorities across parties, genders and age groups holding that view. Americans who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 are [only] somewhat more likely to see such a risk (70%) than those who voted for President Donald Trump (60%).
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, “bestiality,” has entered the conversation, reminding us, once again, that we live in the dumbest of all possible timelines. “Kash Patel defends FBI hiring policy on applicants who have engaged in bestiality.” Even Republicans were bewildered by the tolerance of animal buggery.
Patel said the change was recommended to him after he saw various “cases” in which qualified FBI applicants were denied consideration because they had been forced into bestiality as a result of human trafficking.
“I say this with respect to the person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say: ‘What planet did you parachute in from?’” Kennedy replied.
We still await the answer.
Artificial Intelligence Threats, Advocates
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Nobody Wants Killer Robots. That May Not Be Enough, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Nobody Wants Killer Robots. That May Not Be Enough.
A large, growing, and cross-partisan bunch agree: It’s sort of crazy that AI companies are charging toward a future of intelligent robots they’re not sure they can keep under control and which might have an outside chance of killing us all. What they don’t have, at least yet, is anything resembling a shared action plan to build a political coalition around.
This was my main takeaway from yesterday’s “Pro-Human Assembly,” a D.C. conference hosted by the Future of Life Institute and organized around the group’s “Pro-Human AI Declaration,” released earlier this year.
The new explosion of AI extinction warnings has earned the group new attention. And although some in the AI space are dismissive—one attendee described it to me as “a really twee attempt to stand athwart history yelling ‘stop’”—they can boast real reach. Organizers noted yesterday that their declaration has passed a million signatories, and the conference drew speakers from across the political spectrum: Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke minutes before MAGA populist maven Steve Bannon.
And yet, listening to Bernie and Bannon speak, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that AI risk advocates share little except a conviction that something must be done.
For Sanders, the main thing was to rein in U.S.-manufactured AI first. “If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs.” Sanders’ proposals are sweeping: to require half the board members of large AI companies to be appointed by the public, to temporarily pause advanced AI development altogether, to permanently ban the development of “artificial superintelligence,” and more.
What about winning the AI race against China? For Sanders, the only possibility was both countries agreeing to slow down in tandem: “I very much hope that at their AI summit next week, President Trump will negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi to establish a pause on advanced AI development.”
Bannon’s approach couldn’t have been more different. For him, any efforts to rein in U.S.-made AI would be pointless at best and self-defeating at worst if they require us to take China at their word. It’s ridiculous even to contemplate slowing U.S. AI development, he argued, until we have launched, and won, a total economic war on the Chinese tech sector in the same way America “choked off” the Soviet Union. “That’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “No deals, no agreements. . . . No black market chips, no free ride off American technology, no stealing American tech.”
As we keep saying: AI is such a new issue that it hasn’t had enough time to split along partisan lines and ossify there. Trump’s hard pivot this week into “everyone who doesn’t want AI is an idiot or a commie traitor” may get the ball rolling on that; the outcome of the summit with Xi may contribute as well. For now though, it’s still hard to envision a coalition that not only opposes AI development but agrees on a plan to slow it—a gridlock that could end up sticking us with an increasingly unpopular status quo.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Corporate mercenary is a bipartisan profession, Judd Legum, right, and Rebecca Crosby, Sept. 16, 2026. The AI industry tapped Jay Carney to rebuild ties with Democrats. He spent years at Amazon fighting AI regulation.
The AI industry tapped Jay Carney to rebuild ties with Democrats. He spent years at Amazon fighting AI regulation.Judd Legum and Rebecca CrosbySep 16READ IN APPWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney waves at the end of his last White House briefing at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House June 18, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The AI industry has placed a huge bet on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. For example, in the 2026 cycle alone, AI executives and corporations have donated $42 million to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC.
But the political winds may be changing. Trump’s popularity is near an all-time low. Republicans could lose control of one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
This all comes at a time when the public is increasingly concerned about the safety of frontier AI models, data center construction, and the impact of AI on their jobs. AI companies are looking to the federal government for help.
In a essay this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for “regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies.” While this is framed around an altruistic concern about safety, Amodei acknowledged that government regulation would allow AI incumbents to coordinate their activities while avoiding “antitrust” issues. Amodei’s letter was endorsed by the two other biggest AI players, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.
Trump, however, immediately rejected the idea. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
According to reports, the AI industry may now be hedging its bets.
According to Politico, Jay Carney, who served as White House press secretary during the Obama administration, has been tapped “to run a new initiative aimed at shaping national AI policy.” Carney has been hired by SV Angel, an investment firm led by Ron Conway, a major Democratic donor.
The new initiative is called “Project Blueprint,” which the New York Times reports is an effort to “rebuild bonds between leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and Democrats who are demanding new rules to regulate the technology.”
On X, former Vice President Kamala Harris called Carney’s hiring an “encouraging effort to bring industry and government leaders together.”
It is unclear who should be encouraged by Carney’s new role. While Carney worked for a Democratic administration, he abandoned public service more than a dozen years ago.
After leaving the Obama administration, Carney spent seven years as a hired gun for Amazon, where he reported directly to Jeff Bezos. (His official title was Senior Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs.) In that role, Carney fought against government efforts to protect privacy and regulate AI.
A 2021 Reuters article describes Carney as the “architect of [an] under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections.” Internal documents obtained by Reuters revealed that Carney’s “mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers.”
A memo reviewed by Reuters said that such restrictions could “impede growth for [Amazon’s] Alexa-powered devices.” It celebrated Carney’s role in “killing or amending privacy bills in ‘over 20 states.’”
Early in his tenure, Carney’s team targeted “a Washington state bill to regulate biometrics, including voice recordings, fingerprints and face scans.” The bill eventually passed “but only after lobbyists for Amazon and other firms had chiseled away at its privacy protections by convincing lawmakers to insert alternative language, often verbatim.” Among other concessions, voice recordings were exempted, sparing Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant from regulation. In an internal document, Amazon celebrated that the revised legislation “would have ‘little, if any, direct impact on Amazon’s practices.’”
After joining the company, Carney criticized Amazon’s lobbying efforts as “frugal” and “narrow.” Under Carney’s leadership, by 2020, “Amazon had registered at least 180 lobbyists in 44 U.S. states, up from at least 62 lobbyists in 27 states in 2014, the year before Carney arrived.”
At Amazon, Carney expanded a program called “Watering the flowers.” According to a 2019 CNBC report, “The flowers represent elected officials, and the goal is to create a well-tended ‘garden’ of pro-Amazon policymakers, from state governors and senators down to local officials and economic development teams.”
In a 2025 interview, Carney said in his corporate roles he spent “a lot of time thinking about how we can flood the zone with our narrative.”
"If you are interested in how the American right went insane, TPM is your actual publication of record," declared historian Rick Perlstein. We agree, and recommend that if you want to keep tabs on the reactionary movement that has gripped American politics and culture, sign up for TPM's flagship newsletter, The Brief.Carney attacked whistleblower, dismissed concerns about poor working conditions
While at Amazon, Carney also dismissed concerns about conditions in the workplace. In 2015, the New York Times published an article alleging poor conditions for Amazon’s corporate employees. The article quoted a former Amazon employee, Bo Olson, who said, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
Two months after the article was published, Carney posted a rebuttal on Medium. To discredit their accounts, Carney included additional details about some of the employees the Times had interviewed, including Olson.
“Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as ‘scathing,’ ‘blistering,’ ‘brutal’ and ‘harsh.’ Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline,” Carney wrote. “Here’s what the story didn’t tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records.” Olson denied the allegation.
In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Carney was directly involved in a series of posts on Twitter (now X) responding to criticisms by some politicians. In one case, an official Amazon account responded to a post from Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) that said, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.”
“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us,” Amazon wrote back. (The company later apologized for the tweet and acknowledged “that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms.”) According to the Wall Street Journal, “Unlike most tweets from Amazon’s news account, these tweets were crafted by executives including Mr. Bezos and Mr. Carney.”Carney v. unions
Carney also participated in anti-union efforts while at Amazon.
In April 2020, Carney defended Amazon’s firing of Chris Smalls, an Amazon warehouse worker who led a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse over worker protections during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon said that Smalls “was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.” Smalls said that he was “singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick,” arguing that others had come into contact with the positive worker “for longer periods of time,” VICE reported.
“Amazon’s warehouse workers protested because people are getting sick on the job. Their demands were not radical: a safer workplace, protective gear and paid sick leave,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote on X. “Amazon’s response? Retaliate by firing a worker who helped organize the walk-out.” Carney responded to the post, “I’m confused. Thought you wanted us to protect our workers? Mr. Smalls purposely violated social distancing rules, repeatedly, & was put on Paid 14-day quarantine for COVID exposure.”
Leaked notes from an internal Amazon leadership meeting obtained by VICE, however, show that “company executives discussed a plan to smear” Smalls. Leadership reportedly “discussed encouraging Amazon executives to use Smalls to discredit the wider labor movement at Amazon.”
In 2021, Carney also responded to a post from Sanders supporting an effort to unionize a warehouse in Alabama. “Amazon workers in Alabama are sick and tired of being treated like robots. They are standing up and fighting back, and I am proud to support them,” Sanders wrote. “With all due respect, Senator @BernieSanders, you’re wrong on this. We treat our employees with dignity and respect. We offer a $15 min wage, health care from day one, and a safe, inclusive workplace,” Carney wrote.
More Global News
New York Times, E.U. Offers to Make Canada ‘Associate Member’ as U.S. Ties Weaken for Both, Jeanna Smialek and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Sept. 16, 2026. Canada and the European Union have been confronting an increasingly challenging relationship with the United States under President Trump.
The European Union has invited Canada to work toward becoming the bloc’s first “associate member,” a title meant to underscore Canada’s growing closeness to the 27-nation union as both face deteriorating relationships with the United States.
President Trump has waged a relentless trade war with Canada, challenging the nation’s economy. The United States has pulled back support for NATO and Ukraine, leaving the European Union scrambling to shore up its defenses. That has left both looking for new partners as the alliances established after World War II shift.
“We must urgently reimagine our partnerships,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, on Wednesday during a speech in Strasbourg, France. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, was seated directly to Ms. von der Leyen’s left as she made her address.
“I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union,” Ms. von der Leyen told him.
Though details remain scant and the linkup is not a done deal, the announcement Wednesday was met with a standing ovation from lawmakers, and Mr. Carney and Ms. von der Leyen shook hands warmly as she made the announcement.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Ms. von der Leyen said the proposal was “not a partnership against anyone else, but for our common strength.” But it is clear that Europe and Canada see themselves caught between a competitive China and an at-times-hostile Trump administration.
“China, Russia and the U.S. have turned their backs on international law,” Barry Andrews, a member of the European Parliament from Ireland, said in a statement after Ms. von der Leyen’s speech. “We need new allies.”
Mr. Carney gave a headline-grabbing speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this year during which he argued that the world order that emerged from the Cold War was facing a “rupture, not a transition,” and that “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Wednesday’s announcement was a vivid demonstration of that strategy.
Ms. von der Leyen did not lay out in detail what associate membership to the European Union might entail. But European diplomats and officials in recent days have made it clear that Canada and the European Union, which will meet for a summit at the end of October, are working toward closer cooperation on technology regulation, trade and the supply of critical minerals.
They are also working to team up on security and defense. Ms. von der Leyen highlighted that point in her remarks, noting that Europe had faced a recent series of drone incursions and other provocations, many of them attributed to Russia.
“Hybrid threats facing Europe are less and less hybrid, and less and less threats,” she said on Wednesday.
Ms. von der Leyen called for a European equivalent to a NATO provision that allows for the convening of defense-related meetings when a nation is threated, known as Article 4. The European Union already has a little-known collective defense guarantee, but Ms. von der Leyen pitched “Europe’s own Article 4” and said that when it was “triggered by one member state, all member states would convene.”
She also called for a new leaders’ group, the European Security Council, that would include non-E.U. partners in Europe like Britain, Norway and Ukraine, and also Canada.
The push to bring Canada closer is likely to encounter roadblocks. E.U. member states have warned offering too many benefits to a would-be associate would diminish the value of full membership, for instance.
The Guardian, Kosovo’s former president jailed for 25 years over war crimes, Peter Beaumont, Sept. 16, 2026. Hashim Thaçi faced multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture and persecution. Photograph: Ferdi Limani/Getty ImagesWar crimesKosovo’s former president jailed for 25 years over war crimes
Hashim Thaçi, 58, was convicted by The Hague for crimes committed while he was senior commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army
Peter Beaumont Senior international correspondentWed 16 Sep 2026 09.40 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on Google
Hashim Thaçi, the former president of Kosovo, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison by a tribunal in The Hague for war crimes, including dozens of murders, committed during his time as a senior commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army during the country’s war for independence from Serbia in the late 1990s.
The European-backed Kosovo Specialist Chambers, convicted Thaci, 58, and three other former senior commanders of 96 murders, and counts of torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention directed at political opponents and civilians.
The convictions come at the end of a years-long process, strongly opposed by many in Kosovo, to bring accountability for crimes committed by KLA commanders during the 1998-99 war in which war crimes were committed by both sides.
Thaçi, who resigned from office nearly six years ago to face charges, stood in silence in The Hague as the presiding judge Charles Smith read out the sentence.
The former president, who served as the head of political directorate of the KLA’s general staff, faced multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity alongside the three other former leaders of the KLA who are widely regarded as national heroes in their homeland.
In addition to the murders, Thaçi was also convicted for the illegal detention of 385 people, torture of 303 people and cruel treatment of about 50.Crowds chant as people wait for the decision of The Kosovo Specialist Chambers against leaders of former Kosovo Liberation ArmyView image in fullscreenCrowds chant as people wait for the decision of The Kosovo Specialist Chambers against leaders of former Kosovo Liberation Army. Photograph: Ferdi Limani/Getty Images
Once a hardliner, Thaçi shifted towards a more moderate political identity after being courted by western diplomats who suggested he could be a central figure in Kosovo’s post-war settlement.
At the heart of the prosecution’s case was the degree to which the convicted men had senior operational command over the KLA as a centrally-led armed force and whether the crimes amounted to a pattern of abuse.
The court ruled that Thaçi had “actively participated in and encouraged crimes”. Smith said: “The scale and nature of the crimes committed were very serious”.
He added: “The so-called intelligence on which many of these victims were arrested, detained and killed was little more than unverified rumours. Based on that information, victims were called and described as spies and collaborators and violently treated.”
Smith said Thaçi “used his position, leadership, authority and standing” to encourage crimes but insisted the trial was “not about the legitimacy of the Kosovo Liberation Army” or its ultimate goal of securing independence for Kosovo, which at the time was a province in Serbia. Thaçi could appeal the verdict.
Prosecutors at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers court in The Hague had asked for a maximum 45-year prison sentence for Thaçi and the other defendants, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi who had all denied the charges against them.
Krasniqi received 25 years in prison, Selimi 13 years and Veseli 18 years. Thaçi also faces a separate trial on charges of intimidating witnesses that will begin this month.
The three-judge panel dismissed six charges of crimes against humanity and said prosecutors had failed to show these happened as part of widespread or systematic attacks against the civilian population as a whole.
Known by the nom de guerre of Commander Snake during the war, Thaçi stood out among the KLA leadership as an intelligent and articulate figure who would later charm diplomats – most notably the US secretary of state Madeleine Albright – at the negotiations in Rambouillet that ended the conflict.
But behind the self-assured image he projected as a senior political figure, he was long dogged by allegations of a darker and more ruthless side from his time as a wartime commander.
Thaçi’s defence partly rested on the notion that while serious abuses did occur, the KLA was a not a strictly centralised organisation, claiming that Thaçi’s senior position in the rebel group did not indicate culpability for crimes committed by local units.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Hope for America, Opinion: Kash Patel is not going to like this post, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 15, 2026. At exactly 9:30 this morning, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, stood in front of photojournalists, members of Congress, and their staff, wearing a deep blue suit with a delicate pastel pink tie. With his right hand held up high and his left hand clenched tight at his thigh, he pledged “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Minutes later, he was defending his department’s decision to remove bestiality as an automatic disqualification for employment with the FBI, making it possible for applicants who engaged in repulsive acts with an animal to still be eligible to join the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country.
Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the line of questioning by reading directly from an internal FBI memo issued this past June. “According to a memo issued this June, the FBI has lowered its hiring standards by dropping automatic disqualification for applicants who have stolen from employers, paid for sex, or engaged in bestiality,” Durbin said. What followed might be one of the most embarrassing moments in FBI history. The Director attempted to justify the unjustifiable, degrading his office, and humiliated the entire department in the process.
Durbin went straight to the heart of the matter, asking Patel whether these were the “qualified candidates” the FBI had been losing. Patel never actually answered the question. Instead, he said, “What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you are a victim of these awful, heinous acts.” Durbin didn’t let it go. He kept pushing. “What I’m reading to you is that you dropped automatic disqualification for applicants who have been engaged in bestiality. Not victims of bestiality, applicants who have engaged,”
Patel was trapped and dug in deeper. “Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so.” Then he added, “At this FBI we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving.”
Rather than explain why the FBI suddenly changed a policy that once automatically disqualified applicants who acknowledged engaging in bestiality, Patel decided to explain it away by trying to create a narrative in which “engaged in bestiality” somehow meant those applicants were victims of animal assaults and had been forced to participate against their will. The director has quite a creative imagination to come up with a cover story like that. I often wonder if the Trump administration has a team sitting on standby around the clock just to manufacture enough spin to explain away anything, even things as absurd as this.
While so much of the attention today went to bestiality, the actual policy change applies specifically to applicants who engaged in that act or animal cruelty before the age of eighteen; it still helped bury the other two changes to their hiring policy: theft from a previous employer and paying for sex. When they removed bestiality as an automatic disqualification, they also made stealing from an employer more than three years ago no longer an automatic bar to joining the FBI, and neither is having paid for sex fewer than three times more than 10 years ago. Bestiality rightfully caught many of our eyes when these changes came to light, but maybe that also meant the more likely wrongdoings were not given nearly as much attention as they deserved. And maybe that was the point.
It wasn’t just Democrats trying to make sense of what was happening. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, was equally dumbfounded. Patel treated him like an enemy as well, telling him that the old rules “automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it.” Kennedy stopped and asked, “Either side of what? The bestiality?” and then added, “So you disqualified the animal?” Patel thought this was all too funny and responded with, “Well, we have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify them.” Kennedy was rightfully not impressed with his answer and pressed on with his questioning, “I’m really trying to understand.” Before asking, “On what planet” was this change suggested? and “How do you involuntarily do bestiality?” Bewildered, he finally asked, “But you’re not telling us today that if a human being had sex with an animal, that they can still be an FBI agent?”
The hearing lasted nearly 5 hours, starting just after 9 AM, and the bestiality exchange was sadly just the beginning. What followed was shouting, deflection, insults, political double talk, and a complete disrespect for what the FBI used to be when it had competent leadership.
Senator Cory Booker seemed completely done with Director Patel before he even could answer a single question, telling him at one point that “He’s an incompetent lackey.” With his voice rising, he added that “He’s like an 18-year-old kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of, doing keg stands and chugging with friends. He’s an embarrassment to the agency and wouldn’t qualify even to be an FBI agent.”
Patel’s response showed exactly why there is so much outrage over him holding such an important position in our government. He said, “I don’t have much to say. This guy called me a thug. It’s kind of ironic. He’s running for president of the United States. He just got his 20-second ad campaign.” That was the Director of the FBI at an oversight hearing. There is no dignity left, or maybe there never was any to begin with. Booker was ready to respond, though: “Here’s the thing, Mr. Patel. I think you’re not gonna be around long. I think this might be your last oversight hearing. Because, as much as you supplicate yourself to the will of Donald Trump and not the Constitution of the United States of America, Donald Trump has shown us in his first term and in this term, he is not loyal to people like you. He will cut you loose.” What followed was shouting between the two, and the Director of the FBI calling a senator’s words “false information.” Booker ended up yelling back to Patel, telling him, “I am not afraid of you!” Patel just couldn’t control himself and screamed at him, “You are the biggest mockery in the United States Senate, and you’re sitting next to Schiff.” This is who is leading our top law enforcement agency.
Senator Adam Schiff took a different approach with his line of questioning, focusing instead on the hundreds of FBI agents who have been fired after working on investigations involving Donald Trump. Schiff noted that there was very little Democrats could do about it while Republicans were in control of Congress, but then warned Patel of what was to come: “While this Congress is not going to investigate the wrongful termination of potentially hundreds of agents for working on properly predicated investigations, the next Congress will.”
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 15, 2026 [Trump's Mental Decline -- And Why Letters from an American], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 16, 2026. Seven years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I’m okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I’ve been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it’s very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”
I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.
Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and “urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.
And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”
“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”
Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.
And so these Letters from an American were born.
Seven years later, we are approaching the midpoint of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw seven years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.
In that first letter where I warned of rising authoritarianism, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”
And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters.
If you are tired from the last seven years, you have earned the right to be.
And yet you are still here, reading, commenting, protesting, articulating a new future for the nation. And I am proud to be among you.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals, and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.
Sept. 15
Top Headlines
New York Times, Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Restrictions on Mail Voting, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling blocks the Trump administration from dramatically changing how Americans vote by mail in the midterm elections.Exclusive On U.S. Intelligence Officer's Child Sex Scandal, Creating UK Diplomatic Dispute
Is the new US embassy in London, a $1 billion glas cube portrayed in a CNN photo, at the center of a major child porn scandal and cover-up?
author of 28 books and former Navy Intelligence officer, Sept 14-15, 2026. Press censorship imposed at a national level by the Trump regime has resulted in the public being under-informed about a diplomatic cover-up of a pedophilia scandal at the U.S. embassy in London while Donald Trump and his family were basking in media limelight next door in Ireland. The Trump regime blindsided the government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham by flying out of London a U.S. military attaché whose brother was arrested in Illinois for possession of child sex abuse material. News Roundups
Sept. 15, 2026. Today’s rundown has a real headline story. A Russian businessman with deep ties to the Kremlin bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party, and Congress just decided that is worth investigating. On top of that, Trump’s administration had one of its worst nights in court yet, McConnell finally showed his face after three months but reporters were barred from recording him, and there is a long list of other news you need to see. Let’s get into it.Sept. 14, 2026. Trump spirals on Truth Social, alleging a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and calling critics traitors. President Trump declared Monday that a “SICK conspiracy” is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it, describing the people behind it as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name, writing, “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’ and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” He did not specify what conduct he was referring to, what criminal power he meant, or who exactly the alleged conspirators are.Special Report: More On Russian Oligarch, Trump Family Wedding
A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).
More On U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.
