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

Donald Trump erupted in a crazed, manic tirade this week about the South Carolina Senate race. He raged wildly at the Democratic candidate, Dr. Annie Andrews, smearing her with an anti-trans slur and unleashing all kinds of dim-witted lies about her to boot. Notably, this comes as a major GOP super PAC just poured $5 million into South Carolina to shore up GOP Senator Darline Graham. One Republican admitted that the GOP needs an “insurance policy” in the state, and two GOP-aligned pollsters have found the race to be very close.

We think the odds remain very long here, but now that Trump has signaled alarm about this race, we’re getting a download on it from Jalisa Washington-Price, a veteran South Carolina-based Democratic operative who heads the Democratic-aligned PAC Fresh Start. Jalisa, thanks for coming on.

Jalisa Washington-Price: Thank you for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with the money. Axios reports that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is the leading Republican super PAC, is putting $5 million into this race as an “insurance policy.” One source told Axios: “We’re not taking anything for granted.”

Jalisa, two things. One, what does it say that they have to put this money in here, that they can’t take South Carolina for granted? And number two, are you seeing signs of their spending yet?

Washington-Price: Right. We haven’t seen signs yet, but as you know, we know that it’s coming, right? And South Carolina isn’t supposed to be on anybody’s battleground map this election cycle. But looking at the numbers, right, even right-leaning pollsters and polls show Annie Andrews in striking distance with Darline Graham, and a noticeable amount of undecideds still out there, right?

And that’s just not noise. Those are real numbers, that’s real enthusiasm that we’re seeing on the ground and hearing even from some of these pollsters that have been paying close attention to this race.

And the fact that Republicans are having to spend here, instead of being more competitive in these places that we were expecting, like in Michigan, you know, in some of these other states—it says a lot. And it’s also a warning sign for Republicans too, right? Like, what’s to come in November.

Sargent: Well, absolutely. So let’s talk about Trump losing it here. He viciously attacks Dr. Andrews, the Democratic challenger. She’s taking on Senator Darline Graham, who’s the sister of the late Lindsey Graham. Trump called her a vicious anti-trans slur twice and posted this:

“She is in favor of Transgender for Everyone, Open Borders, Defunding the Police, high taxes, a weak military, and will absolutely fight to take your guns away. She is against our Great Second Amendment!”

Trump also called her a low-quality person, while insisting Darline Graham is a high-quality one who can be trusted to have the right values. Jalisa, you just want to start by responding to all that?

Washington-Price: It’s unfortunate we have to respond to this and respond to the president’s comments. But as the saying goes, when you’re winning, you talk about your candidate, and when you’re losing, you talk about your opponent.

Trump’s post was almost all about Annie Andrews, and it tells you everything you need to know. When a conversation is about grocery prices and gas and health care, he knows he and the Republicans are going to lose that conversation and lose that discussion.

Sargent: Let’s talk about South Carolina for a sec. Trump won there by a whopping 18 points in 2024. Lindsey Graham won his last election there in 2020 by over 10 points. This is a red state. Can you just give us the rough demographic breakdown?

Washington-Price: So we have about three and a half million registered voters in South Carolina. Two out of three of those voters are white, and about one in four are Black, right? There’s no party registration in the state of South Carolina, so as of now, anybody can vote across lines in the primary. So it makes it hard for us to kind of track registered Republicans or Democrats in the state.

But what we’ve seen, particularly with the base of Democrats in South Carolina, Black voters—some of your voters in places like Columbia, which is a very Democratic county, somewhat of Charleston and in Greenville, some of your larger counties—you’re seeing the base very excited, not only for Annie Andrews but for Democrats across the state, right?

So you’re seeing that enthusiasm. You’re also seeing kind of the disenchantment with Republicans, and we like to call them non-MAGA Republicans, who are just tired of the fight. And they’re tired of, again, these culture wars that Republicans have been putting on our state, and they are ready for change.

And white voters, they make about six in ten for Darline Graham. And then we see about three in ten for Annie Andrews, according to the latest polls. And for Black voters, I think we have up to eight and nine out of ten for Andrews, which are real numbers, right? Like, those are real numbers. They’re showing real enthusiasm.

And we’re hoping to get those numbers up and really go after some of these undecideds. I think the last poll had about eight, almost 9 percent undecided, still out there and up for grabs.

And I know Annie Andrews, her team, as well as the IE—we are doing everything we can to talk to those voters and put the real issues in front of them, and really showing Annie Andrews’s credentials. She’s a pediatrician, she’s a mom of three. She’s fought her whole life for affordable health care, and she has a real plan to get South Carolina and this country back on track.

Sargent: So brass tacks here. If you get really, really good turnout among Democrats, and Annie Andrews gets 90 percent of Democrats, something like that, maybe even higher, does well with independents—what percentage of Republican voters does she have to get to win?

Washington-Price: Percentage of Republican voters that we believe she would have to get to—I think it’s a short answer, roughly about one in five Republicans, if we can give or take away from the Republicans, right? I think we would do well. So roughly we would need between 15 to 20 percent of Republicans to get over 50 percent.

Sargent: That’s hard!

Washington-Price: It is. It’s very hard, right? And we always knew it was going to be an uphill battle, right? But again, I think even going back to the primary—you know, South Carolina was a part of the conversation around redistricting, right? And we were one of the southern states to reject redistricting in the state.

And one of the reasons I think that was, too, is because I think Republicans in South Carolina saw the enthusiasm and kind of the fire that that lit around Democrats. We had some of the highest number of early voters among Democrats, and particularly Black voters in the South, show up in our primary.

And those voters aren’t just going away, right? They’re continuing to be fired up. We’ve been continuing to fire them up and communicate to them, on top of trying to pull over some of the Republicans. And I think that has to be our goal and our strategy in order to win.

It’s not going to be easy. South Carolina has not voted for a Democrat in the Senate since Jim DeMint. And I can’t tell you how old I was when that was. So it’s also—if you see even, like, David Beasley, who came out publicly condemning—he was a Republican governor in South Carolina—he came out condemning Trump and his comments about Annie Andrews.

I think you’re seeing more Republicans even kind of create a permission structure for Republicans in South Carolina to say this is enough. We’re tired of this. It’s time for something new. And I think you’re going to see even more of that as we get closer to election day. It’s not going to be easy, but we are very optimistic about it. And I think Republicans see that too, right?

Sargent: Well, yes. And since you brought up David Beasley, who’s a former Republican governor of South Carolina, I just pulled up his response. He was quite condemnatory of Trump. He was quite strong on this. He said, “This is abhorrent. Elections don’t have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better.”

That’s strong stuff. David Beasley, I’m guessing, is a fairly well-respected former politician. Is there an outside chance that a sizable bloc of Republican voters listen to a retired Republican in the MAGA era, when Donald Trump is issuing his commands to them to see her as as trans or whatever the hell he thinks he’s saying?

Washington-Price: Yeah, I really do believe so, right? And it goes back to what I said early about some of these Republicans creating a permission structure for other Republicans to be able to vote for a Democrat. And I think David Beasley laid it out correctly. It’s like, there is no place for that type of rhetoric anymore in the political conversational landscape.

Again, Trump and these Republicans know, when you talk about the issues, you talk about affordability, you talk about health care, they lose every time. And that’s why he goes back to kind of these culture wars that he’s no longer winning. I think you want to see more Republicans come out publicly and get at some of this stuff too.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the polls. There’s Trafalgar, which showed Darline Graham up a hair, by 43 to 42, over Annie Andrews. InsiderAdvantage had a poll finding Graham at 46 and Andrews at 45. So both of those have the race at around a point, which is just unthinkable. And those are Republican pollsters as well. Are you guys polling?

Washington-Price: We have a poll out in the field now, so we’re hoping it comes back soon.

Sargent: OK. And where do you guys think the race is right now, candidly?

Washington-Price: I honestly think we’re in two-to-three-point striking distance from Darline Graham. Even when you think about kind of the generational divide—I think even the last polling, and we’re seeing it on the ground, had every age group under the age of fifty break in for Annie Andrews. Again, you think about enthusiasm, you think about who is excited and wanting to show up to the polls for a change, those are the demographics and that’s the age group that we know will show out, right?

And I think even if we can’t convert some of these Republicans, to your point, if we can get them to stay home and just, you know, throw their hands up with it, that’s a win for us. And it kind of goes back to the messaging that we are trying to drill home to these voters, right? Who is going to be best for your families, who’s going to be best for your future, your kids’ future?

And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the polling. I think folks believe that it’s going to be Annie Andrews, and that Darline Graham does not have a plan for the state, and that she’s just going to be a rubber stamp for Trump and his failed policies. And people are tired of that.

Sargent: Would you guys like to see some Democratic money come into the state from places like the Senate Majority PAC or from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee?

Washington-Price: We would definitely love to see it, right? And I think there’s a long-term play for South Carolina. If we can flip the seat for Annie Andrews, I think it sends a signal across the country. It sends a signal across the South that we are competitive and we can stay competitive.

Georgia and North Carolina have done it, and we are right in the middle of both of those states. We share media markets with both of those states. And we think, you know, any resources that come into South Carolina will benefit Democrats, and it kind of is an investment that is a long play for Democrats in the South.

Sargent: Well, it’s worth pointing out that both Georgia and North Carolina right now, those races have Democrats pulling away. In Georgia, it’s Senator Jon Ossoff, who looks like he’s basically on track to having this sewn up. In North Carolina, it’s Roy Cooper, who’s running for the open seat there. He also seems to have this close to sewn up. Republicans are pulling money out of both states.

I mean, as long as I’ve been following politics, if you had told me a while ago that the states where Democrats would be running away are Georgia and North Carolina, I would have looked at you like you were nuts.

Washington-Price: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Sargent: And so the demographic story in Georgia and North Carolina is sort of similar. They’re very similar to South Carolina.

Washington-Price: That’s right.

Sargent: Well, I’m going to ask you about that, because Virginia’s the big success story. That’s the southern state that really first kind of moved in this direction that we’re talking about, with population growth in the northern parts of the state, the D.C. suburbs, kind of slowly outnumbering the vast rural structures of the state.

You see something similar but a little less pronounced in North Carolina, with some other East Coast hubs kind of really developing and becoming more Democratic and kind of slowly catching up with the rest of the state, which is enormously rural and red throughout. Is something like that happening in South Carolina? What’s the process there?

Washington-Price: I think so, right? South Carolina is one of the fastest-growing states in the country. Like, that is something that has been reported within the year. And I think you’re seeing that for a number of issues.

We’re seeing folks moving from across the country to places like South Carolina because of the affordability crisis that’s happening across our country. And they’re looking for opportunities, they’re looking for cheaper childcare, they’re looking for, you know, some affordable housing.

But what does that mean for a state like South Carolina, with these new people that have maybe come from bluer states or maybe even come from more moderate states, right? Like, how do we engage them? How do we get them kind of baked into the political culture in South Carolina? And how do we get them to vote for Democrats? And I think that is the type of long-term investment that we’re hoping not only the party, but some of these committees also will see and want to tap into.

And we’re seeing it in places like Mississippi and Alabama too. I do a lot of work across the South, and some of that’s kind of the same story we’re seeing across the board. You’re having folks that are moving into the state. You’re also having people move back, right, from the state, who were born and raised there, maybe left because of a number of issues, but they’re moving back. And we have to be able to capture those folks, engage with them, and talk about issues that are important to them.

And I think it’s a real opportunity for Democrats. But it has to continue and start now. Georgia and North Carolina didn’t just happen overnight. It took some work. And there’s a host of people, including, like, Stacey Abrams, who is to thank for that.

But I think because of that, you know, we’re seeing what Democrats can do when they win in these southern states. And I think we just have to keep hammering home on what it means for Democrats to win in the South.

Sargent: Well, Democrats need a southern strategy long term, because of what’s happening with some of these demographic changes in the North.

Washington-Price: That’s right.

Sargent: Which is, you know, chipping away at their Electoral College strongholds.

Washington-Price: That’s exactly right.

Sargent: OK, so you guys, the Fresh Start PAC—you guys are going up on the air in coming days, right? How much money are you putting in, and what’s the ad?

Washington-Price: This first tranche of ads that is coming out is about health care. It’s really hammering in on Annie Andrews’s kind of credentials and her fight when it comes to lowering health care costs in South Carolina. I think this first ad—and I’ll send you the article too, Greg—but we want to put about $2 million behind the first ad, and we’re still raising money. We’re hoping we get some more money.

Between me and you, I maybe shouldn’t announce this, and this might be breaking news, but we also have some testimonials from Republicans who have been lifelong Republicans who are breaking away from the party and voting for Annie Andrews, the first time voting for a Democrat. But they’re tired and they’re fed up.

Sargent: So these Republicans are going to be in these ads?

Washington-Price: Yeah. We have some testimonials with Republicans that are on camera, that are going to be in ads.

Sargent: Why don’t you give us one or two names? Nothing wrong with breaking news here.

Washington-Price: So one I can give you is—his name is Scott Singer. He was a former county councilman from Aiken County, which you could say is a mostly Republican county, or goes back and forth. It’s Joe Wilson’s district. But he was a lifelong Republican, and he is tired of the party. He has said that he’s voting for Annie Andrews this election cycle.

Sargent: And he’s going to be in your ad saying that.

Washington-Price: He’s going to be in our ad saying that.

Sargent: OK, well, listen, best of luck to you all. It’s going to be an uphill climb, but it’s certainly worth watching.

Washington-Price: It is. Greg, thank you so much for your time and having me on.

Why? For two reasons. First of all, the numbers, as eye-watering as they are, may be setting us up for disappointment, even if Democrats have a solid night next month. They simply seem too good to be true. According to polls and forecasts, the Democrats are virtually guaranteed to win back the House. Fairly progressive Democrats (Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Maine’s Troy Jackson) are leading in blue-leaning swing states. More centrist Democrats (North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff) are comfortably ahead in swing states that traditionally lean a bit red.

It gets better. Democrats seem poised to win several races in states that have been reliably red in the Trump era: Alaska and Texas Senate, Iowa governor, the Senate and gubernatorial contests in Ohio. They have an outside chance of winning the governorship in Texas and Senate seats in Iowa and Kansas too.

I’m not done. Democrats could win enough governorships and state legislatures that a majority of Americans live in states with a Democratic trifecta next year. A Black politician from Milwaukee (David Crowley) is favored to win the governorship in Wisconsin, overcoming long-standing resentment against the state’s biggest city. In Georgia, Keisha Bottoms has a real chance of becoming the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.

Twenty-one months ago, after Donald Trump won a second term, I would have been thrilled if just one or two of the things I enumerated above happened. Now, the polls suggest a blue wave that would even eclipse 2006 or 2018. If the polls are right, we are looking at a political earthquake akin to 2008, when America, including Indiana and North Carolina, chose a Black man to be president. Democrats winning statewide elections in Texas raises the prospect of the party being competitive in the state that delivers the most Electoral College votes (40) to Republicans, putting GOP prospects in presidential elections in peril. If El-Sayed wins, it will be even harder for centrist Democrats and Republicans to argue that a potentially transformative politician such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t be elected president.

Some data experts say that we should trust the polls; others argue that they might be inflating Democrats’ chances. In my view, polls are generally reliable, but they can’t predict the winner of a race that’s within three to five points—as many of these contests are.

I’ll admit it: I don’t have a data-based reason to doubt the polls. It just comes from covering U.S. politics for more than two decades and being a Black person in America. I will believe that a Democrat can carry Texas the moment that the Associated Press or one of the television networks officially declares that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico or gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa has won—and not a moment before. After all, a Democrat last won a Senate race or gubernatorial race in Texas in 1990. I worry that animus against Black women and Muslims is an understated barrier for Bottoms and El-Sayed, respectively. I worry that too many voters in the South both love Trump and hate Black people for Cooper or Ossoff to win by more than a few points. I worry that Maine’s voters can’t quit Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins, no matter how often she disingenuously claims to be deeply concerned by something Trump has done.

And honestly, to assume that the big blue wave that’s being projected won’t happen is probably better for my mental health. I was saddened when the 2016 and 2024 elections did not permanently force Trump out of politics and put a woman in charge of the country for the first time. I was dismayed at how close the swing states were in 2020, considering how terrible Trump’s presidency had been.

My advice for TNR readers and other liberals would be to assume that Democrats win 48 or 49 Senate seats, 225 House seats, and nothing major in Ohio or Texas. That’s not a prediction; it’s an exercise in setting expectations at a realistic but low level.

Here’s a second reason to be wary of the polls: They are creating expectations that the mainstream media might use against Democrats. In January 2025, if you told reporters at AP, The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and other centrist news outlets that Democrats were going to win 225 House seats and 49 Senate seats in November 2026, they might have been skeptical Democrats would do that well. In January, I wrote a piece that was titled “Amazingly, the Democrats Have a Shot at a Senate Majority,” reflecting how unlikely that seemed even nine months ago.

Now, polls and election forecasts based on those surveys are projecting a much stronger showing for Democrats. The “median outcome” of the election is 242 Democratic House seats and 52 in the Senate, according to FiftyPlusOne, an election site run by G. Elliott Morris and other alums of FiveThirtyEight. Other sites view it similarly: 235 Democrats in the House and 51 in the Senate (Decision Desk HQ); 232/52 (VoteHub); 234/52 (Split Ticket).

If Democrats fall short of these projections, even if they win 229 House seats and 50 in the Senate, I am quite confident the mainstream media will revert to its preferred approach to covering politics: centrism/false equivalence/balance/both sides/“independence.” Centrist news outlets will use headlines like “Voters Dislike Trump but Aren’t Sure About Democrats Either,” “Americans Hate Both Parties,” “American Voters Deliver a Mixed Verdict.”

This is nonsense, of course. Trump is an incredibly unpopular president, so disliked that Republicans are struggling to win in Texas. He is also an authoritarian figure bent on eroding democracy, including the freedom of the press. But the mainstream media is still eager to cast itself as above the fray, neutral, and certainly not opposed to a president trying to destroy its industry. If neither Talarico nor Hinojosa wins, the media will likely not cover this election as the decisive rejection of Trump that it almost certainly will be.

So for now, I’m taking the polls seriously but not literally, to borrow a formation from earlier in the Trump era. I am confident that Republicans will do worse in Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and other red states than usual. I am sure that some Democrats will win by larger margins in many swing states than seemed possible two years ago. But I will be delighted and surprised if there are Governors Bottoms, Crowley, and Hinojosa or Senators El-Sayed or Talarico. It could happen, though. The polls in 2026 look as rosy for Democrats as 2008. They were right back then. They could be right again.

This was my first time back in Ukraine for more than 30 years. I had previously come in Ukraine’s first year of independence in 1992. Back then, I had been invited to spend the year as a visiting professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which was opening its doors for the first time since Russian Czar Alexander I shuttered them in 1819. It was a time of great hope and aspirations for Kyiv Mohyla and for Ukraine, which was attempting to navigate its existence after centuries of czarist and Soviet rule. The same could be said for me and my fellow idealistic (primarily young) American and European lecturers: We had responded to the “people power” that swept Central and Eastern Europe at the time by volunteering to teach in universities across the region as a part of an organization called the Civic Education Project. This idealism was symbolized by Havel himself, who had transformed from dissident playwright to president of Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.

Now, in 2026, I came for two reasons: to give a commencement speech at Kyiv School of Economics, or KSE, one of Ukraine’s most dynamic higher education institutions, and to help oversee and teach in an educational program for advanced high school students called Language and Thinking (affectionately known as L&T) offered at KSE by Bard College, where I am acting president.

Bard runs L&T around the globe, from its main campus on Annandale-on-Hudson to seven prisons in New York state to our program at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. L&T is really the introduction to the liberal arts and sciences, involving a careful reading of texts and a variety of writing practices that emphasize the iterative process between ideas and the written word. Most of all, it is about voice and agency, helping students to understand that they have the capacity to develop and express their own perspectives and views, that they are empowered thinkers. It is, as I say in countries that offer more traditional education systems, the antidote to rote learning. One can imagine how powerful L&T can be for young people whose own voices are being crowded out by artificial intelligence and the endless noise of social media.

In the Ukraine iteration of L&T, students read everything from Antigone to the Ukrainian Constitution. In the classroom at KSE, what struck me was how the program offered a metaphor for many of the changes I have seen in Ukraine over these past three decades, a way of tracking the trajectory from Kiev, as it was known under Soviet rule, to Kyiv, which reflects the Ukrainian pronunciation and symbolizes independence and autonomy. When I was in Ukraine, just after independence, the region was still often referred to as fSU, former Soviet Union. The economy and culture still reflected the Soviet imprint, as well as centuries of Russian imperial rule.

Although the country was visibly at war following Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022, and ubiquitous phone apps rang regularly warning of drone and missile attacks, the streets of Kyiv were bustling with vibrant café and restaurant life, something totally absent while I was previously there and the country was in the midst of post-Soviet economic collapse. More importantly, Kyiv had become visibly Ukrainian, instead of a mix of Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian: The language I heard on the street and in the cafés was Ukrainian, not Russian, and the sense of patriotism, be it in the display of national symbols or the various forms of memorializing the war dead, was palpable.

In the early 1990s, I taught students who had been raised in the Soviet style. They felt that they would accelerate academically if they repeated what I, the professor, said, often in shockingly verbatim forms, offering long recitations of things I had said in class. It was extremely difficult for them to understand that I wanted to know what they thought. It just did not compute.

The students I taught this summer, many from Kyiv but also from frontline communities in the east and south, were remarkably different. These young people are the first generation shaped since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. They were unquestionably and unambiguously Ukrainian.

But they were also Ukrainians who experienced war on a daily basis. The course was in part a sobering search for normalcy that could be achieved by diving into texts. But this was not a simple escape or diversion. After just a couple of days, they were, like their country, confident in their views—their individual views—and determined to articulate them, even if they were a multivocal community.

Perhaps the most inspiring moment came when I taught Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” in which we interrogated something I have been thinking a lot about lately, which is “living in truth.” The essay is about pressures in post-1968 Czechoslovakia—that is, after the Soviets brutally put down the “Prague Spring” uprising—to, as it were, passively comport to and perpetuate the myths of the post-totalitarian order by becoming obedient agents of a hollow ideology.

That was not these students. For them, the daily realities of war are so present and raw that there is no space for artifice. Their engagement with social and political issues spoke to the heart of “living in truth,” which Havel described as “an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.” Their very act of participating in an educational program in the face of a massive assault by the Putin government that has attempted to impose a uniformity of thought and eviscerate any notion of academic freedom was itself an act of living in truth.

But their engagement was not simply an act of resistance. Their manifest nationalism and confidence in being Ukrainian did not mean that they were afraid to criticize the Ukrainian government: Many students were openly critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and sympathetic to anti-government protests that took place over the summer in response to the dismissal of young Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is viewed as the architect of Ukraine’s massively successful drone strategy.

I couldn’t help but notice, moreover, that they were embracing their freedoms in ways that reflect back to us our own reluctance to fight for those freedoms in the United States: the freedom to learn, the freedom to think for oneself, the freedom to disagree in the classroom and in the public square.

For me this was a remarkable turn. When I had originally gone to Ukraine as I was completing my doctorate at Oxford, I was full of youthful exuberance and arrogance as I was teaching students about things like human rights and rule of law. Now, I was being reminded both of the ways in which so many in America today, both individually and institutionally, and particularly in positions of leadership, are willing, as Havel said, to “live within a lie.”

What would Havel think of the top officials at Florida International University, the home of the Havel Center for Human Rights & Democracy, after they sanctioned students for standing in silent protest while wearing “ICE OFF FIU” T-shirts, charging that they violated policies prohibiting “expressive activities” inside campus buildings? What would he think of the academic institutions that have expressed enthusiasm for the different versions of the administration’s “compacts,” or that are choosing to wave the banner of neutrality enthusiastically in order to avoid punishment from the regime, just as the greengrocer, the central character in the Havel essay, did in posting the sign, “Workers of the world, unite”? Would he think that they were perpetuating, as the greengrocer had, the ruling party’s ideology?

The antidote to the melancholy that I felt in reflecting on the transformation that had taken place in my own country in the decades since I first visited Ukraine was situated in the infectious idealism of my student, the chief organizer of the course, Yana Lahoda. Yana is a rising senior at Bard who is from near Zaporizhzhia, where Russians still occupy the nuclear power plant where her father worked. She still speaks Russian with her parents, who now live in Germany. But she is determined to be part of the effort to build a new Ukraine. The L&T program is only the first step in her plans: When she graduates, she intends to return to build an early college in Ukraine as a part of an effort to jump-start what she hopes is a civically robust postwar Ukraine. For her, living in truth is not a choice but a reality that exists in every fiber of her existence.

Havel wrote of young people who were “given every opportunity to adapt to the status quo, to accept the principles of living with a lie and thus to enjoy life undisturbed by the authorities,” and yet who “decided on a different course.” Yana’s determination, in the face of a genuine existential threat, was a stark reminder of the power of idealism, the importance of education, and the fact that courage is not simply manifested in broad public gestures but in small acts of resistance. Acts that so often begin with writing and with thinking.

Now in his seventies, Fukuyama’s new retrospective inadvertently reveals that it’s the liberal democratic model that seems unready for the next century. Able to see the flaws in his system but unwilling to countenance the type of politics that might transcend them, Fukuyama has produced a book emblematic of a “centrism” still proudly fighting the last brushfires of the twentieth century long after the wildfires of the twenty-first have swept by them. Apparently meant as a kind of valedictory statement, In The Realm of the Last Man announces not just the latest phase of Fukuyama’s career but the exhaustion of the ideas that career rested on.

This career, as he reveals in the book’s opening vignette, began in California, where he first arrived to take up an internship at the Rand Corporation in 1978. That position was part of a quest to avoid what Fukuyama calls an “overdetermined outcome”: becoming an academic. “While I was growing up,” he writes, “I told myself I didn’t want to be a professor,” a path he rejected even after getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. The son of first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants, Fukuyama came from an academic family. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, was a congregationalist minister and sociologist who served on the faculty at the Chicago Theological Seminary and Penn State. His mother, Toshiko, herself the daughter of an economics professor and university president, had survived World War II in Japan before emigrating to the United States in 1949 to attend the University of Chicago.

Yoshio, his son writes, was a “committed liberal and pacificist,” the source of some tension as Francis drifted rightward during his college years under the mentorship of Allan Bloom (the classicist most famous for authoring The Closing of the American Mind). The elder Fukuyama had narrowly escaped internment by the U.S. government during the war thanks to a scholarship program that helped Japanese American students attend universities outside the military exclusion zones on the West Coast. His parents and siblings had not been so lucky, spending the entirety of the war unjustly incarcerated in camps in Colorado and Arkansas. Whether those experiences influenced his father’s views, Francis does not say; regardless, Yoshio “and his church were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.” Yoshio often suggested that his son had been “brainwashed” by right-wing professors, and during a visit to California in the 1980s wondered aloud whether Francis would ever leave the Department of Defense–aligned Rand and “get a real job” elsewhere.

Fukuyama would, eventually, become a professor like his father, the result of another transition in which Bloom played a key role. In 1988, while Fukuyama was working for the State Department, Bloom invited him to speak at the University of Chicago as part of a lecture series gloomily titled “The Decline of the West.” Fukuyama accepted, provided he could present a “more optimistic take.” His talk was called “The End of History?” and it was published in article form the following summer.

In the piece (which he later turned into a bestselling book), Fukuyama championed a new political order—that which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as Cold War tensions ebbed and the welfare states of the West staggered under the weight of rising oil prices and slow economic growth. The new order was a fusion of two insurgent sets of ideas, often called “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism.” The former responded to the declining Cold War by arguing for the U.S. to use its power to aggressively spread liberal democratic ideals across the world. The latter, meanwhile, proposed solving the economic crises of the period by gutting the welfare state to free the economy to innovate and grow.

Fukuyama, for his part, saw this moment as the end of a long process of human evolution, one spanning from the primitive societies of the Stone Age past to the advanced industrial economies of the twentieth century. This idea of human history as an evolutionary process was borrowed openly from Alexandre Kojève, a Russo-French philosopher famous on the continent for a series of lectures he gave on philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in the 1930s (and about whom Fukuyama had learned from Bloom). Building on Hegel, Kojève depicted history as a millennia-old battle for “recognition” between dominant groups—“masters”—and their subordinates—“slaves.” The masters would employ belief systems to justify their rule, while the slaves would, with time, develop new ideas that revealed the weaknesses in the masters’ system. The result of the conflict between the “thesis” of the master and the “antithesis” of the slave would be a period of conflict and confusion, before a new “synthesis” was born, fusing the old ideas with the new. This three-step process was destined to continue on repeat until a final structure emerged, one that equally distributed recognition between master and slave, removing the age-old sources of conflict by granting all parties the recognition they desired. Kojève believed just such an idea system had arrived with the emergence of liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—history had thus “ended,” not in the sense that there wouldn’t continue to be wars and historical events, but instead meaning humanity had reached its evolutionary end point.

Fukuyama’s career-making triumph was suggesting that the events of the late twentieth century indicated such an end might really be in the offing, pointing to Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political liberalization of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping’s contemporaneous opening of the Chinese economy, and a wave of democratization and economic liberalization in the global south. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to further confirm Fukuyama’s thesis, transforming an obscure State Department staffer into an intellectual celebrity.

Finally accepting his scholastic fate, he took up an endowed chair at George Mason University in 1996. The first of several academic posts (including later positions at Johns Hopkins and Stanford), it was the beginning of a long and successful career as an academic, consultant, and public thinker. The “end of history” idea, meanwhile, came to define the age, as a dominant United States loomed over a globe seemingly destined to transform into one vast mirror image of America.

More nuanced a scholar than many other neoconservatives and pro-market idealogues, Fukuyama emerged from all this as one of the most talented defenders of this new post–Cold War order, his very reticence in its support seemingly signaling his reliability. Never an orthodox neoliberal calling for the complete deregulation of the economy, for example, Fukuyama remained an ardent supporter of economic liberalization—usually finding other causes, like “social trust,” a concept he wrote about a great deal in the late 1990s, to explain problems others might have attributed to money’s machinations. He was also relatively wary of the use of military force abroad and yet still signed two open letters urging the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, one in 1998 and another, more significantly, in late September 2001.

It was with Iraq that things began to unravel. In private, Fukuyama was growing increasingly skeptical of what became George W. Bush’s March 2003 invasion of the country—hedging his bets in editorials and interviews over the course of 2002, suggesting that removing Saddam was justifiable but dangerous and that the U.S. should not proceed without U.N. support. He also reportedly warned, or cautioned, his friend and fellow neocon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, against the invasion in a classified briefing in early 2003. He took a clear public stand against the war, however, only in 2004, after it was too late.

“The problem,” as he admits in the book, “was psychological … not a matter of policy judgment.” Though Fukuyama “knew full well that the intervention was likely to lead to huge unintended consequences,” he felt “a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends” and allies like Wolfowitz, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, and the columnist Charles Krauthammer. By the following February—as the situation in Iraq worsened and the invasion’s supporters continued to insist the mission was a success—Fukuyama had had enough, determining that his “friends … had taken leave of reality.” He would denounce the war in the pages of The New York Times soon after.

Fukuyama later broke even more decisively with neoconservative thinking in his 2006 book, America at the Crossroads, and would endorse Barack Obama in 2008. By this point, not only had neoconservatism lost its shine due to the disaster in Iraq, but so too had neoliberalism, thanks to the Great Recession that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. As he writes in the memoir, “The twin failures of the war and of the financial system did a lot to discredit conservative ideas about the uses of military power and of free markets, mistakes for which America paid a huge price.”

Fukuyama deserves a great deal of credit for abandoning his previous positions once it was clear they were wrong—a rare enough trait in academia, as well as the punditocracy—but, as a widely respected scholar who apparently knew better, staying quiet about the war seems a bigger mistake than he acknowledges in these pages. He also further tests the reader’s tolerance for his mea culpas by describing the isolation he suffered after being cast out of neocon social circles—recalling a silent and “a painful ride up … in an elevator to a party” with Krauthammer and his wife, for example—right before admitting his break with the movement was “nothing like having your brains drilled out by an opposing militiaman, or losing your legs to an IED.” It’s an odd juxtaposition, however humble the intention.

On the whole, Fukuyama does not seem properly chastened by the events of the past two decades—mixing a strange complacency about the deeper problems confronting liberal democracy with attacks on straw-men versions of those who seek its reform.

These issues appear to stem from his continued attachment to the end of history thesis. In his mind, the biggest problems of the world in 2026—Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism draw most of his attention—are part of the tribulations of the “last man” of his title. The “last men” (and “last women”) are all of us living today in liberal societies. We, Fukuyama argues, are the “last” because we live in a time and place when history has ended, where all the big questions have already been answered. This, he suggests, is fundamentally unsatisfactory for many, because an inherent part of being human is in fact the desire to be part of history, to struggle for causes larger than oneself. “When the world is actually in pretty good shape,” he writes, and “there are no great causes worthy of risking one’s life,” people start to get restless. Thus, they pursue “struggle for struggle’s sake,” taking apart a perfectly good political order in the foolish pursuit of an impossible perfection. The primary culprits here for Fukuyama are “the extreme right and left.”

While he reserves most of his ire for the MAGA right, Fukuyama is also unwavering in lecturing members of the (so-called) radical left. Much of the analysis on this score is thin and unreasoned. Though Fukuyama admits that the left focuses on problems truly in need of fixing—like economic inequality, climate change, and “the plight of Palestinian civilians … in Gaza,” for example—he still thinks most activists are motivated primarily by boredom. Of students protesting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, he sniffs, “What they want is a break from their lives of steady but unheroic striving.” Ignoring the glaringly obvious differences between U.S. policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, he argues that if the protesters were serious about improving the world they would be “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia.”

In another sleight of hand, he proclaims that “virtually all progressive visions for an alternative to the current liberal order have been tried already,” or “have already been happily incorporated into present day social democratic welfare states.” (Never mind the work his ideological fellow travelers did to dismantle the midcentury welfare state decades ago.) Briefly acknowledging the desirability of a carbon tax, he also castigates “extreme environmentalists” and the very small “de-growth” movement, leaving the reader with the impression that the latter effectively characterizes the entirety of the environmentalist cause. On all these issues, he insists paternally, the real answer is not “radical change” but the “boring” work of “slow, steady … reform.” Who is going to bring about this reform if not the very people he is dismissing, and when and how it should be expected to arrive, are questions he leaves unanswered.

And herein lies the problem with the “end of history” as an idea: It’s an intellectual trap, limiting our ability to imaginatively confront the future. If the current form of liberal democracy is more or less the best we can hope for, then Fukuyama is right and no problem is worth too radical a reform. We must throw up our hands and simply wait for things to somehow, miraculously, get better—wait for the powers that be to have the spare time to fix up the small projects left unfinished in our otherwise well-founded post-historical home. Meanwhile, perhaps we can take up woodworking, one of the several hobbies (along with photography and flying drones) that Fukuyama describes in strange, avuncular asides that fill the book.

