Trump Team Forced to Acknowledge Midterms Will Be “F*cking Rough”

President Donald Trump’s inner circle is already bracing for a “f*cking rough” round of midterm elections.

With just weeks until November, Trump advisers have privately acknowledged that there is little chance for the president’s party to prevail, CNN reported Monday night.

“It’s obviously going to be f*cking rough,” one adviser told CNN. The best case scenario is for Republicans to lose the House, but narrowly retain control of the Senate, the adviser added.

As Trump’s polling has hit humiliating new lows, he has opted to use the midterms as a referendum on his presidency—leading some GOP candidates to quietly scrub any mention of “Trump” from their campaign platforms, and others to openly criticize his policies.

Trump intends to spend much of October on the road “spending money, and helping every one of them get elected,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday.

One official told CNN that Trump intends to be “playing hard in Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio,” and to focus on battleground districts. Another official, however, told the outlet that even in purple states, Trump will only be visiting more conservative areas. Next week, the president will head to Alabama and Oklahoma.

Donald Trump’s response to the ongoing Rwanda-Congo conflict involved deflecting to the Ebola virus before shutting 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.

Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton seems to think that letting a child predator out of jail after just two months is something to brag about.

Paxton’s remarks came at a United States Hispanic Business Council forum in Fort Worth on Monday.

“The criticism has been that I let a child predator out [after serving] one day,” Paxton said. “Well, guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted, but we did not control the situation. We did our best.”

That is not what you want to hear from a state attorney general running for Senate.

The embattled attorney general is referring to the sweetheart deal his prosecutors offered to Adam Hoffman, a Texas man charged with repeatedly molesting a young boy, earlier this year. The deal would have allowed Hoffman to serve just one day in prison for the crime he pleaded guilty to, and allowed him to avoid signing up for the sex offender registry—a move that was widely criticized. The judge in the case was appalled by the deal. “One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it,” said Judge Roy Sparkman, who insisted on the 60-day sentence.

Paxton’s most recent comment comes just a little over one month before what many expect to be an extremely close midterm election against Democratic candidate James Talarico.

“Omg he is STILL lying. Paxton’s office originally tried to get ONE day, the judge rejected it and bumped it to 60, but even then, Adam Hoffman was released early only served 30 days. For child rape. And Paxton’s office didn’t even put the bare minimum requirement for him to register as a sex offender in the deal,” wrote Sara McGee, a Democratic nominee for the Texas House of Representatives. “A completely corrupt failure at every level.”

President Trump’s move last week to cancel close to $1 billion of funds already appropriated by Congress is getting zero pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to push back on the “pocket rescission” of $810 million passed by Congress for education and health programs, telling Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio that “it’s something I’m sure will be litigated.”

Thune’s comments came after fellow Republican Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday that the move came without warning and that she would address “these illegal actions” with her colleagues.

“Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers,” Collins said. “[The Office of Management and Budget] is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”

Asked about Collins’s statement, Thune replied, “As an appropriator she feels strongly that these are decisions made by appropriators and that the administration doesn’t have this authority.”

“Whether you agree in substance or not with what they did, you can argue that they be good stewards, and some of these things may be things many of us agree with, but the process by which they did it is gonna be, I assume, subject to a lot of discussion and probably some litigation,” Thune added.

The OMB said the funds being slashed were “the most harmful government spending.” Most of the canceled funds came from the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helps refugees and unaccompanied immigrant minors. The Trump administration claims the funds are no longer necessary.

But other spending was also clawed back, including for health research, an education program for immigrant students, a minority entrepreneurship initiative, housing counseling services, and more.

Trump decided to cancel the funds without giving Congress enough time to respond with legislation or reallocation. The end of the fiscal year is in less than one week, and the House is out of session until after November’s midterm elections.

Constitutionally, the power of levying taxes and appropriating federal funds is supposed to lie with Congress. In theory, the president can send a request to the legislature to cancel funds that they disagree with, but with 45 days’ notice to allow Congress to respond. Trump’s rescission did not follow those rules, and is likely violating the Constitution. But even when Trump usurps their constitutionally enshrined powers, Republicans in Congress lack the spine to challenge him.

“This is theft from the American people, plain and simple,” Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said in a statement. “These are funds Congress has delivered on a bipartisan basis and should be helping people—not cut off by a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families. Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious because [OMB Director Russell Vought] is saying their votes don’t count.”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recused himself Monday from a major climate change case coming up on the court’s docket.

Alito’s decision was revealed via a letter issued to the lawyers involved in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which pits ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy against the commissioners of Boulder County, Colorado as the two oil companies attempt to throw out a county lawsuit seeking climate-change related damages.

“Justice Alito has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case,” read a letter written by court clerk Scott Harris.

The letter did not elaborate as to why Alito decided to remove himself from the October 5 hearing, though he had faced mounting pressure from progressive groups such as Consumer Watchdog to step down from the case due to his personal investments in oil companies. Alito does not hold stocks in either ExxonMobil or Suncor Energy, but instead has investments in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, which are involved in similar lawsuits around the country and are likely to be affected by the Supreme Court’s eventual decision in Suncor.

The decision is a remarkable aboutface for the conservative justice, who previously told NBC News (via a court spokesperson) that he saw no need to withdraw himself from the legal proceedings.

“Justice Alito’s recusal from Suncor v. Boulder is the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” said Alexandra Nagy, organizing director with Consumer Watchdog, in a statement. “The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability.”

Alito’s recusal, however, will force the nation’s highest judiciary into an eight-person bench, raising the possibility of a 4-4 split on the matter.

Alito is the only justice in the court with a wide stock portfolio, according to a Bloomberg report published earlier this month. Either Alito or his wife owns tens of thousands of stock positions in dozens of individual companies, making him a standout on the bench. The only other member managing individual stocks is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has maintained investments in just two companies (Lam Research Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific).

In a legal petition to the Supreme Court, attorneys for Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil argued that state law does not preempt federal law on issues related to greenhouse gas emissions, and that states do not have the constitutional right to seek relief for “injuries allegedly caused by pollution emanating from outside the State.”

But this preemption case is not like others that the court has recently heard, in no small part due to the Trump administration’s decision to pare back the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“One argument on the other side is that allowing states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is inconsistent with the objectives of federal law,” penned Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law, in a piece last week for SCOTUSBlog. “But as the county commissioners of Boulder County and the city of Boulder argue in their brief, the EPA recently has denied that it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

“As they say: There is no explanation ‘how the Court can hold that the Clean Air Act preempts claims indirectly relating to greenhouse-gas emissions when EPA maintains that the Act does not allow it to directly regulate some (perhaps any) greenhouse-gas emissions.’”

This story has been updated.