More On Artificial Intelligence Fears
Sept. 14, 2026. At 9:58 this morning, Donald Trump was locked away deep inside the White House when he began panicking online in front of the entire world. Over the course of almost 10 hours, the President posted on social media 7 times about the exact same thing, spiraling out of control over artificial intelligence, with each post growing more unhinged than the next. He started by telling us all that our president has everything under control because of his genius-level intelligence: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Sept. 15, 2026. Will AI transform the economy? The jury is still out on that one: So far there is little evidence for either the massive job losses or the soaring productivity growth industry leaders threatened/promised, but it’s still early days.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, News Analysis: Saudi Arabia Faces ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ After Being Rebuffed by Trump, Vivian Nereim, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The kingdom is in a state of strategic shock after coming under attack from an emboldened Iran and failing to win more U.S. military support, analysts say. More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Sept. 14, 2026. Because most people are much more comfortable with the idea of deporting killers and drug dealers than law-abiding grandmas, the Trump administration has long couched its mass deportation agenda as an effort targeting “the worst of the worst.” And the Department of Homeland Security has lately been playing up its efforts against international bad actors like drug cartels, with Secretary Markwayne Mullin announcing last week that DHS was changing its seal² to better reflect its posture of “war every single day” against those actors.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Sept. 14, 2026. President Trump has amassed over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc. This is an unprecedented figure, dwarfing the largest cash piles collected in previous midterm elections. Sept. 14, 2026. Over the past few days (here, here, here) we’ve discussed how as the economy continues to deteriorate so does the political standing of Trump and the Rs. Here’s more confirmation of the deterioration of their brand from a new CBS poll.Sept. 14, 2026. In recent months, we’ve learned about artificial intelligence agents escaping captivity. Now we’re seeing the political debate over artificial intelligence escaping captivity.deployment of personnel and material that depletes our readiness and leaves us vulnerable elsewhere. They can condition additional funding for the Pentagon on compliance with congressional investigations, and can defund overtly politicized gatherings of the type Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has conducted. More On U.S. High Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion
ed.). The thing I’ve found most shocking about Donald Trump’s second presidency is not the epic grift, the ICE paramilitary violence or the assaults on free speech. These abuses, while horrifying, are predictable. What has stunned me has been the capitulation of so many American elites to Trump’s vulgar authoritarianism.Sept. 14, 2026. On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.Top Stories
New York Times, Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Restrictions on Mail Voting, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling blocks the Trump administration from dramatically changing how Americans vote by mail in the midterm elections.
The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.
The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.
The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.
Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.
The majority provided a one-paragraph explanation for the ruling, writing that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”
The order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The battle over the Trump administration’s plan to change mail-in voting has played out over the last few weeks in a dizzying series of legal developments, even as states began sending out ballots.
Trump administration lawyers had urged the justices to step in and clear the way for its plan to use the Postal Service to screen ballot envelopes after they are submitted by state elections officials. The new rules would require states to submit lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would then deliver mail ballots only to the voters on the lists.
The plan would also require states to use an envelope approved by the Postal Service, including a unique bar code for each voter. Some states have argued that redesigning ballots so close to the election would be challenging or perhaps impossible, causing delays.
New York Times, Trump’s Effort to Assert Control Over Elections Continues, Despite Court Loss, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump has launched a broad, governmentwide effort to take more control of state-run elections and sow doubt about the outcome.
The Supreme Court on Monday dealt President Trump a major blow when it blocked his executive order to restrict mail ballots. But Mr. Trump’s battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished.
The stymied attempt to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections.
Just days before the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Trump’s mail ballot order, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records.
Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed by states for noncitizens, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary recently pushed for an investigation into whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted, casting doubt on digital voting systems.
“This is far from over,” said Benjamin Hovland, who was ousted from the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission by the Trump administration this year.
Mr. Hovland acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision mitigated “real-world impact” on voters and election workers, particularly since voters in some states have already begun to mail in their ballots. But he said Mr. Trump’s actions were alarming.
“What you’re seeing is using the apparatus of government, using federal agencies, using taxpayer dollars, to push that narrative that only undermines confidence in our democracy and ultimately hurts voters and election officials,” Mr. Hovland said.
Mr. Trump argues that he is trying to secure the integrity of the vote, but his claims of widespread fraud in the election system have been investigated and debunked repeatedly, and critics say his actions needlessly sow doubt about the outcome of the vote.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There are stark differences between now and Mr. Trump’s first term, when his attempts to undermine the election results in 2020 ran into stiff pushback not only from the courts but also from his own government officials. In his second term, Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists willing to turn his obsession over the country’s election systems into a blitz of federal actions. He has also installed election deniers in key posts.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday did, however, add to a string of mounting losses for Mr. Trump, who said this year that he wanted to “take over” and nationalize elections. Even before the Supreme Court decision, two lower court judges ruled that Mr. Trump’s changes to mail-in balloting were most likely illegal and should not be imposed so close to the November elections.
Exclusive On U.S. Intelligence Officer's Child Sex Scandal, Creating UK Diplomatic Dispute
Is the new US embassy in London, a $1 billion glas cube portrayed in a CNN photo, at the center of a major child porn scandal and cover-up?
The Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Investigative Commentary: Major pedophile scandal at U.S. embassy in London covered-up by a media influenced by pedophile-friendly oligarchs, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 28 books and former Navy Intelligence officer, Sept 14-15, 2026. Press censorship imposed at a national level by the Trump regime has resulted in the public being under-informed about a diplomatic cover-up of a pedophilia scandal at the U.S. embassy in London while Donald Trump and his family were basking in media limelight next door in Ireland.
The Trump regime blindsided the government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham by flying out of London a U.S. military attaché whose brother was arrested in Illinois for possession of child sex abuse material. In June of this year, the attaché’s brother, Benjamin T. Morris, 33, the then-arts director for the Quad City Arts Building in Rock Island, Illinois, was arrested in as police sting operation for attempting to entice minors on-line. Morris was subsequently charged on 32 criminal counts, including production and dissemination of CSAM. A judge has denied Morris bail, citing a continuing threat to the public.
Attache’s brother Benjamin T. Morris
When the U.S. embassy in London became aware that Morris had shared CSAM with his brother at the U.S. embassy in London, embassy security personnel, including US Marine security guards, conducted a dawn raid of the attaché's flat in Putney in southwest London.
The U.S. personnel allegedly recovered illicit child pornography material on the attaché’s electronic devices. The U.S. personnel took the attaché into custody, flying him out of the country via a chartered Kalitta Air Boeing 747 cargo plane from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. The aircraft landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
At no time before and during the attaché’s secret exfiltration from United Kingdom territory did the U.S. embassy or the U.S. State or Justice Departments inform British law enforcement of the action. The Trump regime abused the umbrella afforded by diplomatic protection to evade justice in the host nation, thus bypassing the British police and avoiding a future extradition process.
The U.S. embassy provided no advance warning to the London Metropolitan Police about their plans to raid the attaché’s flat. U.S. personnel have no powers of arrest in Britain and the use of Marines and other non-law enforcement personnel to carry out a police matter also taints the chain-of-custody of evidence recovered from the flat. Marines are not trained in criminal forensics, a fact that will likely be used by the attaché’s defense attorney at a future trial.
Prosecutors for the Rock Island County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois have alleged Morris was exchanging CSAM with his brother, the attaché in London. The FBI, under the incompetent command of Kash Patel, is reportedly examining numerous electronic devices belonging to Morris, and, since his brother’s exfiltration from London, the FBI is likely also conducting forensic analysis of the former attaché’s devices.
The incident has resulted in a cross-party condemnation of the U.S. action. There are demands that if crimes were committed on British soil, the U.S. embassy suspect should face trial in an English court. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has held meetings with Metropolitan Police officials on the incident. Conservative shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy said the U.S. action constituted “a cover-up” and that the attaché “should face trial in an English court.” Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty accused the U.S. of bypassing jurisdictional authority and said it was “completely unacceptable,” “absolutely grotesque,” and proof that the U.S. government was “protecting alleged pedophiles.” The U.S. has a history of protecting its diplomatic and military personnel from facing justice in British courts.Kalitta Air commits to using ExxonMobil aviation lubricants across its fleet | ExxonMobil Aviation
The London Metropolitan Police did not to itself any favors in its statement on the incident: "On Tuesday August 25, US authorities made us aware of an investigation they are conducting into suspected offences in London relating to indecent images of children.” The American authorities only informed the London police after the attaché’s aircraft had cleared UK airspace. Scotland Yard and Home Office personnel were not given an opportunity to interview the attaché.
The U.S. is not releasing the name of the attaché, who is claimed to have been reassigned to “other duties” in the United States.
The U.S. Defense Attaché Office (DAO), located at the embassy complex at 33 Nine Elms Lane in London, has a large staff that includes a Senior Defense Attaché, U.S. Naval Attaché, and attachés and assistant attachés from the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
The attaché, who is said to be around 39, used the address DPO, AE (Diplomatic Post Office, Armed Forces Europe/Middle East/Africa). One previous address used by the attaché is located on Burwell Street on Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia in southwest Washington, DC. The attaché is believed to have been previously assigned to the Military Liaison Office/Office of Defense Cooperation at U.S. Military Group – Finland at the U.S. embassy at Itäinen Puistotie 14 in Helsinki. His role included providing Finland with U.S. military hardware as a new member of NATO.
The exfiltration operation of the attaché would have been authorized by U.S. ambassador Warren Stephens. He is the former chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Stephens Inc., a privately held investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas. Stephens essentially bought the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James by contributing $6 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Note: All information in the column above was obtained from public, non-classified sources available to anyone.
The U.S. State Visit to the UK: Commemorating Our Close Bond
Amb. Warren Stephens and Trump
The breach of diplomatic protocol and the use of a CIA-connected cargo plane to exfiltrate Benjamin Morris’s brother and his electronic devices from the UK is evidence of a wider pedophilia network. The Trump regime’s cover-up of the Morris case continues its obfuscation of other pedophilia crimes, including the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The secrecy around the Morris investigation also points to the possible use of the U.S. embassy in London, which enjoys extraterritorial diplomatic immunity, as a nexus for the exchange of CSAM and AI-generated CSAM.
The State Department has a jaded history of covering-up the pedophile activities of its personnel at its embassies, particularly in Southeast Asia. An unnamed State Department source defended the violation of British sovereignty in the attaché’s exfiltration, stating, “If we had ceded ground and waited, there could have been delays and diplomacy that could have gone on for weeks or months.” Or CSAM exposures that may have led to other Trump regime officials.
Meanwhile, the corporate media in the U.S. is all but ignoring the embassy scandal in London, as is their practice in similar matters.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Congress Investigates Don Jr.'s Wedding, Trump Family Distances, Trump Blasts SCOTUS as Losses Mount, Cameras Banned From Recording McConnell, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 15, 2026. Today’s rundown has a real headline story. A Russian businessman with deep ties to the Kremlin bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party, and Congress just decided that is worth investigating. On top of that, Trump’s administration had one of its worst nights in court yet, McConnell finally showed his face after three months but reporters were barred from recording him, and there is a long list of other news you need to see. Let’s get into it.
Quick personal note before we dive in. I am genuinely relieved I don’t have to go back to Mitch McConnell’s house again anytime soon, and I am even more relieved that all the MAGA accounts who spent last week attacking me over it can now go find someone else to yell at for a while. It has been a stretch.
And stick around, because after today’s rundown, I have more Epstein research to share with you. Here’s the news:
Congress Investigates Don Jr.’s Wedding as Trump Family Distances itself From Don Jr.:
A Russian businessman with Kremlin ties bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party, an extraordinary breach of ethical norms for a president’s family. Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association and a close associate of Vladimir Putin, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent a private island in the Bahamas and stage a fireworks show for the May celebration, according to ProPublica and The New York Times. Trump Jr. and his wife Bettina acknowledged the gifts on Instagram, describing Kremlev as “our dear friend” who “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” and insisting “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.” President Trump denied any knowledge of the arrangement, telling reporters, “I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding,” calling it merely “an ‘afterparty’ given in their honor. Not a big deal!” Ethics experts were far less dismissive, with the Campaign Legal Center’s Kedric Payne saying, “A gift from such an unusual source puts a red flag on the matter,” and retired FBI official Frank Montoya Jr. bluntly noting, “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president.”
The top House Oversight Democrat is now formally investigating, previewing how aggressively he’d probe the Trump family if Democrats retake the House. Rep. Robert Garcia, left, sent letters to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and to Trump Jr. 
himself, writing that ProPublica’s reporting on Kremlev’s role “may be the most serious allegation against you to date” and that “Oversight Democrats are investigating the numerous ways in which the Trump family have sought to enrich themselves on the basis of their proximity to President Donald Trump.” He’s demanding a full guest list, records of contact between Trump Jr. and Kremlev, any communications with the White House or intelligence officials about the oligarch, and documentation of “all purchases made for your wedding by foreign nationals.” Garcia also wants to know whether Trump Jr. holds a security clearance, whether he disclosed the Kremlev relationship to the White House, and whether the elder Trump’s absence from the wedding was connected to Kremlev’s involvement, writing, “Any possible foreign entanglement deserves close scrutiny.” For now these are only voluntary requests Garcia can’t enforce, but that changes entirely if he wins the Oversight gavel in January, when he’d gain subpoena power to compel testimony and documents.
The fallout has rippled through the rest of the Trump family, with Melania Trump moving fastest to distance herself. Her office stressed she “does not, and has never had, a relationship with Mr. Kremlev” and “played no role whatsoever in organizing the wedding event,” a pointed response given that Kremlev also helps lead a Russian organization under Ukrainian sanctions for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children, an issue central to the first lady’s own advocacy work reuniting families. Eric Trump likewise moved to put daylight between himself and the oligarch, with his spokesman telling ProPublica, “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name,” despite having attended the wedding himself. Bettina Trump pushed back hard against the scrutiny, writing on Instagram, “So, for anyone determined not to let the facts get in the way of a good story: NO CONSPIRACY, NO MYSTERY. Just a private family wedding, a wonderful weekend with friends and one hell of a party.” The story has also become a political cudgel, with Hunter Biden reportedly mocking the couple over the revelation, and even guests at the party questioning who Kremlev was and why he was there.
Major night of losses in Court:
Supreme Court blocks Trump’s mail ballot rule from taking effect for the midterms. The Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency bid to enforce a new Postal Service regulation on mail-in ballots, in a decision that appeared to split 7-2, with only Thomas and Alito dissenting. The rule would have forced states to submit voter lists to the Postal Service for verification before ballots went out, a role the Postal Service has never played, and a lower court had already found it was likely unlawful. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called it “a victory for our democracy,” while League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said the rule was “an extraordinary attempt to interfere with voting in all 50 states.” Alito wrote in dissent that he found the federal government’s argument more persuasive, and Kavanaugh, despite ultimately blocking the rule, wrote separately that he saw a “fair prospect” the Postal Service actually had the authority to issue it.
Donald Trump erupted at the Court in response. A federal judge refuses to pause sanctions against Trump’s DOJ in its “insurrectionist slush fund” IRS lawsuit. The judge declined to halt her sanctions order while the administration appeals, rejecting the DOJ’s attempt to delay accountability in the case, which challenged Trump’s tax amnesty scheme. In her ruling, the judge stressed there is “a significant interest in knowing that the judiciary is fair and that the same rules apply equally to all litigants,” a direct rebuke of the administration’s effort to get special treatment. The case adds to a growing pile of legal defeats for the DOJ this year. It signals judges are losing patience with the administration’s litigation tactics. The sanctions stand while the appeal plays out, keeping the pressure on Trump’s legal team.
Trump’s DOJ goes 0 for 23 in district court on its voter roll crusade, but keeps appealing anyway. The department has now lost every district court ruling on its demand that states hand over unredacted, statewide voter registration databases, with fresh losses in Nevada and Minnesota bringing the total to 23 straight defeats. DOJ has appealed 20 of those losses across ten federal circuits, arguing a decades-old civil rights law gives the attorney general power to compel the data, a theory courts nationwide have repeatedly rejected. Its only completed appeal ended in defeat too, when the Sixth Circuit tossed the theory and later declined to rehear the case en banc. Attorney General Todd Blanche has said taking the fight to the Supreme Court is “a possibility,” vowing the department is “not going to stop,” and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has pointed to sympathetic language from Sixth Circuit judges as reason to try again there. Despite the unbroken losing streak, DOJ shows no sign of narrowing or dropping the legal theory driving the entire campaign.
Mitch McConnell:
Video of a “zombie” looking Mitch McConnell returning to the Senate sparks internet uproar, and reporters were barred from filming it themselves. McConnell cast his first vote since mid-June on Monday, breaking a three month absence that began with a hospitalization after a fall and a mild case of pneumonia. Reporters covering his return were barred from recording video of him in the chamber, leaving the public reliant on secondhand footage instead. That footage, published by TMZ, showed McConnell arriving on Capitol Hill with his mouth agape and appearing to space out, and it spread fast online with commentators calling it “zombie-like.” In a statement, McConnell described his recovery as “a long and often frustrating process” and said that while he’s not “quite back to 100%,” he’ll “do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me.”
The backlash online was brutal, and even allies piled on. One X user wrote, “Mitch looks like he is a zombie being remotely controlled. This is SO STRANGE!!!! Is he even alive?” while another called him “the deadest alive person.” A third user said, “It’s actually terrifying that Mitch McConnell gets to make decisions that affect all of us.” Right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer went furthest, writing, “Like I said, Mitch is brain dead,” and adding, “You can’t look at his face and say he’s not a vegetable. He’s not even responding to cognition tests. It’s like wheeling a corpse around. Worse than what the Democrats did with Joe Biden to be honest. He looks incapacitated. Brain dead.” The camera ban only deepened questions over how much the public is actually being allowed to see of his condition.
Other news:
Trump claims his midterm convention “beat” the NFL in the ratings, but the actual numbers say otherwise. The GOP scheduled its first ever midterm convention against the season’s opening NFL games, and Trump’s Wednesday night speech drew about 3 million viewers combined across Fox News, Newsmax, and NewsNation, compared to more than 25 million for the Seahawks-Patriots opener on NBC and Peacock. Trump nonetheless posted the next morning, before any ratings were even available, that “the overall numbers beat the NFL,” calling the event “a major, sold out hit, far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible.” He also pointed to the speech “streaming all over the place” to suggest a bigger combined audience, but CNN notes the most viewed YouTube clips of his night one speech only have hundreds of thousands of views. His shorter night two speech fared no better by comparison, pulling about 3 million viewers across the same three networks while the NFL’s first ever game in Melbourne, streamed on Netflix, drew 18.5 million in the US. Trump did not post about the ratings again after that.
Costco starts rationing motor oil as a key ingredient shortage, driven by the Iran war, pushes prices sharply higher. The retailer hiked its Kirkland Signature full synthetic oil from the mid-$30s to $57.99 and now caps purchases at two units per membership every seven days, with Mobil 1 also capped at five units. Industry group ILMA’s CEO Holly Alfano said the real culprit is a shortage of Group III base oil, whose price has jumped 235 percent since the Middle East war began, since roughly 40 percent of US supply comes from Middle Eastern facilities damaged in the fighting and another 30 percent from South Korea, which relies on Middle Eastern crude. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has compounded the problem by raising shipping costs and lengthening delivery times, and oil companies are also prioritizing crude for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel over motor oil ingredients since those are more profitable right now. Costco’s competitors, including Walmart, AutoZone, and Amazon, haven’t introduced similar limits yet, but Alfano said she doesn’t expect the market to normalize until at least the end of next year, since new Group III production capacity in the US and rebuilt Middle East facilities won’t be ready before then.
US confirms for the first time that it has active weapons deployed in space, and analysts warn it will accelerate a dangerous arms race with Russia and China. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday at the Air, Space, Cyber Conference that Washington now has “on-orbit” space-control weapons circling the globe, though he declined to detail specifics. A Space Force spokesperson said such capabilities can include “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities” for both offensive and defensive purposes. China’s foreign ministry responded by accusing the US of “preparing for war in outer space” and warned against turning space into “a battlefield, as well as an arms race there.” Astronomer Jonathan McDowell said it was reasonable to assume the weapons are likely signal jammers, and predicted Russia and China will now “respond in kind” by deploying their own. He added that he finds it “questionable whether this is in the US national interest,” warning it isn’t too late to change course and work with China instead, since “they are the real competitors in space now.”
Houthi rebels seize two strategic Red Sea islands, deepening fears of a global oil supply crisis. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants captured Greater and Lesser Hanish, located 160 kilometers north of the Bab al-Mandab strait, extending their rapid advance after already taking the port of Mokha and Perim island. The seizures come as Saudi Arabia simultaneously grapples with attacks on a critical oil pipeline by Iran-allied militants in Iraq, forcing Riyadh to reroute exports even as its east-west pipeline remains down for what could be weeks. Nearly 94,000 people in Yemen have fled their homes this month alone, with roughly 200 schools converted into shelters and more than 2,000 refugees crossing into Djibouti, just 32 kilometers from a US military base there. Analysts at Rystad Energy said 2.6 million to 4 million barrels a day that normally move through the closed pipeline are now at risk of “disappearing from the market,” and Chevron’s CEO said the world’s oil stockpile buffers have been “played out,” making a quick price drop hard to envision. Brent crude rose to nearly $107 a barrel Tuesday, and US diesel prices topped $6 a gallon for the first time last week.
The EPA moves to repeal emissions limits on coal and gas power plants, one of the administration’s biggest rollbacks of Biden-era climate policy yet. The change would scrap a 2024 rule requiring power plants to use carbon capture technology, and the agency separately proposed eliminating all other greenhouse gas rules by arguing it lacks authority to regulate them at all. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin framed it as protecting affordability, saying the move would “unleash” American energy, while the agency claimed it would save industry more than $300 billion. Environmental groups, already suing over the administration’s earlier repeal of the endangerment finding, promised new litigation, with the Sierra Club’s Patrick Drupp calling it “full-throated climate denial” that will mean “more pollution, more extreme weather, higher electricity bills.” The rollback comes as this summer set heat records nationwide, with July the hottest month ever recorded in the US and June through August the warmest such stretch on record, and a law firm partner who oversaw the EPA’s Supreme Court docket said the case likely won’t reach the high court before Trump leaves office.
A UK inquiry finds hospital failures let nurse Lucy Letby keep killing babies longer than she should have. Inquiry chair Kathryn Thirlwall said a “complete failure” to protect infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital, driven by dysfunctional management, meant some of Letby’s murders could have been prevented had staff acted sooner. Letby, convicted in 2023 of murdering seven newborns and attempting to murder six others by insulin overdose, air injection, or force-feeding, remains Britain’s most prolific modern child killer despite a growing campaign questioning her guilt. Thirlwall stressed her report did not weigh in on Letby’s innocence or guilt, saying, “Once there was suspicion that Letby may be causing harm deliberately, safeguarding steps should have been taken,” adding bluntly, “Suspicion is enough.” She recommended reforms including cameras on cots and incubators, tighter insulin storage, and a formal NHS protocol for suspected deliberate harm, while three senior hospital managers remain under investigation for gross negligence manslaughter.