But as it is, the end of history thesis plainly fails to account for important features of our reality. As long as capital continues to dominate the worker, liberal society will be inherently unstable—as is the case today, thanks to four decades of neoliberal economic policy and the rampant inequality it created. End of history liberalism also hides another master-and-slave relationship that must be addressed: that between wealthy industrial states and those of the former colonized world. As long as the bond between affluence in the one and poverty in the other is obscured, the liberal synthesis will continue to generate destabilizing antitheses among the world’s poor and oppressed, in Gaza and elsewhere.

Finally, there is the dialectic between humanity and nature. The very idea of historical progress is premised on the flawed assumption that humanity has separated itself from its natural origins, that—as Kojève himself described it—human progress “creates … a non-natural World, a cultural historical human World” where “man lives an essentially different life from that of animals.” Such logic renders the environment a mere object for our disposal, an utterly plastic means to human ends, open to whatever purposes we seek to put it toward, whether they be rampant consumerism or launching rockets to the moon. Nature in 2026 is exposing that lie, forcing on us the recognition it deserves—whether as equal or master remains to be seen—flooding into our homes, melting our cities, and burning our fields.

Liberal democracy’s achievements should be cherished—yes—but they should not be embalmed. Reflecting on a long career tied to the idea, Fukuyama can perhaps still afford to live at the end of history. The rest of us cannot.

All that remains is for the House clerk to compile a list of new members from the certified winners of the November races. It is an administrative technicality, a rote task that has gone off largely without incident every two years since 1789.

At least it did before Donald Trump turned the Republican Party into an election-denying cult. Now it has become the latest tool in the GOP arsenal to overturn election losses. Following the Democrats’ triumph in November, House Speaker Mike Johnson replaced the nonpartisan House clerk with a MAGA loyalist. Citing allegations of election fraud, the new clerk announces that he will not accept the documents certifying Democratic wins in key races. As a result, the members-elect cannot take their seats. 

The Democratic National Committee unleashes an army of lawyers to challenge the move. But when the matter arrives before the Supreme Court, the Roberts majority, invoking the “political question doctrine,” rules that it cannot interfere in the internal operations of another branch.

And just like that, the Republicans have stolen the midterms.

According to election experts, this scenario, though unlikely, is entirely feasible. Worse, such a scheme might prove to be a dress rehearsal for the main event: a GOP gambit to overturn the 2028 presidential election. In 2020, Trump lost the election but tried to hang onto power regardless. Why would 2028 be any different?

Sure, Trump is barred from running for another term, but the Roberts majority might not see it that way. In any case, one would scarcely expect a different nominee to show more respect for the democratic process. That includes JD Vance. “If I had been vice president” in 2020, he once mused, “I would have told the states … that we needed to have multiple slates of electors”—a reference to an illegal scheme to keep Trump in office.

Freedom-loving people need to plan ahead to counter any Trumpian coup. Fortunately, there is an effective blueprint that we can follow.

The idea of the Trump administration successfully defying an election loss might seem fanciful. After all, these guys are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Perhaps they would try, but could they really pull it off?

They probably won’t. Even still, complacency is dangerous in the face of a cold-blooded autocrat who’s already challenged laws and defied norms willy-nilly. What Trump and his allies lack in brains, they make up for in power. He failed to reverse the 2020 election because the White House and federal bureaucracy were staffed by professionals who refused to go along with the plan.

That is no longer the case. The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.

Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.

Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too.

Political scientists have found that nonviolent rebellion is the most reliable path from dictatorship to democracy. Decades of research point to four steps that successful rebellions follow.

Consider Serbia, where a handful of students launched a movement called Otpor! (“Resistance!”) that brought down strongman Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. The first step was to get organized. Members set up chapters in dozens of towns, trained volunteers in nonviolent resistance, and forged links with labor unions, nongovernmental organizations, independent media, and opposition parties.

Second, they used the dictator’s repression against him. Instead of trying to avoid it, they harnessed the public outrage that it sparked. This backfire effect proved to be their best recruitment tool.

Eventually, Milošević forced through constitutional changes that allowed him to run for another term. Soon after, he called an early election. When the votes were counted, he had lost decisively. But he was not about to heed the will of the voters. The movement had to ramp up the pressure, but how?

Protests can be effective at signaling public support. But they rarely damage a regime on their own. So the third step was to diversify resistance methods. The rebels complemented their protests with a general strike that brought the country to a halt.

The fourth and final step was to sweep away the dictator’s pillars of support. For months, the movement had been courting police officers, officials, and other regime insiders. When hundreds of thousands converged on Belgrade on October 5, Milošević’s loyalists saw the writing on the wall and abandoned him in droves. Even the police stood aside. He had no choice but to concede.

It was a stunning feat. But it would have been much harder to pull off were it not for Otpor!’s efforts to maintain nonviolent discipline. Pitched street battles with police might have galvanized Milošević’s allies to close ranks rather than defect. Such violence could also have sapped public support for the rebellion, preventing the backfire effect from working.

If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.

When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding.

Second, they used the dictator’s repression against him. The sight of armed thugs manhandling children brought waves of new recruits into the resistance. By the end of January, local organizations had trained nearly 30,000 citizen-volunteers to monitor federal agents.

Third, they deployed a range of nonviolent resistance methods, including protests, boycotts, and the tracking of ICE agents.

As for step four—sweeping away the dictator’s pillars of support—Trump and his goons took care of that by themselves. The tragic killings of two resisters, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, proved to be a tipping point. Public anger over the shootings prompted numerous allies to break from the president. A leading GOP gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota dropped out of the race. Republican members of Congress spoke out against the roundups.

With the pressure mounting, Trump was forced to beat a public retreat. Gestapo enthusiast Greg Bovino was shown the door. Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem was relieved of operational responsibility and eventually sacked.

In the coming years, Americans might have to replicate this feat on a bigger stage. Only this time, the goal will be to reverse a stolen election. The four steps above offer a road map to victory. But the work starts now. If Serbia and Minnesota proved anything, it is this: The people determine whether the dictator rules—not the other way around.

In the latest installment of Senior Moment or Shocking Admission?, the president offered an outrageous defense against anyone complaining that his so-called “six-week war” had stretched on for more than seven months.

“We really ended it as soon as the B2 bombers hit, because that was the end of their nuclear [program], that was 95 percent of the reason we did it. Maybe 100 percent,” he said.

Trump was referring to a series of strikes using “bunker buster” bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. That was a full eight months before he ordered attacks in March 2026.

Clearly, those strikes didn’t actually end the war in the Middle East.

This particular comment is concerning in light of the Trump administration officials who have previously contradicted Trump’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program presented any imminent threat to national security.

If Trump’s initial bombing campaign had satisfied his desire for violence, then 22 U.S. servicemembers would likely not have been killed, hundreds more would not have been injured, and the Department of Defense wouldn’t have tried to cover it up. Multiple U.S. bases in the Middle East would still be standing, and the DOD wouldn’t have tried to cover that up, too. Hundreds of Iranian civilians, including dozens of school children, would still be alive. A U.S. battleship would never have been deployed for hundreds of days, leading to a number of attempted suicides. The Pentagon would not have spent more than $45 billion, and the U.S. military weapons’ stockpile would not have shrunk to dangerous levels.

If only Trump’s pissing contest with Iran had somehow ended before it ever started. Yes, if only.

In a two-minute video posted on social media, the supposedly nonpartisan agency decried “democratic socialist leaders” for calling to defund the police. The video included footage of multiple Democrats calling to defund the police, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, current and former Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar, and, of course, El-Sayed, who is running for office in November’s midterm elections.

“Not reform. Defund the police as policy,” the video’s narration stated. “As the path they said would keep you safer. In the cities that led the charge, the street told a different story. What followed was a complete failure.” There is little data that supports this, and crime rates have been in decline for years.

The video praised Patel’s leadership, and touted a major increase in the arrest of violent criminals. It’s worth noting that Patel has reportedly instituted a policy of double-counting these arrests with those made by other law enforcement agencies, and has faced criticism for his disastrous leadership.

Federal law clearly prohibits the use of government funds for campaign purposes, partisan political messaging, and propaganda. A wildly inaccurate attack ad against a Democratic candidate would more than count under all three of these categories—and it’s more than a little ironic that the FBI’s latest video preaching law and order likely violated federal law. But under the Trump administration, it’s clear that nothing will be done.

Recently, the Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections. In order to make and air those videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Defense firm Andruil Industries is announcing that it is building a two-million-square-foot submarine manufacturing facility in Sparrows Point, Maryland, a deal that Moore helped put together and that is expected to create thousands of jobs. Trump is visiting the site and speaking about the investment on Tuesday and is barring Moore from speaking, the governor told The Baltimore Banner.

“That’s correct,” Moore said to reporters following a debate with his Republican gubernatorial opponent, Dan Cox. “I will not be there later on today. This was going to be a deal that we helped break. This is going to be the largest private investment that we have seen in over a decade inside the state of Maryland.”

“If the president of the United States wants to bring the circus in town and tell me that I’m not allowed to speak, despite the fact we were the ones that helped bring the deal, then I will let the circus be conducted while I go back to the work of the people of Maryland,” Moore added.

An unnamed White House official told CNN that Moore was “graciously” invited as a guest but didn’t deny that Trump was blocking the governor from speaking.

“It’s unfortunate that the Governor is now making a multibillion-dollar announcement about himself by throwing a tantrum over a federal initiative that will bring sorely needed jobs back to his state thanks to President Trump,” the official said.

Other Maryland Democrats, such as Representative Johnny Olszewski Jr., whose district encompasses the new facility, were scheduled to speak but pulled out after news that Moore wouldn’t be allowed to make remarks.

Trump has never been a fan of Moore, uninviting him from a bipartisan dinner that included nearly every other state governor, accusing him of committing electoral fraud, and blaming him for a sewage spill in the Potomac River. Meanwhile, Moore is leading his Trump-supporting Republican opponent, Dan Cox, in polls for November’s election.

Inside Washington

Maine’s 2nd congressional district, covering 92 percent of the state, is the largest congressional district east of the Mississippi River. And right now, the largely rural, white population is getting ready to choose between two candidates: Democrat Matt Dunlap, who is a progressive and an avid hunter, or Republican and former two-term Governor Paul LePage, who once said “tell them to kiss my butt” when asked about criticism from the NAACP. 

In the race to replace Democratic Representative Jared Golden, who isn’t seeking reelection, polling is mixed. Dunlap, a member of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s, or DCCC, Red to Blue program supporting candidates in close races, was up six points in a University of New Hampshire poll from late September. Other surveys, however, show a dead heat or LePage slightly ahead.

On Monday, Dunlap held a health care–focused press conference, amid a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the Trump administration’s war on Iran and tariff policies. These issues are a particularly powerful weapon against LePage, who vetoed Medicaid expansion six times as governor and called last year’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act “the greatest thing that can happen to the Maine people” (LePage was referring to the bill’s “no tax on tips” provision, but the legislation also cut Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion).

Dunlap said that the cost of health care is one of the main issues he’s heard about from Mainers. In a conversation with The New Republic, he described a conversation with a resident who was considering selling their home to afford health care costs and another person whose insurance costs went from $560 to $2,700 per month when Affordable Care Act subsidies expired in December.

Mainers are also worried about the cost of gas and heating oil, which could hurt LePage like it hurts every other Republican candidate in 2026. Maine is more reliant on heating oil than any other state in the country, and prices have skyrocketed this year. “The first frost warning for much of the state is tomorrow night, maybe tonight,” said Mark Brewer, the chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Maine, which is located in the second district. “It’s cold here. Winters are long here.”

LePage has tried to distance himself somewhat from President Trump’s agenda. He came out against Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods and has emphasized his focus on affordability as governor. The district is historically conservative, and voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot. But, said Amy Fried, a retired professor of political science at the University of Maine, “This district is one where people are OK with splitting their tickets.” She explained that, in election years past, it wasn’t unusual to see houses with signs for Trump, GOP Senator Susan Collins, and Democratic Representative Jared Golden together in one yard. “Or pretty much any combination you could think of,” she added.

Republicans in past elections have typically portrayed their opponents as out-of-touch leftists. So far, LePage has struggled to apply that playbook to Dunlap. “He doesn’t look like a wild-eyed radical in any way,” said Fried of Dunlap. “His personality is extremely even-keeled, and a friend of mine said the other day that he looks like an insurance salesman.” 

Asked about LePage recently telling Fox News Digital that the race is about “common sense versus crazy,” Dunlap seemed unfazed: “That’s what they say when they don’t have anything else to throw at you,” he told The New Republic. “MAGA Republicans,” Dunlap said, “are very good at demonizing and bringing up the wedge [issues] about the woke agenda and the Democratic Socialists of America.” But, he added, “I’m less susceptible to that because I hadn’t heard of the Democratic Socialists of America until we heard about the Mamdani campaign.”

Dunlap has also played up his experience as a fisherman and hunter. He’s a founding board member of the Maine Youth Fish and Game Association, and the former executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. One ad shows him fishing, boating, hunting, and shooting a rifle. At the end of the video, he puts down the gun and turns to the camera, saying: “I’ve always defended our Second Amendment rights, and in Congress, I’ll do the same.”

“You can’t question his bona fides on outdoors kind of stuff, or guns,” said Brewer. “He can go toe-to-toe with any Republican on those issues.” Golden, who won this district four times, is a Marine Corps veteran who has similar credibility on guns, an important issue in the district.

Both Brewer and Fried echoed what polls have suggested: This is a tight race that could go either way. Brewer said that much could hinge on the support that Dunlap gets from national Democrats in the next month. He pointed to the DCCC’s apparent hesitancy to add him to the Red to Blue program—Dunlap beat out the DCCC’s preferred candidate in June, but wasn’t added to the program until late August—as a potential issue. “The support still, to me, doesn’t seem like what it would be, or what it could be, or maybe should be in this tight of a race,” he said. “I think he could use some more money.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Early voting is now in progress across multiple states, having started on Monday in Maine, California, Nebraska, and Montana (although there it’s technically called a “late registration” period for absentee voting). New Mexico, Indiana, Wyoming, and Ohio begin on Tuesday, and Arizona starts on Wednesday. Early voting and early absentee voting (differentiated by whether a ballot is cast directly into a ballot counter) has been underway in Illinois and Minnesota for weeks. Several other states join next week. Pennsylvania technically doesn’t have early in-person voting, but it actually sort of does, since you can show up, get a mail-in ballot, and then hand it back. Voting rights advocates have typically urged people to vote early if possible, in part for convenience and to avoid lines, and in part so that there’s time to sort things out if there’s a problem. On Saturday, President Trump urged Republicans to vote early or by mail—measures he has previously opposed and tried to restrict.

As key Senate and House races in Texas, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, and more continue to dominate headlines, fewer people are watching California. But over the weekend, Bernie Sanders stopped by California’s conservative Central Valley to give Democrat Randy Villegas a boost in his attempt to unseat David Valadao in the race for California’s 22nd district. Ever since Villegas’s victory over moderate, DCCC-backed Jasmeet Bains in the primary, part of the narrative in this race has focused on whether Villegas is too far left for this “historically conservative, low-turnout area,” as CalMatters puts it. But as Sanders’s visit shows, Villegas isn’t running away from his progressivism. Dems have been fixated on beating Valadao for years, so if a progressive is finally the one to do it, it’ll be quite the story. While public polling in the 22nd has been almost nonexistent this cycle, a Democratic PAC poll in June showed Villegas up four points.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Natural Resources Defense Council issued a statement on Suncor v. Boulder, the big climate case the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for on Monday. Suncor Energy is asking SCOTUS to throw out the suit from the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, over the devastating damages of climate change, including from the Marshall fire in 2021. “Coal, oil, and gas companies have made trillions of dollars in profits from the sale of fuels that are driving the climate crisis. They have knowingly misled the public for decades” and lobbied to delay climate policies, said NRDC senior vice president for environmental health Matthew Tejada. “Now a staggering bill is coming due.… The fossil fuel industry has a responsibility to help pay for the damage its products have caused.”

On Wednesday at 4 p.m., the Center for Strategic and International Studies will host a webcast looking back at the anthrax postal attacks 25 years ago. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs will moderate a discussion between Wendi Kuhnert of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former GOP Senator Richard Burr.

On Thursday, the Institute for Policy Studies will hold its 50th annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards, honoring Unidos MN and La Liga Sindical Obrera Mexicana for their work mobilizing “communities” to “defend their rights.” Unidos MN gained widespread recognition training people to document ICE abuses in Minnesota, and in recent months has shifted to getting out the vote for the midterm elections. La Liga, also known as the Mexican Workers’ League, is a relatively recent independent union—as opposed to the dominant so-called “protection unions” in Mexico that tend to favor employers’ interests.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Aaron Eisenberg, political director for United Auto Workers Region 9A

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?
A: Region 9A represents 50,000 active and retired members across New York, New England, and Puerto Rico. After notching some amazing victories in New York this year, right now, our priorities are electing our former member Troy Jackson to the U.S. Senate in Maine, training our members to run campaigns and run for office, passing local and state legislation to strengthen worker power, winning unemployment for striking workers, and making it easier to unionize.

Q: The UAW backed insurgent—and ultimately victorious—candidates like Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York primaries this year, while many established unions supported their opponents. What did the UAW understand about this political moment that others missed?

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

With Trump having visited Nebraska: A Nebraska Republican senator once defended a Nixon Supreme Court nominee criticized as mediocre by saying: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” Who was he? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

According to his arrest report, 46-year-old Danilo Alves Silva was aggressively pacing between polling locations and interacting with people who seemed to be “in fear” of him at Miami-Dade College’s Kendall Campus. He was wearing an ICE costume that he allegedly purchased on Amazon, complete with a blue “ICE raid jacket,” an ICE hat, sunglasses, jeans, and tactical boots, according to the arrest report. His face was covered with a camouflage mask and he was speaking into a handheld radio.

When confronted by detectives and sheriff’s deputies from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, Silva said that he was wearing the costume “so that I can come here to see people’s reactions.”

“The people were gathered and were clearly in fear that, as they portrayed it, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE agent was interfering with their election, possibly deporting individuals,” the arrest report reads.

Silva claimed that he himself was a Brazilian voter and he changed into the ICE costume after casting his ballot, apparently just to see what would happen. To make matters worse, he attempted to bribe law enforcement officers after his arrest, telling them, “I will get you paid if you let me go.”

Brazil’s closely watched presidential election is seen by many as a referendum on President Trump’s influence in South America, pitting right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of disgraced Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, against leftist incumbent Lula da Silva. The election will move to a runoff in October.

This arrest comes amid widespread anxiety that ICE or other federal law enforcement officials at the polls may interfere in voters’ ability to cast their ballots on America’s Election Day, less than a month away. FBI Director Kash Patel himself hasn’t ruled out sending the bureau’s agents to voting locations in November, ostensibly to prevent “violations of the law,” though their presence would more likely frighten and intimidate voters. Impersonators like Silva could have the same effect.

Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are asking what happened to the “18-karat gold ring encrusted with 321 diamonds and 75 gemstones that the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) gifted to President Trump,” in a letter addressed to the director of presidential gifts, the head of the General Services Administration, and the archivist of the United States.

“To date, we are not aware of any public reporting indicating the current location of the ring,” Warren and Blumenthal wrote in the letter, first reported by Newsweek. The AWDC, which represents the diamond trading industry in Antwerp, Belgium, delivered the ring to the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, a few weeks before the White House announced that European diamonds would be exempt from tariffs.

Warren and Blumenthal said when they asked the AWDC if the gift was a bribe to Trump, they were told it was a gift to the American people, not the president. The organization denied any connection between the tariff exemption and the ring, estimated to be worth close to $30,000, in a statement in August.

“The discussion about U.S. import ‌tariffs was entirely separate from [the gifted ‌ring],” the organization said.

In July, the White House claimed the ring had not been presented to Trump, the senators wrote. Federal law states that gifts given to the president by anyone other than a foreign government have to be screened, categorized, and evaluated by the White House Gift Office.

“If a gift is made to the President personally, it may be retained by the President, while those made out to the government of the United States are cataloged and distributed to the appropriate government agency,” Blumenthal and Warren’s letter states. “The circumstances in which AWDC gifted this ring, and the lack of clarity about its disposition, raise significant questions about whether the President has in fact accepted the ring as part of a quid pro quo agreement to reduce diamond tariffs.”

Trump has a history of taking gifts that are ethically questionable at best, like that luxury private jet from the government of Qatar. His lack of transparency could mean that the ring has been hidden away in the White House or one of his estates.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, the U.S. leader claimed that “what’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration.”

“This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!” Trump wrote.

But there’s no evidence for that. Since September 17, students, parents, and teachers in 40 French cities have collectively closed hundreds of high schools in protest of poor classroom conditions and deteriorating schools, demanding smaller class sizes and better funding for the country’s educational system.

Since then, portions of the nationwide demonstration have directed some of the anger toward police brutality and the racism underlying it. Protesters have been spotted with signs reading “ACAB,” an anti–law enforcement slogan that stands for “All cops are bastards,” and “We are all antifascists.” Others have been spotted with signs expressing anger at France’s government, as well as the National Rally, the country’s far-right party.

Immigration has not been a part of the conversation in France—but that hasn’t stopped far-right American thought leaders from weaponizing the protests for their own political gain stateside.

Ex-InfoWars host Alex Jones, who still owes Sandy Hook victims $1.4 billion for claiming the school shooting never happened and instead was staged by child actors, shared images of people on fire during the protests last week, falsely insisting that the demonstrations were a “racial uprising against the indigenous whites” in France.

In another post, Jones said that there were “dead bodies everywhere” as a result of the protests. In truth, zero deaths have been reported—although one student in Lens reportedly lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade fired by riot police, according to Al Jazeera.

Fox News host Tomi Lahren suggested that the protests should be a “cautionary tale” for Americans, fabricating a connection between the student protests and a supposed problem with diversity.

“This is something we’re learning from Europe, and we would be wise to learn from Europe: They decided they wanted to have open borders,” Lahren said on-air Saturday. “When you let so many people come into your country, leech off of your system, then the people who are from there are going to at some point get upset.”

But the conservative perspective appears to be completely divorced from or entirely uninformed by reality—at least according to the people present in the streets.

“Young people are worried about their future, and we can understand them,” Mickaël Sauvage, a 50-year-old aerospace worker and union member who attended the protests, told The New York Times Tuesday. “The trap is that the government is pushing them to violence, so that public opinion will turn against them and their demands won’t be heard.”

Murdock is stepping down after 18 years at the federal agency because, as he wrote in a bombshell resignation letter obtained by The Guardian and Public Domain, “We are headed in the wrong direction.” A self-described conservative Christian, Murdock makes it clear in his resignation letter that the Trump administration’s impact on the Interior Department, and its blatant disregard for environmental regulation, has gone too far.

“Simply going fast and breaking things is not, in my view, the solution,” Murdock wrote. “Flooding the zone with shit is a strategy for producing a shitty country.”

Murdock went on to list actions outside the Interior Department that most concerned him, both as a citizen and an attorney: “Masked federal agents; the abandonment of Afghan allies; pardons and payouts for rioters and those who supported them; the rapid dismantling of USAID; our military likely committing war crimes; plus, a president who demeans the dead and sees himself as Jesus comprise a partial list of the instances that have left my mouth agape.”

The longtime lawyer also cited specific experiences he had over the course of his career. He was especially concerned by a statement from Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, who announced to the public that the Trump administration was “upholding the highest environmental standards” soon after completing a large oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration explicitly bypassed federal regulations in the Endangered Species Act, Murdock wrote, and Giacona lied about it with impunity. “I have seen my supervisors behave in ways that I would never have expected,” Murdock wrote.

In a response statement, a spokesperson for the Interior Department reaffirmed the agency’s devotion to Trump’s agenda. “One former employee’s personal disagreement with the Department’s policies does not transform lawful policy decisions into an ‘assault on the rule of law,’ nor does his inflammatory rhetoric make his opinion accurate,” the spokesperson said. “The Department stands firmly behind its work to implement President Trump’s agenda consistent with federal law.”

Murdock is the latest in a string of federal officials resigning in protest against the Trump administration. The Interior Department alone lost thousands of workers following Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades last year.

“I walk away from the stable salary and benefits of a government job and my retirement likely becomes less lucrative and more complicated,” Murdock wrote. But that calculation is worth it, he wrote—“I will preserve my integrity. Thankfully, the arithmetic is easy.”

The Associated Press spoke to a group of nine service members who all claim that the U.S. military’s medical system failed them after they were injured in the deadly attack on March 1.

Army Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Lincón, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered extensive injuries from shrapnel, including to his left vertebral artery, which put him at risk for a stroke. However, his injuries were not considered serious enough to get him admitted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Instead, he was dismissed to the Army barracks and instructed to schedule outpatient appointments.

“I was just kind of on my own, at least it felt like that,” Lincón told the AP. He underwent weeks of specialized outpatient care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington. Months later, he is still struggling to receive traumatic injury benefits under the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance.

Another service member, Major Stephen Ramsbottom, said he waited over four months to receive MRI results after he had shrapnel removed from his head. “I’ve had to build my own case for everything,” Ramsbottom told the outlet. “It’s very frustrating.”

While some of the most injured service members were evacuated within two days of the attack, others weren’t so lucky.

One group was not evacuated out of Kuwait for 10 days after the attack, including Chief Warrant Officer 4 Rodney Bearman, who had shrapnel embedded in his face and legs. When the soldiers were eventually evacuated, they were strapped to the floor of a cargo plane and taken to Germany. When the group arrived, Bearman said he learned that the military had not documented them as wounded in combat, so they would not receive medical treatment at Landstuhl. Bearman told the AP they were not documented as wounded in combat due to a coding error.

“Never did I think that if I was wounded that these things would happen,” said Bearman. “Some sacred trust that I thought would never be broken was broken.”

The military also failed to provide timely evaluations of the soldiers. Some soldiers told AP they they only learned they had traumatic brain injuries after they returned back to the United States. Many of the troops who spoke to AP did not know the severity of their own TBIs.

“It’s disappointing but not surprising,” said Dr. James Kelly, chief medical scientist at the Invisible Wounds Foundation, a group that studies brain injuries in the military. “In a war scenario, it goes on a fair bit.”

It seems that the Department of Defense’s failing medical system is the system working as it was designed: The Pentagon has shuttered large military hospitals in the Middle East and regularly redeploys troops after they receive a mild TBI diagnosis.

The Pentagon downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that only five service members had been seriously wounded. The day after it happened, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

Trump officials have insisted that U.S. citizens are not at risk under the president’s agenda. “We have said it a million times: ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens,” former DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement last October.

But that was a lie. A ProPublica story published Tuesday tracked every instance of an immigration agent holding a U.S. citizen during the second Trump administration.

They found 506 such cases, including at least 70 children and teenagers, and more than 100 Americans who were detained after federal agents questioned their citizenship status—nearly all of whom were people of color. ProPublica acknowledged that this total is likely an undercount.

At least 63 Americans were detained while they were recording and documenting their arrest, and 36 were refused the right to contact their lawyers or family for more than a day. Roughly a dozen U.S. citizens were deported, according to the report. Most of them were children.

“Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed,” ProPublica noted.

The nonprofit newsroom’s findings call into question practically every public assurance DHS has made. Instead, it’s become increasingly clear that federal immigration agents have run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution as they face mounting pressure from the Oval Office and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to deport as many people as possible.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Miller was fundamental in crafting some of the more draconian policies of Donald Trump’s first term, including separating families at the border, terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, and the executive orders that amounted to Trump’s Muslim ban.

In May 2025, Miller issued another tyrannical order to his ICE underlings: a minimum quota of 3,000 arrests per day. “President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day,” Miller told Fox News at the time.

But that goal proved unsustainable, particularly after reports began to circulate that ICE agents had never been so miserable. Agents complained that the massive quota pushed them to detain noncriminal immigrants. The Justice Department walked back Miller’s directive in August that year, though even the loosened reins didn’t stop agents from arresting dozens of citizens.

During Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, DHS pledged that ICE had “significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed,” noting that there would be “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens.” Something entirely different happened on the ground: At the height of the federal encroachment, agents detained more than 120 citizens across the state, according to the ProPublica report.

Darius Reeves, who ran ICE offices around the East Coast for roughly eight years before he retired in 2025, told ProPublica that he had “never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years.”

“It’s an embarrassment,” Reeves said.

A former supervisory intelligence analyst in the bureau’s field office in Los Angeles, Jill Fields, made a formal complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s response to the protests around federal buildings last year, NBC News reports.

After President Trump saw a TikTok video of people using megaphones to alert the public about immigration agents, their legal rights, and the legal requirement of judicial warrants, he ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate those organizers, according to the complaint. A person whose name was redacted in Fields’s letter told her that “the President wants this investigation.”

The protests came in response to stepped-up ICE activity across Los Angeles early last year. Fields’s complaint states that the FBI’s L.A. agents were pulled from active drug cartel cases to provide “optics” and “make a show for the president,” in the words of one of her supervisors.

When Fields spoke to a senior bureau official who dealt with privacy and civil liberties issues, that agent shared her concerns but said she planned to resign. Fields would later resign herself after she was removed from leading three programs, which she believes was retaliation. The FBI created a chilling effect within the workforce” and “signaled to other employees that raising constitutional or legal concerns could carry professional consequences,” Fields wrote.

The Justice Department called Fields’s complaint politically motivated and said that the Constitution does not protect violence, even though her letter only mentioned investigation of peaceful protesters.

“Under President Trump, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously uphold the First Amendment rights of all Americans and restore the rule of law,” a DOJ spokesperson told NBC News. “The DOJ and FBI have a responsibility to investigate any potential violations of federal law, and conspiracies to impede federal law enforcement and assaults on federal officers are against the law.”

Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to charge protesters in Los Angeles only resulted in dropped cases, and his decision to send federal troops to the city was shot down in federal court. But Trump wasn’t deterred from ramping up immigration enforcement in other cities across the country, such as Minneapolis and Chicago, and he continues to press on with his mass deportation efforts, defying the Constitution and federal courts every day. It remains to be seen if Democrats will put a stop to his policies if they take control of Congress after the midterms.

According to a DOJ press release published Monday, the department has filed “denaturalization actions” against these individuals after they were accused of “serious offenses,” including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.” The press release goes on to list the names, ages, countries of origin, and alleged crimes that each foreign-born citizen committed.

This move comes in the final months of a year that the president has spent doggedly pursuing his mass deportation agenda, which has included expanding denaturalization efforts so that no one born outside of the U.S.—not even those with legal status—feels safe. Reporting from The New York Times in April revealed that the Department of Justice was targeting 384 naturalized Americans from whom it wanted to revoke citizenship, an attempt to denaturalize Americans at a level not seen since the early nineteenth century. A DOJ official at the time told the Times that the department’s April effort was only “the first wave.”

“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Monday. “From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders.”

“Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate added in the release. “This administration will continue to pursue the largest denaturalization effort in department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship. Our message is clear: The United States will not tolerate deception in the naturalization process.”

This is indeed a massive escalation in the Trump administration’s denaturalization crusade. In comparison, an average of just 15 denaturalization cases were filed per year from 2017 to 2025.

The 40 foreign-born American citizens now in danger of losing their citizenship originally came from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Haiti, Nepal, and Ghana. For the millions of naturalized Americans living in the U.S. today, the message is clear: Your citizenship may not be safe.

Trump invited a very special guest onstage at his rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Monday night to deliver an executive order aimed at addressing the elevated fuel prices sparked by his war against Iran.

“So, tonight I’m going to sign a historic executive order to officially waive the off-road requirement and allow anyone to purchase tax-free red-dye diesel for any reason,” Trump said. “And I’d like to ask Natalie to come out. Natalie, come out! Bring it out here!”

As the president’s grinning blonde aide walked onto the stage, the crowd cheered wildly. After signing the document, Trump handed it back to Harp, patting her on the shoulder. As she departed the stage, the president looked back, just to ogle her one last time.

“She reminds me of, like, The Price is Right. ‘Thank you, Natalie! Come on!’ This perfect person comes up, hands it, walks up—we should go on television with this show, right?” Trump said.

Trump’s comment comparing Harp to a model only deepens assertions that the two have a wildly inappropriate working relationship. As Trump’s “human printer,” Harp has become the de facto gatekeeper to the president of the United States. In turn, Harp seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with the president’s approval. Her own writing reveals that Harp views Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead.

It was only two months ago that the White House raged over the speculation about Trump’s relationship to his 35-year-old assistant. Now the president doesn’t seem the least bit committed to putting those rumors to bed.

What things does Sam Altman think are bad? He offered a few examples during a two-part interview with Vanity Fair published this week. Altman called it a “bad thing” for kids to be “glued to a touchscreen of some sort scrolling through brain rot short form video,” and said he would limit his own kids’ access to technology. People using LLMs to “create novel pathogens” would also be bad, he asserted. When Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci asked him to weigh in on a recent New York Times op-ed by journalist Laura Reiley—whose daughter committed suicide shortly after speaking to ChatGPT—an OpenAI publicist attempted to intervene. Altman eventually answered the question, and equivocated on whether it is good or bad for people experiencing a mental health crisis to turn to an LLM. “This is just like, this is new,” he said. “And the fact that someone in a moment of need that maybe can’t get help or isn’t willing to talk to a therapist can get some help here. Clearly people think there’s a version of this that is good. There are also clearly versions of it that are bad.”

As Altman has made clear in these and other interviews, however, he thinks it would be very bad for governments to regulate his industry in a way that suppresses innovation. He explained to Guiducci that he’s driven by the belief that putting powerful LLMs “in the hands of everyone and giving people a legitimate new superpower relative to I think what any of us could imagine a few years ago will do tremendously more good than bad.” The upshot here is that Altman would like the public to trust OpenAI to judge when the good is outweighing the bad. And although the “goods” of LLM development remain largely speculative—like curing cancer and granting wishes—the bads continue to pile up.

OpenAI faces a growing mountain of legal risks over incidents of its products hacking into government agencies around the world, not to mention providing advice to mass shooters, as Florida’s attorney general’s office has alleged. Nearly every company that’s developing large language models—OpenAI, Nvidia, SpaceX, Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet—has contracted with a Pentagon that’s been proudly killing fishermen in Latin America, and that continues to wage an illegal war on Iran. While the self-styled good guys at Anthropic declined to work with the military several months back, the company hasn’t balked at building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists. Silicon Valley executives have largely dismissed concerns that the data centers fueling their technologies threaten everything from local aquifers to electricity rates, and have seemed relatively unconcerned about the ways that LLM-generated slop is rapidly distorting people’s ability to think and reason independently.

The trouble with trusting AI companies to decide what’s good and what’s bad is that, like other CEOs, Altman and his colleagues have a financial interest in the answers to these moral questions. There are obvious commercial upsides for the executives in continuing to portray their companies (their “labs,” as they like to call them) as upstanding research entities, and mere stewards of a fundamentally mysterious, powerful, and inevitable technology. But they have just as much to gain from the public conversation about LLMs orbiting around the question of whether individual CEOs are good people. It doesn’t really matter one way or the other. They run large and powerful companies that sell products and have no legal obligation to the public good. Those companies appear to be committing crimes, which they could be tried for, using laws that already exist. As far off as real enforcement and regulation might seem, such laws are the only things that will keep the rest of us from being subject to their lousy ethics.

Former Department of Justice official Ed Martin revealed the meeting to host Eric Bolling on the conservative network Real America’s Voice Monday, saying that Trump had met with Peters about two hours earlier.

“Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans,” Martin said.

Peters was the Mesa County clerk and recorder, a position that put her in charge of local elections, including polling logistics, candidate paperwork, voter registration, and processing ballots. After the 2020 election, she swallowed the MAGA conspiracy theory that the election was rigged through voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems.

That led her to give a security badge to a fellow election conspiracist, Conan Hayes, who used the access to copy the hard drive of a voting machine while Peters ensured security cameras were turned off. The data was turned over to MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell.

For her efforts, Peters was convicted of election tampering and sentenced to nine years in prison. Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis caved to pressure from Trump in May and ultimately commuted her sentence. Since then, she has basked in positive attention from right-wing media, repeating her claims of voter fraud and asking Trump for a job.

Monday’s visit was Peters’s second time at the White House, as she was invited to meet with Trump in June.

“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at the time. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

Of course, Peters found no proof of election fraud, which raises concerns about the supposed midterm plans the president wanted to discuss with her. On Monday, Martin claimed they discussed how Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in August “that election voting machines use parts from China and Russia and foreign places and are therefore compromised.” It appears that Trump is taking the word of a convicted election fraudster and trying to mess with November’s elections.

The confession came on the back of an insult toward Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Peltola, who served as one of the state’s representatives from 2022 to 2025.

“Her sole job was to support Alaskans in the House of Representatives. Yet she couldn’t be bothered to show up for one in five votes,” Vance said.

“I was a senator for all of two years. It’s not that hard of a job,” he continued. “You show up. You fight for your people. At a bare minimum, just show up and cast your vote.”

During another portion of the campaign stop, Vance shared an exchange he had with former senator and current State Secretary Marco Rubio, in which he effectively chalked up his current role to the efficacy of conservative news pundits.

“Marco said, there are two kinds of guys in the United States Senate,” the vice president recalled. “There are the guys who want to go on TV and earn a lot of credibility for themselves, and there are guys who get things done.

“I said, ‘Marco, first of all, don’t criticize the people who show up on TV,’” Vance said. “That made me vice president of the United States.”

The trip, which constituted Vance’s first visit to Alaska, was in support of Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Nick Begich, both of whom were endorsed by Donald Trump.

Both Vance and Trump are expected to stay on the campaign trail for the next few weeks as the executive branch leaders attempt to prop up their struggling party members ahead of midterms. Trump, for his part, is expected to attend rallies for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3.

That will effectively place Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published in August suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way a year prior.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of artificial intelligence and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

The Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center publicly called on Marshall to stop using the campaign ad, which featured an image of its campers while accusing Hamilton of being related to a sexual abuse scandal at the Church of the Resurrection, which he founded. This has nothing to do with Tall Oaks.

“Our concern is straightforward,” Tall Oaks’ Board of Directors president Lea Ann Combs told the Kansas Reflector. “This advertisement creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here. Protecting the dignity of these young people and accurately representing our organization should be a shared priority.”

Marshall’s chief of staff said the campaign believed the Tall Oaks picture was a stock image, and acknowledged it was not taken at Hamilton’s church. That wasn’t enough for the Hamilton campaign.

“Marshall lies and uses children as political pawns to distract from the fact he had pregnant mothers arrested and jailed over small medical debts, and voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files,” said Hamilton’s campaign, striking back. “Roger Marshall is desperate to hide from his record of protecting predators, and preying on low-income families in Kansas.”

This all comes as the race for Senate in Kansas is the closest it’s been in almost 100 years, with Trump’s dismal approval rating in the state making Marshall’s chances at reelection all the more precarious.

The New York Times published a story Sunday about the ethical red flags surrounding Trump’s decision to hold an international summit at Trump National Doral, his private golf club in Miami. Never one to concern himself with his own ethics, Trump was more concerned about the photograph they used.

Trump accused the publication of using a “DOCTORED” picture of the building’s facade. “These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night.

The president compared the Times photograph, taken by Scott McIntyre, showing a yellowed facade with noticeably dark and dirty spots, to a promotional photograph from the Trump Organization website, in which the facade looks white and pristine.

Earlier that day, Trump claimed the publication had used a “picture where the facade has been blackened and denigrated by them in order to make it look shoddy, filthy, and just plain BAD.”

“They want World Leaders to see this, knowing it is not the ‘TRUMP’ way,” he added.

Clearly, Trump’s way is to ignore any of the actual issues facing Americans to harp on his own petty bullshit—and that was actually his second temper tantrum of the day. The president had only just finished raging at a report that there were empty seats at his recent rally in Ohio. (Spoiler alert: There were.)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV doctor revealed just how out of touch he was with the average American on Fox News Monday night.

“You have no idea what things are gonna cost. I brought you some things [for] example,” he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham, holding a pack of butter. “Stick of butter, bag of peanuts. Butter in America, it’s about a buck [for] a stick like this.”

Ingraham checked him immediately.

“Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck, it’s like $4,” she said.

“I just bought this, so it’s close to that,” Oz stumbled. “Maybe it’s going bad!”

Dr OZ: We went grocery shopping. Butter in America is about a buck.

Laura Ingraham: Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck. pic.twitter.com/B9NeYUhXv0

— Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 (@LucasSa56947288) October 5, 2026

Butter is about $4 according to the Department of Labor, but someone as wealthy as Oz likely would never remember that.

“I want to challenge Dr. Oz. I will fly out on my own dime to D.C. and we can go to every grocery store he chooses, but at least 20 and we’ll stop when he finds butter for $1 lb,” former American Heart Association Chairman Craig Beam commented. “I’ll arrange a video crew to film it all.”

It’s ridiculous that Oz confidently brought a whole pack of butter on air just to be wildly incorrect about how much the average American—whom the Trump administration claims to care about—is paying for it. This isn’t the first time Oz has exposed his lack of connection to the average consumer. In 2022, during a failed Senate run in Pennsylvania, he was widely lambasted for posting an embarrassing video of him shopping at “Wegner’s” (not a real store) complaining about how much crudités cost. It’s clear he’s just as clueless now as he was then. It’s that kind of ignorance, that kind of apathy, that defines the Trump administration. It’s painfully obvious that they just don’t care.

Trump first said that the prices of goods and services, which have gone up thanks to his ill-advised Iran war and tariff policies, were “just a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

Trump: "With the war, it's just artificial. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay ... let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay." pic.twitter.com/iIelj5sPUt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

Conservative activists have argued that Trump didn’t really mean that losing the two cities is a “small price to pay,” but that he was referring to high gas prices. In that generous interpretation, Trump was arguing that his war, which has killed scores of civilians in the Middle East and an estimated 23 U.S. soldiers, is preventing Iran from waging large-scale attacks on American cities. But Iran’s targets during the war have been U.S. installations in the Middle East, and it wasn’t targeting American cities before the war, either.

California leaders, however, have taken his words at face value.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blasted Trump’s words as “irresponsible,” saying the remarks “could potentially compromise” the city’s safety.

“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” Bass said in a statement. The mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, concurred, saying his city was “not collateral damage.”

“We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay,’” Gloria wrote in a post on X. “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

California’s Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, also criticized the president’s speech.

“Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home,” Becerra said. “Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and its allies in Yemen, the Houthi militia, controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. As of Tuesday morning, the average price of gas nationwide is $4.37 per gallon, while diesel fuel is a whopping $6.32 per gallon.

Trump’s claims that the war is almost over belie the fact that talks aren’t going anywhere right now. The president rejected Iran’s peace proposal on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, and mediators haven’t made much headway. Meanwhile, the conflict has escalated in recent days as the Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia’s airports, with the Saudis bombing Yemeni targets in response. The midterms are less than one month away, and Trump has nothing to show for his war.

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

Donald Trump has been holding rallies lately to energize his voters for the midterms, but he’s running into problems. Press scrutiny of his declining crowd sizes has been harsh, and he exploded in a crazed rant over this, fuming that in fact his rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.

But if anything, these rallies are an admission of weakness and failure. Republicans themselves are leaking word that Trump’s campaigning is a signal of the midterm emergency the GOP faces in deep red areas. And one rally in Ohio displayed a scene that’s doubly revealing along these lines.

We’re getting into all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled interpreter of MAGA, who has a good piece on Trump’s epic but failing struggle to make voters like him. Amanda, always good to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump has done rallies in Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas, and he’s doing one Monday night in Nebraska. The Times had two pieces showing his crowd size is diminishing considerably.

In Alabama, the Times reports, upper sections were, quote, “almost completely empty,” in an arena that’s smaller than previous ones. And there were empty sections at an even smaller arena in Ohio, the Times noted. Amanda, even more to the point, polls are showing Republicans turning on him in spite of all these efforts. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think obviously he’s aging, he’s getting even weaker. The political situation is so embarrassing right now that even his loyal supporters are beginning to be uncomfortable. We are hitting that same portion of, like, Bush’s second term, where even his voters just didn’t want to defend him anymore.

It feels, I think, for a lot of the people that support him, it feels kind of pointless at this point. Like, so much of the reason that a lot of Trump supporters kept doubling down and doubling down and doubling down was that they wanted to never admit they were wrong to liberals, first of all.

And second of all, as long as this political project had legs and they could kind of keep reviving the corpse and pushing into the future, it had value to them. So there was a purpose behind blind loyalty. But you can’t reelect Trump. It’s not worth it anymore, now that he’s a lame duck, and there’s only so much juice they can squeeze out of this lemon.

Sargent: So Trump raged wildly at the Times for questioning his crowd sizes. He posted on Truth Social that his Ohio rally was “great” and “PACKED,” in all caps. He accused the Times of dishonesty. And he said this about his rallies:

“The rallies are HOTTER than ever. The networks refuse under any circumstances to show the crowds, but you can hear the thunderous applause, and you know that it represents thousands and thousands of people.”

He also said: “I never have empty seats, never have and never will.”

Amanda, I don’t know, for someone who’s doing so smashingly well, Trump sounds awfully angry and unhappy. Your thoughts about that?

Marcotte: I mean, wasn’t it at one of these rallies he literally got up and said that he knows more about every subject on the planet, on the whole planet, than any other person knows about anything? When you’re standing there being like, I’m the greatest of all time, and to a half-empty crowd—it’s like the trope on television when somebody says something and then comically they get disproven the next minute.

Sargent: And on top of that, this actually gets at a real thing, which is that in three of these states that he’s held rallies in, there really are tough Senate races—Texas, Ohio, and even Nebraska, which has somehow become closer now. In fact, one GOP lawmaker from a state Trump recently visited told CNN, quote, “This is a five-alarm fire.”

Amanda, the five-alarm fire is among MAGA and Republican voters. Obviously, the internal data is showing cratering support among Republican voters, especially MAGA ones. The Fox poll of Texas actually showed non-MAGA Republicans not approving of Trump. Like, more non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump than approve of him.

Marcotte: I think it’s also true that they have this perception, and I don’t think it’s incorrect, that whatever Trumpism is, was, and whatever they got out of it, that’s coming to an end. And no one wants to be the last person at a party, right?

Sargent: Right. Right. I think that’s a real dynamic, for sure.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think that it’s not unreasonable for people that saw Donald Trump as their pathway to the kind of culture-war victories that they were hoping to get, many of which they did—deportations, abortion bans coming back, you know, homophobia has been surging back, that sort of thing.

I mean, they got a lot of victories. Open racism has been normalized again. So they did get a lot of victories. And now he’s just this embarrassment. He got them into this war, he’s ruining the economy. He’s a lame duck. So this is a good time to sort of do an Irish exit.

Sargent: At this rally in Ohio, Trump talked about how Haitian immigrants who used to get temporary protected status are now getting deported. And he lied about how they’ve hurt the town of Springfield. In fact, the Haitian influx has done a lot to help reinvigorate the place.

Immigrants have reinvigorated the left-behind heartland in many ways, the places where Americans, especially young Americans, have deserted. But that aside, the crowd got very excited when Trump said the Haitians are getting sent back to their home country, where the conditions are horrific. They started to chant: “Deport, deport.”

Amanda, before we get to the culture-war stuff here, they get mad when people like us say that the lifeblood of MAGA is sadism, but there you have it on full display. That is the lifeblood of MAGA.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think the reason that Trump rallies have been as popular as they are, even though it’s the same thing over and over again, is precisely this. There’s safety in numbers.

I think a lot of the people that have this sadistic desire to inflict pain on women, minorities, LGBTQ people—they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying that on an individual basis. But when they go to a rally, they can chant hateful, racist things like that and get that glee, and they’re kind of anonymous.

Sargent: They’re actually kind of losing the culture wars over immigration, in a certain sense. And I think this Ohio scene displayed it in an interesting way. The New York Times had some polls over the weekend of these Senate races. Just going to read the top lines. James Talarico, the Democrat, is ahead in Texas, 51 to 45. Mary Peltola is ahead in Alaska, 50 to 43, also the Democrat. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up three points. In Iowa, Josh Turek, the Democrat, is down one. And Kansas is tied, which is incredible.

But here’s the thing I want to get to. In all these states, Donald Trump is underwater on immigration. That means that among likely voters, more than half disapprove of his performance on immigration. Again, this is in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. All states Trump won by double digits. And get this: The percentages who strongly disapprove are in the forties in all these states.

I have not seen numbers like this before. I mean, he has completely lost the deep-red states on his best issue. And here you’ve got a bunch of MAGA people in a bubble chanting the words “Deport, deport, deport,” thinking that they’re winning this debate in some sense. But in reality it’s just crushing Republicans, even in these red states. What do you make of all that?

Marcotte: After the shootings in Minneapolis, I felt like this was probably going to—I’m surprised at how much it has turned around, but I felt like this was going to happen. Thomas Edsall in The New York Times had a really good article recently where he shared some research that showed that while Republican voters have become kind of more racist under Trump, the opposite has happened to Democratic voters.

Which is to say, I think they’ve had to think about some of these issues a little bit more than they used to, and they’ve discussed them. And I think their racial tolerance levels have gone up in response. And that’s an interesting thing.

And I suspect that’s happening kind of in the center too, where a lot of people who had a delusion about this country’s racism and had convinced themselves it wasn’t that serious are seeing this happen, and they’re finally admitting that Haitians are just normal people that want to work hard and raise their families.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to point out, though, that there’s a little bit of cause for optimism in this. Because if you’ve got majorities in these states that Trump carried by double digits turning against Trump on immigration, what it means is that the people that were chanting “Deport, deport, deport” kind of represent an increasingly fringe minority.

The MAGA sadism is a minority position, at this point, even in some of these red states. And it’s kind of creating this opening for Democrats to capture some of these much softer Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are horrified by what they’re seeing, don’t relish it the way the MAGA sadists do, and could potentially be looking for something else.

I think there’s potentially cause for real gains to be made there, in terms of building a larger consensus in favor of immigration. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think absolutely. And I think it’s moments like this that you can actually start to change people’s minds, right? The door has been cracked open. You know, they took it so far that they’re causing some people that otherwise were kind of softly racist toward immigrants to feel bad, and to maybe reconsider some of the opinions they had.

Sargent: For MAGA, Trump’s promise was that he would defeat us. He would crush you and me, basically. He would crush liberal America, you know, destroy us culturally, rout us in the culture wars permanently, put America back on a anti-woke path, or whatever the precise thing they want is.

But that hasn’t happened. It’s not happening, in the sense that majorities are rejecting him on immigration. They’re rejecting the white nationalism. And, you know, their candidates are in trouble in very deep red areas as a result of this.

And so maybe the fact that liberal America is fighting back and is mobilizing and is so energized and is really ready to take this all the way, right—take this to the mat, as it were—is itself a dissuading factor for some of these MAGA Republicans.

They say, Well, you know, he’s not actually crushing them. He’s not crushing Amanda Marcotte and Greg Sargent, or whatever. You know what I mean? He’s not crushing those libs. So I don’t know, man, I’m not sure I’m on this train anymore. Does that seem crazy?

Marcotte: No, that’s really perceptive. I love it. I love it. That’s amazing. Because it’s like—you’re right, like, many broken promises from Trump. He’s going to lower prices. He’s going to keep us out of wars. He’s going to crush the libs. Add that to the list of broken promises. I love it.

And yeah, I think, you know, it also just—there was that one moment, like right after he won, for a few months, where there was this sense that MAGA was, like, culturally ascendant. And it started to crack apart, right? Basically right when Charlie Kirk died, honestly. And like, Jimmy Kimmel—they tried to fire him, and instead it showed, like, there was this support for Jimmy Kimmel.

And I think at that point they began to realize that actually most Americans still think that they are not cool, and they will never be cool. And I think that that’s been a shot in the arm culturally for the left, and has been very depressing for the right. And you love to see it.

Sargent: Well, you know what else happened at around the time when that supposed cultural ascendancy seemed to suddenly waver and start tail-spinning down? Two things. Kilmar Ábrego García was sent to a foreign torture prison, and ICE started invading cities. I think that really was one of the things that started the unraveling.

Marcotte: Yeah, no, I mean, part of what MAGA was able to do to sort of make themselves seem cool, even for a minute, was they presented their fascist ideas as, like, arch irony, right? They’re like, these are jokes and memes and silly stuff.

But you can’t, like, pull a gun on somebody and force them into a concentration camp in a joking way. And they tried. They really did try. Like, ICE and DHS were putting out all these memes. They had, like, the cartoon meme of the woman crying as she was getting arrested and stuff. But it’s not funny. It’s not funny, because that’s a real person.

Like, I think for normal people that voted for Trump—a lot of people allowed themselves to believe it really was just jokes, that the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing was just a joke. No, they meant that. They meant that in the same way that Nazis saying similar things about Jews meant it.

And there becomes the moment where the proof starts to happen that they meant it. And that clip about Donald Trump leading a bunch of people chanting “Deport”—like, those are real people. Now, they were always real people, but I think in a lot of people’s imaginations that was a joke. And now you cannot deny that they are actually uprooting these people and sending them to a violent country that they were trying to escape.

Sargent: And if you think about the videos that just absolutely saturated the culture, saturated social media, of the shooting of, first Renata Good and then second Alex Pretti—in the Renee Good one especially, you could hear the crack of gunfire. You could hear the shots.

And those break through all the memes and all the cartoon stuff and all the hilarity and all that sort of stuff. And then the car just sort of slowly rolling down the road with a dead person slumped over the steering wheel, and then essentially hitting a pole. Like, that just broke the memes, I think.

Marcotte: Yeah. It’s very reminiscent of how a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests rose up out of seeing video of people getting killed by police. And you know, that has a clarifying effect on the mind. Because, yeah, now it’s not a cartoon anymore. That’s a person. That person has a family, you know.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, just to completely wrap this up, where do you see this going? You’ve got Trump doing these rallies. He’s obviously struggling to boost energy in MAGA country. I fear it’s going to be a little bit successful.

Like, they are going to bring Republicans back into the fold, especially because they’re going to outspend Democrats by around $200 million or something. And we’re going to see potentially the polls tighten. I think people should be prepared for that.

Marcotte: I cannot emphasize enough how much, in some communities in this country, the idea of voting for a Democrat is the equivalent of selling your child into slavery. It’s treated as—they are literally told that it’s demonic, that you will literally go to hell if you vote for a Democrat. And so I think a lot of people are going to struggle to do that, even though they know in their heart that it’s the right thing to do.

So yeah, I think a lot of them, if they go to the voting booth, I think they’re going to vote for the Republican. That said, they’re going to have a turnout problem. I think a lot of people aren’t going to want to make that choice. And so they’re probably just going to sit this one out.

Sargent: Yep. It sure looks like it’s trending in the right direction. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

That changed when she started work at Columbia University, which was unionized, she said. “My union gave me—it really gave me—time,” she said. She started to use that time to learn about political organizing and think about the way she could help make workers’ lives better. That ultimately led to her race against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, in the congressional primary in June, which she won by more than 20 points. The race was often portrayed as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed her, versus the machine, socialism versus the establishment. But there was another way to frame the battle: the union member versus the political insider.

At least five other candidates are new to national politics this year but are running for seats in the House and Senate because of their experiences with unions. Like Valdez, their rhetoric is worker focused. They believe that their worker-led agenda is key to Democrats winning back some of the disillusioned middle-income voters who have flipped to President Trump or stopped showing up for elections at all. Earning their votes is essential for the Democrats to return to power. But the key question is, assuming the Democrats do return to power, will the presence of these union member legislators result in a governing agenda that really tries to deliver for working people?

First, these candidates have to win in November. Some are running in states and districts where they have an advantage—Valdez is almost certain to win her heavily Democratic New York City district—but others don’t have it so easy.

What the candidates —who include Troy Jackson, a former logger running for Senate in Maine; Bob Brooks, a Pennsylvania firefighter running in the state’s 7th district; Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and labor leader running as an independent in Nebraska; Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter and forest worker organizer running for Montana’s 1st congressional district seat; and Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running in Ohio’s competitive 7th district—have in common is that their campaigns promise to truly represent the workers left behind in today’s economy, and especially by the Republicans so many put faith in in 2024.

They are promising that, if elected, they will force a potential Democratic majority to finally deliver on policies the party has promised for years, like increasing wages, lowering the costs of health care, and providing federally guaranteed paid sick days and family leave.

In Maine, Jackson, the former president of the state Senate, rose to the Democratic nomination after Graham Platner’s implosion this summer. While he’s not entirely new to Maine state politics, his campaign leans hard on his history as a fifth-generation logger, and his campaign website shows him in coveralls and a baseball hat standing in front of a yellow bulldozer.

His task is unseating five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins. Collins has tried to have it both ways by portraying herself as an independent who’s not in the Trump MAGA camp while still mostly supporting Trump: That, plus her incumbency, gives her an advantage with independent-minded Maine voters. But the political gods have blessed Jackson with a newly reported scandal from the news outlet ProPublica. Collins was at the center of an FBI probe in which a defense contractor allegedly donated to her 2019 campaign in exchange for contracts. ProPublica reported that Trump stopped the probe when he returned to office.

This plays into Jackson’s case against Collins, which he’s made at least since a Democratic candidate debate in July. “Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said onstage then.

His campaign has been hammering her over the scandal. But before that, his position as the candidate to help working-class Mainers against Washington insiders may have already been working. Recent polling shows him with a slight edge, though definitely within the margin of error.

All of the other candidates face uphill battles trying to turn red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th district, Brooks, the firefighter, is trying to overcome a slight Republican advantage to defeat the one-term incumbent Representative Ryan Mackenzie. Cook Political Report rates the contest as a toss-up, and it’s a critical seat for Democrats to win if they want to gain control of the House. Brooks is betting on voter dissatisfaction with the Trump economy. “The number one thing I hear from my neighbors is how unaffordable life has gotten, and that’s what I’m running to fix,” he said in an email. “I’ll fight for universal health care, crack down on private equity buying up our housing, and work to pass the PRO Act so workers have bargaining power again.”

While Democrats have long supported unions and been endorsed by them, rank-and-file union workers have split with leadership over the past few election cycles to sometimes support Republicans, especially Trump, who has made a big show of wearing hard hats and climbing into big rigs to give the appearance of fighting for working Americans. Brooks is trying to push back against that illusion. Like the other candidates, he is speaking like a member who knows how to fight on the workers’ side of the bargaining table.

“I decided to run for Congress because I’ve watched career politicians like Ryan Mackenzie fail the working people of the Lehigh Valley,” Brooks said. “Washington is a dumpster fire, and Mackenzie is the arsonist who helped light it.” Brooks, a firefighter, promises to put it out.

Forstag, the smoke jumper, is running for the Montana seat against Aaron Flint, a combat veteran and radio host. The district leans Republican after shifting toward Democrats this year, according to the Cook Political Report. (The seat is being vacated by Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who also served as Secretary of the Interior in Trump’s first term and left amid numerous ethics investigations.)

Forstag has been endorsed by Our Revolution, and his district is home to the college town of Missoula, where New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined him for a rally in May. There, he struck a similar tone to Brooks. “If we want to build a country that works for working people, we need to start sending working people to Congress,” he said at the rally.

In Ohio’s 7th, Poindexter, the ironworker, is gaining ground after his R+5 district has moved from a relatively safe seat for Republican Max Miller, who’s faced horrific abuse allegations concerning his ex-wife and daughter, to a toss-up.

Poindexter highlights another critical promise these candidates are making; they say they will support unions, not just working families. “I don’t have to be pro-labor, folks. I am labor,” Poindexter said in July at the North Shore AFL-CIO headquarters in July, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. “My friends, my family—I would not be able to look them in the eye if I went to Washington and forgot where I came from.”

“Working people are tired of politicians who talk about their struggles without having lived them,” an AFL-CIO spokesperson said in a statement, echoing the sentiment. “For too long, the people writing the rules on wages, health care and retirement have no real experience with what those rules mean for the rest of us.”

For Michael Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, the decline of unions helps explain why Democrats have stopped truly representing working people and also stopped getting credit for the policies they do pass. Unions were a trusted intermediary that helped voters connect their daily struggles to the political solutions that could help them; even more critically, they gave working people a true seat at the table.

In a piece published in The Contrarian on Labor Day, Podhorzer wrote: “Today, too many Democratic and media professionals talk about working people the same way that Coca-Cola executives would talk about regaining a prized market segment they’ve lost to Pepsi—which is not the way anyone in a democracy should be talking about its citizens, regardless of their demographic group. That most commentators ask how Democrats can ‘win back’ the working class—not ‘represent’ or ‘answer to’ them—reveals this dynamic in action.”

Even if these candidates win, advancing a worker agenda in Washington will be a tough task. Decades of labor law have tilted the playing field in favor of corporations, and these candidates will have to convince the Democratic Party as a whole that it’s a fight worth taking on, even when there’s so much else to do.

But for them, fighting for unions once in office is a fight that’s critical for the Democrats to take on. “This is a really essential time for people who have familiarity with the labor movement, who have been union members themselves, to step up,” Valdez told me. “Union density is still low, and far too few workers are able to organize with their co-workers … and so I think that’s a really important aspect of the affordability crisis that we talk about a lot.”

Mats is trying to break the Nordic ice by joking about vampires, but the gag is lost on Mihai, a devout Christian who sees paternity as a cross to bear, and his faith as a cudgel to wield in a daily crusade against malign progressive forces. These include YouTube, which is banned in his home, much to the shock of the extremely online children next door, who retreat nightly into their iPad playlists. Lisbet, who works as a nurse in an elder-care facility, appears more moderate than her husband. She’s a genuinely kind, considerate person, who is skilled at her job and possesses a lovely bedside manner. Still, she can’t help sneaking a crucifix, unsolicited, into the casket of a recently deceased patient.

The trickiness of the Gheorghius’ position as true believers living in a hotbed of agnosticism manifests initially in a series of misunderstandings and microaggressions, like when Mihai is admonished for plunking out “Amazing Grace” on the school’s piano. (“Can we have something more cheerful,” he’s asked.) Later, there’s another, more unsettling skirmish involving a kindergarten class discussion around gay marriage: Mihai’s younger daughter, Judith (Teodora Sabina Barau), claims she’s been told at home that it’s a sin. Then a gym teacher notices bruises on the back of Judith’s older sister, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), marks that weren’t visible before the class started doing full-contact wrestling drills.

From there, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film mutates fully from a modern, mirthless comedy of manners to full-on horror show, with Norway’s child protective services unit descending on the Gheorghius’ modest home and taking their children away until such time as their parents can mount a legal defense. Their first lawyer is so appalled by Mihai’s bossy attitude that she quits. Her replacement, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), is Mats’s wife, who tries to dampen her own skepticism about the pious interlopers and their ideas about what it means to lay on hands.

The family’s plight echoes the 2015 Bodnariu case, which saw Romanian-Norwegian couple Marius and Ruth Bodnariu separated from their five children following accusations of corporal punishment, and which served in the European press as a flash point for discussions of religious persecution, xenophobia, and the zealousness of Norway’s Barnevernet (child protection unit). The latter was described in one petition, signed by dozens of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers, as a “dysfunctional organisation which makes far-reaching errors of judgment with serious consequences,” and Mungiu leans into the characterization. Terrified at the prospect of handing over her baby, who is still in the midst of breastfeeding—and having difficulties latching—Lisbet tries to push back, only to be informed, with an unmistakable air of even-keeled menace, that it would better, for all involved, to run through the formalities as smoothly as possible. The implication is that good intentions might be paving the road to you-know-where. So much for Scandi tolerance.

From his own perch on the proverbial fence, Mungiu tries to see the big picture. “If you have a mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism,” he said at Cannes, implying a shared continuum of radicalization. The movie’s mindset is oh-so-equanimous; it’s just asking questions. Such as: whether the secular Norwegian humanists, with their meticulous procedures and concern-trolling protocols, are genuine guardian angels or bloodsuckers? And is Mihai—who admits under interrogation to giving his children the odd slap on the butt, but also worries he’s being misquoted, on the record and in an adopted language—a true fire-and-brimstone monster from the Old World? Or is he a victim being impaled on the stake of political correctness? “They never had Communism,” scoffs a weathered, battle-weary Romanian official, who gets called as institutional heavy artillery once news of the Gheor­ghius’ plight breaks containment. He knows overreach; in a movie filled with selectively deployed euphemisms and double-talk, this old hand speaks in the cracked voice of historical—if not moral—authority.

The talking points here are many: not just political polarization and cultural relativism, but also generational conflict, euthanasia, surveillance technology, and the discombobulating echo chamber of internet activism, which begins driving the action once the Gheorghius become semi-willing mouthpieces for the online anti-woke mob. Mihai’s friends back home have collected thousands of signatures, and encourage him to post in the comment sections of various wing nut influencers; there’s a thick irony in this Luddite turning into a YouTube cause célèbre. The sheer density of socially relevant themes and the loosely ripped from the headlines plot, combined with Fjord’s precisely engineered form and above-the-line pedigree—not only the established award-magnetism of its acclaimed writer-director, but also the commercial clout of its Hollywood-ratified stars—are such that a good, liberal-minded film festival jury in 2026 has little choice but to bestow prizes on it.

Big ones, as it turns out. Fjord took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and is already being earmarked for possible Oscars beyond the foreign-language category, as Parasite, Drive My Car, and Anatomy of a Fall were before it. The latter is the real precedent here; like Justine Triet’s 2023 film, Fjord finally adopts the structure of a courtroom drama, one pitting Norway’s bureaucracy against a defiant clan of outsiders. There are, inevitably, plot twists, surprise witnesses, and impassioned testimonies; crucially, the onus of judgment—legal and otherwise—is placed on the audience. We’re privy to more evidence about the case and how the Gheor­ghius operate behind closed doors than the presiding judge, but only just barely. The real subject of Mungiu’s script, beyond all the aforementioned topical maladies, is—wait for it—the elasticity of truth, and how there are two sides to every story, whether or not they’re created or perceived equally.

Ideally, a drama like this one, calibrated for dramatic and ideological ambiguity, would challenge consensus; that a tribunal of international a-listers found common ground in Fjord’s morality play suggests it may be a safer bet than it seems.

Feeling good about feeling bad, to the point of getting off on melancholy, is a hallmark of contemporary European art house cinema. Mungiu is a master of the form. Since his first Palme in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a pressurized portrait of a student trying to get a back-alley abortion in the waning days of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian director has honed his style to a fine point. Mungiu is a staunch realist who favors spare, unvarnished compositions and quotidian scenarios; his preferred form of punctuation is the pregnant pause.

The upshot of such austerity measures is that Mungiu’s films, including Fjord, wear their seriousness as a badge of honor. The director traffics in symbols and subtext; each strategically locked-off frame and declamatory piece of dialogue is an invitation to read between the lines. (“We don’t do evangelization at school,” observes one educator, several scenes after the church-versus-state setup has been established.) The problem is that Mungiu’s subtlety is often inscribed in all-caps. For instance: When Lisbet is surprised at home by the child-welfare services representatives who have arrived to take her kids away—even potentially the baby who’s been struggling with bottle feeding—the Navy blue cross of the Norwegian flag can be seen through the living room window, the billowing standard of the nanny state.

There are other on-the-nose moments, like an early allusion to an impending avalanche and later the loaded image of a senior citizen in a wheelchair, gazing out at the harbor, hoping to topple in. These awkward moves contrast with the nearly flawless work of the actors, starting with Stan, who doesn’t just disappear into the role (something he didn’t quite manage as Donald Trump in The Apprentice) but captures a withdrawn nature that comes off as authentic. Because of the way Mungiu parcels out information, Mihai is simultaneously the film’s protagonist and its most mysterious figure; he stridently voices his opinions, but we rarely if ever see the action from his point of view. There’s a similarly adept conceptual trick in Reinsve’s performance as Lisbet, which suggests a woman caught intractably between righteousness and denial.

In a different and probably more palatable version of Fjord, Lisbet might begin to question her husband’s backward-leaning beliefs, or break with him for the sake of their children, complete with movie-star close-ups of Reinsve’s tear-streaked face. But there are no explosions here, in private or otherwise. The Gheorghius present a united front, even when Mihai explains in court—once again striving, with a sincerity abutting on condescension, to contextualize his inspirations—that “beating comes from heaven.” This claim leads to the story’s most absurd moment—an invitation by a grandstanding prosecutor to the defendant to slap him—which at least spikes the pulse of this otherwise scrupulously controlled movie.

Mungiu is determined to maintain an appearance of objectivity, even as he creates a series of contrived escalations. There’s a difference between diagramming the problems of characters trapped by their class positions and moving them around like pieces on a chessboard, and Mungiu tends to do the latter. He is clumsy in his handling of the contrast between the Gheor­ghius’ tense but tight-knit family dynamics and Mats’s implied coddling of his own moody teenage daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen). When Mats loses his patience with her at the dinner table and bangs his fist, like Mihai, the scene is staged for our benefit, as a gotcha moment: Look who’s the hotheaded authoritarian now. Mihai, meanwhile, is not as bad as he’s made out to be: He seethes and copes without definitively crossing any lines, at least on our watch. The film drapes these characters in ambiguity, less out of open-mindedness and more as a way of quietly flattering certain factions—like, say, sophisticated viewers who see themselves as hovering above the fray, or reactionaries unduly pleased to see social workers presented, however ambivalently, as stooges of totalitarianism.