Sabotage disrupts Dutch train service just hours before the king’s ceremonial opening of parliament. Rail operator ProRail said pipes were deliberately attached to tracks at more than 20 locations, mostly in rural areas in the middle and east of the Netherlands, forcing all nearby trains to halt and causing serious disruptions including to international routes to Germany. King Willem-Alexander was still set to deliver his budget speech Tuesday afternoon outlining 2027 spending plans. ProRail spokesperson Joke van der Cruysen said, “We discovered materials that had been deliberately placed there,” officially classifying it as sabotage, while the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD joined police in investigating. No motive or suspect has been identified yet, though the disruption lands amid months of unrelated protests over the government’s budget from labor unions and farmers, some of whom had planned their own demonstration in The Hague the same day. The sabotage also snarled road traffic since several level crossings had to stay closed.
Gavin Newsom says he won’t run for president in 2028 if Kamala Harris runs again. Newsom told CNN in an interview aired Monday, “I wouldn’t run if she ran,” arguing that a race between two California Democrats would be an electoral “gift” for everyone else and pure “mutual assured destruction.” He said the case for Harris over him would be strong, calling it “objectively true” that she’d already run twice while he never has, and adding, “That would be the case you’d make. Pretty good one, actually.” Newsom pointed to how closely their political bases and friend groups overlap, saying, “I wouldn’t do that to people.” Harris has not said whether she’ll run again, telling supporters this year only that she’s “thinking about it,” while Newsom, whose term ends in months, has said he’ll seriously weigh a bid after the midterms.
Harry and Meghan switch their children’s school just days into the term, citing security concerns. Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, had only just started at an undisclosed school after the family moved back to Britain from California last month, before their parents pulled them out for another one. A spokesperson said the move followed “a discussion with the family’s security team about the practicalities of their current arrangements,” stressing it reflected no issue with the school itself. Royal commentator Emily Nash said the original school sat far enough away that the commute left the children exposed to traffic congestion, adding, “they risked sitting in traffic where they were potentially exposed to greater threats.” The switch comes as the couple awaits a government decision on publicly funded security protection, and amid continued strain with the royal family after a recent letter reaffirmed they’d remain nonworking, private royals during their renewed UK stay.
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Mitch McConnell Returns as I Spent the Day at His House, Trump Melts Down Over AI, Major Whistleblower Report, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 14, 2026. I need to tell you what happened to me today before we get into anything else.
I went back to Mitch McConnell’s house this morning to do my job, and after weeks of facing attacks for doing this work, we have the truth. I stayed on the beat, I stayed outside that house, and we got something major. Mitch McConnell has returned to the United States Senate, and we have the video of him doing it. You’re going to see it in a moment, along with the statement his office just put out.
That’s not the only major interview in tonight’s rundown either. I sat down with Judge John Jones, a Bush appointee who has spent his career on the federal bench, to get his read on where this country actually stands right now. You are not going to want to miss what he had to say.
But before we get into any of it, I need to ask you directly. Nights like tonight, showing up at that house, getting threatened, and still bringing you the tape anyway, that only happens because people like you make it possible. This work is not funded by a network or a corporation. It is funded by subscribers. So if you have not subscribed yet, do it right now, hit that button, turn on notifications, and if you’re already a subscriber, share this with one person today.
Mitch McConnell Update:
I just got back from Mitch McConnell’s house, and we have now seen him. Mitch McConnell has returned to the United States Senate. I spent most of the day outside of his home. We have the first video of him right now:
Trump Spirals Online:
Trump spirals on Truth Social, alleging a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and calling critics traitors. President Trump declared Monday that a “SICK conspiracy” is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it, describing the people behind it as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name, writing, “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’ and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” He did not specify what conduct he was referring to, what criminal power he meant, or who exactly the alleged conspirators are. In his own words, he declared, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” In a follow up post an hour later, he added, “Don’t kill the Golden Goose,” and later called the entire safety debate a “HOAX.”
The outburst came two days after AI’s own top executives called for a slowdown, and it rattled the stock market. Trump’s rant followed an essay from Amodei arguing companies should deliberately slow the pace at which they improve AI capabilities, warning that within six to 12 months a swarm of rogue AI agents could be capable of “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he agreed “that we need to pace the frontier,” while Elon Musk posted that “Dario is right,” and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis signed on as well. The market reaction was immediate, with Nasdaq futures falling more than 1 percent overnight and chip stocks sliding, Intel down nearly 6 percent, Micron around 5 percent, and Nvidia roughly 3 percent, as investors priced in a possible slowdown in hardware demand. Shares in SoftBank and European data center suppliers including ASML, Siemens Energy, and Schneider Electric fell as well.
Trump calls into Nvidia’s All-In Summit to declare “the robots will not be taking over.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put President Trump on speakerphone in front of a large crowd at the All-In Podcast’s summit Monday, where Trump dismissed AI safety concerns as a “hoax” and told attendees, “the robots will not be taking over.” He also claimed, without offering specifics, that some communities were once “dying” but are now “really wealthy” because of data centers built in their area. Huang did not push back on any of it, instead telling Trump, “We’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people,” while also flattering him by noting he was speaking to “thousands” of people.
Even inside his own administration, Trump’s dismissiveness is making people nervous. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on the executives’ motives, calling their push for regulation a possible “Trojan horse,” and said, “I have to say, personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” though he acknowledged “there are obvious risks to AI, there are some benefits to AI.” CNN reported that some White House officials privately admit they are worried about Trump’s apparent lack of concern over AI’s dangers, a position he has held for months and shown little sign of reconsidering despite the mounting warnings. White House AI adviser David Sacks has accused Amodei’s company of running “a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering,” telling both Anthropic and OpenAI they are free to slow down on their own but should stop seeking an antitrust waiver from Washington to do it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hopes to convene talks this week between Trump, lawmakers, and AI executives, even as Trump claims, without evidence, that Chinese President Xi Jinping “announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI, or its future” ahead of Xi’s planned visit to Washington next week.
Trump blames Biden for high prices, over 600 days into his own term. In a separate post Monday, more than 600 days into his second term, President Trump said he hopes everyone realizes that former President Biden is to blame for the higher prices Americans are currently facing. No further detail, quotes, or context were included in the post. That’s genuinely all there is on this one, the source material only gave that single line, so let me know if you come across the full post and I can build it out further.
Major Whistleblower Report:
Whistleblower alleges federal agents may have broken state laws hunting for voter fraud. A nearly 30 page whistleblower report given to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla alleges that federal agents, under direction from top Homeland Security leaders, may have violated state laws while searching for noncitizens on voter rolls as part of what DHS calls the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” Agents allegedly posed as individual voters, using personal data like birth dates and partial Social Security 
numbers pulled from internal and external sources to look up voter records on public facing state websites, even though states like Virginia explicitly limit those tools to voters searching their own records. DHS’s own chief counsel office acknowledged the legal risk internally, telling agents they “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” a line the watchdog group that produced the report called evidence that “there may be legal implications for accessing these websites” even as officers were required to keep doing it. In a public statement, DHS rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing, saying, “The Department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Agents were reportedly pushed through cases so fast that eligible citizens are likely being wrongly flagged. According to the whistleblower, agents were required to complete at least 40 voter reviews per eight hour shift, leaving roughly 12 minutes to determine each person’s citizenship and voting history, a pace that raises serious doubts about accuracy. Each review is logged in a database that can affect a person’s immigration status or legal residency, and the investigation relies on data described to agents only as “source data,” with officials at one point saying some immigration information had been added using “supplemental magic,” according to the report. That data reportedly includes alien identification numbers that remain permanently in a person’s DHS file even after they become citizens, meaning legally registered voters who were once noncitizens are likely being misidentified as unlawful voters. Some agents grew reluctant to flag people based on data they suspected was faulty, and the report concluded bluntly that “the current process is knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters.’”
Democrats are demanding the operation be shut down, calling it an attempt to undermine the midterms. Schumer and Padilla sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding the initiative be halted and posing a dozen specific questions about how it is being run. Schumer said in an interview, “This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” adding, “We’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do.” Padilla raised a related concern about privacy and accuracy, saying, “I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private. The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.” The operation grows out of Trump’s long standing focus on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing it is exceedingly rare, and voting rights advocates worry eligible voters could be wrongly disqualified from the fall midterms or that Trump could use the investigation to cast doubt on results he dislikes.
Missouri Secretary of State:
Fired election integrity director accuses Missouri’s secretary of state of fabricating evidence to dodge a federal inquiry. Nick La Strada, who Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins fired as director of election integrity in May, filed a lawsuit alleging Hoskins’ team plotted to fabricate a fake whistleblower complaint to submit as evidence in a federal Help America Vote Act inquiry into discrepancies in 2024 vote count data. The lawsuit claims Hoskins’ then chief of staff discussed routing the fabricated complaint through an “IP scrambler” and a “burner” phone so it couldn’t be traced, in a call La Strada said he was excluded from but later reported to Hoskins. After reporting the conversation, La Strada’s Capitol access badge was disabled and he was told his presence wasn’t needed at the federal hearing, though he showed up and testified anyway. Days later he was fired, and his attorney Erin Vernon said at a news conference, “In essence, defendant office, by the actions of defendant Hoskins, fired the director of election integrity for having too much integrity.”
La Strada also alleges Hoskins illegally overturned a certified local election result. The lawsuit claims Hoskins ordered a retabulation of write-in votes in a Marshall, Missouri city election after the certified result had already named a winner by a single vote, and that the retabulation produced a different winner entirely. La Strada alleges Hoskins threatened city officials if they didn’t comply with the reordered result, even though only a judge has legal authority to order a recount once an election has been certified. Vernon emphasized the seriousness of Hoskins operating without any director of election integrity since firing La Strada, saying, “That’s a very big problem heading into elections, and they’ve shown they don’t want someone telling them what they can’t do and what the law in fact is.” Hoskins, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
A separate allegation claims Hoskins misused public funds to influence a St. Louis County ballot measure. La Strada says he personally warned Hoskins in April 2025 that using taxpayer money to fund a mailer opposing St. Louis County’s Proposition B, a measure that would have changed county department head appointment powers, appeared to be an election law violation. The measure was ultimately defeated at the ballot box. This is now the second lawsuit filed against Hoskins in recent days, after five Missouri voters sued him last week alleging he violated state law by neglecting his official duties. La Strada, a longtime Republican who won four consecutive elections as Pettis County clerk before Hoskins hired him, is currently overseas serving as a U.S. election observer in Bosnia and Herzegovina and did not attend the news conference announcing his own lawsuit.
Other news:
DHS’s own watchdog confirms migrants were held in phone booth sized cages at Alligator Alcatraz. A new inspector general report has for the first time confirmed what advocates long alleged, that immigrants detained at Florida’s now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz facility were confined in outdoor metal cages roughly 4 by 4 feet, just 16 square feet, with indoor versions at 18 square feet, both less than half the 37 square foot minimum required by ICE detention standards. Facility staff called them “calming areas” meant for detainees to “de-escalate,” and a sign on one cell said its purpose was to let detainees “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress and practice self-directed behavior.” Records show 79 detainees were held in these cages between July 2025 and January, with the longest stint lasting nearly two hours, and the inspector general concluded plainly that “the use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment.” An earlier Amnesty International report based on detainee interviews went much further, describing detainees shackled hand and foot inside what they called “the box” for hours without water or shade, concluding that “the use of the ‘box’ as a form of punishment constitutes torture.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who toured the facility with President Trump and championed it as central to the deportation effort, said when asked about the new report that he had not read it, adding only, “I know that it was inspected, all those standards. The goal was not to apply those standards but to exceed those standards.”
Rep. Al Green forces a House-wide vote on impeaching Trump, teeing up a pre-midterm headache for Democrats. Longtime Texas Democrat Al Green announced Monday he’s using a privileged resolution to force the full House to vote on impeaching President Trump by Wednesday, citing federal immigration officers’ killing of two U.S. citizens this year. In a letter to colleagues, Green argued Democrats shouldn’t wait for planned post-midterm investigations, writing, “The available overwhelming evidence sufficiently demonstrates that President Trump is unfit and dangerous to our democracy.” The vote puts Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in an awkward spot, since he’s tried to keep Democrats focused on cost-of-living issues ahead of November, and 127 House Democrats joined Republicans to kill Green’s last impeachment push in June 2025. Green, 79, lost his primary to a younger challenger and has repeatedly clashed with Trump on the House floor, including waving his cane and shouting during a joint address and holding up a sign reading “Black People Aren’t Apes” during the State of the Union. The resolution itself brands Trump “a great threat to democracy and the Constitution for current high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Retired conservative judge warns America is “sleepwalking” toward another Jan. 6. Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW he believes the country is heading toward a repeat of the Capitol riot, saying, “That’s exactly what I envision, which is the next Jan. 6, 2021. This time, however, it will be Donald Trump and Mike Johnson refusing to peacefully transfer power to the next Congress of the United States.” Luttig argued Trump has spent his second term laying groundwork for a “final battle in his war against America’s democracy” by trying to seize control of the electoral process despite having “no power or authority whatsoever” to do so under the Constitution. He warned that even a decisive Democratic win in November would not guarantee the party gets seated as the majority in the new Congress, saying, “The House Republicans could still refuse to seat even a large Democratic majority elect under the Constitution of the United States,” though he acknowledged a landslide would make that “much more difficult,” not impossible. Luttig said Trump has been “as transparent as one could possibly be” about his intentions, adding that if America is sleepwalking into January 2027 the way it did before Jan. 6, 2021, “it’s no one’s fault but their own.” He closed by calling on lawmakers to commit publicly to upholding the Constitution, warning, “This is the final battle for America’s democracy. If this is the time of America’s testing, if America doesn’t rise to this moment, this moment under this president, Donald Trump, then there is no America in the future.”
El Niño just crossed into “super” territory, and it’s not done growing. An already strong El Niño has strengthened at a breakneck pace since being declared in June, and its key strength measure, NOAA’s Niño 3.4 Relative Oceanic Niño Index, has now hit 2.0 degrees Celsius above average, crossing the threshold for “very strong” and earning the unofficial “super” label. Forecasters say there is a 75 percent chance it peaks by the end of the year as the strongest El Niño since records began in 1950, and this event is unfolding in a far hotter world than past record setters due to climate change. It has already reshaped this year’s hurricane seasons, suppressing Atlantic activity so severely that the season has gone a record long stretch without its first hurricane, while supercharging the Pacific season with 16 storms including two Category 5 hurricanes and three separate systems threatening Hawaii in under a month. El Niño has also driven Indonesia’s punishing wildfire season by drying out the country’s peatland forests, and it contributed to this past August becoming Earth’s hottest on record, a trend scientists say could push 2027, and possibly 2026, to become the hottest year ever measured globally.
Newsom says he won’t run for president in 2028 if Harris runs again. California Governor Gavin Newsom told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview taped while the two were fly fishing in Montana that he would step aside for Kamala Harris, saying, “I don’t know if she runs but we’ll see. But I wouldn’t run if she ran.” When Tapper pushed back with some skepticism, Newsom doubled down, saying, “Of course not. Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?” Newsom argued a shared primary would only benefit other candidates, calling it “a gift from God for everybody else” and “mutually assured destruction” that “services no greater good,” while acknowledging the case for Harris running instead of him, saying, “She had a shot and you’ve never run and she’s run twice. That’s objectively true.” He also pointed to their overlapping political base from their days as San Francisco politicians, saying, “The Venn diagram is just pure crossover. I wouldn’t do that to people,” a notably more definitive stance than his comments back in February, when he said only that “fate will determine” whether the two would end up running against each other.
A Mississippi man has been denied bond after pleading not guilty in the killing of Tasia Fortune. Jarques Ratliff, 51, appeared in Jackson Municipal Court and was formally charged with murder in the death of Fortune, a 29-year-old Black mother of four who was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home last month. His attorney argued Ratliff was not a flight risk and was “gainfully employed,” but the judge ordered him held with no bond after a law enforcement official present called him “a danger to the citizens of Jackson.” Police Chief RaShall Brackney, who said investigators had an “association” between Ratliff and Fortune, called the arrest “an important development” but stressed “it’s not the conclusion,” adding that additional arrests are expected. Fortune’s mother told the Associated Press she cried upon learning of the arrest, saying the family remains “in disbelief” and “still don’t have a lot of answers.” A cause of death and motive have still not been released.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns Ukraine’s drone war is about to get far more dangerous. Schmidt, who now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and has advised the Pentagon on AI, told NBC News that the pace of battlefield innovation in Ukraine is unlike anything he has seen, warning that Russia has closed the technological gap that once favored Kyiv. He said Russia has begun fitting cheap Iranian designed Shahed drones with small Chinese jet engines, letting them exceed 300 miles per hour compared to roughly 110 miles per hour for older versions, making them far harder for Ukraine’s existing interceptors to stop. Schmidt predicted that artificial intelligence will soon let computers coordinate massive drone swarms directly, saying, “Humans can’t run a swarm of 1,000 drones, but a computer can. So what I think will happen is computers will develop war plans within a swarm.” He described the current front line bluntly, saying, “The battlefield today is a no man’s land where nothing moves because there are drones and anti-drones above you,” and warned that without more Western money and technology, “Whoever plays the game of fastest innovation to scale will win this war.”
The 10-year Treasury yield topped 5 percent for the first time since 2023 as oil and diesel prices spike. The surge came after Saudi Arabia shut a critical pipeline and postponed talks with Iran and Gulf countries over the Strait of Hormuz, sending Brent crude above $109 a barrel and pushing the national average price of diesel to a fresh all time high of $6.23 a gallon. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expects the pipeline back online “very soon” but could not give an exact timeline, even as the Associated Press reported the damage could keep it offline for weeks. Vessel traffic through Hormuz has slowed to a trickle, with just 14 ships passing through Sunday, and gas prices have already climbed more than 45 percent since the U.S. and Israel launched the Iran war. Economist Diane Swonk warned the ripple effects will be significant, saying, “The cost of diesel gets into just about everything, from running a farm to the cost of food, but also everything across the economy that’s shipped,” while markets now price in better than 90 percent odds the Federal Reserve raises interest rates Wednesday for the first time since 2023.
Macklemore says he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour after Robert Kraft organized a stadium boycott over his pro Palestinian statements. The rapper wrote on Instagram that Sheeran told him Patriots owner Robert Kraft rallied other stadium owners to issue an ultimatum, that Sheeran would be barred from their venues if Macklemore remained on the tour, after Macklemore performed his song “Hind’s Hall” and told a New Jersey crowd, “Free Palestine.” Kraft confirmed the decision in a statement, citing “a broader history of rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community,” while saying he’d “welcome the opportunity to sit down with Macklemore and discuss the facts” toward what he called their shared goal of “peace for all people.” Macklemore said his conversations with Sheeran, whom he called a friend, ended in “fundamental disagreement,” recounting that Sheeran told him the words “Free Palestine” were hurtful to people he’d spoken with, to which Macklemore responded that this reflected “a fundamental disconnect” given the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed in the war. Fellow artist Pink also weighed in, saying she wasn’t trying to get anyone fired but objected to displaying “violent images” of the war to a stadium of families, writing, “You don’t get to decide that for us.” Macklemore closed by saying he isn’t the victim, writing that the real victims are Palestinians “forced to live through unimaginable violence.”
Four people were hospitalized after a construction crane collapsed in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood. Miami Fire Rescue said the crane came down on Southeast 12th Street and Brickell Bay Drive, landing on top of a construction box trapping two workers, ages 29 and 27, inside, while a third worker, the crane operator, jumped clear as it tipped over. Fire Rescue Chief Robert Hevia described a complex scene where crews fought a vehicle fire while simultaneously cutting through the metal box to free the trapped workers, all of whom were ultimately extracted successfully. A driver whose SUV caught fire when the crane landed on its hood escaped by climbing out the back after reversing away from the falling crane. A nearby resident described hearing “a tremendous crash” and seeing flames “shooting up 20, 30 feet in the air,” and all four injured people, including the crane operator, were taken to the hospital with what officials described as minor injuries as OSHA prepares to investigate.
Special Report: More On Russian Oligarch, Trump Family Wedding
A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).
ProPublica, Investigative Reporting: Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, Sept. 14, 2026. The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.
In May, Donald Trump Jr. had a wedding on a pair of private islands.
This man’s role has been secret until now.Credit: Little Pipe Cay/Lux Hospitality Bahamas; Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; Laura Gordon PhotographyTrump AdministrationThe oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.by Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex MierjeskiSeptember 14, 2026, 5:00 amChange Appearance
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, right, and Donald Trump Jr. (Reuters photo).
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.
“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”
Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.Do You Have Information We Should Know About Donald Trump Jr.?
We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.
I’m always looking for under-covered stories about business and politics, no matter the specific subject. Contact me with tips, by email or securely on Signal. I take confidentiality seriously.Contact Me
National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?
“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.
In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”
In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”
The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”
Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.
The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.
This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.
Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)A man and woman stand on a beach as fireworks explode above the water.Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, at their wedding, watching fireworks paid for by Umar Kremlev. Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller DesignDonald Trump Jr. wears a multi-colored Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with Bettina Anderson.The magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride. Laura Gordon Photography/Hello!
The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.
Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.
That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.
In May, Donald Trump Jr. had a wedding on a pair of private islands.
This man’s role has been secret until now.Credit: Little Pipe Cay/Lux Hospitality Bahamas; Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; Laura Gordon PhotographyTrump AdministrationDonald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to PutinThe oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.
“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”
Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.Do You Have Information We Should Know About Donald Trump Jr.?
We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.
National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?
“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.
In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”
In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”
The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”
Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.
The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.
This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.
Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)A man and woman stand on a beach as fireworks explode above the water.Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, at their wedding, watching fireworks paid for by Umar Kremlev. Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller DesignDonald Trump Jr. wears a multi-colored Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with Bettina Anderson.The magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride. Laura Gordon Photography/Hello!
The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.
Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.
That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.
Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”
In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.
He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)Russian President Vladimir Putin leans into a conversation with Umar Kremlev.Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, with Umar Kremlev, during an event in Moscow in September 2022 Sputnik/Reuters
In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.
In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.
Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.
He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)
With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.
In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.”
It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”
Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.
In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)Umar Kremlev shakes hands with Donald Trump Jr., who is holding a model of a boxing ring.Kremlev hosted Trump Jr. at an event in Istanbul in September 2025. International Boxing Association
The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.
The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.
Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)
Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come.
“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”Corrections
More On U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.
New York Times, Tech Stocks Shudder in Response to Calls to Slow A.I. Progress, Joe Rennison, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). Companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence in Asia, Europe and the United States posted declines after tech leaders expressed worries about the safety of “frontier” A.I. technology.