It’s not quite a spoiler to say that the forecast avalanche arrives before the end of Fjord; Mungiu treats it conspicuously as an anticlimax and an indicator of other, less visible things being dislodged. By only barely disguising his metaphors, he stakes his claim to art-cinema Valhalla, and yet the final act leaves the machinery exposed, with a shameless coda that finds Noora racing against time to catch a ferry out of town. Her long-repressed parting words are predictable, as is the fact that they’re lost on the breeze; what we have here, the film says, is a failure to communicate. Mungiu might mean for Fjord to cut through the noise and register as a howl into the void, but it’s finally more like an echo chamber: loud and discombobulating, spacious and hollow.

Still reeling from September 11, lawmakers scrambled. How easily could a biological weapon be acquired or made? What might happen if the attack were larger and more sophisticated?

At a congressional hearing that November, lawmakers cited findings from a 1993 report titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks.” Written in plain language, the report described various weapons’ effects, the technical aspects of monitoring and controlling production, and the trade-offs among nonproliferation tools. It happened to specifically warn that under the right weather conditions, 100 kilograms of anthrax released in the nation’s capital could kill up to three million people—a casualty outcome that, “pound for pound of weapon,” could exceed a nuclear bomb’s. According to one journalist, “in the rush to sort out fact from fiction, rumor from real scientific fact, Congress was using reliable information from a group that was charged with studying the real ramifications of bioterrorism.”

That group, the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA, had in fact been defunct for years. Created in 1972, OTA had been a small but proud agency that worked for Congress alone, helping lawmakers navigate science and technology issues with nonpartisan expertise. When advances in genetics raised the prospect that a blood test might reveal a disease-causing mutation, it was OTA that examined what that knowledge might mean for privacy, insurance, and discrimination. Over the years, the agency took on acid rain, mammograms, telecommunications, drug abuse, missile defense, intellectual property, pest control, electronic surveillance, agricultural technologies, and the disposal of nuclear waste, among hundreds of other issues. Wherever Congress might be caught flat-footed as the world changed, OTA could be found nearby.

Congress appreciated the help. A 1990 survey of congressional staff reported that zero percent of respondents found OTA “not useful.” (Half of them said “very.”) A 1993 study by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution concluded that “the agency is considered highly credible by members of both parties.” Nonetheless, in a mad rush to slash federal spending in the mid-’90s, Congress defunded it. “We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology,” lamented Republican Representative Amo Houghton. A few years later, as a biological weapon made its way through the mail, Congress reached for the work of a team it had let fall by the wayside.

Right about now would be a good time to bring OTA back. In recent months, a parade of senior researchers and executives from the country’s top technology companies has issued alarms about artificial intelligence, using terms like “human extinction.” Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, wrote that companies like OpenAI and his own former employer are “gambling with our lives.” The prospect of advanced artificial intelligence escaping human control is not a new worry, but the very public warnings by industry insiders have very suddenly shaken Washington.

Company leaders have their preferred approaches. OpenAI wants mandatory national safety requirements and industry-led standards. Anthropic has called for independent safety evaluators inside companies and a slowdown in development. Nvidia argues that slowing down is unnecessary and that speed and safety are a “false choice.” The executive branch, meanwhile, has its own technical experts, while lobbyists, trade associations, academics, labor groups, and AI safety organizations press their own theories of problems and solutions. Congress is hearing from no shortage of people with something to say about the way forward.

The issue facing Congress, at least initially, is not one of selecting a particular approach among a clear set of options. It is to determine which claims being made are true, what remains unknown, and what each proposed intervention would likely accomplish. The principal and overwhelming challenge is to wade through an extraordinary amount of information—much of it technical, some of it contradictory, and most of it laden with uncertainty. It is precisely the sort of problem OTA was designed to solve.

This September, Axios reported that more than two dozen members of Congress and governors said they either don’t use artificial intelligence or have used it only rarely. Axios called it a “striking admission.” A House Democrat, meanwhile, called it “fucking absurd”—that people overseeing the technology might not be regular users.

This view of things suggests that if only lawmakers knew more, from personal experience or otherwise, they would legislate better. But we similarly expect Congress to legislate on issues like war without serving in the military and on agriculture without ever having tilled the land. Why, in this case, should we expect them to be users of a particular technology in order to regulate it? Of course, we don’t actually expect lawmakers to be personal experts in most things. No one seems to have an issue with lawmakers overseeing the work of NASA absent experience with space travel. But we do expect them to rely on the expertise of others—to gather it, to assess it, and to make informed decisions with it. The problem facing Congress is not really a question of knowledge but a question of capacity.

Congress is drowning in advice. Lawmakers are inundated from think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, advocates, and armies of experts from the executive branch, all telling Congress how to do its job. Talk with anyone on Capitol Hill today, and what you will not hear is a complaint about too few meetings with too few people offering their ideas. What Congress lacks is the ability to make sense of it all: to sort through the torrents of information flooding the institution and pull out what’s important—and also true—so that lawmakers can make informed choices. A lack of capacity is the underlying deficiency.

This is made all the more difficult because most of the information coming into Congress has a source with something at stake. Advice givers are rarely providing lawmakers with unvarnished analysis. As a member once griped to me during a 2019 interview on Congress’s capacity constraints: “We all have our biases here, but we also sometimes just want information we actually think is free of political leanings. This is harder to find than you think.” Which is to say, Congress lacks the ability not only to make sense of all the information but also to feel confident about its impartiality. Enter OTA.

To understand how OTA worked, consider a debate over commercial explosives. In 1980, Congress was contemplating a bill that would have required manufacturers to add chemical markers to explosives, known as taggants, that supposedly made it easier for law enforcement to trace the materials after a bombing. When a bomb detonated, investigators could theoretically recover the markers from the debris and trace the explosive back through the supply chain. Explosives manufacturers strongly opposed the idea, telling lawmakers that the solution was both costly and ineffective. Also chiming in were federal, state, and local law enforcement; aviation and airport-safety officials; and scientists and weapons engineers. Each had pieces of important information—some of it contradictory—and also preferred outcomes. The questions involved, moreover, were technical: For example, would the markers actually survive an explosion? Would they yield useful information? And at what cost?

Lawmakers turned to OTA, whose job it was to gather the evidence and make it legible. What questions could be resolved? What was still unproven? OTA wasn’t performing original research as much as it was analyzing the scope of what was known, in light of scientific uncertainty and disagreements. In this case, it found that taggants could in fact be useful to law enforcement. But its analysis also raised genuine technical concerns regarding their safety and the costs of a tracing regime. It did not collapse those findings into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down answer, but rather laid out the various policy paths Congress could take, with the trade-offs of each. Congress ultimately came out where the manufacturers wanted it to, declining to impose the taggant mandate. But OTA had given lawmakers a basis for getting there that did not depend on taking the manufacturers’ word for it. OTA equipped lawmakers with the capacity to make an informed judgment.

Having an independent source of in-house expertise also helped strengthen Congress’s hand in its dealings with the executive branch. In 1983, the Reagan administration moved to expand the government’s use of polygraphs to investigate leaks of classified information. Congress asked OTA to examine whether the machine could actually do what its proponents promised. OTA concluded that the technology could register physiological signs of stress but could not reliably tell whether that stress arose from deception or some other form of anxiety. Congress imposed a temporary moratorium on the proposed expansion while it considered the evidence. A few years later, as it weighed restrictions on private employers’ use of polygraphs, it again drew on OTA’s findings. The resulting Employee Polygraph Protection Act generally prohibited private employers from using lie-detector tests.

In neither the explosives nor the polygraphs case did OTA tell lawmakers what to do. It did not tell Congress that taggants should or should not be required; instead, it laid out for lawmakers what each choice would likely buy, cost, and risk. Nor had it told Congress that the executive branch couldn’t pursue leaks or that employers had no legitimate interest in theft and fraud. But it had separated the promise attached to a technology from the evidence for what it could accomplish. OTA acted as an “impartial ‘honest broker,’” said Representative Houghton. “Members of Congress are deluged with advice from many quarters, but it is often tinged with the underlying bias and political agenda of the bearer.”

Perhaps almost to a fault, the agency was fanatical in its commitment to analysis, not prescription. OTA’s leadership and staff knew that in a highly partisan environment, any move in the wrong direction—any whiff of seeming like it was taking sides, on policy or politics—would imperil its reputation, and ultimately its usefulness. So its mandate was treated seriously: Translate an issue’s complexity into relevant knowledge for members and staff, and articulate the potential trade-offs associated with different courses of action. Said John Gibbons, the agency’s director, in 1984: “There are many advocates of particular solutions—even the scientific community is an advocate in its dealings with the Congress—but OTA is unique in its almost idealistic mandate to remain free of advocacy.” That restraint had some costs. OTA could leave both sides of a policy dispute dissatisfied: It would not bless anyone’s preferred solution, and it would not reduce a hard question to a recommendation lawmakers could simply adopt. But this was OTA’s own trade-off. The agency supplied Congress with the best available account of what a policy choice would do and avoided any suggestion about which choice to make.

Over the course of its life, OTA published roughly 750 products for its congressional clients across a bewildering scope of topics. As it happens, there are few policy domains where science and technology do not play a meaningful role. The work was substantial and consequential. Indeed, OTA staff may have been committed to impartiality, but they understood the stakes. After news reached staff that the agency was being disbanded, most chose to stay on till closing day, “vigorously pursuing its mission to the last,” reported The New York Times. “Even as they empty desks, pack boxes and circulate resumes, staff members working in offices a few blocks from the Capitol are rushing to complete and distribute as many studies as possible before the deadline.”

In the 1990s, despite its broad appeal across Congress and across the aisle, OTA became a minor casualty in a much larger fight over the federal budget. Certain members thought it wise to show the public that Congress, too, was tightening its belt as it simultaneously recommended eliminating a much broader array of federal programs. But it was hard to see the move as anything other than optics.

For one, OTA’s funding peaked at $21.3 million in 1995—in inflation-adjusted terms, less than the cost of returfing the grass on the National Mall. But OTA also paid for itself many, many times over. A single OTA study in 1994 on the Social Security Administration’s computer procurement policy saved the government an estimated $368 million—more than 16 times OTA’s budget that year. Its broader impact on evidence-based policymaking is harder to quantify in dollar terms. But as one analyst put it: “If conducting [an OTA study] costs less than one-tenth of one percent of the money at stake in a decision, and increases the odds that we’ll get the decision right, that is a considerable bargain.”

There have been calls for reconstituting OTA in some form or another since not long after it closed its doors. A notable one came in 2019, when a House appropriations committee approved $6 million to begin reopening OTA. (In 1995, the agency was defunded, but the statute creating it is still on the books.) In 2020, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recommended “reestablishing and restructuring an improved” OTA. Indeed, no serious proposals—and there are a number—imagine simply recreating the agency as it existed in 1995. Analyses, including by the Congressional Research Service, have suggested a number of new design recommendations if it is one day brought back. In 2019 and again in 2023, a bipartisan, bicameral group folded some of these recommendations into companion bills that would have created an updated OTA.

However, the money did not survive the final appropriations process, the recommendation did not make it into the House’s eventual modernization package, and the bills stalled. Still, in recent years, Congress has repeatedly recognized the problem.

There have also been other efforts to provide Congress with more support. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office created a Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team, which now produces technology assessments, short explanatory “spotlights,” and audits of federal science and technology programs. It has done serious work, including on generative AI, deepfakes, biotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces. A reconstituted OTA could be viewed as duplicative.

But STAA is a team within an agency whose central job is auditing how the government spends money and carries out its programs. OTA solved a different problem: sorting through a barrage of information in order to clarify options, often in close partnership with lawmakers and their staff. As the Washington Post editorial board once argued: “GAO’s institutional culture centers on audits and investigations, and it lacks the hallmarks of OTA in its heyday,” which include “experts with whom legislators can build relationships.” Indeed, the relationships mattered as much as the mission. OTA staff attended meetings with lawmakers, commented on draft legislation, and generally made themselves accessible. Lawmakers even sat on OTA’s governing board. GAO, meanwhile, is not deeply embedded within Congress; it operates at arm’s length. An OTA annual report from 1981 proudly underscored the opposite: that the agency functioned as a kind of “shared staff.”

The OTA was a model of legislative expertise so distinctive that other democracies came to study it—and, in various forms, to borrow it. In the late 1980s, Britain sent a delegation to examine the agency, and in 1989, it established its own Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Germany followed with the Office of Technology Assessment at the Bundestag in 1990. So did France, Finland, Japan, and the European Parliament, among others. The agencies differed in their designs but generally reflected a shared idea that lawmakers confronting the consequences of new advancements in science and technology should not have to depend entirely on another branch of government, outside interests, or their own overextended staff. The great irony of the decision to shutter OTA was that so many others thought it a good enough idea to replicate themselves.

Even the White House stood up its own science and technology body. In 1976, it created the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the president and coordinates policy across the executive branch, and which still exists. Only Congress decided it could do without its own source of independent judgment.

Naturally, as civilizational-stake issues like artificial intelligence mount, a reconstituted OTA is not the only solution to Congress’s capacity problem. For decades, the institution has been shedding staff, as have its support agencies. Between 1975 and 2015, the combined staffs of the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office fell by 45 percent, with minor fluctuations since. Over the past two decades, despite being charged with making the country’s laws and overseeing the entire federal government, Congress has allocated roughly one-tenth of one percent of the federal budget to itself. The result of this self-inflicted hollowing-out has probably not been more capable policymaking. For those who want Congress to do something useful, starving the institution has been an unhelpful approach.

Bringing back OTA should be one component of a broader effort to seriously invest in congressional capacity—to dispense with the idea that somehow, an ascetic legislature is capable of doing the work expected of it. A revived OTA alone is not coming to the rescue, but it is one easy and obvious and urgent place to start.

Trump does Kinsley one better by attaching his obvious lies to promises of money. The most ludicrous example is Trump’s pledge, restated this week, to give every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Set aside that this is essentially a bribe for votes; it’s also never going to happen because doing so would cost $1.3 trillion. Trump has a history of pledging to send out money that never arrives. Last year, he promised $2,000 rebates to compensate American families for his tariffs. That didn’t happen. Neither did his promise last year to share 20 percent of DOGE savings with U.S. citizens (possibly because DOGE saved no money at all, but rather added $244 billion to the federal deficit).

Now Trump is claiming fictional economic development projects to be underway in two states where Republicans are at risk of losing Senate seats. These are Iowa (where Republican Representative Ashley Hinson is in a dead heat with Democratic state Representative Josh Turek) and Alaska (where incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan is trailing Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola).

The make-believe project in Iowa is a $15 billion Mesabi Metallics steel mill that will create 1,750 jobs (plus 6,000 temporary construction jobs) in Iowa’s Lee County, where Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks may also lose her seat.* A White House press release called it “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States” and posted a Des Moines Register front page with the headline “Steel Project Hailed as ‘Transformational.’” “This deal is done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured reporters at an Oval Office ceremony that Hinson attended on September 28. “They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal.” Trump pitched in: “They’ve already started building.”

But Lutnick and Trump were lying (and shame on the Register’s Bri­anne Pfannen­stiel for not calling them on it). The deal was not done, and Mesabi Metallics certainly hasn’t already started building; it hasn’t even purchased the land, according to Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, who reviewed Lee County land records after Trump’s announcement. (Iowa’s TV news reporters are beating the crap out of the Register on this story.) Lutnick’s “This deal is done” comment was in response to a question about whether the deal was contingent on the state granting tax breaks. But if the deal was not contingent on state tax breaks, why did Republican Governor Kim Reynolds scramble to call the legislature back into session four days later to provide up to $1.4 billion in tax incentives? Five Republicans voted against it, including Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs, who chairs the state Senate’s Ways and Means Committee. Dawson told CNN that the state would end up losing $880,000 in tax revenue for every job created.

Despite that dismal accounting, the bill passed, and Reynolds signed it into law Friday night. Still, that doesn’t mean Mesabi Metallics has yet secured the billion-dollar state tax break on which the deal pretty obviously is contingent. As Amanda Rooker of KCCI in Des Moines reported October 2:

The credit would be based on the project’s qualifying investment, which can include land, site preparation, infrastructure, construction, and certain business assets. The Iowa Economic Development Authority would determine how much of the credit to authorize, up to the 10 percent limit.

The company would … have to meet certain requirements before receiving the credit. The project, or a designated portion of it, would have to be operating, and at least half of the jobs associated with that portion of the project would have to be added to the company’s payroll. Those jobs would have to pay at least 140 percent of the state’s qualifying wage threshold.

No permit applications have yet been received at the county level, according to KWQC’s Christensen.

There’s also some question whether Mesabi Metallics will follow through. Lana Zak of CBS News reported October 4 that Mesabi and its Indian parent company, Essar Group, “have a long history of missed deadlines and unfulfilled job promises.” In 2008, Zak reported, Essar announced plans to build a $1.6 billion iron mine and steel mill in Minnesota that promised to create 700 jobs. It was never built. KCCI’s Rooker reported that as recently as July, Mesabi was planning to build the Iowa steel mill in Kentucky, and it isn’t clear its talks with Kentucky state officials have entirely ended. Memories are still fresh of Trump’s 2017 promise that Foxconn would build a plant in Wisconsin that would create 13,000 jobs. Nine years later, a much scaled-back plant has created only about a thousand jobs.

For all the unacknowledged obstacles to “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States,” Iowa’s steel mill is a slam dunk compared to a $54 billion liquid natural gas pipeline Trump’s promised for Alaska, which he announced at a separate Oval Office ceremony on September 30. The pipeline, Trump said, is to be paid for by South Korea in partial fulfillment of its 2025 pledge to spend $350 billion in the United States (in exchange for lower tariffs). A Commerce Department press release said the United States and South Korea had “agreed to commence working on the Alaska LNG project.”

Almost immediately, South Korea disputed this. “Putting figures or using definitive language goes far beyond what was agreed,” Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry, and resources, told the South Korea news agency Yonhap on October 2. Indeed, the veteran Alaska commentator Dermot Cole (he spent 37 years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Minor and four at the Anchorage Daily News) reported that there are no signed agreements. Seoul Broadcasting Service reported: “The South Korean government has never agreed to this.” Cole quoted “a leading official of Korea’s ruling party” saying, “The Alaska LNG project will be decided on the basis of sufficient review in accordance with our domestic legal procedures in accordance with the principle of commercial rationality.”

Trump also announced on Truth Social that South Korea had agreed to spending $8.4 billion on an enhanced oil recovery project, prompting the South Korean government to reply that it had no earthly idea what Trump was even talking about. Trump responded by threatening to double South Korean tariffs.

The South Koreans did, however, confirm that a separate Trump announcement on September 30, of a $22.3 billion gas-fired plant to power an AI data center in La Salle County, Texas, was truthful. Texas, of course, is another midterm trouble spot for Republicans, with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democratic state senator, pulling ahead of Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In this case, though, Trump’s announcement is unlikely to do Talarico much damage because Talarico is already campaigning against new data centers. “A lot of these giant data center companies are running over local communities,” Talarico said the day Trump announced the gas-fired plant, “and these giant data centers are popping up in people’s backyards and there’s no input.” Even Republicans are split on whether building data centers is a good idea, with 46 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed.

The irony is priceless. For once Trump tells the truth, and it bites him in the ass. Maybe he should stick to lying.

* This article originally underestimated the proposed cost of the project.

Trump held a rally at a 4,500-person-capacity high school gymnasium in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. By the time he finished speaking, several areas of an upper deck had completely emptied out, The New York Times reported.

Multiple photographs of the event confirmed that there were empty seats in the upper sections, but in a series of lengthy posts on Truth Social Monday, Trump claimed the reporting was false and called for the news outlets stating otherwise to be arrested.

“The Ohio Arena was already full to the brim—And yet these people were still trying to get in,” Trump wrote in one post, including a 30-second clip of a large line of people waiting in the parking lot outside ahead of the rally. It’s not clear, however, that these people were not admitted.

The president claimed that there had been no empty seats (though photographs show that isn’t true), and that “thousands of people had to be turned away” from the event.

“The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country,” Trump wrote. “When Bernie Sanders has 500 to 1,000 people, they make it sound like it’s the biggest event that ever took place. When PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP has 50,000 people, they make it sound like nobody showed up!”

In another post, Trump continued to insist that the so-called “arena” was “totally MAXED OUT.” (Again, it was a high school gymnasium.)

Trump then tried desperately to spin the empty seats, which he’d previously claimed did not exist. “What does happen at all of my SOLD OUT Rallies, is that the people in the upper sections tend to migrate down to the Main Floor—The ‘migration’ process always happens! The Times knows this, and so does everyone else. I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!”

“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” he wrote.

The Times wrote that Trump’s dismal turnout in Ohio was part of a wider trend of waning enthusiasm for the president’s speaking events, which have come to feel less like pep rallies and “more like a farewell tour.”

Trump even took aim at his favorite show, Fox & Friends, on Sunday for choosing not to cover the less-than-bursting event.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he was concerned, and he tried to explain the U.S. government’s response, saying that he was concerned about what he called “the pneumonia plague.”

“Well, I hate to see them having it, it’s a rough, it’s a rough disease, you know that’s a disease that we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter, they’re like an army. And we don’t have the same medical,” Trump said. “Even with great advancement, the germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore, so, uh, but we’ll help. Anybody that has that kind of a problem, we’re always willing to help, we’ll help.”

Trump’s word salad evokes memories of his disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term, as well as his bizarre explanations. It’s pretty clear that the president was briefed on the suspected outbreak in Russia, which has led to a quarantine in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, but didn’t understand what he was told.

Unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China is also how news of the Covid-19 outbreak spread. That led to a pandemic that left about 2.05 million people worldwide dead of confirmed Covid-19 cases, with the U.S. making up 400,000 of those deaths, close to 20 percent of the total.

Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “always willing to help” belies the fact that his administration has cut funding to Ebola response in Africa, which has exacerbated the spread of the infectious disease on the continent. Hopefully, this outbreak in Russia is contained early, because Trump can’t be trusted to handle another pandemic.

The case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder, pits two fossil fuel companies against the town of Boulder, Colorado. The town sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in state court in 2019 for damages over the harmful effects of climate change, arguing that their products contributed to a range of climate-related woes and that they knowingly lied about the harms they imposed on the community for decades. Boulder, like many Western communities, is wrestling with higher drought and wildfire risks, all of which it blames on oil and gas production.

The two companies have sought to squelch the litigation on multiple grounds. One is statutory: They argue that Congress preempted state and local governments from suing them for climate-related harms by enacting the Clean Air Act, which sets up a national regulatory scheme for air pollutants like carbon emissions. The other is constitutional. Boulder can’t sue them for alleged harms in one state caused by out-of-state oil and gas production on federalism grounds, the companies claimed.

Beyond the precise legal points, the companies have also leaned heavily on the near-existential consequences that they will face from litigation. “If Boulder’s claims are allowed to go forward, some 90,000 municipalities across the country will have the ability to make national and international energy policy by asking juries to impose catastrophic damages on selected fossil fuel producers,” Kannon Shanmugam, who argued for the companies, told the justices in his opening remarks.

At least one justice appeared to strongly sympathize with the companies’ stance. Justice Brett Kavanaugh told Shanmugam that he thought a raft of previous Supreme Court rulings “make crystal-clear that interstate air and water pollution are matters for federal law unless Congress specifically preserves state law.” That position would strongly favor the companies since Congress did not explicitly carve out this type of litigation for the states to pursue in state courts.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to lean toward the companies’ position on preemption. Her apparent position was slightly more balanced than Kavanaugh’s, suggesting that Congress had not displaced the states altogether with the Clean Air Act. Barrett suggested, by way of a hypothetical, that “here was some room for some state law nuisance claims for pollution, but it was just much more circumscribed,” perhaps excluding the broad case that Boulder is pursuing here.

She also appeared sympathetic toward Suncor’s arguments on federalism and extraterritoriality issues with the Colorado lawsuit. “Everybody agrees that state tort law is a form of regulation,” she told Kevin Russell, who argued on behalf of the town. “But what if Colorado passed a law purporting to cap emissions in the other 49 states? Is there any principle that would prevent that?”

Russell argued that they were fundamentally different methods of approaching the same actions. A lawsuit like this one, he argued, “doesn’t prohibit them from engaging in the conduct. It requires them to internalize a portion of the cost of their activities by paying for some of the damage that those activities inflict.” Russell added that the companies “ultimately don’t disagree with that, they just say this case is social because it involves water and air.”

Boulder argued that their lawsuit, which is based on traditional nuisance claims, was hardly novel or ground-breaking. They rejected the companies’ allegations that the town was trying to enforce Colorado law in other states against their will, or that Congress had preempted such lawsuits altogether. “It has never been thought that only federal law can provide a remedy, simply because the tortious conduct and the injury occurred in different states, because the harm was widespread, the damages were large, or the defendants were part of an important industry,” Russell told the court in his own opening statements.

Other members of the court’s conservative majority appeared to lean toward that stance, as well. Chief Justice John Roberts sounded skeptical about the federalism argument in particular, quizzing Shanmugam on a hypothetical in which someone from one state throws a rock at someone in another state. “[The rock] wasn’t directed at State A,” he asked. “But, if you’re in B and you’re aiming at C, but you hit somebody in A, that doesn’t make a difference, does it?”

Shanmugam agreed in principle, but countered that it was too difficult to establish who threw the rock at all, so to speak, in this case. The companies have argued at every stage of litigation that Boulder can’t prove that their particular emissions caused the harms for which the city is suing. Shanmugam said that there was no support in precedent for creating such an exception to what he described as the “venerable prohibition against extraterritorial regulation.”

The chief justice also had pointed questions for Russell and Boulder. “Presumably if you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit [and] they’ll probably copy your pleadings,” Roberts asked him. “How would you think that will work out on the ground?” But this may have been a less hostile question than it sounds: It gave Russell the opportunity to point out past examples of major multistate litigation, such as asbestos litigation in the 1990s.

Justice Elena Kagan made a similar comparison in her own questions. “In multiple respects, this suit appears to be based on the old 1990s tobacco suits that were brought by states and local governments,” she told Shanmugam, where they alleged that tobacco companies had misled the public about the harm of their product. “I suppose the opioid litigation more recently follows the same model,” she added. “This is chapter 3.”

The court’s liberal justices, for their part, appeared skeptical of resolving anything at this stage—either by punting on procedural grounds or by remanding it to the Colorado Supreme Court for further clarification on certain aspects of the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch also did not seem to embrace the companies’ preemption argument. At one point, he implicitly compared the case to one where a car manufacturer’s negligence in one state caused harms in another state. “Is there anything anomalous, in your mind, to applying state law here to worldwide conduct?” he asked Russell, who replied no.

Finally, Justice Clarence Thomas’s questions were more Delphic than usual and largely focused on questions of jurisdiction. That aspect of the case could still be decisive to the outcome. One of the questions presented to the court is whether it has jurisdiction to decide the case at all. Suncor asked the justices to intervene after the Colorado Supreme Court rejected its motion to dismiss the case. Since the companies may yet prevail at trial or another later stage of the litigation, Boulder argued that it would be inappropriate and unlawful for the Supreme Court to intervene now.

The jurisdictional question could allow the justices to punt on this case without reaching the ultimate merits about preemption, federalism, or climate change harms. Another complicating factor is the last-minute recusal of Justice Samuel Alito, who announced last month that he would not be participating in the case. The court does not generally shirk cases because of recusals from one justice. At the same time, Alito’s absence could further complicate efforts to form a five-justice majority by making a 4–4 deadlock more likely.

Even a 4–4 split is hard to predict, however, because the justices appeared to be pulled in multiple directions on the case, and no clear consensus emerged from oral arguments. Sending it back to Colorado state courts might be the likeliest outcome by default. After all, if the court is unable to reach a decision in this particular climate litigation case, it will have no shortage of future ones to revisit the matter.

“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is to not let Trump put such horrible justices—MAGA justices—on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News in a Monday report. 

The rest of the ranks echoed the sentiment. 

“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, referring to Mitch McConnell’s 10-month obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a spite-fueled move that resulted in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the court instead. “I don’t think, you know, you want to go down that road.… But clearly, you know, McConnell and Trump used ... their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”

“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Senator and senior Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal said. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

This report comes just a day after conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News he was considering retirement, saying it was “something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term.” Alito is 76 years old, and fellow conservative Justice Clarence  Thomas is 78, leading both sides of the aisle to start thinking about their replacements. 

“A major reason why I’m running to serve South Carolina and why it’s so important to keep the Senate conservative this November. Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Senator Darline Graham wrote on X last Friday. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”

Politico was scheduled to be the White House print pool representative, and Trump administration officials offered its spot on the plane to other news organizations who are part of the pool. In solidarity, several print organizations said no, CNN reports.

The night before, the White House’s email to the press corps offering guidance on Trump’s trip did not mention any news outlets who were traveling on Air Force One, which is not normal, and could be a sign that media organizations are trying to send a message to the president. Last month, Trump banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House, only to be rebuked by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who ordered the ban immediately lifted while the outlets’ court challenge received a full hearing.

At the time, the rest of the White House TV pool refused to cover Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House, leaving only Chinese state media to have video of Xi’s entrance September 24. At the state dinner for Xi that same night, a dumbfounded Trump asked where all of the cameras were.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Trump appeared to be confused about Kelly’s order and is still bent on punishing news outlets for coverage that he doesn’t like. The fact that other mainstream media outlets aren’t trying to take advantage of Trump’s ban to get increased access to the president is a good sign. Enabling Trump’s latest attacks on the press would result in watered-down, less critical news coverage of a president who thinks he is above any laws or checks on his power.

A version of Jackson’s website from June stated that he “will work with President Trump to protect Georgians from the consequences of Washington’s failures.” As of Monday, the mention had been removed, MeidasTouch reported.

This sudden deletion (read: defection) comes after Jackson spent months tirelessly tying himself to Trump. In February, his campaign aired a 30-second Super Bowl commercial comparing him to the president. “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything,” Jackson said. On the campaign trail, Jackson promised voters he’d be Trump’s “favorite governor,” and framed himself as similar to Trump, but with a “southern tone.”

All of this was done without Trump ever actually endorsing Jackson. The president reluctantly bestowed his endorsement to Jackson in July, after the businessman defeated Trump’s original pick, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, in the Republican primary runoff in June.

Jackson’s sudden switch-up is part of a wider trend of Republicans toning down their ties to the president ahead of the midterm elections. Jackson is at least the second candidate to remove Trump from his campaign website, after Florida Representative and gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. The shift appears to indicate that the Republicans’ leader has become the party’s biggest liability.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s handling of Yemen’s Houthi militia attacking ships in the area in 2025 had Pentagon leaders raising concerns that would come to fruition during the Iran war the next year.

Specifically, Department of Defense officials Dan Caldwell and Alex Velez-Green were worried that an extended military campaign against the Houthis could deplete U.S. missile stocks, which ended up happening one year later. Last year, in March 2025, President Trump announced Operation Rough Rider, a bombing campaign in Yemen that would become infamous after the national security adviser at the time, Mike Waltz, mistakenly invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into a group chat of senior administration officials discussing the early bombings.

The campaign resulted in 1,000 targets being bombed, with Houthi commanders and ammunition stocks being targeted, but also scores of civilians being killed. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the operation a success, but others in the Pentagon, such as Caldwell and Hegseth’s first chief of staff, Joe Kasper, questioned whether the operation had clear and achievable objectives, again similar to the current Iran war.

A spokesperson for Hegseth, Kingsley Wilson, told the Post that the operation “achieved decisive success against Houthi forces,” resulting in “severely degraded radar networks, air-defense systems, ballistic-missile and drone launch sites, weapons depots, and production facilities while removing multiple mid- and senior-level commanders from the battlefield.” It also “substantially reduced immediate threats to vital international shipping lanes, compelled a clear tactical shift by the adversary, and helped create conditions for a ceasefire that strengthened freedom of navigation in the region.”

Those “successes” seem at best hollow now, as Houthi forces took over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea last month. Last year’s operation ended in May 2025 with an Oman-brokered ceasefire and Trump declaring victory, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.”

“They gave us their word that they wouldn’t be shooting at ships anymore, and we honor that,” Trump said.

In reality, the Houthis weathered the U.S. attacks. They shot down at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, and two F/A-18 fighter jets were lost at sea. Trump lost interest in Yemen shortly afterward, to the chagrin of some in U.S. Central Command. Some officials reportedly said at the time, “You ignore Yemen at your own peril.”

That seems all too apparent today, and the U.S. is stuck in a conflict with Iran and its Houthi allies with no clear end in sight. The war has stretched on and continues to hurt the U.S. and global economies, with Trump unwilling to acknowledge that the war should never been waged, was horribly executed, and now needs to end regardless of how bad he looks.

After spending months denying and downplaying the fact that gas and diesel prices have become more expensive, Donald Trump finally conceded Monday. The only catch to his admission: The rising price tag is definitely not his fault.

“What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz, because Record Numbers of Barrels are coming out now on an almost daily basis,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday.

Instead, Trump blamed the sky-high prices on Ukraine, claiming that its recent attacks on Russian oil refineries had aggrieved the global oil market. (It’s worth noting that Ukraine would likely stop attacking Russian infrastructure if Trump’s buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin stopped invading Ukraine.) Trump also wagged a finger at “Blue States like California” that are trying to veer away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources.

Provisional ship-tracking data obtained by Reuters revealed that, in the last month of September, oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz had roughly returned to prewar levels. Millions of barrels of oil from European reserves are also expected to help lower prices in the near future, following an urgent plea from Trump to G7 leaders last week.

But American wallets are still hurting. The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.36 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.68 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.32 a gallon.

Collectively, Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and oil since the war began seven months ago, according to an analysis by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University published last month.

Consumers have spent roughly $59 billion more on gas and $48.6 billion more on diesel, according to the university’s tracker. That breaks down to an increased price tag of approximately $822.20 per U.S. household.

The Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections—even though it’s illegal to use government funds for campaign purposes.

Speaking to the press ahead of his trip to Alaska, Vance tried to downplay the administration’s blatant law-breaking by claiming the television spots did not endorse any particular candidate or party.

“I’m sure that some people don’t like it, but if you look at the message of those advertisements, they’re not partisan, they’re not—you know, it’s not like we’re advocating for a particular candidate,” Vance said. “We’re trying to tell a story, I think, about how great the United States of America is.”

The vice president compared the advertisements to videos that the Obama administration produced about the Affordable Care Act. “You have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance continued. “It’s part of actually, I think, living in the constitutional republic.”

In 2010, the Department of Health and Human services paid to produce short 30-second ads explaining the changes that the Affordable Care Act made to Medicare, including free check-ups, cancer screenings, and lower prescription drug costs. Not only did these videos have a clear public service function, but they were also not self-aggrandizing or partisan.

By comparison, Trump’s television spots are wildly partisan. One spot, called “King of the Jungle,” features images of Democrats targeted by the Trump administration edited alongside videos of lions hunting in the wild. Another, called “God Made Trump,” presents the president as a messianic figure. One ad called “Resilience” shows multiple moments in Trump’s life before he became president. And in another, the president begs voters to “Love Me.”

In order to make the videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Instead, Patel appears to be completely under the thumb of the White House, bending over backward to enact the president’s retribution campaign, according to a new report by The Atlantic.

Whereas Patel’s predecessors have historically tried to create distance between themselves and the Oval Office, Patel reportedly receives numerous calls from the White House and its allies throughout the day. Some of his orders come directly from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or other executive branch officials, according to current and former officials who spoke with reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick.

“I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official said.

The White House did not deny that Miller tells Patel and his agency what to do. Instead, it seemed to reinforce Miller’s broad influence over Trump’s executive branch, confirming that Miller “interacts with all law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.”

FBI Operations Director Joe Perez told The Atlantic in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

Patel’s primary mission seems to be lending institutional credence to Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. Yet despite spending months repeating promises of supposedly imminent arrests, Patel has yet to produce actual results for Trump’s cause.

But the FBI wildcard has invariably escaped consequence from his MAGA boss, even in the wake of numerous controversies.

Over the last year, the podcaster turned agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

His alleged substance abuse issues have also caused problems. Patel ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report earlier this year about his alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

But Patel has nonetheless hung on to his credentials within the Trump administration. The windfall, according to a Republican operative who spoke to Fitzpatrick, is due to the fact Patel “is the only guy who never says no.”

“And the president likes that,” they added.

Meanwhile, Patel has been remarkably brash and cavalier while dealing with his critics. In response to three pages of detailed questions about his connections to the White House sent by Fitzpatrick, Patel responded: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

Fitzpatrick noted that she had never asked or written about a gold-plated jet ski or the English Channel, writing that she “did not understand this response.”

However, a quick Google search turned up an MS NOW report from July about Patel that included an image of a jet ski. At the time, Patel had responded to the article via X, writing: “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated … dumbass.”

“Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website,” Fitzpatrick observed.

This comes in the midst of a neck-and-neck campaign between Democrat Reverend Adam Hamilton and incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, with most polls showing them locked at 45 percent. This is the closest Kansas has been to flipping blue in nearly 100 years, making Trump’s historic unpopularity there a clear cause for alarm.

"I would say Donald Trump is probably at this point in his term the least popular Republican president since Herbert Hoover" -- Enten details how Trump is down 20 points of approval in Kansas relative to his first term https://t.co/1bJkA1rlWO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

“President Trump is historically unpopular for a Republican president in the great state of Kansas.... I absolutely buy the idea that this [Senate] race is close because just take a look at these,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Monday morning. “In his first time … Donald Trump had +5 points. Look at how much less popular Donald Trump is than he was in term number one at this point. He’s way down in the basement, 15 points underwater—that’s a 20-point shift away ... 16 less points popular than any other Republican president at this point in the term.”

Republicans are worried that Trump’s unpopularity will spill into the race between Hamilton and Rogers.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said last week. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

Marshall isn’t really helping his case, either, as his tenure has been defined by timely waffling on ICE and controversy spurred by his past aggressive, high-interest medical debt collections during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“This to me is potentially a mathematic perfect storm,” Enten continued. “A historically unpopular Republican in Kansas and Donald Trump, and a historically popular Democratic Senate candidate in Adam Hamilton—that may be the equation that gets Kansas its first Democratic senator in 94 years.”

President Trump fired Noem from the Cabinet in March over a series of scandals including how DHS handled contracts. But she didn’t leave the agency until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, took over on March 25. Just before she left, the department agreed to pay $108 million to Daedalus Aviation Corporation for a Boeing 737 private jet with a bar, two bedrooms, marble showers, and a table covered in manta-ray skin.

The firm had acquired the plane for less than $90 million, and it wasn’t the only plane deal DHS made to the corporation. The agency bought two more luxury jets from it for $106 million, far more than the $83 million the company paid for them. It also bought two 17-year-old 737s for $45 million each, more than their typical market value, according to The New York Times. All five of those planes were bought on Noem’s last morning at the DHS.

Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, gave $10,000 to Noem’s political action committee, American Resolve, in 2024. After she was appointed as DHS secretary, Walters’s companies got over $900 million in agency contracts. DHS hired his business Salus Worldwide Solutions to fly Noem and her aides on chartered jets, as well as to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Daedalus was given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.

When Mullin was confirmed as Noem’s successor, he looked into backing out of the deal but was worried about paying a financial penalty. Mullin spoke to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was also concerned about the penalty. She told him not to block the plane purchases, and ultimately, he didn’t.

The planes DHS bought from Daedalus were mostly unused as of August. The whole deal smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government.

In the latest installment of the most corrupt administration in history, the dynamic duo behind multiple botched peace agreements has secured a massive deal to purchase a series of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, The New York Times reported Friday. 

One private firm had already reached a tentative agreement to purchase Lukoil assets earlier this year, but that deal was stalled as a new group of investors emerged—each with direct financial ties to Kushner, Witkoff, and President Donald Trump.

The new group of investors is led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025 and another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee through Eldridge Industries, his investment firm. 

One major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi–based fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Sheikh Tahnoon previously dumped $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Witkoff and majority-owned by the Trump family. Then the U.S. president lifted export restrictions on AI chips to the UAE. Nothing to see there, certainly. 

Another major stakeholder in the sale is a Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, who have helped finance Kushner’s shady luxury hotel project in Albania.

For Kushner and Witkoff’s friends, the best thing about this part of the peace deal doesn’t actually require any peace. The Trump administration has reportedly signaled that it is open to making deals with Russia before the war actually ends, and one person familiar with the matter told the Times that included the Lukoil sale. The potential deal stands to be extremely lucrative for the American buyers as the purchase would release the assets from Russian sanctions, causing their value to instantly increase. 

Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white-collar crime and ethics adviser, told the Times that the deal was “an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements.”

“And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?” Chen said.

News of this deal comes on the heels of a report exposing Kushner’s investment firm as the largest stakeholder in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. 

And just one day before the Times report dropped, Kushner himself took to X to insist that he does not let his business dealings influence his diplomatic work.

Donald Trump rationalized the stunning overstep while speaking with reporters Saturday, defending the decision to post Cotton’s personal phone number as a method to pressure him into bending to Trump’s position on daylight saving time.

“We want to get away from this ridiculous way and custom of—every twice a year, turning your clocks back, turning your clocks forward, being late to dinner, being late for very important meetings, it’s ridiculous,” Trump said.

“We don’t want to change clocks twice a year. It’s very expensive, it’s got many problems,” Trump continued.

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July, moving to officially do away with the notion of daylight savings within the 50 states. But Cotton’s staunch opposition to the bill—largely over the prospect of dark winter mornings—has stalled its progress in the Senate.

While addressing the matter on the Senate floor last year, Cotton warned that in some parts of Arkansas, sunrise would not occur until after 8 a.m. if they chose to do away with daylight savings, forcing children, commuters, farmers, and construction workers to begin their days in darkness.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton wrote on X Saturday, responding to Trump’s remarks. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”

Trump’s pressure campaign was not as well received by Cotton’s fellow Senate Republicans, however. In an interview with NBC News, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said that Trump “can go from zero to a–hole in about three seconds.”

“Every now and then, there are disputes in Congress that have existential significance for the future of Western civilization. Daylight savings time is not one of them,” Kennedy told Kristen Welker on Sunday. “I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cell phone number. I don’t think that’s going to help convince Tom.”

“Karoline’s firsthand experience in the White House and on the presidential campaign trail gives her a distinct understanding of today’s political landscape,” Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott said in a statement.

In her own statement, Leavitt promised to bring “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.”

Leavitt joined the Trump administration in 2019, and in 2024 ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before returning to serve as White House press secretary. She was the youngest press secretary ever at 28 years old, and has still not been replaced. She often made headlines for complete falsities, lying about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, blaming a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight on DEI, calling the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and saying that wrongly deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Ábrego García was a “foreign terrorist” and “MS-13 gang member” who was “engaged in human trafficking.” All lies.

Trump’s “machine gun” will appear across various shows and time blocks on the right-wing network, using her voice and institutional legitimacy to push what will likely be an unapologetically pro-Trump agenda.

At a fundraiser in September, Paxton spoke candidly about his flailing campaign, according to the recording shared with Politico and published Monday.  

“I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.,” he said. “I don’t control the message or what we’re doing.

“I don’t have ability to change anything,” Paxton continued. “So I have to live with whatever I’ve got. So it is a challenge.”

The audio was leaked by someone who does not support Paxton, and confirmed by another attendee. One attendee said that Paxton never specifically referred to Donald Trump’s team. Nick Maddux, Paxton’s campaign adviser, said that the candidate was “obviously” referring to the fact that campaigns don’t coordinate with super PACs. 

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Instead, Trump has focused on making the midterm elections a referendum on his own presidency. Last month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline to Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton only raised $9.3 million. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll found that Paxton was six points behind Talarico. 

This is the second piece of audio leaked about Paxton. Last month, the attorney general was caught trashing Trump’s disastrous midterm convention.

Over the weekend, right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump’s preferred candidate, advanced to a runoff with incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist.

The White House has done all it can to boost Bolsonaro and cement Trump’s influence over Latin America. Trump has backed conservative allies in Colombia as well as Argentina and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. The day after Maduro was brought to the U.S., in January, the State Department posted a picture on social media with Trump and the slogan, “This is OUR hemisphere.”

In total, seven right-wing candidates have won presidential elections across Latin America in the last 18 months, with Trump publicly backing most of them.

“We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said in September. “Lots of people that I got elected.”

Trump was a strong supporter of the elder Bolsonaro, and they share some odious similarities. Bolsonaro refused to accept losing Brazil’s 2022 elections to Lula, and his supporters stormed government buildings in response. Unlike in the U.S., Bolsonaro and his allies were arrested and put on trial for the coup attempt, with investigators uncovering a plot to kill Lula and his running mate.

Trump’s response was to threaten the country with exorbitant tariffs over the “witch hunt,” as he put it, in July 2025. Undeterred, Lula went ahead with Bolsonaro’s trial and the former president was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. In May this year, Lula and Trump had a frosty meeting with no cameras at the White House. Then, as elections neared, Trump dispatched two State Department officials to investigate “electoral integrity,” only for Brazil to deny their visas and accuse them of interfering in the country’s elections.

Lula used Trump’s efforts in his reelection campaign, accusing Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate,” and called out Trump at the United Nations General Assembly last month. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will help Lula to win the October 25 runoff.

The new NBC News/Telemundo poll has Latinos going for Democrats by a margin of 59 percent in the upcoming midterm elections, almost doubling their support from 2024. The new CBS News/YouGov poll tells a similar story, with 60 percent of Latino voters preferring Democratic House candidates. Overall, 69 percent of Latino voters disapprove of President Trump’s performance ahead of the midterms.

This comes two years after Trump won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them, sparking discourse about a new multicultural Republican coalition. That dream seems to be all but dead, as those same voters have responded extremely negatively to Trump’s handling of the economy, his lack of action on the affordability crisis, and his mass deportation campaign.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that these voters will automatically turn out for Democrats now—more Latinos (42 percent) still have a negative view of the party, as it has not fully taken advantage of two years of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and killings.

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

A new Fox News poll finds James Talarico up seven points over Ken Paxton in Texas. It’s such a shocker that it induced Fox figures to panic right on the air. But what’s striking about this poll is what it says about Trump and Republicans, and how Texas captures what’s happening with the MAGA movement as Trump sunsets. Also telling is how this comes as Republicans are moving around their Senate spending in ways that reveal what they think of their own plight at this very moment.

We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Alan Elrod, who had a great piece for Liberal Currents on Texas Republicans as representative of the Trump-era GOP. Alan, great to have you on.

Alan Elrod: Good to be back.

Sargent: So the new Fox poll finds Talarico up by seven points among registered voters in Texas, 53 to 46, and up two points among likely voters, 51 to 49. I think his lead is probably somewhere in the middle there. But critically, the Fox poll finds Trump’s approval at 44 percent to 55 percent disapproving.

He’s eleven points underwater in a state he carried by 14 points only two years ago. Alan, you have some experience with Texas personally. How surprising is that Fox finding?

Elrod: Yeah, it’s true, my wife is a Texan. She’s from Fort Worth. You know, I think the interesting thing about the finding is that it points at a number of the groups that are frustrated with the second Trump administration, right? Texas does have a lot of Latinos who are jilted—some of them who voted for Trump, some of them who didn’t, but a lot of whom are very frustrated on immigration.

It has a lot of conservative Christians, but there’s also a lot of moderate and progressive Christians in Texas who are angry with Trump for different reasons. And then there’s just the, I think, broader problem of the Texas GOP and some of its candidate selection issues that gloms onto Texas politics in general at the moment.

Sargent: Well, those non-MAGA Christians are going to loom large in this discussion, so let’s put a pin in that. Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt was so shocked by these findings. Listen to this exchange between her and Fox contributor Clay Travis.

Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas. How is that possible?

Clay Travis (voiceover): Texans have to wake up. I think sometimes when you have seen Republicans win for generations, a lot of people out there just don’t think at all that Democrats are capable of winning in the state. Now, I watch a lot of football, I watch a lot of sports. Every single game that I am watching, I am seeing Republican ads dominating. I think that Republicans have held their proverbial, you know, cash until the last moment, and they now are delivering overwhelming amounts of dollars into the playing field.

Sargent: Alan, note how she says, how on earth can this be happening? And the answer she gets back is, don’t worry, Republican money will bail out Paxton. All that cash going to ads to reach the football demographic. Like, those are the people who should be there for Republicans, but really need to be re-energized behind Trump and today’s Texas GOP. I thought that was telling. What do you think?

Elrod: So I don’t want to pretend that I have no fear of big spending close to the election, but Travis is just avoiding the key problem, which is Paxton. The problem is Paxton. Paxton is a terrible candidate. He’s hated by a lot of people in his own party. I mean, 60 members of his own party voted to impeach him a few years ago. So we’re not talking about a guy that is beloved across the state.

And so, you know, when we look at this, I think one of the encouraging signs is, hey, actually, you can find candidates that are so bad, and on the other side you can find candidates that are so kind of perfectly built for the moment, that you can put those things together and get a potential big win in a state like Texas.

Now, we’re not there yet, right? Signs and polls don’t vote. But what we’re seeing is that candidates still do matter sometimes, and we’re getting good indicators that it is important that the Democrats nominated Talarico, and it is relevant that the Republicans nominated Paxton.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, this race is on a knife’s edge, let’s face it. And the money is going to be a big deal. They’re going to put a lot of money in there. But let’s talk about Paxton and the Republican Party. He’s sort of like the perfect exemplar of the Texas GOP. And in order to set up the rest of this discussion, let’s talk about what the Texas Republican Party actually is.

You had a great piece on this stressing how the Texas GOP’s white male Christian supremacy and naked ethnonationalism are the future of the Republican Party now that Trump has reshaped it. Talk about that.

Elrod: The argument in this piece is that that’s something that we should both, I think, see a bit of a silver lining in, and also be very concerned about, because the politics are very nasty. They’re corrupt, they’re hateful. They’re very, very nasty.

On the other hand, I think what you’re seeing with the Talarico race is some of the consequences of those politics, right? Ken Paxton is a criminal. He has been under investigation for securities fraud. He is a philanderer who then turns around and tries to castigate Democrats on moral issues. He has waged a really aggressive campaign against trans kids in Texas, going so far as to try to level sort of legal intimidation at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, because he’s so determined to try to prevent any form of care for trans kids.

Abbott is running for an unprecedented fourth term. There’s been all the kind of stuff at the border with putting razor wire in the Rio Grande. I mean, these are people who I think have lost the plot.

And it is an example of both the dangers, I think, of our politics. We are headed in a direction where what comes after Trump, I think, is going to be a lot like what we’re seeing in Texas. It’s going to be even nastier, it’s going to be even more corrupt, it’s going to be even more hateful. At the same time, the window is there. You can lose people by behaving this way. And Texas GOP is showing that.

Sargent: And I want to pick up your point about how this kind of opens up a window for making a case to some of these voters that they should peel away from the Republican Party. And the Fox polling actually gets at this. Trump’s approval is underwater in Texas with working-class voters, who are supposedly his base, and even deeper underwater with Latinos, at 38 percent approval to 61 percent disapproval.

Alan, in the mythic version of Trumpism, which was supposed to be a multiracial working-class movement, Latinos were going to be permanently brought into the Trump coalition because they’re culturally conservative and they see the economy as being lifted by Trump.

But of course, what happened in the real world is what the Texas Republican Party has become. The ethnonationalism and the violence helped drive these people away. Doesn’t that sort of get at your thesis a little bit, those findings?

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing here is, from the racial hatred to the stupidity of things like the tariffs, if you hurt people enough, they will potentially eventually abandon you. You cannot just keep hurting them over and over again and expect loyalty. That does eventually matter.

Now, the people who will stick it out are the people who might feel like they’re getting something in return for that, or the people who feel like they’re the group that gets to hurt everybody else. But that’s a much smaller pool of people than everybody else in Texas. And Texas is a big state.

People don’t, I think, remember this all the time. They know it’s big physically. But Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Texas itself is wildly economically, religiously, culturally diverse. So if you try to wage war on all these different subsets of America, that’s going to be felt in a place like Texas.

Sargent: Well, it gets even more striking with this data. In the Fox poll, Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA—non-MAGA Republicans—at 46 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval. Those are Republicans, Alan. And only 50 percent of that demographic, non-MAGA Republicans, are extremely interested in the election, and that’s lower than other groups—lower than Texas voters overall, lower than Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think there you see the dynamic that you were talking about, in which kind of non-MAGA Christians in Texas just aren’t willing to go along with what this movement has really become. I mean, they’re not interested in voting for who Trump is telling them to vote for.

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, there are MAGA Christians all over America who simply come to whatever position or justification they have, even biblical ones, from the starting point of, I do what Trump says, I vote how Trump wants, I say what Trump says. But there are actually a lot of other Christians who are frustrated. And I see this in my own communities here in Arkansas, which is next door. It’s not like you can treat American Christians as this one giant lump, and plenty of them are quite worn out.

It is hard to get people to buy into constant displays of public cruelty, right? That is very different. When you’re trying to nibble around the edges on this stuff, and when you’re sort of being, I think, opaque about the really vicious parts of your policy, and you’re using more maybe sort of sleight-of-hand talking points about how we need border security, you might get people to go along.

But when they’re turning on the TV and seeing that people are being murdered by our own government, by DHS, and then that the Trump administration basically seems to take pleasure in that, that is going to turn off a big middle of Christians who may have otherwise not been activated. Now, we may have wished they would have been activated before this, but that is where we are now.

Sargent: Right. I think you’re putting your finger on something important here about MAGA, right? Which is that the violent ethnic purges, the violent ethnic cleansing, is a feature of the movement. It absolutely saturates official government propaganda about immigrants. It saturates ICE’s recruitment.

ICE’s recruitment is literally, you get to participate in a violent purge. That’s the selling point. If you become an ICE agent, you get to participate in this kind of violent cleansing of America. And it’s like, you will be part of something bigger and higher. That’s what MAGA is. And there just does seem to be a segment of conservative Christians that isn’t there. Is that overly optimistic, though?

Elrod: Well, I think my message in my piece is, you know, I said it’s a warning and it’s a silver lining, but the warning isn’t just to the country as a whole. It’s also, I think, to these sort of self-styled non-MAGA Republicans, which is to say, guys, this isn’t your party anymore. What does it even mean to say you’re a non-MAGA Republican? That’s not a thing anymore. You need to embrace, I think, supporting Democrats for the next few cycles at least. And I think we should just be comfortable trying to say that.

Sargent: I think there’s another development which actually underscores your point quite well, which is that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is a major GOP super PAC, just pulled its spending out of North Carolina, essentially ceding that Senate race, where Democrat Roy Cooper seems to be up. SLF is now putting more money into the Kansas Senate race, of all things. And I think this is really sort of indicative of the phenomenon that you’re identifying.

Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is a pastor. He’s religious. He speaks about his faith. He’s written books about his faith. And so all of a sudden, there does seem to be an opening being created by MAGA extremism to try and appeal to some of these middle-of-the-road religious voters. That’s happening in Texas as well. James Talarico talks about his faith openly. Can you talk about these dynamics?

Elrod: I think at the core of this is, people want to connect with candidates that are coming from a place that they can relate to. And the reality is that a lot of Americans, whether it’s Protestant Christianity or some other affiliation, have some form of faith. And I think people hear candidates talking openly about their faith, and what they hear is, I know people like this. This person is someone I can relate to. This person is being honest, I think, about their own limitations.

And I don’t want to suggest that you can’t do those things and be an atheist candidate. You can. But I think when Democrats spent a little while running away from talking about faith, what they actually did was just make themselves seem sort of unrelatable, and maybe judgmental in a way that I don’t think they maybe meant to. I think some of it was rooted in, we don’t want to seem exclusionary by talking about things like Christian faith.

When in reality, I think what people are drawn to is not sort of one-to-one theological agreement, but a sense of honest and humble striving. Because that’s what a lot of people think about when they think about their faith. They think about their own imperfections. They think about the things in their life that their faith has gotten them through. They think about the things in their life that they’re grateful for.

And I think that’s what people really need to hear from candidates—candidates who feel like they are speaking to the totality of their life experience. And if it feels like you’re hiding some part of yourself away, or you’re unwilling to talk about some frankly huge chunk of what life is about to a lot of Americans because you’re worried about stepping on it the wrong way, then what you’re doing is losing out on a chance to connect with people.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that when James Talarico talks about his faith, or Adam Hamilton does, what they’re essentially saying is that there’s a place in this party for other people of faith.

And that’s an important message if you’re going to win in a place like Texas or a place like Kansas, right? I mean, these are red states. You are not going to win unless you’re able to win over a segment of Republican voters.

And I just wonder whether what we’re seeing here is the kind of development of a new kind of politics for Democrats, a politics that’s very well suited to the kind of moral collapse and moral depravity of what I keep calling Late-Stage Trumpism. Does that seem like it could be happening?

Elrod: Yes. And to that point, I would say people need to be watching very closely Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear from Kentucky is almost certainly going to be a candidate in the 2028 cycle. And his messaging around this stuff is exactly right.

What I love about Andy is that after he vetoed those anti-trans bills in Kentucky, his argument was faith-centric. He said, all children are children of God, and I don’t believe in bullying kids. And then he followed it up very, I think, effectively by saying, also, I don’t think government should be regulating local sports. That’s for communities and schools and families to decide.

But that key thing of, we are all children of God, and I don’t believe in demeaning or making any person who is a child of God feel attacked—that’s incredibly powerful. I think Beshear, even maybe more than Talarico, has just got it figured out on this stuff. And I think he’s going to be a very, very compelling person to watch.

Sargent: I’m glad you raised that message from Beshear, because I think what we’re now seeing is Democrats kind of returning a little bit to this idea of Christianity as equality before God. When James Talarico says that his faith requires him to treat the stranger well, or the neighbor well, he’s basically making a variation on the point that Beshear made about trans people.

Now, I know that people will get mad at this, and yes, I wish James Talarico would figure out where he stands on trans issues a little better. But generally speaking, he’s been very good on immigration. And I do think the through line to all this is this return to a kind of Christian message of equality before God.

Is that what we’re seeing here? And is there kind of an opening here for a broader values-based Democratic coalition that the kind of corruption and depravity and collapse of late-stage Trumpism has created?

Elrod: Absolutely. And I would say this. Christianity is just deeply interwoven into liberalism. And by that I mean, like, small-l liberal—it doesn’t have to be progressive or left—but the universal ideas of Christianity, especially things that come later, the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, this idea that we have equality before God, that we are individuals with equal worth and merit and dignity striving together.

I mean, these are fundamentally Christian ideas that are also really, really rooted in the liberal revolution that comes in the early modern period and onward.

In fact, I think we should embrace the idea that Christianity does not have to be—and this is something that a lot of people on the left side of center make the mistake of doing, which is assuming Christianity has to be a kind of reactionary, regressive thing—when in fact it can be a powerfully liberating and leveling and unifying idea. And it comes in history in many cases, in many points in history, as a liberating and universalizing force and not an oppressive one.

Sargent: Where do you see the Republican Party going? Does the future essentially hold a Texified, if you will, Republican Party? And is that going to be something that’s, you know, a little bit more of a rump, potentially? Or are they going to be able to figure out how to get past Trump and Trumpism and kind of reconstitute something more like a previously existing Republican Party?

Elrod: No, the near-to-medium-term future is a Texified party. And as far as it being a rump, it’s up to us to make it a rump. It won’t be a rump unless we fight to make it one.

And it’s only once we do that, once the party is essentially razed to the ground through electoral defeat after electoral defeat, that there’s a chance you have something different and better on the other side.

Sargent: And James Talarico’s theory of the case, which is that you need this very broad coalition in order to defeat Republicans in Texas, is kind of a way of saying that we have to turn the Republican Party into a MAGA rump. That’s what he’s saying, isn’t he?

Elrod: Absolutely. And this is why I go back to some of the lessons I took from Hungary earlier in the year, with, you know, Péter Magyar basically said the same thing. You have to build a massive coalition against this stuff, and you have to deliver overwhelming defeat. And then you can start to build a program of reconstruction on top of it.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Alan, big things could be happening now. I guess we’ll know more in around a month. But man, Talarico and these other candidates really have to close this thing out, don’t they?

Elrod: They do. They do. Got to get across the finish line.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out Alan Elrod’s piece. It’s called “The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas.” And it sure looks that way. Alan, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Elrod: Thanks for having me.

The four states considering such ballot measures are Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia. The initiatives in Nevada and Virginia would not change existing law but would amend the constitution to enshrine abortion protections. The Idaho ballot measure would reverse the state’s strict abortion ban. Meanwhile, the Missouri initiative is attempting to undo protections approved by voters as a constitutional amendment in 2024.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 17 states have put forth abortion-related ballot measures. In 2022 and 2023, every state that voted on these measures protected access to abortion. Voters in seven out of the 10 states considering abortion-related ballot measures in 2024 supported protecting abortion rights. But even the failure of ballot measures did not necessarily translate to lack of support: In Florida, an initiative to protect abortion rights received 57 percent of the vote, which did not clear the state’s 60 percent threshold for adding a state constitutional amendment.

“We’ve seen time and time again in states across the country that voters do turn out en masse to support abortion rights ballot measures. They have shown us that when they have a chance to change their state laws and support abortion access, they will take it,” said Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Control of Congress is up for grabs in this year’s elections. Democrats are favored to take the House of Representatives and have a shot at winning the Senate, as well. (The latest analysis from the Cook Political Report says that Democrats retaking the lower chamber is a “done deal” and assesses the chance of seizing the upper chamber as “very realistic.”) But the downballot contests are key where reproductive rights are concerned. State legislatures and gubernatorial races are perhaps even more crucial to ensuring abortion access. Since the Dobbs decision kicked the question of abortion rights to states, they have become the primary battlegrounds on the issue. Abortion rights advocates believe that ballot measures may help juice turnout in these states, but the challenge is ensuring that voters also back their preferred candidates.

“The ballot measures are a tremendous tool in our arsenal here, in order to protect and expand access, but it’s imperative that people are also voting their values up and down the ballot, and and voting to elect people to state office that are going to carry out and enforce the will of the voters by implementing these amendments in the appropriate way,” said Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights organization that launched a $23.5 million voter mobilization campaign earlier this year.

Support for abortion does not necessarily translate to support for Democratic candidates. Of the seven states that approved ballot measures supporting abortion rights, four supported Trump in the 2024 election. Moreover, in Montana and Missouri, politicians who oppose abortion rights were elected governor.

A recent paper by scholars at the University of Richmond and Texas Christian University found that abortion ballot measures aided Democrats in 2022—but two years later, they benefited Republican candidates. The researchers concluded that the spillover effects benefiting Republicans were a result of moderate voters who supported expanding abortion access while also voting for GOP candidates.

“In 2024, moderate voters who would have otherwise voted for Democratic candidates to protect abortion rights instead voted to protect abortion rights on the ballot measure while also voting for Republican candidates to align with their other policy preferences,” the report authors wrote.

Still, voters might now appreciate the stakes of electing candidates who support abortion access. A 2025 poll by the public opinion firm PerryUndem found that 46 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights, including 45 percent of independent voters. (Forty-one percent of independent voters said it would not affect their vote at all.) Another 2025 survey from Navigator Research found that majorities of voters reported they probably or definitely could not support candidates who are in favor of banning or restricting access to abortion and contraceptives.

Linking politicians to their positions on abortion is a critical challenge for Nevadans campaigning to oust current Republican Governor Joe Lombardo from office. Although Lombardo signed abortion protections into law in 2023, critics point to his personal opposition to abortion and unwillingness to say whether he supports the amendment as proof that he cannot be trusted to protect access. Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom recently launched a $1 million digital ad campaign in support of the amendment, which also highlights Lombardo’s previous comments opposing abortion. Separately, Planned Parenthood Votes is also investing $1.2 million in ads slamming Lombardo.

Krystal Ortiz, campaign manager for Question 6 at Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, expects that “yes” votes for the ballot initiative will likely outperform Democratic candidates, but that’s because it’s an issue that Nevadans overwhelmingly support. In accordance with Nevada law, voters must approve a citizen-initiated ballot initiative twice before it can be added to the state constitution. The measure enshrining abortion protections was passed with 63 percent of the vote in 2024, and is now on the ballot again.

Ortiz is focused on building on the work advocates did in 2026—they don’t need to get on the ballot this time, but they do need to remind voters what’s at stake, she said.

“One of the differences between 2026 and 2024 is that this year, we have even more proof that our rights are under attack,” Ortiz said, pointing to abortion bans in other states, as well as efforts by the Trump administration and GOP state attorneys general to limit access to the abortion medication mifepristone. “We’re reminding voters that we have been seeing these kinds of attacks all across the country, and that’s why we need this.”

Abortion rights advocates are also hopeful about the prospects of initiatives in Idaho and Missouri, which are both deeply Republican, even as the road to passage is bumpy. In Idaho, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, the GOP governor and attorney general succeeded in changing the language of the ballot measure to note that current law “preserves the life of preborn children by prohibiting abortion” with few exceptions. Because passage of the ballot initiative would mean establishment of statutory law and not a constitutional amendment, this measure could be repealed by the state’s conservative legislature even if it succeeds.

In Missouri, Republicans are attempting to sway voter sentiment by including language that would constitutionally ban gender transition care for minors—even though such surgeries and issuing new puberty blocker prescriptions have been illegal in the state since 2023.

Supporters of the amendment are highlighting the gender transition care aspect in their campaigning, and Stitzlein said that abortion rights advocates needed to convince voters that this measure is primarily an abortion ban.

“They’re not saying the word ‘abortion’ in all their paid media. They know that it’s because if they were honest about their intentions here, they would lose,” said Stitzlein. The amendment also shares the same name as the one that enshrined abortion rights two years ago: Where supporters needed to vote “yes” on Amendment 3 two years ago to protect access, they must vote “no” on Amendment 3 to do the same this year. The 2024 measure ensured the right to an abortion through fetal viability.

Even with the efforts to protect abortion access in red states under siege, advocates believe their campaigns will have long-term impact. Standiford said that, as someone who has long worked in abortion rights advocacy, she is very aware that victories can be temporary. Conversely, those wins can inspire voters to continue fighting because their actions at the ballot box result in immediate change. Even if rights are threatened, she argued, that will not depress the movement overall.

“What voters and supporters find energizing about it is they can translate their votes—especially on these constitutional amendment fights—immediately into protections for themselves and their families. And that is a really empowering place to be,” said Standiford.

Earlier this week, the justices announced that they would take up what may be the most important case of the term. The Trump administration had asked the court to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review lower court rulings against its mandatory-detention policy for undocumented immigrants. How the Supreme Court decides the case could have vast implications for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations.

At issue in Rhoney is whether the federal government can indefinitely hold undocumented immigrants in custody while their deportation proceedings take place. Since at least the 1980s, immigration courts have routinely allowed them to post bond while they await the outcome of their cases. The Trump administration changed tack in July 2025, arguing that it could instead hold undocumented immigrants without bond.

To support this position, the administration cited a 1996 law known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Everyone calls it IIRIRA instead. Under IIRIRA, the Justice Department has claimed that one provision in the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border. That provision says that “an alien who is an applicant for admission” into the United States “shall be detained” if “the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.”

To that end, the Justice Department has invoked the IIRIRA provision to justify holding any undocumented immigrant in custody without bond hearings until their deportation hearings are concluded—or, importantly, until they “voluntarily” agree to leave the country. Since the Trump administration has detained tens of thousands of immigrants in squalid conditions over the past 18 months, an unknown number of those held have agreed to forgo deportation hearings to leave the country.

Holding people indefinitely without due process has been illegal in the Anglo-American legal tradition since Magna Carta in 1215. More to the point, the administration’s policy appears to be based on a misreading of federal law. While the provision they cite does require mandatory detention in a narrow set of circumstances, it only applies to people who are an “applicant for admission”—meaning that they presented themselves at the U.S. border for entry.

Ricardo Barbosa da Cunha, the plaintiff in this case, did no such thing. He crossed the U.S. border in 2004 after traveling from his native Brazil through Mexico. He and his family have lived in Massachusetts for the last two decades, where he owns a small construction business. Barbosa da Cunha has had a legal work authorization since 2016 and has no criminal record. Federal immigration agents arrested him on the way to work last year and have kept him in custody since then.

In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him and rejected the administration’s interpretation of IIRIRA. The section it cited does not apply to undocumented immigrants “who were not apprehended while entering the country or shortly thereafter,” Judge Joseph Bianco wrote for the court. Instead, immigrants like Barbosa da Cunha fall under a different section of IIRIRA that does allow for bond hearings before an immigration judge.

Lower courts are often divided and splintered about how to read certain federal statutes. This case is not one of them. The New York Times reported earlier this week that more than 500 federal district-court judges have rejected the Trump administration’s mandatory-detention policy as unlawful, as have nine of the 11 federal circuit courts of appeal. The Trump administration is hoping that it can garner at least five votes from the justices to outweigh them.

The Supreme Court will also hear another major immigration case later this term on the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to third-country removals. Most deported immigrants have typically been returned to their home countries, aside from recent arrivals at the U.S. border in Mexico who are returned there. In their zeal to remove as many immigrants as possible from the United States, Trump administration officials have shipped thousands of them to countries in Africa that agree to take them in exchange for favorable diplomatic and financial treatment.

Multiple lower courts have held that immigrants must be able to challenge third-country removals, which the Trump administration has vociferously rejected. Some deportation flights have stranded immigrants in countries where they do not speak the language or—as in the case of South Sudan—where they are at risk for torture and abuse by local officials. The Supreme Court declined to forbid the Trump administration from carrying out these types of deportations while it considers the case—a grim sign for the immigrants’ hopes that the justices will ultimately side with them.