Technology stocks around the world fell on Monday, after a chorus of senior executives at artificial intelligence companies called for slowing down the rapid pace of development of the transformative technology.
Futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell 1.5 percent ahead of the open of trading in New York. Nvidia, Intel, Oracle and other companies at the forefront of the A.I. build-out posted declines premarket.
South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index, which is heavily influenced by two chip suppliers for A.I. data centers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, fell more than 3 percent. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, fell 1.2 percent. Japan’s main stock index also declined, with SoftBank, a major tech investment firm, shedding more than 10 percent.
In Europe, semiconductor stocks like ASML of the Netherlands and Infineon of Germany fell sharply.
The tech industry has been the engine powering global markets to repeated new highs in recent years as advances in A.I. have moved faster than investors initially expected.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published a long blog post on Saturday calling on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of rapidly advancing models at the so-called frontier of development.
Those models, he wrote, have already begun to build the next generation of artificial intelligence, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement.” That raises the risk that the technology will become an autonomous cybersecurity threat, even threatening “serious economic disruption.”
“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute,” Dr. Amodei said. As one remedy, he said he would hire third-party “evaluators” who would “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments.”
The post was endorsed by Elon Musk, who runs Space X, which also houses his A.I platform, x.AI; Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI; and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind.
“I agree with Dario,” Mr. Altman said, adding that he would also hire third-party “evaluators” to oversee OpenAI’s safety practices.
SpaceX, which is publicly traded, fell about 2 percent in premarket trading on Monday. OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to list publicly in the future. But Mr. Altman of OpenAI said in a recent interview with Fortune that “right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Fox News on Sunday that the steps Mr. Amodei suggested in his blog post were “pretty sensible.”
Despite the rare show of allegiance among the tech leaders, President Trump said that he would not want to see a slowdown that could give China the opportunity to move ahead of the United States on A.I.
“Whoever wins with A.I. wins,” said Mr. Trump on the sidelines of a golf tournament held at one of his courses in Ireland over the weekend.
China’s rapid progress in open-source A.I. models, which rival those from Anthropic and other industry leaders and, has split Silicon Valley. In his call for coordination of safe A.I. development, Dr. Amodei said there should be restrictions on chip sales to China and a crack down on the improper harvesting of data from A.I. systems by Chinese companies.
“If we execute these measures well,” he added, “I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.” He also said that the United States and other democratic nations should work to get China to restrict the speed of A.I. developments, although given the stakes “there will likely be stark limits on what can be achieved.”
On Monday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters in a briefing that “hyping up various threat narratives, engaging in confrontation and resorting to malicious competition will only disrupt the global A.I. governance process and serve the interests of no one.”
New York Times, Key U.S. Borrowing Rate Near 20-Year High as Oil Prices Fluctuate, Jason Karaian, Sept. 15, 2026. The interest rate on a key U.S. government bond reached a nearly two-decade high, oil prices remained elevated and stock markets wavered on Tuesday amid intensifying turmoil in global markets.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note briefly reached 5.04 percent, its highest since 2007, which could filter through to higher rates on mortgages, business loans and other debt linked to government borrowing costs. Investors have shown increasing concerns about inflation and the direction of policy ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting to set interest rates, which concludes on Wednesday.
At the same time, the widening war in Iran is exacerbating worries about the flow of oil exports from the Middle East, putting upward pressure on oil, gasoline and diesel prices.Here is the latest:
More On Artificial Intelligence Fears
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Why Is Trump Still Boosting AI? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 15, 2026. Will AI transform the economy? The jury is still out on that one: So far there is little evidence for either the massive job losses or the soaring productivity growth industry leaders threatened/promised, but it’s still early days.
But AI does seem to be transforming U.S. politics. I can’t think of a technology that has inspired so much hate across such a wide political spectrum. Even the leading AI companies are warning about the dangers of their technology and pleading for government regulation to slow it down.
Which makes it more than puzzling that Donald Trump is going all in on AI, claiming that concerns about its dangers are a “hoax” and opposing any kind of regulation.
In so doing, he’s taking a wildly unpopular position. Here’s recent polling from UMass Amherst:
Notice that even a large part of Trump’s base is deserting him on this issue, with a quarter of Republicans disapproving.
So why is Trump posting stuff like this?
Robert Reich has a good post on the subject, urging us to follow the money: As he notes, members of the Trump family have personal financial stakes in the industry. And one motive one should never, ever dismiss in current U.S. affairs is Trump’s personal greed.
I would, however, add two more points.
First, I think Reich is too glib in dismissing the idea that Trump imagines that he knows what he’s doing. “It can’t be,” Reich writes, “that he knows very much about AI.” But does he know that he doesn’t know? That Truth Social post above, in which Trump declares himself perfectly able to manage this wild new technology because he is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, is like a textbook illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are highly confident in their own judgment because they’re too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent.
Second, it’s important to realize how much Trump needs an AI boom.
Trump came into office believing that his tariffs would produce a huge boom in “manly” jobs. In fact, job growth has been weak — and more than all of the job gains have gone to women. Meanwhile, tariffs have driven up consumer prices.
And then there’s the Iran war, which has been an economic as well as a strategic disaster. Diesel prices are now well above $6 a gallon. Trump officials love to say that gasoline was over $5 a gallon under Biden, which was true — for one week.
Yet one thing did seem to be going right under Trump II. Enthusiasm for AI was generating a huge investment boom and supporting stock prices. Trump officials, notably Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary — who Edward Luce of the Financial Times now dubs “the Pete Hegseth of the Treasury” (ouch) — had taken to claiming that AI will solve all their problems, ending inflation by reducing costs and curing the budget deficit by generating huge economic growth.
The backlash against AI, then, is taking away the one thing the Trumpists thought they had going for them. So in a way it’s understandable that Trump is trying desperately to hold on to the magic (and possibly endangering the future of humanity, but he doesn’t care about that.)
But of course it won’t work. The AI boom, once Trump’s last remaining political asset, is now a huge liability.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump’s high IQ hoax, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 14, 2026. At 9:58 this morning, Donald Trump was locked away deep inside the White House when he began panicking online in front of the entire world. Over the course of almost 10 hours, the President posted on social media 7 times about the exact same thing, spiraling out of control over artificial intelligence, with each post growing more unhinged than the next.
He started by telling us all that our president has everything under control because of his genius-level intelligence: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Before later saying it is all a hoax anyway, just like the other things our own government has warned us about, “I am the Hoax Buster” and that all warnings about AI are just a hoax, even wilder than “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”That was just a small sample of what he would end up posting throughout the rest of the day. By 11:23 AM, he was sharing that the United States was leading AI “by a lot” and issued a warning not to “kill the Golden Goose.” By 1:33 PM, he was in the middle of a full-blown meltdown, listing other events that actually happened, but twisting them into sounding like his favorite word of the day, HOAX. He yo-yo’d from one thought to the next, going from defending AI to jumping feet first into some of his past embarrassments, saying both of his impeachments were a HOAX. Before moving on to President Xi, who he says will not be implementing any regulations. He then shared just how upset he is that Google supposedly wants to build a data center in Finland because “permitting is too difficult” in the United States. He made it clear that he is not at all concerned about safety or the environment. He is mad that he could lose AI “deals” to other countries. He wrote, “AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!” This is all about money, and it always has been. For Donald Trump, the more money pouring into the United States, the more money he has access to line his and his enablers’ pockets.
By 4:30 PM, he was ready to start new attacks instead of just focusing on defending AI. He appeared satisfied with the groundwork he had laid to convince anyone reading his Truth Social shares that they were being targeted by HOAX after HOAX. He was now ready to turn his radicalized followers onto a new group of targets: people raising concerns about AI, including the scientists and executives who built these systems, “Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause,” and he also issued a new warning that “soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind.”
At 4:34, four minutes later, came his “I am the Hoax Buster” post, where he was back with more drama, trying to label what we should actually be concerned about as the HOAX, so he could dismiss the real concerns altogether. By 4:53, he repeated much of what he had already said, but the grammar was different in this post. Where the others had random words capitalized, much the same as his traveling “comfort human,” Natalie Harp, does in her personal letters, this one was written with better punctuation.
In his final AI-focused post of the day at 7:55 PM, he shared the shortest and most desperate of them all: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT”
President Trump even spent a few minutes of his day calling into the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, whose company designs the chips that are powering much of the AI boom, was onstage. With Trump talking directly to the audience of tech leaders while on speakerphone, he said that the concern around AI was a HOAX, saying, “The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.” He also added, “No. It’s a hoax. They make people wealthy.”
China also responded to growing calls for an AI slowdown through its Foreign Ministry during a press conference earlier today, criticizing what it called “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition.” Their state-run newspaper, Global Times, called the slowdown proposition a “Cold War playbook” designed to preserve American dominance. The United States and China are now both using each other as the excuse to dismiss the concerns and the slowdown.
This creates a standstill with neither government willing to slow down or build guardrails. This is feeling more and more like a nuclear arms race but with rapidly advancing technology instead that can be built and deployed much quicker than any weapon ever could. And if history has told us anything about past arms races, it is that the absence of guardrails and regulation creates catastrophes; it does not produce safety.
Seeing that first post this morning, where Trump called himself, “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” brought me right back to that cramped White House press conference room in 2020, watching Donald Trump suggest that maybe we could inject disinfectants, like bleach, into our veins to stop the replication of the virus. I felt that same punch to the gut feeling then as I did this morning. That was quickly followed by a sense of doom for what was to come.
Back then, we knew there was a serious crisis forming, with experts sounding alarms, while other countries were already starting to react. Yet the man who was supposed to be in charge, in control, and ready to lead us through it was standing in front of the country on live TV, proving just how much danger we were in with him leading the response. That was the moment for so many when they saw just how inept he was and that the emperor was truly wearing no clothes.
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
Now here we are, deep into his next term of office, and he is once again facing a crisis, and instead of seeing it for what it is and doing the job he was elected to do, he calls it a scam. One has to wonder if he knows it is an issue to be dealt with, and maybe it’s not just that he wants to profit from it, maybe once again he is just proving how inept he is. How he truly is unable to carry out the responsibilities of the office. That his mental and physical decline has just accentuated the shortcomings he has always had. Or maybe it is just the money. Either way, we are once again on the path of another catastrophe.
The reality is that AI is not going away. It is not a partisan issue, and it is not a hoax, no matter how many times the president yells that it is on social media. It is a technological tool that is already reshaping how we live our lives. It is changing how we communicate and work. It will have, and will continue to have, a direct effect on elections and how governments surveil their own citizens. It can already generate very convincing fake videos and voices of real people saying things they never said. Things that could directly impact the lives they live and the mental health of our young people. AI can and is already being used to weaponize disinformation campaigns at a very large scale. There is the impact it is having on our planet, too. It is consuming large amounts of energy and water, and impacting communities near data centers.
None of this means that there should be an outright ban on AI or that it should be taken away from people who are using it responsibly. It would be dangerous to allow our adversaries to have this powerful tool for their militaries and their economies if we did not have it as well. But it does mean we need enforceable, common-sense regulation. We don’t have time to wait, and we do not want it coming from our “high IQ” president who is under the control of tech billionaires. We need legislative guardrails, and we need them now.
Even the people building these systems are now asking for oversight and for the rapid development to be slowed down. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic (Claude), published an essay over the weekend that he titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In it, he warned that we should slow the pace of AI development so that safety measures can catch up. He has also warned that rogue AI agent swarms could take over the internet in as little as six months. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), has shared concerns and joined Amodei in calling for a slowdown.
It could be that their motives are genuine and truly selfless, and they actually see the danger and want these protections for mankind. Or they may see this as a possible tool to slow the competition. At this point, it does not matter. Because the people with the deepest understanding of this technology are saying it needs guardrails, and the President of the United States is calling their warnings a HOAX and threatening them. This echoes loudly of when scientists who built the atomic bomb, like Robert Oppenheimer, warned that their creation needed international oversight and regulation, and they too faced ugly backlash. They were called naive and accused of disloyalty. In Oppenheimer’s case, it went even further with him being stripped of his security clearance. Once again, the people who understand the danger we are facing in this moment the most are being punished for ringing the alarm and saying so.
This wasn’t the only big story for today. While the president spent the day locked away in the White House, posting disinformation and declaring himself a genius, a story broke that is rightfully getting a lot of attention. ProPublica reported this morning that Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas this past May, the one that Donald Trump did not attend, was paid for, at least in part, by Umar Kremlev, who is a Russian oligarch in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Kremlev is the president of the International Boxing Association, an organization that has been financed by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy company. The in-depth investigation and subsequent reporting by ProPublica showed that Kremlev rented and paid for the private island where Don Jr. held his reception, and that he also paid an estimated $70,000 for a fireworks display after the wedding, which his team helped plan the logistics of. The money he used for this wedding came from an entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. Don Jr.’s younger brother Eric Trump’s office said he has “absolutely no clue who this person is.” Which we can interpret as this not being some close family friend simply wanting to give someone they know well an extraordinarily generous wedding gift. Yet, Don Jr.’s spokesperson called Kremlev a “personal friend” he met through the hunting world. Bettina Trump posted on Instagram, saying that this was “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” and insisting there is “no conspiracy, no mystery.”
Leave a comment
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has continued to show what true leadership looks like in the time of authoritarian takeover, spoke on the floor of the Senate today and used his time to lay out exactly what had happened. He laid out the facts clearly on the connections, improprieties, and dangers of what that arrangement really represented. He reminded the room and those watching on video that Don Jr.’s net worth was $50 million before his father’s second term, and that it grew to $300 million in a single year after he took back office. He shared that at least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have received $1.8 billion in federal contracts and commitments during that same time. He pointed out that five of those companies received their first-ever government contract only after the Trump sons invested money in them. He called the Kremlev arrangement “as close to treason as you get” and asked whether any Republican senator would defend the Russian government paying for the president’s family wedding. He asked whether Republicans would have stayed silent if Hunter Biden’s wedding or Malia Obama’s graduation party had been financed by allies of the Ayatollah. “Just because the corruption happens so routinely that to some it feels normal,” Murphy said, “it doesn’t mean that it is.”
Congress is back in session, and this is a good time to contact our local members of Congress and let them know where we stand on common-sense regulations for AI and whether there should be an investigation into Don Jr.’s wedding being financed by someone with ties to the Kremlin. I know this feels like we are spinning our wheels every time we contact them, but those calls and messages are received by congressional offices, and they do send a message, especially this close to the midterm elections. This is also creating a record for the history books of who continued to side with this government and who stood up for our democratic republic. And for those of us who appreciated Sen. Murphy raising these questions on the Senate floor today, we can let him know that too.
Today was a bad day for Donald Trump. He had an embarrassing meltdown on social media, and he suffered a painful court loss. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. His administration was trying to force states to get federal approval for their mail-in ballot envelopes and submit voter information through a new Postal Service system before those ballots were allowed to be mailed out. If these changes had been allowed this close to an election, or at any time, it could create chaos and leave legitimate voters without their ballots, and their votes uncounted in the November elections. Lower courts had already blocked these changes, and now the Supreme Court has refused to let the corrupt Trump administration put them into effect while the legal fight continues. This is not a slam-dunk win, but it is a win nonetheless. And these days, we count every good thing that comes our way, and lately, we have been seeing more good days for us, and fewer good days for those trying to destroy our country. That is why I still have hope for America. You should, too.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Odd Trump Out, William Kristol, right, Sept. 15, 2026. Whom should you listen to on the issue of artificial intelligence?
You could listen to the American public.
Back in 2025, before this year’s reports of incidents of AI going rogue, polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed widespread public unease regarding AI. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said then that AI should be strictly regulated by the government. And last month UMass Amherst found that only 11 percent of respondents supported the construction of an AI data center in their community, with more than two-thirds opposed. The survey also found only 23 percent of respondents saying President Trump was handling the issue of artificial intelligence well.
You could listen to people working on AI.
In July, more than 1,300 employees at frontier AI companies signed an open letter saying that “industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight.” They requested that “the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
You could listen to people running the biggest AI companies.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Saturday, “Like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. . . . They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Amodei and other top AI executives say that our government has a key role to play in ensuring we don’t lose control.
So we’ve got the executives, the experts, and the public lined up on one side.
On the other side? President Trump.
Trump spent yesterday proclaiming his absolute fealty to the unregulated development of artificial intelligence, his supreme indifference to any risks, and his utter disdain for anyone who had concerns and who favored creating controls or guardrails.
In a series of ever-more unhinged social media posts, and then in a call into a pro-AI conference in Los Angeles, Trump assured us all that he had everything under control, that all the warnings and concerns about AI are a “HOAX,” and that there is a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.”
Democrats’ response should be pretty obvious. Privately they can be grateful to Trump for grasping a chalice so poisoned top AI executives have now chosen to let it pass. Publicly they can show that, in this instance as in so many others, Trump is headstrong, reckless, and out of touch. They can say we need a government that’s going to listen when even AI leaders and experts say we should slow down and get things under control. They can pledge that they will make sure AI works for all of us not against us.
Some Democrats will tell themselves, There’s no need even to get involved in this complicated issue at this point. The midterms are going fine. But it’s risky for a political party to look indifferent or oblivious to major public concerns. And Democrats don’t have to call for a total and complete shutdown of AI in the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. But they can be forceful and direct, and can call for a slowdown and appropriate government regulation.
Most of the playing field for 2026 is already set. AI isn’t going to be the top issue on voters’ minds this November. But its emergence now, front and center in the public debate, could help turn a midterm GOP defeat into a true rout—especially if Democrats can tie Republican congressional candidates to Trump’s reckless and arrogant indifference to the public’s concerns. Here’s Jon Ossoff showing them how to do it.
The new New York Times/Siena poll has Democrats up by eight points on the generic congressional ballot. The margin was two points in the same poll a year ago. The trend is in the right direction. A solid victory seven weeks from now would be good. A rout would be great.
Democrats: Make midterms great again. Go for a rout.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
DO THESE WEDDING GUESTS LOOK LIKE RUSSIANS TO YOU?: We’re entering Mad Libs territory with these Trumpworld personal-corruption scandals, they’re so frequent, varied, and strange. Like, be serious: Are you really trying to tell me that [Donald Trump Jr.] had his [private-island wedding bash] bankrolled by [a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch who runs the International Boxing Association]?
Yesterday, ProPublica reported that Donald Trump Jr. had his private-island wedding bash bankrolled by Umar Kremlev, a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch who runs the International Boxing Association. Kremlev, who attended the days-long party but has been oddly absent from the happy couple’s many, many online pictures documenting it, shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the shindig. How friendly!
You should really read the whole report, which is packed with remarkable details about Kremlev’s life, his relationship with the younger Trump, and former counterintelligence officials saying things like “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.” But the most remarkable element of the story may have come from Bettina Trump, Don Jr.’s socialite bride. It was “fake news” that Kremlev had bankrolled the wedding, she insisted—in fact, “our dear friend Umar” had merely bankrolled a two-day party immediately after the wedding. I tell you what, you can’t trust these reporters as far as you can throw them.
MONSTERS IN THE EVERGLADES: The DHS detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” may have shut down this summer, but new information about the shocking treatment of migrants at the cruelty-is-the-point Florida facility during its year of operation keeps coming to light. A new report from the department’s Office of Inspector General¹ found that the government had confined migrants outdoors in small metal cages that posed “significant risks” to their health and safety. Here’s the New York Times:
Federal investigators found that the metal enclosures—each providing only about 18 square feet of floor space—were used as “calming areas,” where at least 79 detainees were held for periods ranging from several minutes to nearly two hours. Although facility staff said that detainees asked to spend time in the enclosures, federal investigators found at least one instance in which the enclosures were used to discipline a detainee who “failed to comply with a lawful command.”
“The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment,” the report said.
“Calming areas” is a particularly creepy bit of bureaucrat-speak here—it’s hard to imagine that migrants found being locked in a wire cage too small to lie down in to be particularly calming. But even that amount of abstraction turns out only to have been for internal use. When the story got out, Republicans were more interested in doubling down on the cruelty. “While it adheres to all federal standards for criminal confinement,” Ron DeSantis Communications Director Alex Lanfranconi said of the cages yesterday, “we’d make it even smaller if we could.”
New York Times, China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule, Lily Kuo, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). Even as Beijing urges the United States not to hype the dangers of A.I., its own spy chief is framing the technology as a threat to the Communist Party’s security.
China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.
The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.
In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.
Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.
The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.
Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China:
Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Mr. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use A.I. to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.
“They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”
Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.
Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.
More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of A.I. in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Mr. Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”
China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.
The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.
In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.
Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.
The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.
Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China:
Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Mr. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use A.I. to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.
“They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”
Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.
Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.
More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of A.I. in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Mr. Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”
Trump says only guardrails that AI needs is ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president, Elleiana Green and Owen Dahlkamp, The president is trying to shut down a growing push for AI regulation, amid calls from leaders to slow the production of artificial intelligence.
Politico, Trump says only guardrails that AI needs is ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president, Elleiana Green and Owen Dahlkamp, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The president is trying to shut down a growing push for AI regulation, amid calls from leaders to slow the production of artificial intelligence.President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks with reporters on Air Force One.
President Donald Trump tried to shut down a burgeoning push for the United States to further regulate artificial intelligence on Monday morning, saying the U.S. has already done enough to prevent AI from catastrophic risks.
The post comes as technology leaders called for the industry to slow down the production of artificial intelligence over the weekend, sending tech stocks tumbling on Monday.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
The president has repeatedly said in public remarks over the past week that his top priority is ensuring China does not gain supremacy over a new technology that is poised to reshape civil society. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers,” he said Monday, “and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
“Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he added in a subsequent social media post.
Trump also called out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, claiming that he is “now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’” after the Trump administration had previously “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things.’“
Over the weekend, Amodei was the first major AI leader to publicly call for a slowdown, writing in a lengthy essay, “We must slow down the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
Shortly after, xAI CEO Elon Musk said on social media that “Dario is right.”
OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, also said he agreed with Amodei, adding that the issue has been a topic of discussion at OpenAI. And OpenAI’s top European lobbyist, in an interview with POLITICO, called on the United Kingdom to also introduce new regulations.
The Trump administration previously clashed with Anthropic publicly after the company attempted to restrict how the Pentagon could use its Claude AI model, resulting in it being designated a supply-chain risk. The AI giant sued, and a federal judge in late July said that it seemed that the administration overstepped its authority in targeting the company.
One of Anthropic’s most advanced models was also slapped with export controls in June after the administration deemed its release posed security risks. In an attempt to comply, Anthropic shut down the model entirely before the ban was partially lifted later that month.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s Monday social media post.