The first case of the term next week will also be one of the term’s most important decisions: Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. At issue is whether local communities that are harmed by climate change and its effects can seek damages in state courts from oil and gas companies that contributed to higher carbon emissions. The town of Boulder, Colorado, argued that its claims fit well within traditional causes of action for harms caused by companies.

Fossil fuel companies have urged the Supreme Court to reject these claims, arguing that federal law preempts the town’s lawsuit and that state courts cannot hear them at all. The high court may also decide to punt the case on procedural grounds for now. Though the court is hardly averse to ruling in favor of the fossil fuel industry, Boulder received some good news on Monday when Justice Samuel Alito announced that he would recuse himself from the case after resisting past suggestions to do so.

In Viramontes v. Cook County, the justices will examine whether state assault-weapons bans can survive under the court’s new Second Amendment precedents. The plaintiffs in the case are challenging bans on AR-15s and similar rifles in both Illinois’s most populous county and the state of Connecticut. (The justices consolidated them on appeal.) Almost a dozen states have similar laws on the books. The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment challenge to laws banning a specific type of firearm this century.

More than a few plaintiffs asked it to do so after proclaiming an individual right to bear arms in 2008, but the court long declined to hear such cases. In 2022, the court’s conservative majority made it substantially easier for gun owners to challenge gun laws when it laid out a new, stricter Second Amendment test that requires states to find a “historical analogue” for laws to survive judicial scrutiny. How that test comports with earlier Supreme Court decisions that allow states to restrict “dangerous” and “unusual” firearms will be the central question for the court.

On the constitutional front, one of the most curious upcoming cases this term is Jouppi v. Arizona. The case centers on an Alaska pilot who flew into a dry town with a passenger who had a six pack of beer in their possession. In response, state officials charged the pilot with violating state liquor laws—which are aimed at reducing alcoholism and domestic violence in the state’s isolated interior—and seized his airplane, which is valued at more than $77,000.

Jouppi, the pilot, argued that confiscating his Cessna violated the Eighth Amendment, which forbids levying excessive fines as punishment for a crime. He argued that seizing an airplane for carrying a few cans of beer met that threshold. The Supreme Court has not elucidated the scope of the excessive fines clause or what counts as “excessive” in this context. How the court decides the case could affect criminal forfeiture laws across the country.

The Supreme Court will also tackle what we can call the “known unknowns.” These are cases that the court is likely to hear but hasn’t yet intervened in. One area where the court may feel compelled to weigh in is on legal challenges to prediction markets and sports betting. A Supreme Court ruling in 2018 struck down a federal ban on sports betting, allowing dozens of states to pass laws to legalize and regulate sportsbooks within their borders. Last year, prediction-market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket also began allowing users to place wagers on the outcomes of professional and amateur sports at all levels in all 50 states, even those that have not legalized sports betting.

The prediction-market industry argued that it wasn’t really offering “bets.” Instead, it claims to be offering “swaps,” where customers could buy contracts on its exchanges that would pay out depending on the outcome of an event. (As courts have noted, its advertising often said otherwise.) The industry also argued that it was regulated by federal law through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, preempting state enforcement with an extremely favorable regulatory regime from the Trump administration.

State regulators in Nevada and state attorneys general in California, New York, and other states sued Kalshi and Polymarket nonetheless for operating illegal sports-betting websites in their states. The states won a major victory over the summer when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prediction-market swaps on sports are bets and that federal law on derivatives exchanges hadn’t displace the states’ traditional authority to regulate gambling. At least one other circuit reached the opposite conclusion, making it likely that the justices will need to resolve the split in the coming term.

Another obvious area where the court will likely feel compelled to involve itself is on President Donald Trump’s extraordinary claims of executive power. During the summer recess, for example, the Supreme Court forbade a lower court from blocking construction of an illegal ballroom on the ruins of the White House’s East Wing, over the dissents of Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices. Litigation over the fate of the Kennedy Center, which Trump has demanded to be illegally renamed in his honor or face financial ruin, or a heavily armed 250-foot arch outside Arlington National Cemetery, could also reach the court this term.

Since it is an election year, among the most important cases will be election-related ones. The court routinely hears a small number of cases involving ongoing elections on the shadow docket every two years, usually involving last-minute changes or new restrictions. Since last year, the justices have already considered a spate of cases involving the partisan-gerrymandering wars, which it largely let play out without further intervention. Some of those gerrymanders came about after the court effectively legalized racial gerrymandering last term.

This time, the concern is about what Trump could do after the election if he and Republicans suffer major defeats and lose control of Congress, as polls suggest they likely will. The Justice Department’s seizure of ballots in Georgia earlier this year stoked fears among voting rights groups that the administration will interfere in the certification of state results under the false guise of investigating voter fraud. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s legal bids to overturn the 2020 election six years ago. How they respond to any illegal and extralegal attempts to corrupt the 2026 midterms could be the most important test that the justices face this term.

“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still OK for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Byron Donalds, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Florida of his Democratic opponent. “Just pure insanity.” Ads of that nature are running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, and many other places. Talarico has walked back his previously supportive stance, and other prominent Democrats in purple or red states have taken similar positions. But that won’t stop the deluge. You’d think—and of course, this is exactly what Republicans want people to think—that Brown and Talarico spend two-thirds of their waking hours scheming to figure out ways to get trans athletes into Buckeye and Longhorn uniforms.

It’s pathetic. Here we have a president and a political party that have done the following. They have seen prices rise dramatically on their watch and have not only had no response to it but, at least in the case of the president, have repeatedly denied that this is even happening; they have sanctioned and defended the detention (in harsh conditions) of innocent people and the shooting of American citizens by a lavishly funded and poorly trained paramilitary force whose members are recruited through appeals to racial extremism; they have started a calamitous war because the president created the conditions that made war, in his mind, necessary (that is, by rescinding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action); they have exploded the deficit and the debt; they have engaged in (the president) or turned a blind eye to (the rest of the party) corruption on a Ferdinand Marcos type of scale. In these and numerous other ways, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made daily life harder for regular Americans while simultaneously degrading the nation’s character and soul. And they’re going to finish this campaign by trying to terrify people about a thing that hardly exists.

That’s a point that can’t be made often enough. In December 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “How many athletes are there in the U.S. in NCAA schools?” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked. About 510,000, said Baker. And how many of these athletes are openly transgender, Durbin wondered. The answer came back: “Less than 10.”

And what about the Olympics? In this century, which in this case is likely the same thing as saying “ever,” exactly two transgender athletes have competed in the Olympics, along with about six nonbinary athletes, out of something on the order of 13,000 Olympians every four years (the International Olympics Committee has banned trans women from competing in women’s categories starting in 2028; you can agree or disagree with this decision, but whatever one’s view, the fact is that it means that the future number will be zero).

Finally, firm numbers on high school participation don’t seem to exist. It stands to reason that it could be a bit higher because a lot more athletes make high school teams than win a collegiate scholarship or a spot on an Olympic team, but it’s hard to think of a good reason why it would be that much higher.

The argument that there are very few trans athletes in the country is one Democrats make a lot. But there’s a second argument that I don’t hear them make very often at all, which I think would be extremely effective, maybe even to the point of ending the debate in most voters’ minds: Individual sports all have governing bodies, and it’s not as if those bodies haven’t been thinking about this issue. They have, and they, or most of them, have drawn up policies. So why don’t we just leave it to them?

It’s a more important point that it may seem. Indeed, I would argue that allowing Republicans to talk generally and vaguely about “sports”—a category that includes everything from football to curling to underwater hockey (yep, it’s a thing), as well as everything from the heights of organized professional sports to local rec leagues—amounts to allowing the demagogues to set the terms of debate.

There are all kinds of sports being played out there, and what’s right for one sport might not be right for another. From the website TransAthlete.com, here’s a sampling of policies:

• USA Badminton: admits trans women “on a case-by-case basis.”
• USA Biathlon: states that all athletes “may participate in the gender category that best aligns with their gender identity without restrictions, medical intervention, or proof of gender.”
• USA Cycling: adopted a policy last year making the “female” category “open only to those assigned female at birth on their original birth certificate.”
• US Figure Skating: essentially the same as USA Cycling.
• US Golf Association: promulgated a policy in 2024 allowing trans athletes to participate “if they meet requirements.” Golf!
• USA Roller Sports: has a policy that “follows the 2015 IOC Consensus Statement and requires testosterone levels below 10nmol/L for trans women” (that’s a low testosterone level for young men).
• USA Swimming: adopted a policy in 2025 to “limit the female category to those assigned female at birth.”

Several governing bodies have not promulgated a policy, meaning presumably that it’s not a burning issue in their realms: canoe and kayak, equestrian, luge, pentathlon, skateboarding, softball, table tennis, a few others.

This is important information for people to have. Again, one may agree or disagree with these policies; that’s not the point. The point here is what Democrats should tell voters. And I think they can flip the tables on Republicans by bringing these facts to light, because doing so will make voters see that thousands of responsible adults who have devoted their lives to getting young people to play sports have given this matter a lot of thought, and maybe it’s true that politicians don’t need to meddle in this. Facts don’t usually defeat demagoguery, but in this case, they would help a lot.

So Democrats should say that. But the larger questions here for Democrats concern tone and context. And this is where Democrats have to understand a crucial point: We aren’t still in the 1990s, when Democrats could use the left as a punching bag on such issues. That isn’t the reality anymore, and doing that would be a political, and moral, disaster.

I think everyone, save maybe a small number of ideological activists, understands that this is a tough issue for Democrats, especially in places like Ohio and Texas. Earlier this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of around 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats on a broad range of issues. Bear in mind here that this was a very liberal group—when given five ideologies by which to label themselves, about a third said they were “liberal” and another third “progressive,” which was clearly defined to respondents as being a little left of liberal.

We asked folks about their level of support for three aspects of trans rights: protecting trans people from discrimination, allowing trans youth access to gender-affirming care, and allowing trans youth to compete in sports according to their chosen gender identity. The answers: protection from discrimination was supported by 80 percent of respondents; gender-affirming care by 62 percent; playing sports, just 39 percent. And remember—these were loyal Democrats only. Polls of Americans in general tend to show about three-quarters of the population opposed to allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports.

Those kinds of numbers make it tough for Democrats in purple or red states to take a pure pro–trans athlete line. Again, I think most people understand that. But there are defensible ways to finesse the issue and indefensible ways.

Under “Indefensible,” see Gavin Newsom. The California Governor decided it would be dandy to announce his anti–trans athlete position on his podcast with Charlie Kirk as his guest. Kirk, of course, expressed his hatred of gay and trans people on numerous occasions. It was the debut episode of the podcast, in March 2025. Someone aching to be the Democratic nominee for president telling someone like Kirk that “I agree with you completely” on that issue—it’s the textbook definition of throwing a small and powerless constituency under the bus and pandering to a notoriously homophobic right-winger.

A generation or two ago, what Newsom did would have been very widely praised by pundits for “standing up” to the left-wing loonies. There was some of that when he did it, but not very much. There was far more criticism. That’s what’s different today from, say, 1992, when Bill Clinton created his famous “Sister Souljah moment.” Centrists who pine for Democrats to do a Sister Souljah on trans people today fail to understand how things have changed. In a world where verdicts on such moves are decided not by David Broder and Tim Russert but by TikTokkers and podcasters and YouTube influencers, any attempt at such a moment is guaranteed to backfire and offend liberal base voters. It’s also, you know, the wrong thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint.

More broadly—and this is the needed context I referred to above—Democrats need to keep in mind that trans people are under assault in this country from the right wing. In many states, trans people—not children, but grown adults, who should be able to live their lives without the state threatening their political and civil rights—live in fear of everyday situations or circumstances like having to go to the hospital. Calls to LBGTQ hotlines have spiked. Forty-three states have passed 63 bills this year alone impinging on the rights of transgender people. In one poll, nearly half of trans respondents said they had moved or wanted to move to a more hospitable place.

If Republicans are going to bang on about trans athletes, then part of the Democratic response must be to broaden the conversation and remind Americans of this appalling dehumanization campaign. Your average American may not be willing to fight and die for his trans brothers and sisters, but I doubt he wants people to be persecuted in the United States of America. Polls tend to show that 70 or 80 (or more) percent of Americans think trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

So, to sum up, the Democratic response on the trans athlete question should consist of three parts:

1. Look, all these sports have governing bodies, and those bodies have all studied this. What works for fencing might not work for track and field. So why don’t we just leave it to the people who ponder these matters for a living, and keep the politicians out of it?

2. The president of the NCAA said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of literally more than half a million athletes at America’s colleges and universities, so why is my opponent spending so much time talking about this and not gas prices and the war?

3. Finally, if my opponent wants to talk so much about transgender people, let’s talk about the way trans people, kids and adults, are being persecuted in red states and living in fear, and the fact that trans Americans who are willing and eager to wear this nation’s uniform and even die for their country if asked are being denied the right to do so.

Those three points defend a progressive political position without throwing anybody under any bus or bowing to right-wing framing or pandering to some presumed lowest-common-denominator thinking. They also, I wager, would sound like common sense to your average person.

It’s worth pointing out just how much the landscape has changed since the 2024 election bred fear that Trump’s “they/them” political ads hurt Kamala Harris’s chances. Need proof? Here is Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy for none other than Third Way, talking about trans issues in a September piece at Assigned Media, a website that tracks trans issues: “Going after healthcare for adults, kicking people out of the military, taking people’s driver’s licenses away, they can’t pick up their kids at school—these are well beyond the pale for most American voters. We’ve got an HHS secretary right now who believes the only appropriate healthcare for transgender people is conversion therapy. That’s crazy.” 

If Third Way’s point person on this issue isn’t afraid to say the right thing, no one in the Democratic coalition has any excuse.

I realize that Democrats still have to answer the basic “Do you support trans females participating in girls’ sports?” with a simple yes or a no. Some, like Talarico and others, will feel they have to say no. But I think if they say it in the context of the kind of rhetoric I suggest, most activists will grant them some leeway. Activists worry that yielding on the athletes question will inevitably lead to giving way on other issues, which is certainly a fair concern. But making a broader defense of the rights of transgender people—and actually meaning it—can allay that concern.

And most regular voters will think what they said is fine, and they can pivot back to the issues people actually care about. And if the Democrats can fight off the relentless and vile Republican attacks on this issue, that leaves the Republicans with nothing. Which is precisely what they offer the country.

The emergence of this community safety ecosystem is one of the more striking innovations in municipal governance in recent years. Community safety agencies are beginning to consolidate jurisdictions’ efforts to address safety through prevention and early intervention, rather than just law enforcement. These community safety interventions include community violence intervention, a range of programs designed to prevent community violence before it happens; community crisis response, a branch of first response designed to handle a range of behavioral health crises and low-level conflicts; and victims services and homeless outreach.

What binds all of these interventions together is a recognition that the most effective way to build safer neighborhoods is to rapidly connect vulnerable populations in crisis to stabilizing services. A violence intervention worker might only have a few hours to find new housing in a neighborhood across town for a family at risk of retaliatory violence. A community crisis responder may be able to provide mediation services to resolve a dispute between neighbors before it takes a darker turn. Or she may be the best equipped to stabilize a person in the downtown corridor experiencing a mental health crisis and then connect them to long-term care.

Community safety interventions are best understood and organized separately from law enforcement—not in opposition to law enforcement but because the draw of relying on enforcement and coercion can undermine the core ethos of community safety. The very point of these agencies is to develop city infrastructure that can intervene before law enforcement becomes necessary. These services can operate without the downsides of relying on force or coercion. Community safety and law enforcement may partner on specific initiatives, such as to deliver a co-response that pairs clinicians and officers to respond to highly volatile situations like high-acuity domestic violence calls or barricaded suspects. But ultimately, cities are wisely recognizing that trying to deliver community safety services from law enforcement agencies is not as effective as giving community safety its own home in the municipal ecosystem—and its own well-trained personnel.

These new community safety agencies are often leveraging services that already exist, but are doing so in a way that addresses long-standing problems in municipal governance related to siloing and reliable investment in and delivery of services. Public health–oriented safety interventions have often operated at a remove, scattered across—and sometimes duplicated across—various city departments. This disconnection has meant that the community violence intervention worker might not know whether a housing voucher is available for their vulnerable family, if they know anything about available housing services at all.

These safety interventions also have not historically received the level of investment afforded to law enforcement, and so, relatedly, they have not been held accountable for responding with the same level of urgency we expect from law enforcement. As a result, the person experiencing a mental health crisis has often faced a difficult choice: a police officer who can arrive quickly but may not be equipped to address the crisis or a trained clinician who may take hours, or days, to arrive. Traditional social services—even those with an implication for public safety—simply were not designed for rapid response. That is beginning to change. Instead of cities considering these programs as charitable and “nice to have,” they are beginning to build them into the city’s safety infrastructure as critical assets that must be deployed as reliably, and sometimes as rapidly, as law enforcement.

In doing so, they reflect a broader understanding of safety that more closely aligns with what residents have been seeking for decades. In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman Jr. writes about how Black communities asking for both better protection from law enforcement and better social services and neighborhood investment over the course of the last half century have been given more (although rarely better) policing, but almost nothing in the way of services and investment. Building dedicated community safety agencies that are focused on leveraging social services, prevention, and early intervention rather than enforcement can help cities take a step back in the right direction, and in a way that also better aligns with how communities are actually thinking about safety.

Politicians often wrongly assume that communities concerned about safety are solely focused on law enforcement as a solution. But both opinion polling and academic research make it clear that people also prioritize prevention and early intervention strategies, including housing, education, employment, and even the design of the built environment of the neighborhood as part of their understanding of the safety of a place. In this way, community safety agencies represent the culmination of a long-overdue effort to address these concerns as vigorously as efforts to address crime rates through enforcement.

Community safety interventions are designed to keep some of the most vulnerable people in our neighborhoods safe, to the benefit of all of us. For example, people living with serious mental illness are more vulnerable than the general population to a range of victimizations, including from police violence. Despite this, our safety infrastructure has largely treated them primarily as a source of potential danger and a problem for law enforcement to solve. In a community safety framework, a moment of mental health crisis is an opportunity to get that person the help they need from someone trained to provide it—and in a way that is most likely to lead to long-term care, reduce the likelihood of additional crises, and ultimately create a safer environment for a person in need of help.

None of this would matter if the evidence base for this work wasn’t strong—and growing. Evaluations of crisis response programs in several cities indicate they reduce arrests, crime reports, and response times while increasing connections to immediate and follow-up services. One multisite study found the likelihood of arrest was 42.5 percent lower in the year following contact with a mobile crisis team. Countless evaluations of community violence intervention programs across the nation have shown impact. A recent study of Richmond, California’s Peacemaker Fellowship found sustained reductions in firearm violence over the course of 14 years.

The community safety field still faces several barriers to achieving its full potential. For one, the field’s interventions are only effective as long as services remain available. Community safety work is already beginning to expose the insufficiency of our decades-long underfunding of the social safety net—especially in housing and behavioral health. Policymakers have always been willing to find the money necessary to jail and imprison as many people as the police were willing to arrest. But they haven’t always been willing to find the money necessary to house and treat those who need it. That will have to change. Governments will need to figure out how to develop and deliver services at a scale commensurate with problems that have been papered over by overreliance on jails, which have become the nation’s de facto treatment facilities for mental illness. As Moki Macias, the director of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion once asked me, how effective would we think the police were if they didn’t have a jail to take people to?

Community safety agencies have emerged primarily (though not at all exclusively) within city governments, raising real questions about how to develop complementary roles for federal, county, and state governments in advancing the field. This is especially the case because many of the behavioral health interventions critical to effective community safety reside in county departments. Bridging the gap and figuring out resource allocation between these county-based services and public safety–oriented teams operating out of cities will be critical for long-term success. State governments will need to begin developing standards for program operations, workforce development, and protocols for partnering with other governmental entities like 911 call centers.

Perhaps most important, federal and state governments will need to develop reliable funding streams for needed community safety services, as well as operations. Current federal streams like Medicaid and Department of Housing and Urban Development housing vouchers can provide some help to budget-strapped localities, but neither program was designed with community safety in mind. Reforms will be needed to ensure these resources can be reliably used by community safety agencies. The federal government may also need to develop dedicated grants for community safety agencies, much like it does for police through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office.

If these early successes are any indication, the field of community safety has the potential to fundamentally redefine and expand the way cities address safety concerns and improve the quality of life for everyone—including an unburdened police force. Policymakers, researchers, philanthropic organizations, and community members all have a role to play in ensuring the field continues to grow. The reward for this focus could be that, for the first time, local governments could have infrastructure specifically designed to build safety through prevention and early intervention—not just law enforcement and incarceration.

That will be the relevant question for Democrats in the House and Senate if the wave election that looks increasingly possible comes true and they win control of both houses of Congress. There will be initial euphoria from everybody hoping to put a halt to the nihilism and march toward corrupt autocracy driven by the destructive narcissist Donald Trump and his minions.

But the euphoria won’t last. The task for a party holding Congress and facing a hostile president with no regard for laws, norms, or the Constitution and its separation of powers—and a Supreme Court that has unleashed him—will be daunting. If Democrats in the majority don’t handle it well, their majority may not last long—and the country’s democracy and well-being will suffer deeply.

Start with three big challenges. First, a lot of those who voted for Democrats are expecting action to improve their economic conditions: Run on affordability, you better improve affordability. Second, and related, with Democrats holding a sizable piece of power in Washington, the failures of policy driven by the reckless Trump and his administration could be blamed on them—and it is a sure thing that hundreds of millions will be spent by Trump allies to try to pin the problems on the Democrats. Americans already think Washington isn’t working; if it looks like Democrats are a part of the problem and not of the solution, that could have brutal consequences in 2028.

Third, it is clear that the Democratic Party base wants toughness and serious pushback against the corruption, misconduct, and mayhem that are the core of Trump’s presidency. Witness the negative reaction to the private meeting between House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, looking for areas of possible common ground after January 3. Rank-and-file Democrats want pushback, not compromise. Of course, compromise will be necessary to meet the first challenge of improving people’s economic circumstances. But if it is not led by Democrats using every tool at their disposal to name names, kick ass, and stop further destruction, there will be hell to pay with the base.

What are those tools? I see six of them. First, of course, is lawmaking: the ability to pass bills and get them enacted into law—or if not, to lay down markers of what you would do if in full power, and what the other side wants to negate or block. That includes putting restraints on ICE to limit and hold it accountable for its predations, reducing or removing Trump’s tariff disasters, restoring defense readiness and making sure we are ready for twenty-first-century warfare, rebuilding our food and drug safety capacity to account for the serial lapses, among other things.

And to accomplish these goals without being stymied by GOP filibusters, consider reforming the Senate’s Rule XXII, not by eliminating the filibuster but by putting the onus on the minority by flipping the numbers—41 required to continue debate, not 60 required to end it.

Second, and related, is the power of the purse: the ability to tax and spend, to replenish programs that have been slashed or eliminated, to cut funds from programs bloated and misused by a president, and to put restrictions on how dollars are redirected from the purpose specified by Congress (see Park Service maintenance used instead for Trump vanity projects, and money earmarked for minority health protections used for RFK Jr.’s security). The power is also there to increase or cut taxes on different categories and groups.

Using reconciliation, which requires only a majority in the Senate, Democrats can pass and send to Trump tough spending measures to right the balance toward decency and the rule of law—but vetoes and confrontation over appropriations bills and continuing resolutions to keep the government funded will likely lead to possible government shutdowns. Democrats cannot afford to blink and concede to Trump on these.

Third is investigations and oversight: to dig into wrongdoing, corruption, lawbreaking, and malfeasance inside and out of government, along with the failure to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Fourth, and related, is the bully pulpit: the ability to use debate on the floor and in committees, and the megaphone provided by the legitimacy of Congress, to report to the public what you are doing and to shed light on failures or gaps in norms, laws, and policy. Fifth is advice and consent in the Senate: the power to examine the qualifications and character of presidential nominees for federal courts and executive positions, and to reject those unworthy of confirmation. Sixth is impeachment: the power in the House to hold miscreants to account and recommend their removal to the Senate.

So what do they do if and when “now” occurs? It can start with accountability. That means hearings that bring in—via subpoena, if necessary—every miscreant who violated the law, implemented disastrous policy, grifted, or lied to Congress. It also requires changing the rules to change the nature of the hearings—no more of the tired, disjointed, and ineffectual five minutes of questions for the majority, five for the minority, with each majority member freelancing without coherence and witnesses able to bob and weave and filibuster for five minutes, followed by a five-minute breather from a friendly questioner. Do 30 minutes at a time, with the initial questions done by expert staff to establish the predicates for the hearing and frame the inquiry, and disciplined and coordinated questions by majority members in each 30-minute interval to follow.

One important reason for the hearings is to use Congress’s power to document the violations of law and norms by virtually every Cabinet member, key White House staffers, and nongovernment employees sent to negotiate with foreign governments. If witnesses refuse repeatedly to appear under subpoena, and they are held in contempt of Congress, no reliance on referring them to Todd Blanche’s Justice Department. In extreme cases, order the Capitol Police to arrest them and create holding cells in the Capitol. That is clearly within the power of Congress.

It also has to include making sure that the statute of limitations does not run out on illegal acts perpetrated by anyone in the federal government or among private contractors or private citizens carrying out illegal acts on behalf of the administration or with cover from it, from perjury to assault to murder to bribery to grift and insider trading. And it means passing reforms to block further misuse of office and to punish corrupt actors. If Republicans filibuster those reforms, or Trump vetoes them, hold them accountable in every venue for the cover-ups. And see above for the best way to restore the original meaning of the filibuster.

It should also include selective impeachment—not of the president, which would be a fool’s errand, but of Cabinet and other officials who have sullied their offices and endangered the security and health of Americans and of our national security. Among those who should be first in line: Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, RFK Jr., Russell Vought, Brooke Rollins, Kash Patel, Brendan Carr, Doug Burgum, Howard Lutnick, and Bill Pulte. Even if none would be convicted by the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, the process of bringing forward articles of impeachment detailing their corruption, malfeasance, illegalities, and failures, much of it to be documented in the hearings above, with debate on the floor of the House, would serve to underscore the devastation wrought by this horrific administration—and force House Republicans either to endorse the monstrous behavior or reject it. Of course, to make impeachment effective, these need to be staggered so that the enormity of their individual perfidy can sink in before moving on to the next.

Next comes a positive agenda. The policy part can include golden oldies like free community college and subsidized childcare, but it requires a fresh approach to the substantive challenges the country faces. That has to include reducing barriers to implementing policies like infrastructure, and addressing festering problems like housing shortages, childcare, the health crises amplified by radical cuts in Medicaid and the removal of tens of millions from health insurance, the climate crisis, the threats from AI, and ways to reduce the burgeoning inequality. Relying less on bureaucracy and regulations and more on creative ways of empowering individuals and implementing public-private partnerships and relationships is necessary. So is finding ways to protect women and reproductive health, and righting the wrongs against all minorities. Lots of groups are working on fresh approaches to our biggest problems. Whether laws get passed and enacted or not, the agenda has to be available for presidential candidates to embrace in 2028.

The second part of that agenda is reforms both to curb abuses and to reboot a broken political system. In the former category, we need to repeal or curb the Insurrection Act, repeal or restrict the myriad emergency powers granted the president, always under the assumption that the president would act in the national interest, an assumption that no longer holds. We need to reform the Inspectors General Act to make it far harder for the president to negate any independent oversight of wrongdoing in agencies; the Vacancies Act, which lets a president bypass the Senate’s advice and consent power, which Trump has repeatedly abused; and there is an urgent need to restore the agencies and powers that regulate ethical standards throughout the government. That includes strengthening the Hatch Act to keep political figures from using their positions for partisan political purposes.  

It also includes hearings, and possibly an attempt at a constitutional amendment, to restrain the presidential pardon power, which Trump has despoiled into a pay-to-play scheme. An amendment that makes clear a president cannot pardon himself and that pardons in return for favors can be rejected by the courts should be a slam dunk.

Congress should also revisit the Budget and Impoundment Control Act to make it even more clear that the illegal use of “pocket rescissions” by Russell Vought and Trump to negate the congressional power of the purse is out of bounds; to require presidents to distribute to all states, not just the ones he likes, federal aid that uses allocation formulas; and to institute criminal penalties, with extended statutes of limitations, for officers of the Postal Service and the IRS if they use their positions for partisan purposes. It should alter the law to make clear that presidents cannot change the White House, other federal buildings, or federal property without approval from an independent body that is not under presidential control.

Congress should also work on reforming itself and fixing the parts of the election and voting system broken by Trump and John Roberts. These measures would include: enlarging the House by 150 from its current 435 members; repealing the 1967 law requiring single-member districts and creating opportunities for multimember districts with ranked-choice voting; reforming the redistricting process to require independent commissions in every state; adding not just Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states but also considering the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa; re-passing a tough and meaningful Voting Rights Act and campaign finance reform to overcome the outrageous Shelby County and Citizens United decisions; and taking away the power of antidemocratic billionaires to swamp the system with money and buy policies that enrich them more. Laying out markers, at least, for adjusting the imbalances in a Constitution built for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not one where soon 70 percent of Americans will live in just 15 states, should be on the to-do list.

Supreme Court reform should be high on the agenda, starting with something that might actually get enacted—a tough and enforceable code of ethics for rogue justices who have repeatedly shown disdain for ethical standards. The code that Chief Justice John Roberts put in effect after sustained criticism is hollow and unenforceable. A code that uses an independent office of judicial ethics, akin to the Office of Congressional Ethics, consisting of former judges and judicial ethics experts, to examine allegations of unethical behavior and recommend appropriate remedies to the Judicial Conference that now oversees lower level federal judges, with the requirement that the Judicial Conference explain in writing if it refuses to adopt those recommendations, should be a part of it.

But there is more. There is overwhelming public support for term limits for justices; Congress should pass a bill calling for 18-year terms, effective upon enactment, with justices then given options of senior status or continued service on a special court of appeals, to fit the constitutional provision of service during good behavior. If it is enacted, for the Roberts court to try to negate it would be a blatant conflict of interest, worth challenging. Consideration of enlarging the Supreme Court to 13, to fit the 13 circuits, with the term limits then extended to 26 years, should be on the agenda. And if the Roberts court continues to bypass the Constitution to promote its radical unitary executive theory, protect Donald Trump, and negate congressional authority, it should at least hold hearings on returning the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to the original specified in the Constitution: to wit, as Section 2, Article 2 states, “In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. Congress has the power to create a new court of appeals to hold overall appellate authority.

One other idea, admittedly a stretch but not without grounding in history, is moving the Justice Department and attorney general out of the executive branch. The initial consideration of the Judiciary Act of 1793 had the attorney general chosen by the Supreme Court. If combined with court reform, it may be worth considering.

To make some or all of this happen, Democrats in the House and Senate need to do what they have failed to do up to now: create a unified and disciplined message to let Americans know what the problems are and what they are doing about them. Trump has learned from his friend Steve Bannon that if you flood the zone with outrages, they will wash over each other and few if any will stick. The media are ill equipped to handle it, and most voters, occupied with their own lives and challenges, are not paying close attention to every corrupt act or policy outrage. If Democrats, given the timidity of the press corps and its predilection to both-sides issues and let Trump define the narrative, do not develop a discipline that includes changing the old ways of doing business and communicating, their tenure in power will be short and brutal. The way to counter the zone is to have one message pursued relentlessly for at least a week at a time.

That starts with creating a message group; a collection of lawmakers from both houses to meet at least every week to craft a message for the week, from Trump selling national security for money or favors to Republicans blowing up health insurance and access for millions of Americans; to RFK Jr. and his allies undermining responses to epidemics and pandemics and causing deaths from measles and other ailments; to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins shredding food safety; to the American gestapo tactics of Steven Miller, Tom Homan, and ICE; to the deterioration of national parks as Trump drains their money to pay for his perks. The message is not just the outrage but what Democrats say they will do about it, from holding miscreants accountable to proposing solutions to policy failures.

Each week should start with a press conference, followed by coordinated speeches in morning hours, on each floor during regular business, in special orders in the evening, in as many committees with hearings and markups that are relevant to the issue of the week, and with TV, radio, and social media appearances and podcasts, including by their allies outside Congress. If the solution is legislation that passes the House but is stymied by a filibuster in the Senate, there has to be a strong and sustained element to the message that remedies are being blocked by the same Republicans who caused the problem in the first place.

Another innovation should be regular weekly prime-time debates on key issues, primed to the message of the week, on the House and Senate floors, with perhaps two members on each side, to show that Congress is serious about the importance of debate and dialogue, and to highlight in some cases the complexities of resolving complex problems at home and abroad. If Republican lawmakers boycott, replace them with outside experts—say, former member Bob Inglis of South Carolina, a conservative who believes in market solutions for the problem of climate change. And the debates do not always have to pit Democrats against Republicans. The debates can go on YouTube and be used as springboards for media coverage and even use in classrooms and elsewhere.

Of course, a lot of this is easier said than done. If Democrats win majorities in both houses, but they are razor-thin, it may be difficult to do much other than holding hearings, and discipline might be a bridge too far. In any case, it will require a different mindset than we have seen from the leaders in both House and Senate. But the road map to relevance and an ability to turn the ship of state away from its current disastrous course is pretty clear. We know what they should do when the time comes. Let’s hope for the sake of decency and democracy that they have both the opportunity—and the will—to seize the moment.

But rather than think of this as some kind of flex, or one more scandalous abuse of the public trust, I want to suggest that what these ads represent is desperation—an acknowledgment that if Trump’s goose isn’t cooked yet, the pot is at least boiling. I also think, if anything, this fusillade of propaganda will likely backfire.

These ads haven’t generated good news for Trump; very few people outside of the administration and its obvious sycophants have tried to defend them. Moreover, the media seems resistant to give this story the “both sides” treatment. As with Trump’s 25-minute prime-time ramble last July, the political press seems wise to what’s going on. Of that aforementioned speech, TNR editor Michael Tomasky said, the overall reaction to the president’s attempt to shine us on “tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.” I think these PSAs do little else than advertise that fact.

I am not sure that Republican lawmakers necessarily agree with that assessment, but their own appraisals range from avoidant to withering. As MS NOW reported this week, “even congressional Republicans are expressing concern that the ads may violate the laws governing PSAs.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune is quoted in the piece as saying that he didn’t mind the message of the ad but believed “it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” That’s about the nicest thing any Republican who made their way into the story had to say about it, with Senator Mike Rounds saying, “It’s not something I would have done” and the outgoing Thom Tillis comparing it to Viktor Orbán. “I hate it,” said Tillis, bluntly.

Trump’s midterm activities aren’t limited to these controversial ads. According to reports, the president is planning to spend 32 of the next 35 days on the road campaigning for Republicans. As Politico notes, many of his intended destinations suggest the GOP is in tremendous peril. Instead of swing states and traditionally competitive districts, Trump is visiting “bastions of conservatism” like Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Texas. He’s even going to trek out to Alaska, “a significant commitment of time and presidential resources that underscores how dire the situation is for Republicans.” As one GOP donor told Politico, “The problem is that the fires are everywhere right now.”