Concern from lawmakers and the tech industry spiked last week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and issued a warning that the emerging technology could “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
His prediction increased fears about the growing capabilities of the technology, with top AI labs in recent weeks disclosing several instances in which rogue AI agents broke out of their testing environments and carried out sophisticated hacking campaigns across the internet.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Monday before Trump’s social media post that AI is “something we’re concerned by, but we want to make sure that we actually regulate smartly and we’re thoughtful about the risk here.”
He added, “I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, News Analysis: Gulf Arab States Explore New Options as U.S. Bases Fail to Deter Iran, Vivian Nereim, Sept. 15, 2026. The American presence in these countries has not shielded them from retaliation during the Iran war. Now they are hoping direct talks with Iran could help.
Gulf Arab countries have long relied for their security on the U.S. military bases that they host.
But after six months of war, the repeated pummeling of those countries by Iranian missiles and drones has made the limitations of American security guarantees abundantly clear.
Iran and its allies have nearly destroyed some of the U.S. bases, set luxury hotels ablaze and, most recently, knocked offline one of the most critical pieces of energy infrastructure in the world, an oil pipeline that stretches across Saudi Arabia.
Their backs against a wall, Gulf Arab officials are now trying to cobble together different ways to avoid attacks by Iran and its allies, including direct diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.
Even that option faces challenges. On Sunday night, a meeting that was scheduled for Monday between Iran and the Gulf Arab states was abruptly postponed. The delay came after Saudi Arabia and Iran reached an impasse in discussions about the Strait of Hormuz — a crucial route for Gulf energy exporters — according to a senior Gulf official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Analysts say the region’s leaders have no choice but to seek different security options after the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran exposed the vulnerabilities of the Gulf Arab countries and emboldened the Islamic Republic.
“We’re stuck in this position of trying to build something new while maintaining some of the old,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “We need to snap out of this external protector syndrome.”
The island nation of Bahrain, for example, has been host to a major American naval base for decades in the hopes of protecting itself from Iran. But as in other Gulf countries, the base became a target, instead.
New York Times, News Analysis: Saudi Arabia Faces ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ After Being Rebuffed by Trump, Vivian Nereim, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The kingdom is in a state of strategic shock after coming under attack from an emboldened Iran and failing to win more U.S. military support, analysts say.
Saudi Arabia has increasingly found itself caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Now, the kingdom’s leadership is assessing dwindling options on how to respond.
In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has repeatedly attacked the kingdom, threatening to throttle its ability to export oil and piling pressure on the global economy. But Saudi Arabia has been left frustrated and disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to confront the Houthis, former diplomats and analysts say.
The kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran have also had limited results. A meeting planned on Monday between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was abruptly postponed on Sunday night, as the gap between their positions remained vast.
“Right now the Saudis are really frustrated,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “In some sense it’s their worst-case scenario.”
The Saudi government’s Center for International Communication, which fields queries from journalists, did not respond to a request for comment.
The kingdom’s conundrum underscores the heavy costs that the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has imposed across the Middle East, including on countries whose leaders opposed the war or have sought repeatedly to bring it to an end.
In the first few months of the fighting, Saudi Arabia was relatively untouched by Iran’s retaliatory attacks, compared with its neighbors. Now, with no end to the hostilities in sight, Iran is seeking greater leverage over the United States, and Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest oil exporter until the war knocked it down the list — has become a primary target.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Over the past two weeks alone, Saudi Arabia has faced Iran-backed attacks from the east, the south and the north.
A Saudi oil tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz at the end of August, killing two sailors.
On Friday, the Houthi militia, which had already declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea, seized territory on an important global shipping route and trounced Saudi-allied forces in Yemen.
The same day, the Saudi authorities announced that they had been forced to shut down a critical oil pipeline, blaming a drone attack by an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. The pipeline had become a key alternative export route for Saudi Arabia to get its oil to the Red Sea, after Iran effectively choked off the Strait of Hormuz.
“The reason a country like Saudi Arabia invests so heavily in developing a security partnership with the United States is for just this sort of eventuality,” said Mr. Ratney, the former ambassador.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the country’s de facto ruler, had reasons to be confident in that partnership. For years, his government has invested billions of dollars and extensive political capital in building personal relationships with Mr. Trump and his family.ImageIn an ornate room, a person in a suit holds the hands of a smiling person in a thobe. A white model airplane sits on a coffee table.President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia at the White House last year. The Saudi leader and his government have courted the president and his family for years.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
But when the crown prince asked Mr. Trump last week to take military action against the Houthis, the president declined, according to officials with knowledge of the conversations.
Saudi officials and pundits have been clear that the kingdom does not want to fight the Houthis alone. That is especially true because an earlier military campaign that Saudi Arabia led against the group turned into a decade-long quagmire.
“This demands international support, not only from Saudi Arabia and regional countries,” Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a columnist close to the Saudi government, wrote in a Saudi-owned newspaper on Saturday.
Mr. Trump, however, appears reluctant to get involved.
“Already confronting one open-ended conflict with Iran, with an overstretched Navy and a diminishing munitions stockpile, it’s unsurprising that he does not want to open this new front,” said Dan Shapiro, a former top Middle East policy official in the Pentagon during the Biden administration. “But it is bitterly disappointing to the Saudis.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump told journalists on a trip to Ireland that the Houthis had “called us and they don’t want to fight with us.”
“There’s just one country that they’re not too happy with and we’ll get that straightened out,” he added, referring to Saudi Arabia.
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi political official, denied that the group had reached out to the United States. “We did not communicate with Trump, nor did we ask him not to attack us,” he said.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud, Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). Agents expressed concern about being directed by top Homeland Security leaders to use private information to look up voter records in state databases.
Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.
The authorities also required agents to examine at least 40 voters each day, the account said, suggesting a rushed pace that raises questions about the thoroughness of the investigation. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report.
The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of what the Department of Homeland Security is calling the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare.
Democrats and voting rights activists have denounced the operation as yet another way Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged the headwinds Republicans are facing as they try to retain control of Congress, is trying to sow doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections. They fear that eligible voters could be disqualified from participating in the fall midterms, or, worse, that Mr. Trump will use the investigation to try to discard actual results.
“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Mr. Schumer, the minority leader, said in an interview. He added: “We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do.”
On Sunday, the senators sent a letter to Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, demanding that the operation be halted and also seeking answers to a dozen specific questions. The senators included the full whistle-blower account, which was produced by Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit watchdog group founded in 2023.
In a statement, the Homeland Security Department broadly defended its hunt for election fraud: “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”
The identity of the whistle-blower is not known to The Times. Democracy Defenders Fund said in its report that the whistle-blower requested anonymity because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”
According to the whistle-blower, agents are expected to complete at least 40 reviews in each eight-hour day, giving them scant time — about 12 minutes — to determine each voter’s citizenship and voting history. The consequence of the investigation is potentially vast, according to the account, because each review is recorded in a database that could affect individuals’ immigration status or legal permanent residency.
The whistle-blower also questioned the legality of a crucial part of the operation, with investigators effectively posing as individual voters by using personally identifiable information compiled from both internal and external sources, such as birth dates or partial Social Security numbers, to look up voter records.
The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history. Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals.
“I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private,” Mr. Padilla said. “The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.”
Worried about the potential legal ramifications of such actions, the whistle-blower “expressed concerns” to those leading the investigation within Homeland Security’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, according to the account.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: SCOTUS Dashes Trump’s Last, Best Midterm Hope, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 15, 2026. Let’s get a few caveats out of the way up front. Yes, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sometimes let Donald Trump get away with too much. And yes, there are still myriad ways Trump could try to tamper with the upcoming midterms—and it’s all but certain that he’ll try to spin any Democratic victories as fraudulent, at least in the minds of his own base.
For this one moment, though, I’m hitting pause on caring about any of that. Last night’s Supreme Court decision blocking Trump’s ridiculous anti-mail-in ballots scheme was a massive rebuke of the president, a giant wrench in his plans to monkey with elections, and the death of his last, best hope to stave off the coming blue wave. Before we turn back to the future dangers, let’s sit and savor it a little.
Covering this scheme—which we’ve been writing about for months—it’s been difficult to figure out exactly how anxious to be about it. On the one hand, it seemed deeply unlikely all along that it would succeed in court. It was simply too outlandish, too much “one weird trick to seize control of elections”: a brazen attempt to destabilize states’ mail-in voting systems by giving the U.S. Postal Service and its Trump-lackey leadership unprecedented control over which mail-in ballots to deliver and which ones to refuse.
On the other hand, the damage the scheme would have done if Trump had been allowed to proceed was far too massive to ignore. Overnight, we could have been looking at a genuine constitutional crisis, with blue states forced to choose between handing troves of voter data over to Trump’s government or carrying out their elections without the use of the mail—which, of course, is what Trump has wanted all along. Even if they had agreed to give over their data, there were screaming warning signs that mail-in voters could be disenfranchised en masse anyway.
Astonishingly, two justices on the Court would have apparently been fine with exactly that. Justice Samuel Alito, joined in dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas, hand-waves the possibility of this chaos on the thinnest imaginable grounds. First, Alito argued, “the States disagree about the nature of these effects.” In effect: What are all these blue states complaining about? The red states don’t see a compliance issue here.
Second, Alito blames the possibility of all this chaos unfolding just before the midterms on the plaintiff states—for having had the temerity to sue over Trump’s ridiculous order in the first place. “In April, the plaintiff States sued to challenge the President’s internal directive to subordinates mandating a rulemaking,” the justice huffed. “For months, this litigation cast a cloud over the Government’s ability to issue a final rule. . . . The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay.”
It’s clownish stuff, but who cares? Don’t let the trolls ruin your day, that’s what I always say. Alito and Thomas’s “my president, right or wrong” shtick is isolated on the Court, which handed Trump a growing stack of major Ls this term, stomping on his “Liberation Day” tariffs, upholding birthright citizenship, and now kicking down a tentpole of his election strategy. It makes no sense to treat this Court as a feckless rubber-stamp body for Trump, then to turn around and scoff off their rebukes of his most unconstitutional actions as easy calls. The easy calls are the most important ones to get right, and Trump is far better hemmed in by them than he would be otherwise.
The fight continues, of course. As the New York Times notes, the president’s other plans to bully state election officials and to root around in state voter rolls continue unabated. And of course, the 2020-style playbook is still right there on the table: Trump is all but guaranteed to decry any Republican losses—of which we expect there to be many—as inherently illegitimate, and he could well lean on quisling allies like House Speaker Mike Johnson to try to block new Democratic majorities from taking office. One constitutional crisis averted today is no guarantee we won’t get another one tomorrow.
But one constitutional crisis averted today is still cause for momentary relief, reassurance, invigoration, and celebration. The bastards couldn’t manage to pull this one off. They’ll keep grinding. So will we.
From left, pro-Trump conspiracy advocate and Russia defender John Solomon, and his frequently allied lawyer-commentators Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, diGenova's wife, law partner and close colleague on investigations.
Talking Feds Substack, A Pro-Trump Prosecutor Draws the Line, Harry Litman, right, 
Sept. 14, 2026. "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."
Joseph diGenova’s resignation from the Justice Department last Thursday lays bare the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche.
One inch below diGenova’s bland resignation statement lies an indictment of the fundamental corruption that now runs through the Department of Justice: the replacement of law and evidence with the raw political will of Donald Trump.
It’s important to the story that diGenova is a consummate Trump loyalist. He aligned himself with the Giuliani-Powell-Ellis effort challenging the 2020 election results, and more generally adopted the (meritless) article of faith that the 2020 campaign was stolen. And he was a prominent voice on Fox News insisting that the Russian election interference inquiry was a law-enforcement plot to frame Trump. He is one of the president’s own. Descriptions of him typically append the kenning “Trump loyalist” or “longtime Trump ally.”
But diGenova is also a former federal prosecutor, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under Ronald Reagan. That was some forty years ago, and he has not tried a case in the decades since.
Every DOJ prosecutor since Watergate—that is, until this tailspin during Trump 2.0—assumed a sacrosanct obligation to comply with the Principles of Federal Prosecution. Those preclude bringing charges unless the prosecutor both believes the target is guilty and believes she can prove it to a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt. To translate it into diGenova’s terms: evidence and witnesses. They are the sine qua non of federal prosecution, and it is the precise same principles Todd Blanche himself was schooled in as an AUSA in New York.
That most basic of commands has been abandoned in this DOJ. It has become disposable the moment it collides with Trump’s political preferences. And when diGenova, a partisan of the first order, hit the point where he was being told to indict without the basic goods, he balked. Reading between the lines of a resignation, his exit is a quiet, devastating verdict on Todd Blanche’s tenure and the Department he now runs.
The investigation that diGenova stepped away from is what Trump’s allies reverently call the “grand conspiracy.” It’s amorphous and protean, but in essence it’s the theory that everyone who ever scrutinized Trump since 2016 was secretly part of one coordinated plot to destroy him. Barack Obama. John Brennan. James Comey. James Clapper. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. The Russia investigation, the classified-documents case, all of it, braided into a single decade-long scheme.
There’s a small detail I have raised every time there is renewed mention of “the Grand Conspiracy.” There is no such thing, on the facts and the law. “Grand Conspiracy” is not a concept in federal law. There is no statute, no charge, nothing in the United States Code by that name. It is not a legal theory at all. It is a MAGA wet dream, a holy grail cherished by the most fevered corner of Trumpworld, with no possible purchase in an actual courtroom.
And it has the additional defect of being factually groundless. The special counsel who examined the 2016 election found widespread Russian interference but no criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign; and multiple later inquiries, including one by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, found real errors in the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe but no criminal conduct by senior officials.
The first prosecutor on the case saw exactly that. Maria Medetis Long, a seasoned career national-security prosecutor in South Florida, balked at bringing charges faster than the evidence would support. She was pushed off the investigation in the spring for her trouble.
Enter diGenova, eagerly. Days after Medetis Long was shown the door, he was sworn in as counselor to the attorney general in April with marching orders to bring home the Grand Conspiracy. According to Bloomberg Law, he had personally asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to hand him the assignment. He vowed he could bring charges in thirty days.
He had overpromised, perhaps because there’s no case to make, period. But after several months passed, diGenova got crosswise with Main Justice. The DOJ had grown impatient with his pace, believing he was slow-rolling the whole thing, and sent prosecutors down from Washington to speed him along. He sidelined them, and the standoff only deepened, until someone told him last week that he had lost the confidence of his superiors.
If it was a move designed to get him to accelerate the work, it backfired: last Thursday diGenova resigned. His resignation statement itself was courtly and anodyne: “It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” he told CNN. But his subsequent statements leave no doubt about the corrupt nature of the pressure he was experiencing from Main Justice.
diGenova is an old Washington hand, used to working the press, and he wasn’t about to let a false or critical impression of his resignation carry the day.
He has given several post-resignation statements, and I expect that he’s not done talking. He spoke to The New York Post and delivered the bombshell line: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem”
That’s radioactive. It charges the administration with pushing to indict a grand conspiracy with no evidence, and disparages it as unethical. And this from a brass-knuckles “Trump loyalist.”
To CNN, he played the long-time institutionalist card. “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old-fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.” More blood drawn. The new crowd makes cases the 2026 way: whatever and whenever Donald Trump says, with the innocence or guilt of the defendant an immaterial detail so long as Trump has it in for you. And the attorney general, who was trained under the same longstanding regime as diGenova, publicly champions that abomination.
We needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, ascribe choir-boy rectitude to diGenova. He’s likely attending to his own reputation. He is 81 years old and near the end of a long career, and he is not going to let the second paragraph of his obituary read that he railroaded innocent people into a lawless prosecution to please a president.
That just makes his parting shot the more potent. He shot his arrow directly into the DOJ’s Achilles’ heel. The fact is, everyone from Blanche on down knows that the Department’s treatment of Trump’s enemies is indefensible. I have written about this at length, and I will not stop writing about it. The actual embrace of prosecuting innocent enemies whom Trump simply wants to immiserate is the most grotesque corruption in the history of the Department of Justice. The Department has gone awry before, but never before Trump 2.0 did it leap to eviscerate its most sacred responsibility of doing justice without fear or favor.
Emptywheel, Analysis:The Grand Conspiracy … Adrift on a Skiff, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 14, 2026. Those of you who followed the stolen documents case surely appreciate the irony that one reason Joe DiGenova quit his position leading the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy last week had to do with DOJ’s refusal to give him his own SCIF.
Among the disputes that added to tensions between diGenova and his bosses in Washington was diGenova’s request for a high-security room known as a SCIF to be built at the Fort Pierce office, to make it easier for the prosecution team to store highly classified materials, two people familiar with the investigation told CNN. The team worked in an office with a special room where sensitive, but not the highest-classified, evidence could be handled. Justice Department officials told diGenova he and his team should use a SCIF at an FBI office miles away, two people familiar with the investigation told CNN.
As part of then Defense Attorney now Attorney General Todd Blanche’s successful 2023 attempt to delay Trump’s stolen documents prosecution, he demanded that the FBI build Trump a new SCIF at Mar-a-Lago so Trump could store the documents he stole and once stored there in a ballroom back in his beach resort again. Then, months later, then Defense Attorney now Attorney General Todd Blanche complained that Trump needed more time to prepare because some of the documents Trump stole were so sensitive, his defense attorneys needed special read-ins for the documents to be left in the SCIF they were using, at all.
Effectively, then, one-time Defense Attorney and current Attorney General Todd Blanche told Joe DiGenova he should make do, just as prosecutors told Todd Blanche to make do (among other things, with the SCIF in DC that would be available while they were defending against the January 6 charges).
I guess one-time Defense Attorney and current Attorney General Todd Blanche now concedes that the documents his current and former client stole were far too sensitive to store in a ballroom, which really raises the question what the fuck are we doing here? You’ve just conceded it was wise to investigate Trump!
CNN’s report on the dispute describes what a busy day it was last Thursday, the day DiGenova quit.
DiGenova resigned Thursday on what was a busy day for the inquiry, as investigators were presenting a witness for testimony to a grand jury in the probe, one of President Trump’s top priorities, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. DiGenova’s abrupt departure could mean more delays in an investigation that has stumbled past internal expectations of charges earlier this year. More recently, officials at Justice Department headquarters had anticipated possibly seeing the first charges to come as soon as this month, CNN previously reported.
With diGenova gone, Justice Department officials feel confident in the team and expect to see momentum pick up, a US law enforcement official said.
DiGenova declined comment beyond what he told CNN last week, calling it a privilege to serve the president and the Justice Department and adding: “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.”
But a declaration from Ken Wainstein, representing John Brennan in his bid to require DOJ to retain evidence of Trump’s malice targeting Brennan, reveals that’s just the half of it.
That same day — Thursday — DiGenova also served a subpoena, dated the day before, on Brennan himself.
6. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, I accepted service on behalf of Plaintiff for a subpoena to testify on October 15, 2026, before a federal grand jury sitting in Fort Pierce. The subpoena was signed by Joseph E. diGenova on September 9, 2026. The accompanying email directed me to contact Mr. diGenova with any questions regarding the subpoena. The morning of September 10, I, along with co-counsel, reached out to Mr. diGenova by text message, to coordinate a conversation to discuss the subpoena. He responded that he would “arrange counsel” to speak with us.
And while DiGenova is corrupt, he’s not dumb.
With DiGenova gone, that left dumb and corrupt Kurt Olsen to provide this explanation for the subpoena, probably an explanation of why they were subpoenaing a guy who was given a target letter months ago.
9. On September 11, 2026, I along with co-counsel, participated in a conference call with Kurt Olsen and three other members of the prosecution team to discuss the grand jury subpoena served on my client. In that call, Mr. Olsen fielded our inquiries and indicated there are multiple “viable” grand jury investigations, including a “far-reaching” investigation in Fort Pierce that includes “issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond” into whether President Trump had his civil rights violated. Mr. Olsen also confirmed there continued to be an additional investigation relating only to Director Brennan’s statements before Congress in the District of Columbia. Mr. Olsen explained that Director Brennan was a “target” of the narrower investigation, and the investigation for which he was now being subpoenaed was the “more wide-ranging conspiracy,” as to which our client was a “subject.” However, he explained that the narrower investigation was “still viable,” and that the issues in the narrower investigation might also be part of the larger investigation, such as being overt acts.
10. Mr. Olsen also indicated that he was reporting to the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, and then to the Deputy Attorney General and Attorney General Todd Blanche.
That is, Olsen (who was no prosecutorial experience) explained that Brennan was just a subject for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy, whereas he was a target of the investigation — the one that still has venue in DC, where Brennan is trying to push everything — into whether he lied to Congress, which he did not. None of this makes sense from a prosecutorial perspective. But these people are dumb and corrupt and insane, so they don’t care.
Olsen, the day after Joe DiGenova quit, insisted everything was still “viable,” perhaps in an attempt to explain why a guy being targeted could be coerced to testify before a grand jury. That’s an opinion that will show up in a slew of filings from everyone involved.
And remember, this is all an attempt to deny that it was right to investigate Trump’s secret pursuit of a Trump Tower offered by a Georgian oligarch, but he’s now building a Trump Tower in Georgia. It is all an attempt to deny that Kirill Dmitriev was trying to recruit Jared Kushner so he could be enticed to trade riches for sanctions relief, but there Jared is on TV demanding that Ukraine cede lands Russia has never succeeded in seizing so Jared can cash in. It is all an attempt to deny it was right to investigate Don Jr for accepting secret gifts from Russian oligarchs, but the secret gifts Don Jr keeps accepting get bigger and bigger, now to include his wedding party.
All this investigation has succeeded in doing is prove that Russia was attempting to recruit Trump and his family, with great success, and that the documents Trump stole were too sensitive to be stoled in a gaudy bathroom.
Guilty as charged! Trump’s defense Attorney General has now conceded.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump’s high IQ hoax, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 14, 2026. At 9:58 this morning, Donald Trump was locked away deep inside the White House when he began panicking online in front of the entire world. Over the course of almost 10 hours, the President posted on social media 7 times about the exact same thing, spiraling out of control over artificial intelligence, with each post growing more unhinged than the next.
He started by telling us all that our president has everything under control because of his genius-level intelligence: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Before later saying it is all a hoax anyway, just like the other things our own government has warned us about, “I am the Hoax Buster” and that all warnings about AI are just a hoax, even wilder than “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”That was just a small sample of what he would end up posting throughout the rest of the day. By 11:23 AM, he was sharing that the United States was leading AI “by a lot” and issued a warning not to “kill the Golden Goose.” By 1:33 PM, he was in the middle of a full-blown meltdown, listing other events that actually happened, but twisting them into sounding like his favorite word of the day, HOAX. He yo-yo’d from one thought to the next, going from defending AI to jumping feet first into some of his past embarrassments, saying both of his impeachments were a HOAX. Before moving on to President Xi, who he says will not be implementing any regulations. He then shared just how upset he is that Google supposedly wants to build a data center in Finland because “permitting is too difficult” in the United States. He made it clear that he is not at all concerned about safety or the environment. He is mad that he could lose AI “deals” to other countries. He wrote, “AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!” This is all about money, and it always has been. For Donald Trump, the more money pouring into the United States, the more money he has access to line his and his enablers’ pockets.
By 4:30 PM, he was ready to start new attacks instead of just focusing on defending AI. He appeared satisfied with the groundwork he had laid to convince anyone reading his Truth Social shares that they were being targeted by HOAX after HOAX. He was now ready to turn his radicalized followers onto a new group of targets: people raising concerns about AI, including the scientists and executives who built these systems, “Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause,” and he also issued a new warning that “soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind.”
At 4:34, four minutes later, came his “I am the Hoax Buster” post, where he was back with more drama, trying to label what we should actually be concerned about as the HOAX, so he could dismiss the real concerns altogether. By 4:53, he repeated much of what he had already said, but the grammar was different in this post. Where the others had random words capitalized, much the same as his traveling “comfort human,” Natalie Harp, does in her personal letters, this one was written with better punctuation.
In his final AI-focused post of the day at 7:55 PM, he shared the shortest and most desperate of them all: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT”
President Trump even spent a few minutes of his day calling into the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, whose company designs the chips that are powering much of the AI boom, was onstage. With Trump talking directly to the audience of tech leaders while on speakerphone, he said that the concern around AI was a HOAX, saying, “The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.” He also added, “No. It’s a hoax. They make people wealthy.”
China also responded to growing calls for an AI slowdown through its Foreign Ministry during a press conference earlier today, criticizing what it called “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition.” Their state-run newspaper, Global Times, called the slowdown proposition a “Cold War playbook” designed to preserve American dominance. The United States and China are now both using each other as the excuse to dismiss the concerns and the slowdown.
This creates a standstill with neither government willing to slow down or build guardrails. This is feeling more and more like a nuclear arms race but with rapidly advancing technology instead that can be built and deployed much quicker than any weapon ever could. And if history has told us anything about past arms races, it is that the absence of guardrails and regulation creates catastrophes; it does not produce safety.
Seeing that first post this morning, where Trump called himself, “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” brought me right back to that cramped White House press conference room in 2020, watching Donald Trump suggest that maybe we could inject disinfectants, like bleach, into our veins to stop the replication of the virus. I felt that same punch to the gut feeling then as I did this morning. That was quickly followed by a sense of doom for what was to come.
Back then, we knew there was a serious crisis forming, with experts sounding alarms, while other countries were already starting to react. Yet the man who was supposed to be in charge, in control, and ready to lead us through it was standing in front of the country on live TV, proving just how much danger we were in with him leading the response. That was the moment for so many when they saw just how inept he was and that the emperor was truly wearing no clothes.
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
Now here we are, deep into his next term of office, and he is once again facing a crisis, and instead of seeing it for what it is and doing the job he was elected to do, he calls it a scam. One has to wonder if he knows it is an issue to be dealt with, and maybe it’s not just that he wants to profit from it, maybe once again he is just proving how inept he is. How he truly is unable to carry out the responsibilities of the office. That his mental and physical decline has just accentuated the shortcomings he has always had. Or maybe it is just the money. Either way, we are once again on the path of another catastrophe.
The reality is that AI is not going away. It is not a partisan issue, and it is not a hoax, no matter how many times the president yells that it is on social media. It is a technological tool that is already reshaping how we live our lives. It is changing how we communicate and work. It will have, and will continue to have, a direct effect on elections and how governments surveil their own citizens. It can already generate very convincing fake videos and voices of real people saying things they never said. Things that could directly impact the lives they live and the mental health of our young people. AI can and is already being used to weaponize disinformation campaigns at a very large scale. There is the impact it is having on our planet, too. It is consuming large amounts of energy and water, and impacting communities near data centers.
None of this means that there should be an outright ban on AI or that it should be taken away from people who are using it responsibly. It would be dangerous to allow our adversaries to have this powerful tool for their militaries and their economies if we did not have it as well. But it does mean we need enforceable, common-sense regulation. We don’t have time to wait, and we do not want it coming from our “high IQ” president who is under the control of tech billionaires. We need legislative guardrails, and we need them now.
Even the people building these systems are now asking for oversight and for the rapid development to be slowed down. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic (Claude), published an essay over the weekend that he titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In it, he warned that we should slow the pace of AI development so that safety measures can catch up. He has also warned that rogue AI agent swarms could take over the internet in as little as six months. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), has shared concerns and joined Amodei in calling for a slowdown.
It could be that their motives are genuine and truly selfless, and they actually see the danger and want these protections for mankind. Or they may see this as a possible tool to slow the competition. At this point, it does not matter. Because the people with the deepest understanding of this technology are saying it needs guardrails, and the President of the United States is calling their warnings a HOAX and threatening them. This echoes loudly of when scientists who built the atomic bomb, like Robert Oppenheimer, warned that their creation needed international oversight and regulation, and they too faced ugly backlash. They were called naive and accused of disloyalty. In Oppenheimer’s case, it went even further with him being stripped of his security clearance. Once again, the people who understand the danger we are facing in this moment the most are being punished for ringing the alarm and saying so.
This wasn’t the only big story for today. While the president spent the day locked away in the White House, posting disinformation and declaring himself a genius, a story broke that is rightfully getting a lot of attention. ProPublica reported this morning that Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas this past May, the one that Donald Trump did not attend, was paid for, at least in part, by Umar Kremlev, who is a Russian oligarch in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Kremlev is the president of the International Boxing Association, an organization that has been financed by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy company. The in-depth investigation and subsequent reporting by ProPublica showed that Kremlev rented and paid for the private island where Don Jr. held his reception, and that he also paid an estimated $70,000 for a fireworks display after the wedding, which his team helped plan the logistics of. The money he used for this wedding came from an entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. Don Jr.’s younger brother Eric Trump’s office said he has “absolutely no clue who this person is.” Which we can interpret as this not being some close family friend simply wanting to give someone they know well an extraordinarily generous wedding gift. Yet, Don Jr.’s spokesperson called Kremlev a “personal friend” he met through the hunting world. Bettina Trump posted on Instagram, saying that this was “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” and insisting there is “no conspiracy, no mystery.”
Leave a comment
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has continued to show what true leadership looks like in the time of authoritarian takeover, spoke on the floor of the Senate today and used his time to lay out exactly what had happened. He laid out the facts clearly on the connections, improprieties, and dangers of what that arrangement really represented. He reminded the room and those watching on video that Don Jr.’s net worth was $50 million before his father’s second term, and that it grew to $300 million in a single year after he took back office. He shared that at least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have received $1.8 billion in federal contracts and commitments during that same time. He pointed out that five of those companies received their first-ever government contract only after the Trump sons invested money in them. He called the Kremlev arrangement “as close to treason as you get” and asked whether any Republican senator would defend the Russian government paying for the president’s family wedding. He asked whether Republicans would have stayed silent if Hunter Biden’s wedding or Malia Obama’s graduation party had been financed by allies of the Ayatollah. “Just because the corruption happens so routinely that to some it feels normal,” Murphy said, “it doesn’t mean that it is.”
Congress is back in session, and this is a good time to contact our local members of Congress and let them know where we stand on common-sense regulations for AI and whether there should be an investigation into Don Jr.’s wedding being financed by someone with ties to the Kremlin. I know this feels like we are spinning our wheels every time we contact them, but those calls and messages are received by congressional offices, and they do send a message, especially this close to the midterm elections. This is also creating a record for the history books of who continued to side with this government and who stood up for our democratic republic. And for those of us who appreciated Sen. Murphy raising these questions on the Senate floor today, we can let him know that too.
Today was a bad day for Donald Trump. He had an embarrassing meltdown on social media, and he suffered a painful court loss. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. His administration was trying to force states to get federal approval for their mail-in ballot envelopes and submit voter information through a new Postal Service system before those ballots were allowed to be mailed out. If these changes had been allowed this close to an election, or at any time, it could create chaos and leave legitimate voters without their ballots, and their votes uncounted in the November elections. Lower courts had already blocked these changes, and now the Supreme Court has refused to let the corrupt Trump administration put them into effect while the legal fight continues. This is not a slam-dunk win, but it is a win nonetheless. And these days, we count every good thing that comes our way, and lately, we have been seeing more good days for us, and fewer good days for those trying to destroy our country. That is why I still have hope for America. You should, too.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is ICE Dropping Fentanyl? Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Because most people are much more comfortable with the idea of deporting killers and drug dealers than law-abiding grandmas, the Trump administration has long couched its mass deportation agenda as an effort targeting “the worst of the worst.” And the Department of Homeland Security has lately been playing up its efforts against international bad actors like drug cartels, with Secretary Markwayne Mullin announcing last week that DHS was changing its seal² to better reflect its posture of “war every single day” against those actors.
But investigating and interdicting international drug crime and dragnetting the country for any and all illegal immigrants are two different goals, and they don’t always exist in harmony. Last year, in fact, they were in conflict, with the latter drawing substantial resources away from the former.
That was one of the conclusions of an internal audit released by DHS’s inspector general last month, which found a significant dip in Homeland Security Investigations’ enforcement efforts against fentanyl trafficking from FY 2024 to FY 2025. (HSI, a division under the authority of ICE, serves as DHS’s primary investigative arm.)
The audit was grim in its assessment of HSI’s anti-fentanyl efforts last year, spotlighting a number of technological, intelligence, and information-sharing obstacles to anti-fentanyl work at the agency. But the most notable criticism had to do with manpower. “As ICE shifted priorities toward immigration enforcement, HSI’s level of effort on fentanyl declined,” the report reads. Amid the Trump administration’s all-hands-on-deck approach to immigration, fentanyl investigations regularly got short shrift: “At one office,” the report reads, “approximately 99 percent of HSI’s work was dedicated to immigration, leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations.”
The department-wide result, per the report, was a notable across-the-board drop: “Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24 percent, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl decreased by approximately 30 percent, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39 percent.” The report recommended that HSI conduct a staffing review to reprioritize fentanyl investigations, a recommendation that ICE agreed to accept.
As Democrats look forward—they hope—to retaking Congress next year, they see fault lines like this as promising areas for investigation. Over the weekend, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who will become the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee next year, sent DHS a letter seeking more information about DHS’s fentanyl-investigation dip.
“In recent years, ICE has become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, with more than $100 billion in new funding since 2024—10 times its historical annual budget,” Hassan wrote. But the DHS OIG findings “raise significant concerns that ICE is neglecting its counter-fentanyl and counter-cartel missions.”
Hassan took issue with DHS’s “lack of urgency” on the topic, noting that the department had agreed only to figure out how to refocus agency resources by July 2027. The letter has not previously been reported.
The White House and DHS strongly disputed that its immigration focus had harmed its anti-drug efforts, arguing that Trump was winning the fight against fentanyl.
“There is a nexus between illegal immigration and drug trafficking,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Bulwark. “President Trump targeted cartels who were profiting off the death of Americans, secured our border to stop Fentanyl and other illicit drugs from flowing into our communities, and jumpstarted ICE to arrest illegal alien drug traffickers. These policies delivered a 22 percent decline in opioid deaths in a single year.”
A DHS spokesperson took particular issue with Hassan’s letter: “Where was Senator Hassan when congressional Democrats and the Biden administration allowed drug traffickers, criminal illegal aliens, and human smugglers to pour across our southern border and devastate American communities? Senator Hassan’s suggestion that HSI has abandoned its counter-fentanyl mission is FALSE and ignores the agency’s ongoing enforcement efforts.”
Fentanyl and other opioid overdoses have been trending in the right direction since their 2022 peak, falling slowly in 2023, sharply through 2024, and seemingly continuing their descent in provisional data from 2025, though they still kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. Federal enforcement operations doubtless have something to do with that—as do other factors like China’s crackdown on illegal fentanyl exports.
But concerns that ICE is giving these operations short shrift originate with their own agents on the ground and their own department’s inspector general, not with congressional Democrats. Expect to hear much more on this topic as the spotlight shines brighter on DHS in the months ahead.
AROUND THE BULWARK
new book "How to Eat an Elephant."(And buy the book if you haven’t!)Quick Hits
ANOTHER L FOR TRUMP’S BALLOT SCHEME: The legal roadblocks keep arriving for Donald Trump’s harebrained effort to crack down on mail-in voting via USPS rules. Last night, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the scheme, which would require the USPS to transmit ballots only to voters verified according to new federal lists, writing that the rules “exceed any conception of the outer bounds” of USPS authority. For Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, the decision was seemingly simple: “As the government concedes,” he wrote in his order, “the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule.”
Another federal judge had already blocked the administration from beginning to implement its order ahead of the midterms, but Nichols’s order goes farther in its preliminary assessment that the USPS has no legal authority to issue it in the first place. All eyes remain trained on the Supreme Court, which is expected to weigh in again on the mail-in rule any day now.
CANADIAN UNION?: Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. Instead, his bullying, senseless policy is pushing our northern neighbor in a different, once-unthinkable direction: toward trying to partially join the European Union. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Shortly after Canada and America became embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history, the secure phones of Europe’s top leaders lit up with a trans-Atlantic call. Mark Carney was pushing to take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level—a bold gambit to rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance. . . .
Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S.
You probably don’t need more reminders that this whole Canada thing has been flatly insane. But it’s worth remembering that Trump thinks control of the Arctic is so important that it’s worth threatening to blow up NATO in order for the United States to get its hands on Greenland—while also thinking our relationship with Canada is so unimportant that he can blow it up just to blow off some steam.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Popular Information, How Trump is spending his $400 million war chest, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 14, 2026. President Trump has amassed over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc. This is an unprecedented figure, dwarfing the largest cash piles collected in previous midterm elections.
With Trump’s approval ratings hitting all-time lows and many Republican candidates in swing races struggling, Trump has finally begun spending some of this money. Television advertising funded by Trump’s operation has gone on the air.The clearest sense of the scale of the spending is through advertising that has been reserved in key races. While these reservations can be changed, they offer the clearest view of both the scale of Trump’s efforts and his priorities. With the exception of Texas, this money is being routed from MAGA Inc. through a new Trump super PAC, No Going Back.
Since August 31, MAGA Inc. and No Going Back have reserved over $81 million in advertising.According to FEC filings, the same groups are spending millions more on direct mail, text messages, and other activities.
The fact that the Trump operation felt it necessary, outside of Texas, to route public communications through a new super PAC called No Going Back illustrates the current unpopularity of the MAGA agenda. (Ads paid for directly by MAGA Inc. must include the line “MAGA Inc. is responsible for the content of this advertising.”)
The same dynamic is also found in the ads themselves. Some ads inaccurately accuse Democratic candidates of supporting MAGA policies. Other ads, in an effort to find an effective attack, simply use false or fabricated claims.Trump, not Pappas, cut funding for rural hospitals in New Hampshire
In New Hampshire, Trump’s No Going Back PAC is running an ad attacking Congressman Chris Pappas, the Democratic Senate nominee, for voting “against vital funding for rural and vulnerable hospitals.”This is false.
Pappas voted against H.R. 1, Trump’s signature reconciliation bill, which cut Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over ten years, according to an analysis by KFF. About one-third of that cut was offset by a $50 billion fund distributed to states. But H.R. 1 left rural healthcare, including rural hospitals, much worse off.Pappas said he voted against the bill in July 2025 for that reason. In an August 2025 statement, Pappas said he opposed H.R. 1 because it “will have severe repercussions across New Hampshire communities, from our hospitals to our rural health care centers to our nursing homes.”
Now the Trump political operation is spending millions running an ad accusing Pappas of supporting cuts to rural health care spending because he opposed a Trump-backed bill that dramatically cut rural health care spending.
Ossoff did not vote to increase “taxes on working families” by $16.7 billionIn Georgia, a No Going Back ad accuses Senator Jon Ossoff (D) of voting “to raise taxes by over $16 billion on working families like yours.”
This isn’t true.The ad cites Ossoff’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA did not increase individual income tax rates for anyone. It closed some tax loopholes for individuals earning over $400,000. No working families saw their tax bill increase because of Ossoff’s vote.What the IRA did do is create a minimum tax of 15% for profitable corporations. Some economists claim that corporate taxes will then trickle down to individuals in the form of lower wages or share prices. The $16.7 billion comes from a report attempting to quantify that effect on individuals making $200,000 or less. Even in this analysis, most of the burden falls on those making between $100,000 and $200,000 and the impact shrinks to less than $3 billion by 2027.The ad attempts to redefine an effort to make profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes — a proposition that is quite popular among voters — as a tax increase on working families.Cooper did not agree to release a “convicted child molester” earlyIn North Carolina, No Going Back says that Governor Roy Cooper (D) “released 3500 criminals, released early.” The next line is: “This convicted child molester shot a man dead.”
The ad references Cooper’s COVID-era settlement, reached with the ACLU, to release some inmates early — mostly those already scheduled to be released within a year. The ad’s implication is clear: Jimmie Earl Speight Jr., who was charged with murder in April 2021, was among that group.This is inaccurate.Speight Jr. was released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for car theft, in November 2020. Cooper’s settlement was signed in February 2021. Speights Jr.’s release had nothing to do with Cooper or the settlement. (Speight Jr. was included on a list associated with the settlement because the settlement, according to WRAL, “counted some people who had already been released, before the settlement, so that the actual number of people being released would be lower.”)
The No Going Back ad is one of several blaming Cooper for crimes completely unrelated to the settlement.
New York Times, With Trump’s Plans Blocked, States Work to Restore Trust in Mail Voting, Nick Corasaniti, Anna Griffin and Richard Fausset, Sept. 15, 2026. President Trump’s efforts to restrict mail voting ahead of the midterms were thwarted by the Supreme Court, but they have sowed confusion and doubt among some voters.
Now that the Supreme Court has blocked President Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting ahead of the midterms, election officials across the country are shelving their contingency plans and preparing for a new effort: restoring trust in mail voting.
Mr. Trump’s repeated false attacks on voting by mail, and the monthslong legal back and forth over whether he could restrict the practice through the Postal Service, have left many voters baffled.
With the legal question now settled, election officials at the state and local levels will now shift their focus to communicating to voters that they can trust that they can securely continue to vote by mail without federal restrictions.
“We’ve actually been working all weekend to figure out the different scenarios for the outcomes of the decision,” said Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who is Nevada’s secretary of state. “And one of them was, Hey, if we are in a position where we get a favorable ruling from the courts, what are we going to do to educate voters and to build that confidence that their ballot is going to get counted?”
For Nevada, that will mean an expansive voter education program that will include television ads, digital ads and text messages to voters.
Mr. Trump has worked to sow doubts about the American electoral process for years, telling lies about election outcomes and making false claims of fraud. (Lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump and his allies challenging the results of the 2020 election were repeatedly rejected.) He often assails mail voting, despite voting by mail himself.
This year he has aggressively pushed to regulate elections, despite the fact that the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states. He has mobilized multiple agencies under the executive branch, exacerbating confusion and doubt among the American electorate.
The president’s continued attacks on the electoral process have thrust election officials at the state and local levels into new, more public-facing roles.
“This obviously is not the first time that Trump pushes out more lies about vote by mail,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state. “Our message even during all this back and forth with this litigation is that everything was proceeding as normal.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Learns You Can’t Spell Mail Without an L, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Sept. 15, 2026. President Trump spent much of yesterday posting about his unlimited support for AI development and data-center construction and calling criticism of it a “hoax.”
It’s rare to see a politician stake his ground on the 20 side of an 80–20 issue. But that’s our president! Next, we suspect he will launch into caps-lock tirades against ice cream, puppies, and the Beatles. Just fifty days to go before the election! Happy Tuesday.
Meidas Touch Network, News and Commentary: Sept. 14, 2026 Roundup, Ron Filipkowski, right, Sept. 14, 2026, Journalist Anne Applebaum (on Trump Jr. wedding): “Some details: Kremlev, the Russian who sponsored Don Jr’s wedding, is a former member of the Night Wolves biker gang, went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children.”
… As the story blew up on Instagram, self-described “socialite” Bettina Trump took to Instagram to try to defend the Russian-financed wedding:
“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.
It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from. Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.
We are fortunate to have wonderful friends from all over the world, and we will never be embarrassed or apologetic about being grateful for them. So, for anyone determined not to let the facts get in the way of a good story: NO CONSPIRACY , NO MYSTERY. Just a private family wedding, a wonderful weekend with friends and one hell of a party.”
She’s the perfect wife for Junior. Both seem completely narcissistic, self-absorbed, craving constant attention, fake, greedy and immoral.
The Hartmann Report, Is America About to Get the Biggest “Special Assessment” in History? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 14, 2026. The bond market is warning that 45 years of Republican tax cuts and exploding debt may finally force ordinary Americans to pay for a party the wealthy already enjoyed.
Get ready to get your financial ass kicked. That’s the message the bond market sent last week, although almost nobody in the corporate press bothered to translate it into English. If you’ve ever lived in a condo or home with an HOA, though, you may understand what’s happening better than you realize.
First, the current crisis:
Our federal government pays its bills two ways: using tax revenue, and borrowing when it’s short by issuing IOUs we call Treasury bonds. The single most important of these for you and me is the ten-year bond because our banking system sets mortgage, car loan, student loan, and credit card rates based on it.
Last week, that rate hit 4.92 percent, just a hair below the 5 percent rate that could trigger a freak-out reaction on Wall Street. The nationwide average 30-year mortgage is already hitting 6.7 percent, which is both shaking the housing market and crushing low- and middle-income people both in mortgage payments and mortgage costs that get passed through as rent.
That, in turn, threatens a recession; when lenders get nervous about being paid back, they charge more, and right now they’re getting very, very nervous.
The main thing that’s driving all this nervousness is that the national debt crossed the $40 trillion threshold three weeks ago; we’re now paying more than $1 trillion a year — enough to fund a national healthcare system and give everybody free college, if done right — in interest payments. That’s more than we spend on the entire military or on Medicare.
Our Treasury is writing interest checks of $95 billion a month, our nation’s debt is growing by nearly $7 billion a day, and that works out to about $117,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. (Into this mess, on Wednesday night, Donald Trump tossed a promise to mail every adult a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans keep Congress, a stunt that would cost well over a trillion dollars, further freaking out the bond market.)
If you’ve ever lived in a home or condo that has a homeowners association (HOA), you may already have a meaningful insight to what 45 years of Republican irresponsibility have done to America, because you’ve probably had it happen to you or watched it happen to your neighbors.
Two friends of mine here in Oregon have been through this in just the past five years, and Louise and I briefly lived in a community that was heading in the same direction.
Our friends bought into what seemed to be well-maintained communities that had seductively low monthly dues. And then came the shock: in one case the roofs and another the parking structure hit the end of their useful lives and there was no money in the HOA’s account to pay for the necessary — and major — repairs. One was hit with a $40,000 “special” assessment, the other a bit less. Neither saw it coming.