The biggest question is whether Trump’s growing effort to further inject himself into the midterm cycle is going to help or hinder the electoral hopes of Republican lawmakers. In at least one contentious race, the Republican candidate is calling Trump an albatross. According to leaked audio obtained by The New York Times, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton told a room full of donors that Trump’s weird midterm convention in early September—which was held in Texas, in the hopes it would boost Paxton—had the opposite effect. “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.” (As Lawfare editor Eric Columbus pointed out, it’s also not good “when your 12-person private fundraiser includes someone who hates you enough to leak damaging audio.”)

The Paxton audio is a potent snapshot of some larger trends. All across the country, we’re seeing stories of GOP strongholds edging toward collapse as onetime Trump voters bear the weight of his administration’s incompetence. There are daily reminders that other Republicans are trying to create distance between the president and their campaigns, and even defying him on key matters. On Wednesday, in fact, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice broke with Trump on the matter dearest to the president’s heart—his mass deportation machine. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,” he said. You think?

Over the course of the year, as Trump’s approvals hit new lows and began to decimate the GOP’s midterm ambitions, I’ve tried to figure out what Trump and his fellow Republicans could do to reverse or even just arrest those trends. For a brief mad moment, I thought that the negotiated Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran might provide a springboard Trump could use to extricate himself from his crazy war. This didn’t come to fruition. The truth is, to save their bacon, Republicans would have to do things they are genetically incapable of doing: improve people’s lives and fix the economy. As I pointed out two weeks ago, Republicans—despite their misgivings about Trump—are still touting their One Big Beautiful Bill Act: a document that says the wealthiest among us deserve thousands of extra dollars, and the rest of us deserve some measure of pain.

It’s all adding up to defeat. The Cook Political Report says a Democratic takeover of the House is a “done deal” and that winning the Senate is “very realistic.” The Quinnipiac generic poll of the House has Democrats opening up a 51 percent to 39 percent lead, which are bloodbath numbers. The only headwind Democrats face is that while voters seem willing to give them their vote this year, they’re not as ready to give them their affection. Still, you’d rather be the Democrats right now than the GOP, who like Vice President JD Vance have been left begging voters for a “second chance” without understanding that they’ve already received that second chance—and they’ve blown it.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

On October 3, 2025, Johnson accompanied top Homeland Security officials to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, where a crowd had gathered in a designated “free speech” zone. Johnson filmed as ICE agents broke up the peaceful protest, shoving and striking attendees until they fell to the ground.

He then posted the videos to his various social media channels on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Rumble. The content featured clips of the protesters being lined up against a concrete wall, while Johnson narrated the scene, framing the civilians as “left-wing terrorists” who were “arrested for attacking police officers and ICE officers.”

But that was far from the truth and, almost a year later, two of those protesters—Harvard University data scientist Kyle Frankovich and contracted court reporter Maureen Foody—are ready to recoup damages from the reported inaccuracy.

On Friday, Frankovich and Foody filed a joint lawsuit against Johnson, claiming that Johnson knew his portrayals were false, but that he “did not care.”

The duo “sang songs, participated in prayers, held signs, and recorded official activity,” according to the complaint. Neither was charged with a crime, though they were detained for roughly eight hours and eventually released a half-mile from the jail.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s content from that day has collectively accumulated millions of views and interactions, granting the former BuzzFeed writer another pathway to rake in cash on a false narrative. (Johnson was fired from the digital outlet in 2014 for plagiarizing multiple blog posts.) In one post, Johnson claimed he saw “dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement” and further purported that “every activist” attending “attacked ICE agents in broad daylight” was viewed 1.7 million times.

Frankovich told MS NOW that he was “shaken” when he saw Johnson’s posts and the comments made by his followers that likened him to an antifa leader and attempted to dox his identity. Some comments included calls to torture, shoot, and kill the arrested protesters, according to the network.

The data scientist also scorned a DHS post that turned an image of his tattooed arms and zip-tied hands into a recruitment poster, framing Frankovich as a criminal.

“You shouldn’t get to lie about me,” Frankovich told MS NOW.

This has been brewing for some time. The Trump administration has threatened military action against Brazil, started classifying criminal groups there as terrorist organizations, and even sent State Department officials to Brazil to delegitimize its election system. The U.S. Consulate in São Paulo hosted pro-Bolsonaro social media influencers for a private roundtable. Bolsonaro’s other son, Eduardo, even floated the idea that the Trump administration might reject the outcome of the election if Lula wins. Yet all these things and more have potentially turned Brazilian voters away.

“Brazil did not want the U.S. imposition of this category on these criminal organizations because it opened the door for many ways in which the Trump administration could interfere in Brazilian internal politics,” Brown University professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies James Green told Responsible Statecraft. “Even though they haven’t overtly said, ‘Oh, Flávio is my candidate,’ they sent all these signals to indicate that that’s who the United States wants to see elected.”

While Lula’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent—much higher than Trump’s has been at any point in his second term—the election margin is expected to be close regardless. Voting begins on Sunday.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.

What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made its bones fighting Covid-era mask and vaccine mandates).

The suit argues that when Smith, while probing the January 6 insurrection, subpoenaed phone companies for some GOP lawmakers’ call logs (but not the content of the calls), he was in violation of that clause. It’s an argument Republicans have been making for a while, and it’s nonsense. The speech and debate clause is a protection against being arrested and prosecuted for legislative activity.

Smith wasn’t looking for people to arrest; he was looking for witnesses to a coup d’état (like Senator Darline Graham’s late brother, Lindsey, as Smith explained to her Tuesday in yet another planned gotcha moment that flopped). In any case, the clause has generally been understood to protect only legislative activity. Admittedly, the law here isn’t settled, and these days you never know when a case like this might land in the lap of some Federalist Society servant. But there’s a reason federal judges have been in the habit of tossing MAGA suits like this.

Smith’s pursuit of these call logs is the basis of the claim by some House members, notably Jim Jordan, that Smith perjured himself before the House last January. It’s a little complicated, but: At two hearings last December, House Republicans asked Smith: “Did the toll records that you requested from the senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?” Smith replied no. It was truthful as far as it went, but it wasn’t quite the whole story because Smith and his team did see the contents of some congressional text messages from 44 legislators—but it wasn’t as a result of records requested from the senators. It was as a result of a separate subpoena, to the National Archives and Records Administration. Republicans never asked about that subpoena.

Like every good lawyer, Smith learned in law school: Answer the question you were asked, and only the question you were asked. Jordan contends that Smith was engaging in half-truths, and so he issued a criminal referral against Smith to the Justice Department in July. Jamie Raskin counters that “wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution.” Smith’s lawyers said at the time that “the questions and answers preceding and following these exchanges also make clear that the focus of the question was on the toll records subpoenas. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith’s answers.”

Raskin said that if the referral were ever brought before a judge, it would “get laughed out of court.” That it probably will—although again, it depends on whose court it lands in. But in between here and there, Republicans can make Smith’s life very difficult indeed. The week before Jordan issued his referral, Attorney General Todd Blanche sat before the same Senate Judiciary Committee that became America’s laughingstock this week for his confirmation hearing. Missouri (really, Missouri again?) Senator Josh Hawley, surveying Smith’s supposed transgressions, asked Blanche if he had “thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Blanche’s answer: “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes.”

In sum: We should all be steeling ourselves for the day that Blanche files an indictment against Smith. It would be another textbook example of Republicans doing exactly what they accuse the liberal deep state of doing: using the machinery of the government to engage in political witch hunts. There’s no actual evidence that Smith was engaged in any kind of witch hunt. Republicans say his investigations were unprecedented. Well, yes, they were—but that’s because we’ve never had a president who orchestrated a coup against the United States and who carted away boxfuls of classified documents and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Florida and have a look.

Any prosecution of Smith should go about as far as Trump’s other failed revenge cases. But make no mistake: It could be assigned to an Aileen Cannon–type judge. And MAGA could claim a scalp and persuade uninformed Americans that there is no such thing as a rule of law, that there is only power, which is their point.

And finally, let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.

It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.

That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.

But we’ve been through this before. What Trump Derangement Syndrome–addled philistines fail to grasp is that our president is a poet. As Trump explained two years ago, he applies a rhetorical technique called “the weave,” about which “friends of mine that are, like English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” 

In October 2024, we published a digital chapbook of these Trump weavings as found verse, drawing from the campaign trail. Here we publish a sequel, drawing this time from the Time transcript.

MSDNC 

I do respect the free press
But I don’t respect fake news.
I’ll give you an example.
CNN and MSDNC—
Which is MS NOW—
They changed the name because it does so poorly. 
But I won the election. I won it handily 
By massive numbers. 
I won the popular vote. 
I won all seven swing states. 
They said if you won three swing states, 
I won all seven. 
I won the counties. 
It’s very important, 
86 percent popular vote. 
Everything, and very conclusively, 
I haven’t had a good story
On CNN
For years.

Kaitlan Collins: A Blazon

So at a certain point
You say,:
“What’s the purpose of like this crazy Kaitlan Collins?” 
She’s a very average person. 
She’s the most unhappy young person 
I’ve ever seen. 

Saudi Arabia 

I’ve done a lot for
Saudi Arabia. 
I protect 
Saudi Arabia. 
If I weren’t president
Saudi Arabia 
Wouldn’t be here right now.

Neither would Israel. 
They’d be wiped off the face of the planet. 

I do a lot for 
Saudi Arabia. 
My relationship with them
Is very good. 
I like the crown prince. 
My relationship
Is very good. 

But remember:
If I weren’t here, 
There wouldn’t be a 
Saudi Arabia.

There wouldn’t be an
Israel.

There wouldn’t be
Various other countries also. 

Song of Himself

A Disgusting Mess 

In truth, both Fox figures are slightly overstating matters. The poll does show Talarico up by seven points among registered voters, 53–46. But it shows his lead is much tighter among likely voters, 51–49. The latter might matter more.

Still, Talarico’s lead among both groups is remarkable in a state where no Democrat has won statewide in decades. What’s more, the poll’s internals help shed light on Trump’s role in bringing about Talarico’s lead. Here the news for Trump is very bad, and it captures something essential about the winding-down Trump era.

Let’s start with Trump’s approval among Texans. The Fox poll finds Trump badly upside down at 44–55—remarkable in a state he carried by 14 points in 2024. Drill down, and it’s worse: Trump’s approval is underwater with non-college voters (47–53), meaning he’s losing the working class, and Latinos (38–61). He won the latter by 55–45 two years ago.

And here’s a surprise: Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, or “non-MAGA Republicans,” at 46–53. Why does that matter? The Fox poll sheds light here too: Only 50 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election, which lags behind Texas likely voters overall (62 percent), and even further behind Democrats (67 percent).

It’s a big deal if non-MAGA Republicans are less enthusiastic about the election due to disapproval of Trump. Though MAGA Republicans are enthusiastic, a nontrivial number of GOP voters, alienated by Trump, may peel away and stay home.

Critically, this dovetails with the Talarico campaign’s theory of the case. Talarico is winning around 10 percent of Republican voters in the Fox poll, versus only 1 percent of Democrats going to Paxton (not a typo). This is driven by Talarico getting 22 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.

Talarico constantly says siphoning off Republicans is essential to winning. He recently described them as “disillusioned” under Trump, adding: “We have a real opportunity to build a big coalition of Democrats, independents, and Republicans.”

This opportunity really is there. In addition to getting more than one-fifth of non-MAGA Republicans, Fox finds Talarico winning nearly one-fifth of conservatives, almost exactly at parity with Paxton among non-college voters—Talarico is getting half the working class!—and edging into the requisite mid-60s with Latinos. His 79 percent of Black voters probably needs improvement, but a big tent appears to be forming.

Indeed, Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Talarico campaign, makes a critical point about these non-MAGA Republicans: Many are exactly the voters who would have supported Senator John Cornyn, and didn’t understand why Trump ordered them to vote for corrupt adulterous dirtbag Paxton in the primary. Talarico’s ads, Rocha notes, often echo attacks on Paxton from Cornyn’s primary ads.

“These non-MAGA Republican voters are the folks who liked Cornyn,” Rocha tells me. “They’re not just going to fall in line in the general when you see Talarico using the exact same issues against Paxton that Cornyn did.”

Exacerbating that dynamic is the economy: G. Elliott Morris’s new national poll finds that for the first time, a majority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents disapprove of Trump on the cost of living. MAGA Republicans won’t let that dilute their support for Trump-endorsed candidates; non-MAGA ones, however, might.

Let’s be clear: None of this means a Talarico victory is remotely assured. This is absolutely on a knife’s edge. Talarico has led in most polls, and some quality surveys have found his lead significantly larger than Fox’s two-point likely-voter lead. Yet the averages have the race within three points. That’s very, very close. We’re talking about Texas here.

But for now, at least, what’s happening seems to confirm some basic insights about the slowly expiring Trump era. The Trump coalition is fracturing due to his peculiarly terrible misrule. Inflation, tariffs, and war are alienating working-class voters. His subjugation of the GOP into his own personal cult is alienating non-MAGA Republicans. His violent ethnic purges are driving away Latinos. The Latino shift to Trump—which was never the durable realignment observers discerned—has come undone: He’s bleeding their support even in that supposed realignment’s ground zero, the Rio Grande Valley. His corruption and dictator-megalomania are badly alienating independents.

All of which might be creating the conditions for a large anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition to come together, a coalition perhaps broad enough to swamp Trump-GOP rigging efforts. Crucially, Democrats are now outperforming in Texas in ways that could overwhelm the GOP gerrymander there. It all hints—let’s hope—at the very broad anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian coalition that ousted Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year.

If Democrats can win the House and/or the Senate with such a coalition, it will have the party’s back in constraining Trump as the era of Late Stage Trumpism sputters out during his final two years. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First—and again, it’s all on a knife’s edge—that coalition has to really show up, and candidates like Talarico have to put this election away already.

Inside Washington

How worried should Dems be about the GOP’s huge cash advantage?

Late Wednesday night, the Senate adjourned until after the midterms, officially kicking off the final sprint of the campaign season. Republican candidates are heading home to constituents who are concerned about President Trump’s war in Iran and the high price of essentials. Democratic candidates are meanwhile heading into November with a massive cash disadvantage. The question remains: Will floods of money be enough to overcome the anger American voters are feeling?

The Democratic National Committee had $16 million in cash on hand at the end of July, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $130 million on hand. That staggering cash gap is only compounded when you factor in the DNC’s nearly $18 million in debts owed, putting them firmly in the red.

What’s more, a Supreme Court decision in June means the Republican Party cash advantage goes further than ever before; the justices lifted the cap on coordinated donations between political parties and candidates. 

Republicans’ money advantage is particularly stark in the frontline Senate races like Texas, where party money, outside PAC spending, and individual donations are fueling unprecedentedly expensive contests. By the end of September, the race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton had seen almost $259 million in total ad spending for the general election, which was already higher than the $202 million spent in 2024, when Democrat Colin Allred faced off against Senator Ted Cruz. In September alone, GOP spending groups pumped $122 million into the state to counter Talarico’s increasingly high polling numbers.

In the first three weeks of September, Republicans outspent Democrats by more than $100 million in the seven Senate races rated as a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report. In total, AdImpact estimates that a staggering $11.6 billion will be spent during the 2026 cycle, which is more than both the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential cycle.

But it’s less clear what that spending will actually buy. “Money is important, but it’s not everything,” said Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. “Public angst, deep public concern, can offset the type of money advantage—or at least mitigate some of the money advantage—that you’re seeing today.”

Some Democratic candidates are using the GOP’s cash advantage to ring alarm bells among supporters, hoping to pull in cash from small-dollar donors. “The GOP outspending us 3-to-1 is working, and now this race is within their reach,” a fundraising email from Chris Pappas’s campaign on Thursday read. Pappas is running for Senate in New Hampshire against Republican John Sununu. The race is surprisingly tight, experts told The New Republic in early September, and new forecasting confirms it: The Cook Political Report shifted the race toward Republicans—from “lean D” to “toss-up”—on September 15.

Senate hopefuls aren’t the only ones facing high levels of spending. A handful of House races have racked up massive price tags too. All in all, the GOP has spent or booked $454 million on House races to Democrats’ $381 million. In swing districts, that spending disparity is heightened. In New York’s 17th congressional district, GOP Representative Mike Lawler has benefited from $20 million in spending since the start of August, compared to a meager $3.8 million for Cait Conley, his Democratic opponent.

The real impact of Republicans’ cash advantage will only be clear when polls close on November 3. But until then, we have one clear indicator that money might not be everything in 2026: the generic ballot. And signs point to a potential tsunami for Democrats. In August, Democrats had an eight-point lead on Emerson College Polling’s generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters might vote for, regardless of the specific candidates. Come September, that lead widened to a whopping 11 points.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A new poll shows Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in a dead heat with her Republican challenger, John Braun, in Washington’s swingy 3rd congressional district. Interestingly, 11 percent of likely voters still appeared to be undecided in the survey, commissioned by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Gluesenkamp Perez has broken with Democrats on more than one occasion recently to advance a GOP agenda that would have otherwise failed—a move that embarrassed and angered other Dems but was widely seen as reflecting her challenging reelection position. A lot of her home-district Democratic voters, however, are also frustrated with Gluesenkamp Perez: 16.7 percent of them voted for progressive challenger Brent Hennrich in the August primary.  

On the other hand, The Washington Post reviews the prospects of Scott Colom, running for Senate in Mississippi against Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. It’s a “long shot” in a state Trump won by 23 points, write Dan Merica and Gregory S. Schneider, but “top Democratic officials and donors [are] increasingly hopeful that he could pull off the inconceivable,” given “this year’s poor political environment for Republicans.”

The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, that will reportedly be supplying Microsoft with computing power may have emitted 140 tons of nitrogen oxides over the course of “nearly a year before state regulators stepped in,” Floodlight’s Evan Simon reports at The Guardian. This is a follow-up to a piece from last week in which Simon and Brad Racino revealed that the data center had been running “at least 45 gas generators” without a permit. Nitrogen oxides have been linked to respiratory problems and heart attacks in humans, and Rutgers University’s Xiaomeng Jin calculates that the data center ranks as one of “the state’s top five NOx polluters of 2025.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In case you missed it: Data for Progress released a new survey on American social activity this week, and the results are a mix of sobering and fascinating. From 1995 to 2026, the percentage of people who say they’ve entertained at home in the past year dropped from 88 percent to 67 percent, while the percentage of people who say they’ve finished reading a book in the same time period dropped from 80 percent to 62 percent. But staying late at work has dropped too, while going to a concert or an exercise class has gone up. Going out to breakfast, giving or attending a dinner party, picnics, communal worship, clubs, and a class are all way down, while internet use, unsurprisingly, has skyrocketed.  

“Can a clean economy be built at the speed and scale that this moment demands?” At the Center for American Progress, Jessica Keller reviews the “lessons” from New York City’s Climate Week in late September. No real surprises here: Keller highlights the importance of “forward-looking policies that invest in emerging technology and industrial emissions reductions,” union jobs, and “clean, abundant power” that doesn’t increase households’ utility bills. But all of this, Keller writes, requires “bold, progressive leadership.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: James Talarico

Democrats have been disappointed before in Texas, but reports keep rolling in suggesting that Talarico is defying all expectations. He’s outraised Republican opponent Ken Paxton in rich Republican neighborhoods, Newsweek reported on Wednesday. New data seems to show that he has erased Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters, TNR’s Greg Sargent observes. And crucially, an Axios analysis of 2026 versus the 2018 Beto O’Rourke flameout shows 2026 looking much more favorable for Democrats in Texas on several key metrics, especially based on primary turnout.

Bad Week: Eric Schmitt

No need to belabor this one: You really don’t want the first reports that you might be on the 2028 presidential ticket to hit the internet at the same time as viral videos of you screwing up sports team names and getting owned by Amy Klobuchar in a congressional hearing.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

The Oval Office didn’t exist when the White House was built in the 1790s. Under what president was the first Oval Office built? Hint: It coincided with the construction of the West Wing—in other words, at a time when the size of the president’s staff began to grow. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Reporting from Zeteo showed that Crockett, who lost a contentious Democratic primary to state Representative James Talarico, was advertising her political consultation services on her merchandise website the “Clapback Collection.” The services available were listed as “Campaign management and strategy,” “Communications and public relations,” “Government relations and lobbying,” “Digital and social media,” and “Political risk management.” The page has since been taken down but can be accessed via the Wayback Machine at the time of this writing.

The website was taken down after Zeteo reached out to Crockett’s office.

“This website is and has always been focused on selling campaign merchandise,” a spokesperson for Crockett said. “The Congresswoman has only advertised it for merchandise and did not build it.

“She never directed anyone to add the button you are inquiring about.”

Crockett’s move has raised some eyebrows. “Not waiting until you leave congress to start lobbying is impressive,” Drop Site’s Ryan Grim wrote on X.

It’s abundantly clear that Crockett cares about herself and whatever career she might have after politics much more than she cares about the constituents of her district, or helping Democrats take Texas. Crockett has refused to simply endorse Talarico, instead sparring with people online and making a guest appearance at a Chris Brown concert.

The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.

The global coalition consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. The barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.

In a statement, the group said that it had “agreed on decisive, coordinated measures to stabilize immediate energy supplies, shield households and businesses from price shocks, and strengthen the long-term resilience of global energy systems.”

Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”

Two diplomats that spoke with Politico suggested that the G7 declaration was little more than a reiteration of an agreement initially drawn up in March, when the International Energy Agency led an effort to release some 400 million barrels of oil. That oil sale was stalled due to the low availability of cheaper U.S. crude oil, though an EU diplomat told Politico that the oil was finally released.

The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.39 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.70 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.37 a gallon.

This story has been updated.

The nation’s totally healthy, very fit, 80-year-old president gave himself a little pat on the back Thursday after he managed to climb on the rally stage at the Peterbilt Motors manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas.

The celebration came amid a dig at the health of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

“Don’t forget, when Biden left the stage he spoke very shortly, like two minutes, one minute, as quickly as possible,” Trump said. “Could never find the stairs.”

“I don’t have that problem. You know, these things—you know how many stairs they have?” Trump continued. “Look, I can go ramp, and I can go stair, I can go another stair, another stair in the back, I have a stair here—he could never find a stair.”

"I can go ramp, I can go stairs" -- Trump's audience in Texas gives him an extremely tepid round of applause as he brags about being able to go up stairs without falling pic.twitter.com/SvQFajZZGO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2026

Trump is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief. The octogenarian has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions since he returned to office, has fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, appeared lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurs his speech, and seems to almost chronically suffer from discolored and bruised skin.

His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged long-standing U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.

But Trump has nonetheless insisted that he is perfectly fit to keep the country’s most important job. Since 2024, the self-styled “stable genius” has “aced” several cognitive exams, though his recollections of the tests’ contents have called into question whether he actually took them at all.

The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A national Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll conducted in July found that public perceptions of Trump’s mental health were on par with Biden’s, with 46 percent of respondents rating Trump’s mental sharpness as “poor.”

“This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things.… I think every single person who voted for us in 2024 could find something where they wish maybe congressional Republicans had gone further,” Vance told Fox News on Thursday. “The challenge here is between Democrats who want to destroy the country, who want to permanently disempower you … and Republicans who fundamentally are trying to solve the problems that Democrats under Joe Biden created.” 

Vance: This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people pic.twitter.com/lhGetkOvkt

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

Vance was promptly lambasted online for the out-of-touch comment, something that’s become a bit of a trend for Republicans as they struggle to sell their platform to dissatisfied Americans as midterms approach. 

“So worrying about grocery prices, gas increases and no jobs is ‘griping’??” one liberal account posited. 

“By every metric Trump, Vance and the GOP took what the Biden administration left them and made it worse for the American people,” said another. “If you want to give them two more years, your momma done dropped you on your head. Twice.”

It’s clear that Republicans are grasping at straws, panicking ahead of what is widely predicted to be a brutal midterm rebuke. Just two weeks ago, Vance was begging Americans for “another chance.”  

Speaking at a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Thursday evening, the president suddenly claimed that part of his impetus for launching an all-out assault on the country seven months ago was because Iran was “doing drugs” at “drug factories.”

The add-on was introduced as Trump boasted about the special mission that preceded the war, Operation Midnight Hammer, in which Trump directed the U.S. military to destroy nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025.

​“They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really,” Trump told the crowd.

“That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. But these drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.”

Trump on Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran: They unloaded every single bomb—went right down air chutes into this uhhh drug factories, really, that's what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard pic.twitter.com/U0nY3LO315

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

It was the first time that Trump ever suggested the war in Iran was about drugs. Up until the Oklahoma rally, Trump had almost singularly blamed the conflict on Iran’s quest to develop nuclear technologies.

Before Operation Midnight Hammer took place, Tehran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation underwent years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and just weeks prior to the June attack was allowing IAEA inspectors to remain in the country for continuous supervision, according to the United Nations entity.

A series of historic, nationwide protests began in Iran in December 2025, sparked by the collapse of the local currency. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ensuing crackdown killed thousands of people.

When Trump first announced the U.S.-Iran war in February, he explicitly called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government and obtain their independence.

“When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said at the time. “It will be yours to take.”

But even after Khamenei was assassinated, Trump’s charge to the Iranian people did not pan out. Instead, Americans have found themselves in yet another unpopular forever war in the Middle East. The ensuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also roiled wallets at home, as the American economy contends with rising oil and gas prices.

The president offered these comments during his rally at the Peterbilt Motors factory in Denton on Thursday night.

“He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’ll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is,” Trump said of the embattled attorney general and Senate candidate. “I didn’t even know if he was here! I don’t care.”

Trump campaigns for Ken Paxton in Texas: "He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I'll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is. I didn't even know if he was here! I don't care." pic.twitter.com/AR9mNdSGEr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2026

During a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, later that night, Trump even went on to play the recently leaked audio of Paxton talking down on the president’s poorly received midterm GOP convention.

“It was leaked audio that came out yesterday from The New York Times saying Ken Paxton isn’t sure that the numbers after that midterm convention helped him and maybe hurt him. Are they still on board?” a reporter can be heard asking in the clip Trump played. A Trump supporter replied that Paxton was wrong.

Trump still encouraged people to vote for Paxton, “whether you love him or you don’t love him.”

Trump: We're going to send Ken Paxton to the Senate because he is whether you love him or don't love him, he's a little controversial, just slightly, but whether you love him or not, he's probably the best or certainly one of the best… pic.twitter.com/0vftPScZDb

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

The president pretending not to know that a Republican senatorial candidate is at his own rally is deeply unserious—especially when that candidate is locked in a contested race that has the chance to break the historic vice grip that the party has had in the state. Even if Paxton really is a pain in the ass, Trump openly admitting that isn’t necessarily a vote of confidence. And that’s something Paxton sorely needs, as his candidacy has been shrouded in controversy and a lack of enthusiasm.

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

This week, word leaked that the GOP Senate candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, privately said that Donald Trump’s midterm convention in Texas had hurt Republicans in the state. On Thursday, Trump was asked directly about this, and in a rambling monologue, he kept repeating that the convention had been a huge success and that he had won the state three times. Trump just cannot comprehend just how bad things have gotten for him there. And this inability to see his own standing clearly has itself become a major problem for Republicans.

So today we’re talking about Texas with Madison Andrus, a national official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who’s focused on the region. We have new internal Democratic polling to share on what’s going on there. Madison, thanks for coming on.

Madison Andrus: Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to talk about, you know, all the movement that we are seeing down in South Texas. It’s truly great to see about a month out.

Sargent: It’s pretty remarkable. So the Times reported on this event where Paxton declared privately that after Trump’s convention, “everybody’s numbers dropped.” Paxton added, “right now, yeah, not good.” Now, Paxton’s campaign reacted very vehemently to this, saying it was a fake story.

Trump’s convention in Texas was on September 9 and 10. Did you guys see anything in the tracking data or in the internal polling that kind of showed how that was playing in a sort of moment-to-moment way?

Andrus: We are definitely seeing movement in the polling post this party in Dallas. You know, our DCCC internal polling from August showed Bobby Pulido beating Monica De La Cruz 49 to 43. And then just today we got new polling from the House Majority PAC that is showing Bobby Pulido up now double digits. So all of these things compounding are really leading to great momentum, and that is playing out in the data, and we’re seeing it every day.

Sargent: Yep. In fact, the House Majority PAC on Thursday found Bobby Pulido, the Democrat, leading Monica De La Cruz, the Republican, by 54 to 41. So that’s quite a significant movement. Whether that’s entirely from the convention is a little hard to say, but that really shows that something’s happening here, doesn’t it?

Andrus: Yeah, something is very much happening in South Texas, just across the board, and we are seeing great numbers. Not just in Texas 15, but, you know, our polling in Texas 34—we polled in September right before the convention, and our internals showed Congressman Vicente Gonzalez beating Eric Flores 47 to 40. You know, these are just incredible numbers for Democrats to be putting up.

And I want to point out that these are numbers that Democrats are still putting up after Republicans tried tooth and nail to rig the game at the eleventh hour with this insane mid-decade gerrymandering.

They did this because they thought that they were going to be able to lock up, you know, five, six seats for themselves, and that they wouldn’t have to fight in these seats. And now they’re losing. They are still losing after all of that. And they’re trying to pour millions of dollars into these races, and they’re not seeing a return on their investment, because they are just that unpopular.

Sargent: I want to come back to your internal polling a bit later. But first, Trump traveled to Texas for a rally on Thursday. And by the time you all listen to this, you will have probably heard something about that rally. But for now, on Thursday, Trump was asked a question by a reporter: if Paxton is privately saying you’re hurting Republicans there, why go to Texas for another rally? Here’s Trump’s answer.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Why go to Texas? Well, I’ll tell you what, we have to win this election. That convention—you were there—that convention was a tremendous success. It went up against the NFL, and as you know, they had twenty-four, I guess—it was, I said twenty-five yesterday, it was actually—they had twenty-four million views and we had a hundred and seven million views. In other words, we beat the NFL by four times. And maybe that was so for Ken, but I could tell you, we were there for a lot. First of all, I won Texas all three times. I won the Hispanic vote. I’m going because you have to thank these states that are with you a thousand percent.

Sargent: A couple things here. Note how Trump is very deeply preoccupied with thanking Texans for supporting him. I think that’s a really key tell. And same with him talking about how big a success the convention was. I mean, by that he means his own ratings. Never mind that he’s inflating them ridiculously. What he’s focused on is how he did. It’s all about how he fares in Texas. No thought whatsoever to how this is impacting Republicans there. Your thoughts on that?

Andrus: Yeah, I actually thought that that was really remarkable as well. You know, those are the numbers that Donald Trump is focused on. He’s focused on his television ratings. What he’s not focused on is the cost of gas. He’s not focused on the six dollars and fifty cents a gallon it’s taking for truck drivers to fill up their tanks.

Donald Trump on Thursday was at a Peterbilt facility where they manufacture 18-wheelers. What he did not talk about was the fact that those same truck drivers—independent truck drivers and those truck-driving companies—are now paying nearly seven dollars a gallon for the diesel fuel to put in their trucks, that is now cutting into their margins and cutting into their ability to feed their families.

The numbers that he and House Republicans are not focused on are how much the cost of health care has gone up, because they cut Medicaid last year, or because they failed to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. So now the cost of health care is spiking.

The numbers that they are focused on are their TV ratings. They’re not focused on the numbers that Americans and South Texans are talking about at their kitchen table.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the districts that you highlighted. There was Texas’s Fifteenth District, where Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido is challenging GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz. And Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, where the incumbent Democratic congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, is being challenged by Republican Eric Flores. The reason this region, I think, is of such great interest is because these districts abut the southern border, they have a lot of Latinos in them, they have some southern Texas counties. Some of this is in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico.

And that region is where Trump made very big inroads with Latinos in 2024, which produced a lot of punditry about a supposed major multiracial working-class realignment. Can you talk a little bit about that region, the Rio Grande Valley, how much importance you guys are putting on it and why?

Andrus: Yeah, we are investing very heavily in South Texas, especially the Rio Grande Valley, the RGV. An article came out just a few days ago about our seven-figure investment into bringing those voters back home. Because they did swing to Trump last time around. But what Republicans mistook was that these were now going to be reliable Republican voters. And that’s just not the case.

These are voters who simply want to be able to make it to the end of the week feeding their family. These are pocketbook voters, and they are extremely worried about the economy. And so when they look back and they are now worse off than they were two years ago, they are looking for alternatives.

And they are seeing in Johnny Garcia someone who talks about being able to afford Big Red and barbacoa at the end of the week. And they’re seeing our South Texas Democrats talking about making life more affordable.

I really want to mention, Vicente Gonzalez just a few days ago actually released a new ad in the district that talked about one of these big cultural issues that is shifting Hispanic voters back towards Democrats. And that is that there are restaurants now in South Texas that are taking brisket off of their menu, because it is just too expensive, because the cost of beef has gone up by that much. That this Texas staple is now being taken off of the menu.

And so Vicente has a really great ad right now that just highlights how much prices have increased, and how much that’s hurting South Texas families and also just hurting the culture.

Sargent: Beef is becoming a cultural issue. Is that what you’re saying?

Andrus: Yeah, no, it very much is. Like, these are famous South Texas restaurants taking brisket off of the menu, which would have been unheard of just a couple of years ago.

Sargent: That’s pretty remarkable. So you discussed some of the new DCCC polling on these races. You provided these numbers to me as well. Let’s just go quickly over them again.

In Texas’s Fifteenth District, Democrat Bobby Pulido, the challenger, is leading GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz by 49 to 43. And in Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, you have Democratic incumbent Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, as we discussed, leading Republican challenger Eric Flores by 47 to 40. What’s driving those shifts?

Andrus: I think a lot of it is the economy. And you know, it sounds repetitive to say it over and over again, but it really cannot be overstated how hard Republican economic policies are hitting folks down in South Texas. You know, for you or I—and talking about the grocery prices again—for you or I, where a trip to the grocery store might be, you know, ten minutes, it’s nothing.

In these rural parts of South Texas, especially in the RGV and places like that, a drive to the grocery store can be 30 minutes each way. And so when you are thinking about how much gas costs now, to just make your weekly trip to the grocery store eats up that much of your gas budget for the month.

Sargent: Well, let’s say one more thing about these districts. Trump won the Fifteenth District in South Texas by nearly 18 points in 2024. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points. So the shift toward Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and in nearby counties was really a profound thing. It was a very big event.

Now, what is the role of Latinos in all this? We reported this week in The New Republic that in both these districts, Trump’s approval on immigration among Latinos is down in the thirties. And I’m wondering if you guys are seeing something similar. I know you keep talking about the economy. What’s driving this Latino shift for you guys? Is there an immigration component as well?

Andrus: Yeah, so I kind of want to talk about two things here, because you mentioned Trump being underwater in these districts after winning them by so much. And you know, our internal polling backs that up. In Texas 15, right now, only 36 percent of folks that we surveyed approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing. It’s 35 percent in Texas 34. So these are just abysmal numbers for House Republicans to have to try to overcome.