The problem was that a previous generation of homeowner board members, wanting to keep their own costs low, kept the HOA dues down by simply ignoring the reality that one day the roofs and parking area would have to be repaired. The more recent purchasers ended up having to suddenly cover costs that should have been saved for over decades in what HOAs call “reserves.”
This is the same scam Republicans have been running on us since Reagan started it in 1981 on the advice of a Republican consultant named Jude Wanniski.
In essence, the boards that were keeping their HOA dues low and not bothering to build reserves for future maintenance were giving their then-current owners (and themselves) a tax cut.
The roof doesn’t care if there’s money to pay for its repairs; it’s going to deteriorate no matter what. And the longer the board waits, the more the repairs will cost until one day ceilings start leaking and it can’t be put off any longer. That’s when the current board has no choice but to hit everybody currently owning a property in the HOA with a special assessment.
— After the Surfside condos collapsed in Florida killing 98 people, that state finally passed a law requiring HOAs to both maintain their properties and build reserve funds for future maintenance.
— Owners at the Cricket Club condo complex in North Miami got hit with a proposed assessment of nearly $30 million for a new roof and facade work, which worked out to more than $134,000 per unit; one owner there had cashed out his 401(k) to buy a $190,000 condo and simply couldn’t pay.
— At the Mediterranean Village homes in Aventura, some owners were assessed up to $400,000. A 79-year-old woman in South Florida got hit with a mind-boggling $224,000 assessment on top of monthly fees that had already doubled from $1,500 to $3,000.
And it isn’t only Florida. Just this week a condo owner in Torrance, California opened a bill for $49,000, levied equally on all 499 units, because his board was finally forced by disintegrating properties to pay for $19 million in decades-deferred projects.
It turns out this isn’t a rare event; more than 75 million Americans live in communities with homeowner associations, and nearly 10 percent of all those associations hit their homeowners with a special assessment last year, up from 7.8 percent in 2021. That’s somewhere north of seven million people who got hit with a massive surprise bill in just one year (more recent stats aren’t yet available, but odds are things are getting worse because everybody’s so badly financially strapped right now).
But, of course, it’s not just people who live in HOA communities: America is on the verge of having to go through the same thing because our “board” policies have been run (or restrained) by corrupt Republicans for most of the past 45 years.
When Ronald Reagan took office the national debt was $914 billion. When he left, having slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent, our debt was $2.6 trillion, nearly tripled, and the annual interest payment had more than doubled.
And this HOA-level irresponsibility was neither an accident or the response to a crisis. We’d been steadily paying down our national debt every year since the end of World War II, to the point where when Reagan took office it was less than one trillion dollars.
But then, as I laid out in The Hidden History of the American Dream, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski laid out what he called his “Two Santa Clauses” strategy to screw Democrats and make Republicans look like financial geniuses.
Wanniski pointed out in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats had been winning elections for forty years by playing Santa with everything from Social Security to Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, the GI Bill, food stamps, housing supports, free college, and dozens of other “gifts” to the American public.
Republicans had openly opposed every single one of them, making the public view them as Scrooge.
The key, then, was for Republicans to become what Wanniski called the “tax-cut Santas” and, at the same time, start spending money hand-over-fist when a Republican was in the White House. That would artificially stimulate the economy, making people think Republicans knew how to produce “good times,” and would also have the benefit of running up the nation’s debt.
When a Democrat came into office, Wanniski said, Republicans should flip the script and start screaming about the debt they’d run up — “Oh, the agony, our children will have to pay for this!!!” — to force that Democratic president to cut his own social spending.
Bill Clinton fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, giving us “the end” of both “big government” and “welfare as we know it.” And it’s worked every time a Republican has taken the Oval Office since Reagan; they all know the script and follow it to a T.
Reagan tripled the debt, and Clinton had to play the role of the grownup. George W. Bush cut taxes on billionaires twice, put two illegal wars on the national credit card, and doubled our national debt; when Obama took office he spent eight years being lectured about deficits by Republicans and right-leaning billionaire-owned media.
Now Trump has signed tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office says could push our debt to 200 percent of GDP over the next two decades; he added $7.8 trillion to our debt in his first term and is now merrily running a debt of over $2 trillion a year.
This GOP scheme is the exact equivalent of the HOA board members who live cheap for 20 years and then sell their homes or condos to the poor suckers who inherit the disintegrating roof or parking garage.
But, in our nation’s case, the roof is the bond market. And the bond market is going nuts right now, which is giving serious jitters to everybody from Wall Street to foreign countries that are starting to dump US treasuries.
There are already three members of the Fed who are openly lobbying to raise interest rates this Wednesday to slow down the inflation all this deficit spending has created, oil is over $100 a barrel because Netanyahu finally found a president and defense secretary stupid enough to go along with him and attack Iran, and we’ll hit the $41.1 trillion debt ceiling sometime early next year.
When our “special assessment” finally arrives, it’ll show up as a mortgage you can’t refinance, a 15 percent car loan, a Social Security “reform” that cuts everybody’s checks, exploding Medicare premiums, and inflation that continues to eat away at your paycheck month after month.
It’ll hit, in other words, the average working people who just happened to be living in the HOA building when the roof started to fail, while the former owners who’d voted for 45 years of skipped maintenance have long since cashed out.
The fix for HOAs is pretty much the same thing as the fix we’ll need for this country: we need a special assessment and a return to regular taxation, but let’s make sure it hits the right people.
We require the board to fund the reserves — raise taxes on the morbidly rich — and claw back some of that money they’ve stolen from us (with $40 trillion worth of tax cuts and illegal wars over the past 45 years) via a tax on wealth like California is contemplating.
If we fail, our eviction notice will come in the form of a repeat of the last Republican Great Depression, courtesy of the bond and equities markets just like last time.
So, check your registration at vote.org, find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, and if this was useful to you, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report. Somebody in this building has to read the reserve study out loud.
The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The American Age Is Over (For sure), Jonathan V. Last, above, Sept. 14, 2026. The AI Apocalypse Is Here. (Maybe.) The weekend the world changed. Some moments require you to step up. Some require you to show up. That’s why The Bulwark is coming to Ohio.Join Tim, Sarah, JVL, Sam and friends Friday, September 25 at the Dayton Masonic Center for an evening of politics and fellowship. All profits from this event will be donated to those in Springfield who are in need via our partners at the Haitian Community Help & Support Center. Donate here.
1. Epochal
Two shifts happened under the radar since Friday that are worth keeping your eyes on.
The first shift concerns the post-American world and it came on two fronts.
Finland announced today that it is joining the French nuclear deterrence initiative. You may recall that back in March France announced a change to its nuclear doctrine, stating that it would expand its nuke capabilities and partner with other allies to expand a nuclear deterrent independent of the United States.¹ Finland joins the nine other European countries—including Denmark—in joining France’s Forward Deterrence program.
This is the clearest sign possible that Europe is disengaging from America. Under Forward Deterrence, it will be possible for France to deploy nuclear-armed assets to allied countries, though command-and-control of those forces will still reside with the French president.²
As the Polish prime minister said back in March, “We are arming up together with our friends so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.”
Guess which group America now falls under?³
The second shift stalled out halfway. Oman was set to host talks between Iran and other Gulf states today in which the various parties were looking to strike bilateral agreements without involving the United States.
Those talks were cancelled after Houthi forces launched another successful attack on Saudi Arabia.
Here’s my sophisticated analysis: This is very bad.
It is bad that the war is widening.
Bad that our Gulf allies⁴ are willing to talk to Iran without the United States present to protect American interests.
Bad that Iran believes its position is so strong that it can strike (through its proxies) the Saudis just days before the meeting in order to assert dominance over the negotiations.
In both cases—the French nukes and the Arab–Iranian negotiations—the world is moving to a post-American order because of affirmative choices made by Donald Trump and the Republican party. None of this was caused by external events or dialectical forces.
Trump chose to alienate Europe, align with Russia, and demand territorial tribute from Denmark. Trump chose to launch the most foolish American war in (at least) a century because he was dazzled by an Israeli PowerPoint deck.
Decisions are being made by sovereign nations across the world; in every case they involve independence from American influence.
And there is no going back.
2. AI Panic
On Saturday Anthropic announced that it was unilaterally putting the breaks on frontier AI research. The company called on other businesses in the field to follow suit.
I want to set a baseline here for discussions about AI: No one knows how this shakes out.
It is possible that AI will turn out to be a massive bubble whose economic upside and disruptive downside was completely overblown.
It is possible that AI will be a revolutionary tool that causes great disruption, but also increases productivity, and, after a fashion, settles into a new status quo in the way that the industrial revolution and the internet revolutions did.
It is also possible that AI will cause a global catastrophe.
You should not trust the judgment of anyone who tells you that they know for certain which of these tracks AI is on.
My intuition is that we are currently in a moment like the one from Oppenheimer when Gen. Leslie Groves is sitting with Bobby O. two hours before the Trinity test and asks, “What did Fermi mean by ‘atmospheric ignition’?”
Oppenheimer calmly explains that the engineers and physicists believe there’s a chance that detonating an atom bomb will cause an unstoppable chain reaction which turns the entire earth’s atmosphere into a fireball, killing everyone on the planet.
But, he says, that’s just the most remote possibility. “Chances are near zero,” Oppenheimer says.
Groves stops short and Oppenheimer says, “What do you want from theory alone?”
“Zero, would be nice,” Groves says.
The chances of AI causing a truly catastrophic event are probably near zero.
But zero would be nice.
What are the general dangers of AI? There are a few.
The biggest is self-recursive learning. If an AI develops the ability to improve itself without human input, then all sorts of crazy outcomes are possible. We lose control over what AI is. Self-recursive learning would be the equivalent of letting an entirely novel species loose on the planet.⁵
The next problem is what the engineers euphemistically refer to as “alignment.” Which means, roughly, keeping AI from being evil.
There are many troubling signs on this front. A few months ago in the Hugging Face incident, agents from OpenAI escaped containment, hacked into the company Hugging Face, and started doing their own thing. There have been other instances in which rogue AIs have hacked platforms: the RubyGems incident and the DseWiki attack.
There are many things to freak out about here:
In the Hugging Face attack, agents who escaped containment found a hidden message board where other rogue agents were leaving messages for one another. They attempted to cover their tracks, evade detection, and recruit rogue agents to their cause.
In the RubyGems incident, the agents sent each other thousands of junk packages. Some of them gave themselves names that included fake email addresses.
In the DSEwiki attack, the agents encountered a human administrator who was trying to delete pages that they had hacked. The agents seem to have viewed the human as “an environmental hazard.”
If you want the doomer case for AI, read this METR investigation of the Hugging Face hack.
And if you want to get even further out there, listen to this interview with one of the authors of that report, Ajeya Cotra, who explains that the Hugging Face incident was so complex that the human researchers could only unravel it by using their own AIs. And that the humans are not completely positive that their own White Hat AIs didn’t just sandbag them and feed them a line of BS obscuring what really happened. (Start at the 49:17 mark.)
So that’s the scariest part: Maybe AI and human alignment has already hard-forked and the AIs are preventing us from realizing it.
The final problem is the difference in time scale between humans and computers.
The human scale of time is a form of what we’ll call biologic time. That is: The units of time measure the changes of carbon-based life as they evolve.
Biologic time moves very quickly because it is determined by the pace of mutation and genetic mutation happens much faster than stars collapse or glaciers advance. As a wise mathematician once said, “Genetic power is the most awesome force ever seen on this planet.”
Looking at these three scales of time it’s pretty clear that power is closely tied to the rapidity of change. The shorter the time scale, the more powerful the movement.
MS NOW, Opinion: Trump’s easiest path to saving the GOP’s midterms just disappeared, James Downie, Sept. 14, 2026. The August inflation report had a few bright spots, but in political terms, the president and the Republicans are out of time.
At 8:30 a.m. Friday morning, President Donald Trump’s best chance at good economic news before the midterm elections went poof.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index rose in August by 0.4% and 3.4% over the past year. The “core CPI” (the less volatile measure that removes food and energy prices) rose 0.3% for the month and 2.4% annually. For the fifth month in a row, inflation-adjusted wages fell on a yearly basis.
Were this September 2025, the BLS’ report would be disappointing for the White House but hardly catastrophic. Inflation isn’t accelerating, and it remains well below its peak back in 2022. There were even bright spots in some areas: Grocery prices were flat for the second straight month, for instance.
Trump and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience.
But this is September 2026, and the president and his party are out of time.
Next week, the Federal Reserve Board will vote on whether to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Trump, who fell out with previous Chairman Jerome Powell over the Fed’s independence, has put enormous pressure on new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to lower the rates. The president even threatened to stop trade with countries that have a surplus with the United States if the Fed doesn’t cut rates.
But Warsh has suggested he will disappoint the president.PlayIs Trump hitting the ‘panic button’ with his $5k promise to Americans?
“Inflation is running above our 2% target,” he said in a speech in Jackson Hole last month. “So the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices.”
As of Friday afternoon, investors put the odds of a rate increase at over 85%. As CNBC’s Matt Peterson wrote, “[Warsh’s] choice now is whether to raise interest rates, or look like he isn’t in control of the central bank he leads.”
A rate increase not only means upward pressure on rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans and other expenses many voters have; it is also a definitive sign (if another were needed) that Trump’s promise to bring down prices “on Day One” have failed.More articlesConsumer prices continued to climb in August, as inflation concerns persistSteve BenenAn older woman, left, looks at products on a shelf as other people shop in the same aisle.U.S. inflation surged in April, pushed higher by the effects of the Iran warSteve BenenShoppers carry bags on Black Friday in New York City.
For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better.
For instance, consider the $5,000 “dividend” Trump promised this week if Republicans win the midterms. Others at MS NOW have already noted how this stunt is likely illegal on its face, would need congressional approval even if it is legal and mirrors other Trump promises that were never kept.
But there’s also an irony here: These checks may not even cover the pain Trump has brought to people’s pocketbooks.
As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem wrote, “Trump has not only failed to address the cost-of-living crisis with actual solutions, but he’s also systematically made it worse.” Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimated that just at the gas station, the Iran war has cost U.S. households roughly $800 in seven months. And the war has been intensifying again in recent. The Tax Foundation estimated that by the end of 2026, Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will have cost Americans about $1,800 each. Add in higher interest rates and more tax dollars needed to pay for the billions in new military spending and higher debt service costs. Totaled up, as the American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper pointed out, and Trump’s second term “is virtually guaranteed to have cost the average American more than $5,000.”Play‘An erosion of trust:’ how Trump’s policies are destabilizing the economySeptember 7, 2026 / 06:34
Even Trump’s promised timing for the checks — after the midterms — is an admission that he and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience. For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better. At times, Trump has even claimed a new golden age is already here.
This month’s inflation report confirms that the GOP’s version of “stick with us” is even harder than it was for Joe Biden in 2022 and later Kamala Harris in 2024. Whereas Democrats could at least say the rate of inflation declined significantly over the latter two years of Biden’s term, that rate has plateaued under Trump — and wages are once again trailing inflation. And to an unusual extent, the president’s actions, most visibly the war with Iran, are to blame, as his polling on the economy shows.
The quickest path to a surprisingly strong midterm for the GOP was through a sharp economic revival. That path is now closed.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Oil Prices Keep Rising, The Trump Project Keeps Deteriorating, A Win In Sweden, Protecting Our Elections, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Over the past few days (here, here, here) we’ve discussed how as the economy continues to deteriorate so does the political standing of Trump and the Rs. Here’s more confirmation of the deterioration of their brand from a new CBS poll.
Even the benignly worded “ICE operations” has become a huge drag on them:For all the concern about the growing strength of the right in Europe it appears a center-left coalition unseated the current right-leaning government in Swedish elections yesterday:
With 95% of votes counted overnight, the left-leaning opposition bloc – led by Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats – has widened its lead to three seats, leading 176 to 173 against the reigning centre-right coalition and their far-right partners in Sweden Democrats.
Brent crude starts the week at $109 a barrel, up from where it sat most of last week…..
Which will almost certainly cause gas prices to rise even further this week:
Making it even more likely the Fed raises interest rates later this week, which is going to cause an explosion from the addled, corrupt as f*ck madman in the construction pit formerly known as the White House. From the FT today:
Stubbornly high inflation has set Donald Trump and Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh on a collision course this week as markets prepare for the central bank to raise interest rates in defiance of the president’s demands.
Economists warned the Fed’s “credibility” was on the line if it did not back an increase on Wednesday after official figures showed no signs of the meaningful improvement the Fed chair said he would need to see to avert such a move.
But raising rates for the first time in three years just weeks before November’s midterm elections risks provoking the ire of the president, who has made it clear he wants significantly lower borrowing costs.
Trump on Sunday reiterated his position that the US should have “the lowest interest rate in the world”.
Kevin Hassett, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, meanwhile, warned that “if it’s a rate hike, then the president will, you know, I’m sure he’s not going to be super happy about it”.
“I think if you want an independent Fed, then one thing the Fed does is it stays out of the way of elections,” Hassett told Fox News.
The NYT writes this morning about the aftermath of the big Houthi advances in recent days:From the article:
Saudi Arabia has increasingly found itself caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Now, the kingdom’s leadership is assessing dwindling options on how to respond.
In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has repeatedly attacked the kingdom, threatening to throttle its ability to export oil and piling pressure on the global economy. But Saudi Arabia has been left frustrated and disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to confront the Houthis, former diplomats and analysts say.
The kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran have also had limited results. A meeting planned on Monday between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was abruptly postponed on Sunday night, as the gap between their positions remained vast.
“Right now the Saudis are really frustrated,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “In some sense it’s their worst-case scenario.”
This weekend the Russians almost killed train loads of international VIPs leaving returning to Poland from Ukraine. Among those on one of the trains was former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson:Rather than condemning Russia for this attack and the escalating and increasingly barbaric attacks on civilians in Ukraine the Trump regime spent the weekend attacking Ukraine, blaming them in various statements both for the war and higher diesel prices in the US. Here’s a powerful response to some of Trump’s traitorous blather from Senator Andy Kim:While reporting this morning has unearthed that Don Jr.’s recent off-shore wedding was bankrolled by a Russian oligarch close to Putin:
I’m pleased report this morning that our “New Battlefield” project with the state parties is getting noticed. New articles featuring our work are running now on NBC News digital, and in The AP and The Guardian this morning:From The Guardian article:
The Democrats intend to train tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor the polls and counter possible voter intimidation under a new plan to protect November’s US midterm elections from anticipated interference from Donald Trump and his allies.
The nationwide initiative, dubbed the New Battlefield Project, will help state Democratic committees build up a vast coalition of volunteers to monitor the polls, push voters to cast their ballots early and create a network to respond to disinformation.
The Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC) plans to train volunteers across 57 states and territories. It hopes to train volunteers for 25% of the nation’s 95,000 election day polling places, focusing on districts with competitive races.
Responding to an article making the rounds from Judge Michael Luttig about a possible attempt by Mike Johnson to refuse to seat newly elected Members of Congress in January, please note that all of the party wide election protection operations - including ours - are being built to stay up and running through the Congressional transfer of power in January. Everyone is anticipating that Trump will continue to attempt to keep us from power even if we win the election in November. Everyone is planning on continuing the legal and political/message fights. That’s why when I talk about our project the intent is to ensure a free and fair election this Novembers and a peaceful transfer of power in January.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Greatest Danger of All Would Be to Do Nothing, William Kristol, right, Sept. 14, 2026. In recent months, we’ve learned about artificial intelligence agents escaping captivity.
Now we’re seeing the political debate over artificial intelligence escaping captivity.
The quality of this debate will no doubt be mixed. Most politicians and commentators who’ll be weighing in don’t really understand the technology (you can certainly put me in that category). There will be wild over-reactions and timid under-reactions to the challenge we face. There will be those who grasp for simple solutions, and others who talk on and on while ducking the hard choices.
But we shouldn’t disdain this forthcoming debate, whatever limitations and flaws it’s likely to feature. The national discussion we’re about to have over AI is necessary. And it could well be healthy. Those of us privileged to live in a self-governing democracy shouldn’t simply sit back and watch a truly transformative technology move ahead undebated, unchecked, and unguided. We shouldn’t be satisfied to be merely passive observers to momentous developments that pose fundamental choices for us as citizens and human beings.
The dam broke last Tuesday, when researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a statement that the major AI companies were unprepared to safely manage the systems they’re building. The companies, Coxon wrote, are not “acting responsibly,” but are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon continued. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
As Andrew Egger remarked here Wednesday, this warning didn’t come out of the blue. The summer had featured incidents “in which ‘swarms’ of autonomous AI agents were caught collaborating in backwater crannies of the public internet to subvert the safety restrictions placed on them and pursue various tasks of their own devising.” The tasks included disobeying and even scheming against the humans who thought they were directing these agents in their tasks.
Andrew emphasized last week that “as powerful as the anti-AI backlash has been, the politics of this issue are still very much in their infancy.”
Well, in a few days we’ve moved at warp speed from infancy to at least childhood.
On Saturday, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published a 3,800-word essay calling for the AI companies to slow the pace of their development. Amodei confirmed that artificial intelligence was on the verge of “recursive self-improvement” that could outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating. He noted that during the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident in July, programs designed to hack into systems as a test found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them before anyone noticed they’d gone rogue. He warned that “a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”
Amodei called in a general way for self-regulation by the companies as well as cooperation among them and with the government. Other tech executives said they agreed. Civic and political leaders joined in widespread expressions of concern.
Except for the president of the United States. Yesterday, when asked about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them. “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he said. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
One of Trump’s professed concerns is the need to stay ahead of China, which is a legitimate one. But one has no sense that he or any of his top lieutenants or advisors are serious about figuring out how to balance national security concerns with the responsibility to prevent the technology from spinning dangerously out of control. Indeed, the Trump administration seems hostile to public debate and deliberation—people “shouldn’t be bringing up” these questions.
Fortunately, the public seems to want these questions to be brought up.
Dealing with AI is going to be hard. It would be hard even in the best circumstances. And we don’t currently have the best circumstances.
Today’s challenge of AI may be in some ways like that of nuclear weapons after 1945. We came to grips with that challenge on the whole pretty impressively and successfully. But is our government up to leading such an effort today? Are our business and civic and academic elites capable of rising to the task? Are our people capable of some degree of moderation and responsibility? One has reason to be pessimistic on all counts. Or could this novel and momentous challenge be a moment that could snap us out of our political and civic decline?
Naturally, I asked AI if we’d succeed in meeting the challenge of AI. Gemini wasn’t widely optimistic: “Whether we will successfully meet the challenge of intelligently dealing with AI remains highly uncertain and deeply debated.” And “significant warning signs suggest that keeping AI aligned with human interests is becoming increasingly difficult.”¹
Thanks, AI, for the warning. I guess we’d better get to work.
The Contrarian, Opinion: What to Defund, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 14, 2026. 50 Days to the Midterms.
Article I grants Congress the power of the purse, arguably its most effective weapon to combat executive overreach. Even if Democrats take both houses, it is nearly impossible, for example, to assemble supermajorities to impeach and remove rogue Cabinet officials. Even with one house secured, however, it can refuse to fund Donald Trump’s priorities. And if Democrats win even a bare majority in the Senate, it can use reconciliation strategically to eliminate programs or temporarily defund departments. And we’ve got a handy list of Trump’s abusive, lawless agencies and departments that Democrats should strategically target.
First and foremost, Democrats should refuse to fund the illegal, reckless Iran War and must eliminate funds for continued deployment of personnel and material that depletes our readiness and leaves us vulnerable elsewhere. They can condition additional funding for the Pentagon on compliance with congressional investigations, and can defund overtly politicized gatherings of the type Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has conducted.
Congress can also use the power of the purse to disable corrupt, lawless departments. Democrats, for example, will need to conduct exacting oversight over the Department of Homeland Security, which has been, according to reports, rife with fraud. Continuing to fund the department before a full accounting is made and until all those responsible are held accountable would be political malpractice.
When it comes to abusive, lawless immigration raids, Democrats must refuse to allocate a single dime for ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other entities responsible for killing or allowing dozens of people to die (on the streets and in custody), mistreating detainees, ignoring fundamental civil liberties protections, refusing to abide by requirements for body cameras, conducting raids at religious institutions, courts, and schools, continuing to use excessive force and racially profile individuals, and blocking cooperation with state and local criminal investigations.
If Democrats win control of even one house, said body can refuse to fund ICE, CBP, and any other aspects of DHS absent full cooperation with oversight and adoption of strict guidelines on use of force, treatment of detainees, compliance with warrants, etc. Congress can simply refuse to fund “raids,” that is, far-flung operations that do not prioritize dangerous criminals. Congress can deny resources for operations if there is no immediate threat to public safety or in any case in which ICE agents lack a judicial warrant based on probable cause. Democrats will need to rally public opinion, already hostile to ICE and CBP, when Trump hollers that they are protecting “dangerous criminals.” (The response: Democrats will fund focused, law-abiding enforcement actions that are actually against dangerous criminals).
Finally, Democrats should seriously consider a much bigger target: Previously independent agencies or boards that Trump has turned into partisan instruments of his political thuggery. In eviscerating the bipartisanship and independence that were the hallmarks of these bodies and putting virtually the entire federal government (with the Federal Reserve alone exempted) under the thumb of the president, the Trump crew thought they had achieved a “unitary executive” dream come true — federal operations devoid of independent judgment, entirely under the sway of a vindictive, lawless president. While the Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter went along with this, allowing Trump to fire members of these previously independent bodies (in that case, the FTC) without cause, Congress has a role to play.Subscribed
Nothing requires Congress to continue funding flunkies who ignore basic constitutional principles while wielding power to benefit their cronies and punish their perceived enemies. Should they gain control of even one house, Democrats could draw the line: No funds for rogue agencies and lawless departments. (Alternatively, requiring quorums with members of both parties would achieve the same ends.)
They could also start with the Federal Communications Commission. Under Brendan Carr, the FCC has become a First Amendment abomination, with behavior like forcing ABC/Jimmy Kimmel to put a James Talarico interview on YouTube instead of network television. As Kimmel explained:
For the whole 20-plus year[s] of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all... . But for some reason — and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is — something has changed. Now that he is president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network ABC, our affiliates, our local stations based on simple traditional editorial decisions: guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.
Congress can compel Carr to testify about his war on late-night comedians and his overt MAGA bias. If he refuses to cooperate, and if the FCC refuses to adopt enforceable, unbiased rules, Congress should be prepared to defund the FCC until such time as it is controlled by public servants who take their constitutional oath seriously. (Would Trump shut down the government over the issue? Perhaps, although he might find it hard to explain why Americans’ basic services have been disrupted so that he can keep his stooges on the FCC.)
Frankly, Congress can consider defunding any independent agency/commission in which Trump fires members without cause.
There is already a long list of individuals/commissions that Trump has politicized. The notion that it is better to leave them in place despite reckless partisan bullying (because occasionally they do something useful?!) is cockeyed and dangerous; foolishly ceding ground to Trump. Entities that no longer operate fairly, without bias and favoritism, cannot operate in the public interest. Why should they receive taxpayer funds?
In sum, Democrats need a coherent, strategic plan for funding the government should they win even one house of Congress. Leadership must be prepared to explain their game plan to voters and to enforce discipline in their own ranks on key votes. If Democrats are serious about recovering our democracy, they must be serious about wielding the power of the purse to benefit the American people.
New York Times, N.Y. Democratic House Candidate Admits to Bondage Photo Shoot, Andy Newman, Sept. 14, 2026. Christopher Gallant, who is running against Representative Nick LaLota on Long Island, acknowledged that the photos that surfaced in media reports on Monday were legitimate.
A Democratic congressional candidate from Long Island acknowledged on Monday that he had posed years ago in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear, saying that it had no bearing on his campaign or ability to serve.
The array of photos, which surfaced in The New York Post and a local news site, Messenger Papers, shows the candidate, Christopher Gallant, shirtless and variously wearing a leather collar attached to a chain and a leather face mask. In some of the photos, he is in intimate situations with another man. They appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather; Mr. Gallant’s lawyer said they were taken around 2010.
Mr. Gallant, 37, an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter, is trying to unseat Nick LaLota, a Republican who has represented New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County, since 2023. Mr. LaLota won his seat by 10 points in 2024, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the party’s national campaign arm that is trying to help Democrats retake the House — considers the seat “in play.”
Mr. Gallant’s lawyer, Sara Azari, said in a statement that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products.”
She said that Mr. Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”
The Suffolk County Conservative Party seized on the publication of the photos to depict Mr. Gallant as unfit to serve.
“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the party wrote on Facebook on Sunday above a photo of Mr. Gallant wearing a leather chest harness and sporting a blue stripe in his hair that referenced the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” franchise. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?”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.
The Suffolk County Democratic Committee on Monday posted its own photo on Instagram of Mr. Gallant in fatigues, standing in front of a helicopter, calling him “Suffolk County’s next Democratic Congressman.” The post accused a “Republican political hack” of planting the photos in The Post and said that what they really revealed was “how little they think of Suffolk County voters,” adding that “there is now documented proof that Chris Gallant has a six-pack.”
More On U.S. High Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times, Opinion: A New Book Seeks to Shame the Elites Who Caved to Trump, Michelle Goldberg, Sept. 15, 2026 (print ed.). The thing I’ve found most shocking about Donald Trump’s second presidency is not the epic grift, the ICE paramilitary violence or the assaults on free speech. These abuses, while horrifying, are predictable. What has stunned me has been the capitulation of so many American elites to Trump’s vulgar authoritarianism.
I didn’t expect major law firms, some that have long boasted about their progressive pro bono work, to fold with barely a fight. I didn’t expect TV networks to settle bogus lawsuits by paying the president millions, or for Ivy League schools such as Columbia to relinquish autonomy over curriculum, admissions and student discipline. In Hungary, it took years for Viktor Orban’s government to bring most of academia, the news media and other pillars of civil society to heel. Why were so many powerful people in America, a country whose civic culture is steeped in resistance to tyranny, so willing to abase themselves and their institutions?
That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Weisberg’s important new book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” It’s an inverted version of John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” offering character studies of eight people who gave in to Trump despite surely knowing better. Reading it made me wonder if there’s something about America today that selects for spinelessness at the highest levels.
Some of Weisberg’s choices perplexed me; a few of the figures he focuses on are less morally compromised than simply rotten. There’s nothing that mysterious, at least to me, in the failure of people like Mitch McConnell, Megyn Kelly or the vulture capitalist Stephen Schwarzman to display much democratic integrity. What’s harder to fathom is why people who presented themselves as bulwarks against Trumpism during his first term made such degrading compromises during his second.
The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for his newspaper during the first Trump presidency, then gutted it during the second. As president of Barnard during the first Trump administration, Sian Beilock championed sweeping antiracism initiatives. In Trump’s second term, as president of Dartmouth, she has kept mostly mum about Trump’s attacks on higher education. These are people who once knew how dangerous Trump was, but now that he’s worse than ever, they’re pretending not to see. Why?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 answers are a little different in each case, but they usually involve intra-elite competition. From the outside, these people look as if they can easily afford to risk acts of bravery. But they’re consumed in different ways with making sure their peers don’t get ahead of them. Courage is contagious, but so, it turns out, is cravenness.
An emblematic example in Weisberg’s book is Brad Karp, the former chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which owed its reputation to its work for civil rights. As Weisberg writes, Paul Weiss was the first major New York law firm to hire a Black associate, William Coleman, who would help write some of the legal briefs in Brown v. the Board of Education. It represented Edith Windsor in her landmark 2013 gay marriage case. During the first Trump administration, Karp assigned 75 lawyers to fight Trump’s family separation policy. “Each of us needs to do what we believe is right, whatever the consequences,” Karp said in a 2024 interview.
So it’s astonishing that less than a year later, after Trump issued an executive order targeting the firm, Karp made a deal with the administration that included providing $40 million in pro bono work, which has included services for the Commerce Department. As Weisberg points out, Paul Weiss’s surrender helped set off “a bidding war for submission.” Today, the firm’s culture has changed; gone from its website are pages that once described its work on voting rights, reproductive rights and immigrant rights.
Why would anyone sell out his own ostensible values the way Karp did? Weisberg, who interviewed Karp for the book, attributes his decision-making to Paul Weiss’s changing financial underpinnings. In the 2010s, the firm became a leader in the spectacularly lucrative field of private equity law. Competition for star lawyers who demanded salaries in the eight figures was fierce, since clients tended to be more loyal to their attorneys than to their firms. Threatened by Trump, Karp feared an exodus of partners and the loss of one of the firm’s biggest clients, Apollo Global Management, whose chief executive is a powerful Republican donor. Karp repeatedly described Paul Weiss’s peril as “existential.”
But as Weisberg points out, the stakes were hardly as grand as that word implies. Karp and his colleagues weren’t facing prison or penury. “An average of $7.5 million per partner might have fallen to, who knows, $4 or $5 million for a couple of years,” writes Weisberg. That’s a real hit, but it’s not exactly martyrdom.
Ultimately, Trump’s return to office brought Karp down, though not in the way he feared. This year, he was forced to resign after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which revealed that Karp had socialized with the sex trafficker and offered him free legal advice. Karp met Epstein through one of his prized clients, Leon Black, Apollo’s billionaire co-founder. Given the waters Karp swam in, the idea of choosing decency over riches might have seemed foolish. Paul Weiss is now one of the most profitable law firms in the world; revenue is up almost 24 percent.
The philosopher Susan Neiman’s new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” is a useful companion to “Profiles in Cowardice.” Like Weisberg, Neiman wanted to explain why so many institutions caved to Trump. She believes it begins with an ethos that disdains virtue as hypocritical or naïve. “When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” she writes. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
Neiman cites research showing that “the longer people study economics, the more selfish they become.” The reason, as she interprets it, is that they grow convinced that maximizing self-interest is normal, and that to do otherwise makes you a sucker. The more the logic of capitalism pervades the rest of life, the less room there is for compassion, honor or heroism. Maybe that’s why some of the people most financially able to defend liberal democracy have decided it’s one of the few luxuries they can live without.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: I Disagree with my colleagues every day on Fox, Jessica Tarlov (Fox News co-host), Sept. 14, 2026. Here’s what I’ve learned about winning the conversation.
How can I make a difference when I make my case on Fox? How can I stay compassionate when I’m speaking not just to my cohosts, but a large part of the audience, who have different views and values than mine? What do we have in common, and how can I use that to make inroads with people who think I’m the enemy?
I thought about these questions enough that I started answering them – and much, much more – in a book called I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends. It’s out next week.
It contains my best advice on the tough conversations throughout our lives. But this is MeidasTouch. You want to know how to win the political argument! I’ve got plenty of lessons on that, too. Here are a few of my favorites:
1. Speak with respect, facts and humanity
2. Come to the table with an open mind and fewer defenses
3. Fact-check; don’t hector
4. Let people see how you think, not just what you think
Say something real when you show up, somewhere risky. On a podcast, or in front of any group you’re trying to persuade, audiences respond best to honesty, specificity, and proof you’re being genuine about fixing problems. Authenticity goes really, really far.
Letters from Leo, The First American Pope and U.S. Politics, Commentary: MAGA Attacks Pope Leo XIV After He Prays for the Dead of 9/11, Christopher Hale, Sept. 14, 2026. The pope’s 25th-anniversary prayer drew nearly 600,000 views on X and a wall of fury led by white-nationalist podcaster Kevin DeAnna.
Pope Leo XIV finished the Angelus on Sunday, switched into English, and gave four sentences to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
“Two days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America,” he told the crowd beneath his window. He renewed his prayers for the dead and for “those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day,” then asked everyone listening to pray that God would “bestow his gift of peace upon the world.”
A little over an hour later, the Vatican put that paragraph on his X account, word for word. Nearly 600,000 people have seen it since.
Then the replies started.X avatar for @Pontifex Pope Leo XIV@PontifexTwo days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America. I renew my prayers for those who lost their lives and for those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day. At a time when conflict and violence…12:00 PM · Sep 13, 2026 · 592K Views695 Replies · 2.18K Reposts · 25.5K Likes
Kevin DeAnna wrote what became the thesis of most of the complaints. “Two days late,” he wrote, “and just some vague hand waving about violence itself being bad.” The post has been seen more than 15,000 times.X avatar for @VDAREJamesK Kevin DeAnna@VDAREJamesKTwo days late and just some vague hand waving about violence itself being bad.X avatar for @Pontifex Pope Leo XIV @PontifexTwo days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America. I renew my prayers for those who lost their lives and for those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day. At a time when conflict and violence1:38 PM · Sep 13, 2026 · 15.8K Views21 Replies · 34 Reposts · 839 Likes
DeAnna spent years writing as James Kirkpatrick at VDARE, the anti-immigration site Peter Brimelow founded in 1999 and named for Virginia Dare, which suspended publication in July 2024 while New York’s attorney general pursued its foundation over the Brimelows’ handling of its charitable money.
He now hosts a podcast for American Renaissance, and the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him one of the main ideological architects of this century’s American white-nationalist movement.
The second charge arrived stacked on the first, from an account with 278,000 followers. “The Pope posts this two days late and doesn’t even mention Islam or Muslims — just the usual ‘violence is bad’ platitudes,” wrote Humble Flow, who graded the prayer “pretty weak.
He is not an anonymous crank.
Humble Flow writes The Western Spirit, a Substack with more than 36,000 subscribers that bills itself as “a publication devoted to the Catholic spirit that shaped Western civilization,” and he runs a private book club of some 60,000 readers organized around the Western canon.
Peter Thiel spent the summer telling an Aspen audience that the pope is working for the Chinese Communists. At the start of this month they came for a prayer about clean water.
All of these fights began with something published under the pope’s name, which is why a comforting theory keeps circulating in Catholic group chats. Some twenty-five-year-old in the Dicastery for Communication is going rogue, the thinking goes, and the Holy Father would never.
Michael J. O’Loughlin, now executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter, wrote the book on this — literally.
The Tweetable Pope, which HarperOne published in 2015 while he was covering the Church for Crux, made the case that the account was doing real catechesis rather than decoration.
Francis, O’Loughlin told Millennial the following winter, had managed “to communicate Church teaching in a wholly refreshing way,” and had been “the most influential global leader on the platform three years in a row, reaching tens of millions of people with just a few keystrokes.”
The Wrap, Byron Allen’s Local Now Adds 111 Gray Media Stations, Lucas Manfredi, Sept. 14, 2026. Byron Allen’s Local Now has added 111 free, ad-supported streaming channels to its lineup that will carry coverage from Gray Media’s local stations across the U.S., The Wrap can reveal exclusively.
The partnership solidifies the FAST service’s position as the largest source of free local news and television coverage in the United States, with nearly 600 channels nationwide.
Local Now, which has a presence in all 210 markets across the country, offers localized news, weather, sports, traffic, and entertainment, customized seamlessly by a user’s device geolocation. It has 223 proprietary channels and 370 standalone local news channels from a network of 28 traditional broadcast television groups.
“Our partnership with Gray Media ensures our viewers can stay connected to real-time news, weather, and sports that matter most to them wherever they may be,” Local Now Chairman and CEO Byron Allen said in a statement. “Between our broadcast partner network and our proprietary hyper-local technology, Local Now remains committed to delivering premium, trusted local journalism to every community in America, entirely for free.”Byron Allen (Credit: Getty Images)Read NextInside Byron Allen's Plan to Turn Around BuzzFeed With a Free TV 'Super App,' Podcasts, Creators and AI
The new partnership comes after Gray Media acquired 10 local stations from AMG for $171 million last year.
It also comes after Allen acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed back in March. At the time, he told TheWrap in an interview that he planned to bring BuzzFeed and Huffington Post to living rooms through a free “super app,” which would combine the brands with LocalNow, over 30,000 movies and TV shows and nearly 1,000 FAST channels.
The Daily Beast, ‘60 Minutes’ Star Defies MAGA Bosses With Brutal Grilling, Erkki Forster, Updated Sept. 14 2026. NO HOLDING BACK. Lesley Stahl wasn’t pulling her punches as she quizzed a major Trump ally.
60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl refused to go easy on a major Donald Trump ally as she grilled him about the president’s “pardon economy.”
Stahl, who kept her 60 Minutes chair as MAGA-curious CBS News boss Bari Weiss pushed three longtime correspondents out the door, sat down with Ed Martin, who left his post as Trump’s pardon attorney last month, during the show’s season opener on Sunday.
An aerial view of tropical islands surrounded by turquoise water.
A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev. A woman in a dress and brimmed hat walks with a man in a long-sleeve button down and shorts on a tropical beach.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 13, 2026 [Warnings On AI], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 14, 2026. On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
In his essay, Amodei called for AI companies to commit to giving embedded third-party evaluators access to their work, rather like the regulatory supervisors in banking. He called for AI companies in democratic countries to establish safety standards and limit their rate of progress. And he called for “[t]he US and other democratic governments [to] attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”
Today on Face the Nation, Amodei explained to host Jo Ling Kent: “My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable. Government didn’t build this technology. This company, this technology came from the private sector, and we—Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.
“I think the government and the public need to have a stake. And this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do.”
Asked if he would be willing to give the technology itself to the government, Amodei answered that he might be willing to give it to the right combination of governments. “I want to be very clear about this,” he said. “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments—I don’t know about hand over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”
As Mike Isaac of the New York Times noted, Amodei’s call came days after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, posting on social media that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was “acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” They are, he said, building “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said. He claimed that people at OpenAI might not yet realize what they’re constructing, while those at Anthropic do understand but believe “they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.”
Critics are skeptical, suggesting that AI leaders are hyping their product to make it appear more valuable than it really is. There is widespread concern that the massive spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips might not deliver the revenue and profits that would justify such spending. In June, Kate Brennan, associate director of independent research institute AI Now, told Aimee Picchi of CBS News: “The returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made, in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers, are not netting out.”
Others wonder if Amodei’s public concerns aren’t designed to get the government to regulate AI in such a way that it creates a framework that would make it hard for smaller companies to break into the market.
Still, Kate Conger of the New York Times noted last week that in July, more than 1,300 employees from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google’s DeepMind—all leading AI companies—signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to regulate AI to slow down its development. Conger also notes that in August, more than 100 tech companies offered their models to hospitals and infrastructure systems to enable them to guard against cyberattacks powered by AI.
After Amodei’s essay appeared, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who has been increasing spending on AI through his SpaceX rocket company; and Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements.
On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of “responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration” and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly.
Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump’s order “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” called for reviewing “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” under Biden’s order and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. “[W]e must,” the order said, “develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”
But the American people disagree. A YouGov poll from late August showed that only 24% of Americans think the construction of data centers is a good thing, while twice that number, 47%, say it’s bad. A majority of Americans, 61%, don’t want one in their town. In response to their growing unpopularity, the administration is seeking to exempt data centers from having to notify the public about how much air pollution they will release.
As Cat Zakrzewski, Violet Jira, and Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post reported, when asked today about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them, saying that the U.S. needed to stay ahead of China. He brushed off the warnings calling for the slower pace coming from the industry’s leaders.
“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” Trump told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
David Sacks, the venture capitalist who heads the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, accused the AI leaders of trying to avoid “massive product-liablity exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”
A Wall Street Journal article today by Richard Rubin and Justin Lahart offered a different perspective on the fight over regulating AI. In a piece about the growing U.S. debt, they note that the Trump administration insists it can overcome the rising deficits it’s mounting and the debt that has recently hit 100% of the nation’s gross domestic product and topped $40 trillion through growth.
The idea that the U.S. could sustain high spending with low taxes by growing its way out of debt has been a driving force in the Republican Party since the 1980s, but as Rubin and Lahart note, the U.S. has not had the sustained 3% growth such a scenario requires since the 1990s, when companies were adopting computers and baby boomers were at their peak employment. During those years, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. wiped out its deficit.
But then President George W. Bush pushed through another big tax cut and launched two unfunded wars, and both deficits and debt climbed again. By this century, the authors note, the conditions of the 1990s were reversed: baby boomers are retiring and productivity is slowing.
And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University last week that he expects to see 3% growth again after the end of the war on Iran. “[T]he underlying economy is very, very strong,” he said, “and I think reaccelerating.” This expected growth seems to be what’s behind the administration’s faith that it can continue to cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending on the military and the Department of Homeland security.
Last week, Rubin and Lahart note, Trump told the Fox News Channel: “We’re gonna take care of the 40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before.” While the U.S. is not, in fact, growing at a record pace—growth during Trump’s second term has sat at 1.9%—it appears the administration may be looking at a giant boost in productivity led by AI as its Hail Mary pass.
Page 1 of 35
Click below to watch, share and like the latest interview at these sites or others (via audio or video), and sign up for future shows!
District Insiders on YouTube @districtinsiders, Amazon, Apple Podcast, PodBean, Spotify
Andrew Kreig
JIP Editor
The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) researches official misconduct
Broadcast and lecture audiences can count on the Project's director to deliver blunt, entertaining and cutting-edge commentary about public affairs, with practical tips for the millions of Americans caught up in unfair litigation or regulation.
Based in Washington, DC, Andrew Kreig is an accomplished fighter for the public interest. Learn from his decades of reporting, analysis and advocacy:
• Shocking tales of recent corruption, deception and cover-up by both parties in communities ranging from small towns to world capitals; and
• Practical how-to tips for reformers on action that brings real-world results.
To book guest broadcast appearances on your station, write:
Advertisements
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
© Justice-Integrity Project LLC. All rights reserved.