But then also, kind of going towards the immigration angle, I think that definitely plays a part of it. And it plays a large part because of the way it impacts everyday life down in these communities. You know, folks like Vicente Gonzalez have said for years that we needed a strong and secure border and we need safe communities. He’s been right on this issue for years and years.

But what these communities don’t want is the chaotic and terroristic enforcement that we are seeing now. They aren’t going after hardened criminals. You know, they aren’t going after the worst of the worst, like they said that they were going to. They’re picking up nuns on their way to church. They’re picking up high school students and mariachi bands. You know, Monica De La Cruz touted these young mariachi players in D.C., and then she voted for the same machine that went in and detained them.

And so I think we are seeing it just play out in everyday life for folks down there. And also, I know we’re talking about the economy a lot, but this immigration enforcement is also impacting the economy down there. Homes that once took three or four months to build are now taking eleven months, because people are afraid to go to work, because they don’t know if they’re going to be able to go home that day. Because that is who they’re picking up.

They’re picking up folks outside of Home Depot, by policy. That’s it. That’s who they want to go and get. They want to get the people outside of Home Depot, not the drug traffickers and not the dangerous criminals. They’re picking up hardworking families.

Sargent: I want to try to underscore the magnitude of the shift against Trump. Again, he won the Fifteenth District by nearly 18 points, and now his approval rating is 36 percent. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points, and now his approval rating is 35 percent. Those numbers are correct, right?

Andrus: Yep, that is correct. And you know, right next door in Texas 28, which we haven’t talked about a ton just yet, his approval numbers are even worse. Only 28 percent of the people that we surveyed in Texas 28 approve of Donald Trump.

Sargent: Well, you just brought up Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District. That’s where Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar is facing a Republican challenger, and it’s a very competitive race. Guess what? Trump won that district by 10 points as well in 2024. But now you guys have his approval in the twenties, right?

Andrus: Yeah, in the twenties. Just 28 percent of people approve of the job he is doing right now, with 60 percent disapproving. It’s just truly abysmal numbers for House Republicans to try to overcome.

And Tano Tijerina, the Republican challenging Henry Cuellar, was out at that party in Dallas on stage talking about how great things are going. Things are not going great for folks in South Texas when they are struggling to pay their bills and make it to the end of the week.

Sargent: So I understand the economy is on everybody’s minds, and it’s a really, really intense thing for a lot of people, and it’s very preoccupying. It’s at the center of all these races. But I can’t help but notice that there’s just not that much discussion of the immigration stuff on the trail.

I don’t hear that much from Bobby Pulido or from the other Democrats in South Texas. Am I wrong about that? Are they advertising on immigration in any way? And if not, why not?

Andrus: No, I actually do think you hear about it a lot from Bobby Pulido. When that mariachi band was detained, it was actually Bobby Pulido who sounded the alarm about this. He is the first person to speak out when those kids got detained. The family reached out to Monica De La Cruz’s office—the family reached out, that mariachi band. And Monica De La Cruz’s office told them that there was nothing that they could do about it, until Bobby Pulido posted about it and his post went viral.

And so I think, when it comes also to the nun who was detained just a few weeks after, it was Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez who sounded the alarm about all of this happening. And so I do think our South Texas folks are talking about this issue, but they’re talking about it in ways that it directly impacts their communities.

And I think a big part of that is that they are not going after the hardened criminals and the worst of the worst. They’re going after those kids and, you know, people just on their way to church.

Sargent: Is there a risk of overextending here by going after some of these—I want to be clear, like, I think Democrats should compete everywhere. Like, I’m thrilled that Democrats are putting huge resources into the Rio Grande Valley and going after places that Trump won by 10, 18 points. But I do want to ask, is there some risk of overextension here? Or are the resources there for contesting all these places to the degree that they need to be contested?

Andrus: We do have the resources, and we’ve shown that we have the resources to contest in these races. That’s why our polling is doing so well, because we’ve been playing in all of these places for over a year now, and we invested early in these kinds of districts, and that investment is paying off.

Look, we are not taking any voter or any district for granted. We are going to work from now until November 3 to earn every single one of those votes. And it’s especially important in Texas, where we saw this mid-decade redistricting happen to try to subvert the will of Texas voters.

I think it is critically important that people know that we didn’t just roll over and accept that. We fought, and we’re fighting, and we’re winning in those redistricted districts.

Sargent: Can I ask, is there any risk of overextension here or not?

Andrus: No, I don’t think so. And I think, you know, when you talk to folks who do the work in, you know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and places like that, we are still laser-focused on flipping those seats, but we are also focused on expanding the battlefield and expanding the map, and delivering the largest House majority that we can come January.

Sargent: Well, you’re going to need to get those numbers up, in part because of the redistricting, which has taken a bunch off the board, really. Although maybe not, we’ll see.

Andrus: Yeah, it really hasn’t, not in the way that they thought they would. You know, Texas 35 was one of those redistricted seats, and Johnny Garcia is doing some really incredible things out there.

Sargent: Right. Just to underscore the point, Republicans redistricted Texas and they thought that they were actually creating seats that would be easier for them to pick up as well. But some of those are now in real trouble for them, right?

Andrus: No, they’re in a lot of trouble. You know, you’re seeing them having to pour millions and millions of dollars into districts that they thought that they had locked up. You know, when Republicans redrew and created this new Texas 35 district, they thought that it was a lock. What they didn’t expect was for a pissed-off sheriff like Johnny Garcia to throw his hat in the ring, because he wanted to stand up and fight for his communities. And we’re seeing that it is working. It is really resonating with people.

I mentioned that I was down in South Texas just two weeks ago with Johnny Garcia. One of the other conversations we had while we were just walking around in this neighborhood was, he went up to go talk to some guy, and he said, you know, I’ve never voted for a Democrat before in my life, but I’m going to vote for you because I remember you from the sheriff’s department. And I think that is the kind of community connections that Democrats are making in these districts all across the battlefield. And that is what is really going to deliver us these wins come November.

Sargent: OK, are you prepared to predict today that you guys are going to win Texas’s Fifteenth, Texas’s Twenty-Eighth, and Texas’s Thirty-Fourth? Again, these are districts Trump won by a lot.

Andrus: Yep. We’re going to win each and every one of them.

Sargent: Well, there you go. Madison Andrus, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you’re right.

Andrus: All right, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a great time.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine out of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who’s widely expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.”

An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP.

Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 United Nations climate summit, after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account.

France and The Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian.

As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented … across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol.

A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the U.S. midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change?

“We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”

Pike’s failed execution is the worst of its kind in roughly a decade. At least two other inmates over the last 20 years have had their executions botched and failed, but in both cases it was because prison officials had either failed to properly find a vein or set an IV line. The failure was mechanical. This time, it was pharmaceutical.

Pike’s fate is the inevitable by-product of the Supreme Court’s turn on the death penalty over the last decade or so. The high court has created a system where states are free to more or less experiment on prisoners while they’re killing them. Prisoners have virtually no legal recourse to challenge what can appear to be indistinguishable from torture. The justices not only rubber-stamp the states’ decisions but refuse to allow lower courts to second-guess them, as well.

The death penalty remains legal in more than half of the states, but it is only really practiced in a few of them. Sixteen states have executed prisoners over the past 10 years. Most of them have executed only a few people. Just five states—Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas—account for roughly three-quarters of the 170 executions since 2020. The federal government also briefly revived capital punishment under Trump during his first term, executing 13 people between July 2020 and January 2021.

When the Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in 1972, one argument by the justices was that the system before Furman v. Georgia was too haphazard and random to pass constitutional muster. Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in his concurring opinion in Furman that the old, arbitrary system of death sentences was “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” That randomness persists today by geography rather than procedure: Some states are merely more enthusiastic for executions than others.

Christa Pike’s case illustrates that arbitrariness in other ways. A Tennessee jury convicted her in 1996 of the murder of Colleen Slemmer, an acquaintance of hers, on the campus of the University of Tennessee. It was a gruesome killing, one where Pike’s then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, carved a pentagram in Slemmer’s chest. Since Shipp was 17 years old at the time of the murder, he could only be sentenced to life imprisonent. Pike received a death sentence.

Like many death-row prisoners, Pike had a deeply troubled childhood that included stints in foster care. She mentioned that a neighbor had raped her when she was 11 years old while writing a suicide note as a teenager. When she was 15 years old, social workers removed Pike from her home after multiple reports of physical and sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend at the time.

Sentencing Pike to die also marked a historical milestone for Tennessee. The state had not executed a woman in more than 200 years. Between 1807 and 1819, Tennessee hanged three Black women for separate murders. Only one of them, Molly Holcomb, had a name that survived the mists of history. In her final appeals, Pike also requested to be hanged instead of receiving a lethal injection because of the likelihood of a painful and potentially botched execution.

Those fears were well founded. A man executed last year by Tennessee with pentobarbital developed pulmonary edema in his lungs, according to an autopsy, which would have given an excruciating sensation of drowning. When the state executed a prisoner in 2019 with a modified version of the old three-drug cocktail, witnesses recalled how he had been “gasping, choking, and gurgling” after the final drug was injected.

Like many other states, Tennessee once used a three-drug cocktail that included a sedative, a paralytic, and potassium chloride to stop the prisoner’s heart. That method became unviable in the 2010s after the European Union imposed an embargo on lethal-injection drugs. U.S. drugmakers generally refuse to distribute compounds for executions to state governments, as well.

Some states simply stopped conducting executions. Others tried to get around this obstacle by sourcing drugs from under-regulated markets like India or by relying on compound pharmacies in the U.S. to procure drugs. A few tried less familiar combinations of drugs to try to achieve the same outcome. In multiple cases, this led to botched executions in the 2010s.

An Arizona prisoner gasped for air for almost 90 minutes before dying, long enough for his lawyer to confer by phone with a federal judge and the state’s lawyers about their options. Witnesses reported multiple executions in the mid-2010s where the prisoner appeared to writhe in agony as they died. Clayton Lockett, who was injected with the sedative midazolam by Oklahoma officials, groaned and convulsed for almost 45 minutes before dying.

Those botched executions prompted the Supreme Court to take up a case on Eighth Amendment challenges to execution methods. In the end, the court set a nearly insurmountable bar for death-row prisoners to challenge their methods of execution. The high court had never previously struck down a method of execution as unconstitutional. States instead abandoned old methods and introduced new ones in response to public pressure.

On the Supreme Court, another turning point came when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the high court in 2018. Kennedy had been the decisive vote in constraining capital punishment over the preceding two decades. Backed by his vote, the court abolished the death penalty for minors and people with intellectual disabilities and forbade states from executing people for non-homicide crimes. His replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has no apparent interest in following in his mentor’s footsteps.

Today, the court reflexively disposes of last-minute capital appeals without any reasoning or commentary. (Until it began wielding it for political reasons in 2016, the Supreme Court’s eleventh-hour execution docket was the most notable part of its administrative “shadow docket.”) The justices appear hostile toward death-row lawyers and anti–death penalty activists. Justice Samuel Alito even denounced “what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty” during oral arguments in the midazolam case.

In the American constitutional order, people have rights and the government has powers. Not so when it comes to the death penalty. The Supreme Court has flipped it around for the past eight years: The government effectively has the right to execute prisoners, while those prisoners’ constitutional concerns must fall on deaf judicial ears. In a 2019 case involving a last-minute appeal, Justice Clarence Thomas fumed that the court should not reward what he described as “gamesmanship” by prisoners’ lawyers.

“[The prisoner’s] strategy is no secret, for it is the same strategy adopted by many death-row inmates with an impending execution: bring last-minute claims that will delay the execution, no matter how groundless,” he wrote, joined by Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch. “The proper response to this maneuvering is to deny meritless requests expeditiously.” Even if some death-row prisoners do file meritless last-minute appeals, the court’s practice has given the impression that they consider all of them meritless by default.

Most egregiously, the high court has also prevented lower courts from imposing their own stays of execution while they consider legal challenges. The justices faced bipartisan backlash when they allowed Alabama to execute a prisoner with only a Protestant minister available instead of the clergy of his faith—one of the clearest establishment clause violations of the last 10 years. A lower court had suspended that execution, but the Supreme Court reinstated the original execution time while effectively lying about the prisoner’s timeline to appeal.

In Pike’s case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a temporary stay of execution on Wednesday. Pike had argued that the state’s execution method, which involved strapping her to a table while surrounded by male guards would trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder from the abuse she suffered as a child. She asked that the state instead conduct the execution with women officials to avoid Eighth Amendment problems. The state of Tennessee described her lawsuit as an “abusive, tactical delay.” The Supreme Court rejected it without comment or lengthy consideration.

If Pike survives, Tennessee will have to decide whether it will try to kill her again. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1947 that second attempts do not violate the Eighth Amendment.) It has no real alternative: Unlike other death-row prisoners in other botched executions, the state cannot simply wait for natural causes to do the job for them when a 50-year-old woman is involved. In the meantime, the states’ maladventures with lethal injection will likely continue in other states, and public opinion will continue to turn against capital punishment. No “guerrilla war” against the death penalty is necessary when the state keeps shooting itself in the foot.

City’s most dominant stretch didn’t arrive until after 2019. Under the guidance of Pep Guardiola, the greatest coach in the world, the club lost the league only once between 2018 and 2024, and won the Europe-wide Champions League in 2023. There are compelling reasons to believe the team’s financial improprieties stretched into that era, but in some ways that is immaterial. City’s success over a period of nearly two decades, dating all the way back to 2008, when the perennially mediocre team was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, or ADUG—a consortium whose political and economic ties to the United Arab Emirates are so deep the team is state-run in all but name—resulted from what appears to be the most spectacular and brazen financial fraud in the history of professional sports. Every one of its titles is tainted. None of its success would have been possible without the extraordinary manipulations undertaken by its fabulously wealthy owners who transformed the team into a sporting juggernaut.

Given the scale of the violations detailed by the Premier League, there can be no question that City’s success is illegitimate. It cheated for nearly two decades and got away with it. Then it got caught. Wherever the Premier League—and soccer writ large—goes next it has to start from that point. But that’s the tricky part: what comes next. City’s abuses get at the heart of all that ails the sport, most of which can be traced back on some level not just to greed and corruption, but to its increasing dependence on multinational corporations, private equity, and nation-states. Cataloging City’s fraud is simple—so easy, in fact, that it’s not at all clear why it took the Premier League more than seven years to do so. Untangling soccer from the forces that corrupt it is another matter altogether.

This week’s explosive report released describes Manchester City’s fraud as a “disguised funding scheme” that allowed the team to evade financial regulations by inflating its income and hiding its expenses to the tune of nearly £1 billion between 2011 and 2019. It did so brazenly via fraudulent contracts with sponsors, many of which had close ties to team’s owners, who all just happened to include many of the most powerful people in the government and economy of the United Arab Emirates. When the ADUG purchased the team in 2009, its commercial revenues were a paltry £18 million; a decade later they had ballooned to £230 million—an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Commercial revenues from the league’s four biggest teams—Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea—increased an average of 213 percent over the same period.

Nearly all of that money was laundered in some form. The team’s “sham” contracts included sponsorship deals for its most lucrative properties. City plays in a stadium named after Etihad Airlines, the aviation company whose name also graces the front of its uniforms. The UAE-based airline paid the team £67.5 million a year for those privileges. But, per the Premier League’s report, Etihad Airlines actually paid just £8 million; the difference was covered via wire transfer by the holding company that actually owns the team. It’s all monopoly money, really: Both the soccer team and the airline are owned by groups with ties to the UAE that are so deep that they are, for all intents and purposes, state-owned.

City continues to insist not just on its innocence, but that it has “irrefutable evidence” proving it; Etihad Airlines is reportedly considering legal action against the Premier League. Yet the allegations are so extensive, clear, and damning that there can be no doubt that its present dominance was built on, and is inseparable from, fraud on a historic scale.

The report and the public statements that accompanied it also suggest that the Premier League means business. And yet, it’s not at all clear that the league is prepared to make the punishment fit the crime. City is in deep trouble, there’s no question. Whether or not that trouble is commensurate with the offenses committed is another matter altogether. In many ways, this is a problem of the league’s own making. City was far more successful during the seven years it took to produce the report than it was during the nearly decade-long period covered by that report. Invalidating that success would arguably also be existential, threatening to invalidate the Premier League itself. What should we now make of many of its most iconic moments: Sergio Aguero’s 2012 title-winning goal; the rivalry between Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp between 2016 and 2024; Kevin de Bruyne’s lobbed passes and whipped crosses, Rodri’s imperious command of possession, Erling Haaland’s impeccable finishing?

All of that is already tarnished, whatever punishment the Premier League chooses to hand down. But its problem is also—sorry—epistemological. Those moments not only defined the league, they defined many lives, my own very much included. We watched them and felt them. Invalidating them is one thing. But what would it mean if the world’s biggest sports league essentially declared that many of its most defining moments of the last two decades weren’t real?

There are other, less abstract problems too. One is simply that, thanks to all the cheating, Manchester City is now one of the biggest teams in the most powerful league in the world. Guardiola and Rodri are gone as of the summer; de Bruyne left a year earlier. But Haaland, fresh off a breakout World Cup campaign that elevated his already superstardom to another plane, is still there, as are a host of other stars. A forced relegation, either via points deduction or other means, whether to the second division or out of the top four English leagues altogether—a punishment that has been floated—is more than fair given the extent of City’s crimes. But kicking the team out of the Premier League would not just necessitate a historic sell-off—and likely lead to some stars, including Haaland, leaving England altogether—it would diminish the Premier League itself.

The Premier League’s emergence as a juggernaut—both in a financial sense and a sporting one—coincided, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the rise of Manchester City. The league has, over the past decade, become by far the sport’s most profitable league and it has done so while most superstars—Haaland being a key exception—have played elsewhere. It is rare for all six of the league’s so-called “Big Six”—City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—to be firing on all cylinders simultaneously (and a strong case should be made for excising Tottenham from the club altogether) but fielding several big-spending, if not always competitive, teams does matter. Spain has two (Barcelona and Madrid, though Atletico Madrid is hovering somewhere outside that duopoly and the sea of mediocrity below it); France and Germany have one; Italian teams are presently so broke they don’t even rate on this scale. Manchester City is undoubtedly a key pillar of the Premier League’s growing economic might and stature. Does that mean that it’s too big to fail? To put it another way, keeping City in the competition would diminish the prestige of the Premier League, but so would kicking it out.

That’s a thorny problem, but it’s the league’s problem, not ours. It’s one that will ultimately be solved by the lawyers and public relations executives who have been raking in billable hours for seven years. I have little faith that it will be solved in a way that feels just and even less that it will solve the underlying issues that created it. The Premier League may solve its City problem or it may not. But it won’t lay a glove on the real problem. City’s importance to the Premier League both as a brand and as a business is the real scandal here.

That scandal can be found in the numbers too. The £900 million in fraudulent accounting matters. So do the eight Premier League titles and 22 trophies that the team has won since being taken over by the UAE. But the really important number is the 18 years that have elapsed since that takeover. The fraud is historic, both in a financial sense and in terms of how much success it bought. But it was brazen from the very beginning. It not only required, but demanded, willful ignorance on an almost comical scale. City’s rise may have been meteoric, but the simple—publicly available—evidence always pointed to massive fraud. The team was owned by the UAE. Its stadium and jerseys were sponsored by a UAE-based airline. It rocketed from obscurity to being a brand and business ostensibly on par with Manchester United and Liverpool in a few short years.

It was always a farce. The report released by the Premier League earlier this week details the specifics of its massive accounting sham. But the sham itself was always apparent for anyone with eyes to see. Manchester City’s rise was not inexorable, nor was it the result of a sophisticated, hidden conspiracy that required nearly a decade to unravel. Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because it was allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances—let alone about its ownership—were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world.

Here, too, the numbers tell a story. The 2024/25 campaign was not a particularly good one for City, which finished in third place, 13 points behind champions Liverpool. But it was an excellent one for the Premier League, which not only raked in £6.8 billion in revenue, but easily outpaced its European competitors: The Bundesliga and La Liga, the other two top leagues, both brought in about £4 billion. Compare that to the 2008/09 campaign, the season the ADUG bought Manchester City: Back then, the Premier League brought in a respectable £1.9 billion, while the Bundesliga and La Liga brought in $1.6 and $1.5 billion, respectively. The growth of the Premier League’s edge over its rivals from $300 million to almost $3 billion is perhaps the biggest story in global soccer over that period. It’s also a story that can’t be told without the biggest fraud in the history of the sport.

The public hates private equity so much that the once-arcane phrase “private equity” (in the 1980s we called it the leveraged buyout racket) is a political hot button in this year’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that nearly three times as many congressional candidates in competitive races pilloried the industry by name as compared to congressional candidates in the previous five election cycles (when the preferred term of derision was “big banks”). 

Yet Trump keeps removing restrictions on private equity! 

In August 2025, Trump issued an executive order to free defined-contribution pension funds such as 401(k)s to invest in private equity, and this past March the Labor Department issued a proposed regulation to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed through on Wednesday by approving a proposed rule allowing retirement-fund managers to charge a larger universe of clients the sort of high-performance fees associated with private equity (typically 20 percent above a certain benchmark). Currently such fees may be leveled only on “qualified” (i.e., rich) clients, defined either as any whose net worth is $2.7 million or more (excluding their primary residence) or as any for whom the retirement fund in question totals $1.7 million or more. Under the SEC proposal, which has not been made public (summary here), average Joes would pay these higher fees while investing their retirement funds in risky private equity. What could possibly go wrong?

The lure for these average Joes is that private equity, like most investment schemes in which the buyer assumes greater than normal risk, can deliver greater than normal returns. The key word here is “can.” According to the private equity firm KKR, over the past 25 years private equity netted, on an annualized basis, a 4 to 5 percent higher return than “public equities” (i.e., stocks). But lately private equity returns have lagged the AI-torqued stock market. According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog group, during the past three years the median return on the 15 largest “evergreen” private equity funds—i.e., those funds in which assets don’t get locked up, and therefore private equity’s likeliest retirement vehicle—was half the median return for the S&P 500. More traditional (and more numerous) private equity funds, in which investors lock up their assets for 10 or more years, have fared even worse than the evergreens. 

It’s gotten so bad that in April, the analyst Henrique Schneider of the forecasting firm GIS wrote an obituary for the private equity industry:

The pressure to deploy vast sums of capital—a staggering $2.18 trillion in global “dry powder,” the committed but uninvested capital held by private equity, as of March 2025 —has led to a chase for deals at any price.… The industry is now sitting on a bloated inventory of an estimated 31,000 companies, collectively valued at a staggering $3.7 trillion, with a persistent and widening gap between on-paper valuations and what a rational buyer is willing to pay in the real world.

This desperation helps explain why private equity in recent years has moved into various government-subsidized sectors that a more sensibly regulated nation than ours would never allow. These include retirement homes and hospice care. The results have been just as damaging to the quality of care as you’d expect. Private equity has also invested heavily in single-family homes. Private equity’s intrusion here has inflated prices for single-family housing to such an extent that Trump told the Treasury Department last January to put some brakes on it. We have, after all, a housing shortage. Congress followed through in July with a housing bill that banned for-profit entities that owned more than 350 single-family homes from purchasing any more. Private equity’s infuriating role in bumping up housing prices is the main reason the industry gets pilloried so much these days by political candidates.

Even here, though, Trump can’t resist siding with private equity. In an August 31 letter to Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director (and sometime intelligence chief) Bill Pulte, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who co-sponsored the housing bill, complained that these agencies canceled a 30-day purchasing period that formerly gave owner-occupiers an advantage over private equity in acquiring foreclosed homes. The Trumpies just can’t help themselves.

Private equity’s desperation for new markets is why it pushed Trump (largely, it appears, through Blackstone chief executive Steve Schwarzman, who gave Republicans $40 million in 2024) to give ordinary investors greater access to private equity in the name of “democratizing” it. But there’s some question whether these ordinary investors even want it. When The Wall Street Journal surveyed investors last fall via a Harris poll, only 10 percent said they were dissatisfied with their current retirement-fund options. But the same survey found that these ordinary investors were persuadable; informed that most companies with revenue exceeding $100 million were privately held, 59 percent said sure, OK, they’d like to invest in these behemoths. Who’s going to tell them they only got invited in because the party was already over?

You’ve probably heard the term “lemon socialism” to describe government investment in a failing enterprise that, in the event of recovery, gets to keep the profits. (Many of us used that term during the 2008 financial crisis to describe the Bush administration’s bank bailout.) The Trump administration’s attempted rescue of the private equity industry is a related phenomenon, lemon deregulation. (I believe I am the first person to use this term.) Lemon deregulation works like this: Take a failing industry. Throw it a lifeline by removing prohibitions that prevent it from operating in a manner that endangers the public. Then do the best you can to ignore the damage.

Can lemon deregulation revive private equity? That’s an open question. But even if it does, the cost will be unacceptably high to people who can’t afford to risk big losses to their nest egg.  And quite apart from the substance, Trump is throwing his arms around an industry that even many Republican candidates right now are turning into a political bogeyman. Politically, he can’t afford that. Maybe this last part should be our little secret.

For seven hours, two men were trapped on the roof of a house in the central New York city as Border Patrol agents attempted to arrest them. But the agency’s efforts were upended when more than 50 people gathered in front of the house and, seemingly, rescued the men from the agents’ clutches.

The Oswego Police Department said their officers responded to the commotion after receiving complaints about a reckless driver in the area. Their investigation led them to the private residence on East Seventh Street, where Border Patrol’s Targeted Enforcement Division was attempting to apprehend multiple individuals on federal judicial warrants, according to a police statement.

The specific charges of the warrants have not yet been shared, CNYCentral reported Wednesday.

Around 5 p.m., the Oswego Fire Department arrived to provide a ladder for the pair of men to climb down. However, it quickly became clear that the men did not want to utilize the ladder, as they kicked and pushed it away from the rooftop’s edge. The Fire Department then decided to exit the scene, leaving the ladder behind them.

“I want to be clear that our efforts last evening were for safety first and not an effort to apprehend individuals,” said Oswego Fire Chief Paul Conzone. “Once we provided the ladder to safely assist the individuals on the roof, we cleared the scene and only returned to retrieve our ladder once the incident concluded.”

Border Patrol decided to cut their losses hours later, after which the remaining crowd decided to confront a group of broadcast journalists, throwing articles of clothing over the journalists’ camera lenses while demanding that they stop recording.

When the standoff was over, the two men had disappeared from the rooftop and escaped in waiting cars, according to CNYCentral.

“I recognize that incidents involving federal agencies can generate strong emotions,” said Oswego Mayor Robert A. Corradino in a statement Thursday. “Even so, our responsibility as a city is clear: we protect our residents, safeguard our neighborhoods, and maintain order.

“Oswego’s strength has always been its people, and yesterday our community showed that even in challenging moments, safety and civility remain our priority,” Corradino added.

“TURF REPAIR FROM A250,” reads the contract with Maryland landscaping company Custom Lawn Service Inc. The contract runs until March 2027.

The contract does not say where exactly the mall repairs will be. But Trump has been spinning tall tales about “vandals” destroying the grass for a few months now. That patchy, drab-looking area is exactly where the main stage for his Fourth of July celebration event was.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote in August. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

The $3.4 million the Interior Department is now spending is likely due to increased foot, vehicle, and equipment traffic. What kind of vandals are tearing up grass and kicking up dirt and leaving?

Trump himself has been the cause of most of the damage around the National Mall. The Justice Department found that it was indeed Trump and his hand-picked contractors who were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and shielded by chain-link fences. Those same federal contractors were also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the secretary of agriculture and secretary of health and human services to begin exploring options for adding warning labels to food that contain “significant amounts” of alpha-galactose, a sugar molecule found in most mammals.

You may have heard of that substance before because of alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common and potentially life-threatening food allergy to red meat that can develop from a tick bite.

The Trump administration’s new rule was framed as one way of cracking down on tick-borne illnesses—but it may end up hurting the meat industry in the process. The new rule could potentially result in meat processors being forced to slap an allergy alert on every package of mammal products, including ground beef, steaks, pork loins, lamb chops, and even dairy. Just imagine a warning: This burger could kill you!

To be clear, from a public health standpoint, the policy is potentially a pretty great idea, considering just how severe alpha-gal is. But the rule likely won’t go over well with a certain group of longtime GOP allies who are already not too happy with Trump: farmers, herders, and ranchers.

In August, the American Farm Bureau Federation criticized Trump’s plan to grant farmers and ranchers the right to slaughter and process their own meat instead of requiring that they rely on USDA-inspected facilities. Farmers also condemned Trump’s plan to import tariff-free beef, which has yet to actually bring down prices.

All of this comes as the shrinking American herd struggles to keep up with high demand, and Trump’s tariffs and military campaign in the Middle East have kept prices elevated. Farmers in the Midwest—who were once some of the president’s most steadfast supporters—say they are facing the toughest economic crisis in decades.

The only explanation for a policy that will so obviously irritate his MAGA supporters is that it isn’t MAGA at all—it’s MAHA. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent months talking about alpha-gal without really doing anything at all, and has been an outspoken advocate for slapping warning labels on all kinds of foods. As for pleasing the rest of Trump’s base, the social media comments beneath the administration’s announcement indicate that they’re more concerned with discussing conspiracy theories about how alpha-gal started in the first place.

Since Trump took office, pundits have marveled at the tech industry’s rightward shift. The recent explosion of discourse over “AI safety” has reenergized that conversation, as observers question how lib-coded ostensible true believers in regulation such as Amodei—who publicly fought with the White House over the terms of its defense contracts—could make peace so easily with the avatar of the reactionary right. Perhaps his wincing at Tuesday’s press conference betrayed some inner torment. But Amodei isn’t the only self-styled do-gooder to make nice with Trump. Just a few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg—who could barely contain his glee while standing next to the president—poured well-publicized millions into liberal causes. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk cultivated their image as climate champions. It wasn’t so long ago that Sam Altman called Trump “unfit” to be president. “i guess the meme is that Dario is awkward, but it is kind of weird how eager the other CEOs are to participate in a public knee-bending ceremony like this,” tech journalist Kevin Roose marveled of Tuesday’s White House summit with Silicon Valley. “you’d hope more of them would be visibly uncomfortable!”

What explains the new coziness? The terms of the White House’s truce with tech leaders aren’t exactly mysterious. The same executives have showered Trump’s SuperPAC and pet projects with $227 million, the watchdog group Public Citizen notes. There are obvious benefits to having the administration’s enthusiastic support. But there’s more than just opportunism at work here. For as much as has been made of the cultural and ideological fissures between MAGA and Palo Alto, the two camps share a common quasi-religious faith that economic growth can solve virtually every problem known to man.

And although there are certainly weirder corners of the overlapping ideologies that buzz around Bay Area offices and polycules, even top “true believers” who’ve trafficked in rationalism and effective altruism have been steadfast about their belief in growth as a somewhat mysterious but ultimately positive force that promises untold fortunes to those who choose to feed it. Way back in 2013, Sam Altman wrote an essay making the case that rapid economic growth “is not only critical for startups, but for most systems. Either you’re growing, or you’re slowly dying.”

In the essay, Altman argued that attempts to mitigate the inequalities created by the twenty-first century’s biggest growth industries (“robots”) could easily backfire. “We should understand,” he continued, “that as a consequence of technology and an economy of ideas, the gap between the rich and the poor will likely increase from its already high-seeming levels. There is good and bad to this, but we should be careful not to legislate against it, which will hurt growth.”

This kind of cold supposed truth-telling isn’t exactly novel among founders. Scottish philosopher and effective altruism guru Will MacAskill famously counseled disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried that the most effective way he could be altruistic was to make as much money as possible. The idea of “earning to give” is obviously compelling for people who would like to become wealthy, and those who see an opportunity to offer those people lucrative moral guidance. The idea has been something of a mainstay for effective altruists, who like to make up numbers to justify why fortunes that also flow to their pet causes, including “AI safety,” are sum-positive for the cause of building a more abundant world.

To find the origins of this kind of reasoning, you have to go way back. In 1889—at the height of the Gilded Age—industrialist Andrew Carnegie made the same case. “Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it,” Carnegie wrote in The Gospel of Wealth. That rich men had amassed such incredible fortunes testified to their “superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” those fortunes to worthy causes. That spirit of farsighted charity would be a cudgel against “Socialists and Anarchists” looking to upset what Carnegie saw as the natural order of things—the socialists and anarchists who also happened to be organizing at his mills. “The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free,” he wrote. “Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.”

Preachers of today’s newfangled Gospel of Wealth ascribe utopian potential to the stuff that’s making them rich too. Pressed to articulate the benefits of artificial intelligence—and not just its catastrophic risks—Amodei’s core argument has been that large language models will deliver not only technological breakthroughs but riches fantastical enough to save the world and solve its most intractable problems. In his long blog post last month about pacing the frontier, Amodei argued that his industry’s products “could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.” His “dream scenario—perhaps a goal to aim for—would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world, with 10% each coming from AI-enabled economic decisions and the natural spread of AI-accelerated technologies.”

On Tuesday, Trump echoed Amodei’s excitement about LLMs’ capacity to deliver “unbelievable growth.” Faced with rising inflation, mortgage rates, and sprawling  blowback from an unpopular, illegal, and expensive war on Iran, Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have both been adamant that the United States can simply grow its way through economic headwinds. That faith rests in large part on the men who gathered outside of the White House on Tuesday. Investments tied to the building binge on chips and data centers have accounted for about 20 percent of America’s economic growth this year. Frothy valuations continue to buoy the stock market and, with it, the fortunes of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who are responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending. As eager as Silicon Valley executives are to stay on Trump’s good side, Trump wants to keep them happy too—and to appease voters angry about the risks of data centers and artificial intelligence alike. 

Trump and Silicon Valley executives, however, seem to share another core belief that helps inform this week’s “self-policing” spectacle: impunity. Given the steady drumbeat of headlines about OpenAI agents hacking into companies, nonprofits, and government agencies, it isn’t hard to imagine why self-policing is preferable to the alternatives. Altman’s 2013 ode to the powers of growth ends with some suggestions for how to increase growth, including reforming tort laws that can be used to try companies for reckless and negligent behavior. Altman writes that “legal protection is of course important, but it’s gotten so silly that it discourages innovation.” As former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan wrote this week, an unenforceable pledge is certainly preferable to being held accountable under the many laws that already exist to punish corporate wrongdoing. There’s a chance that could happen; Khan’s successor this week announced that the FTC was investigating Anthropic, OpenAI, and other unnamed companies over the potential dangers posed by their products.

Another, potentially more likely, outcome is that Trump loyalists at the FTC clear those companies of any wrongdoing. Trump, for his part, seems to believe that holding companies to existing laws and regulations—much less creating any new laws and regulations—would threaten the AI boom. The people getting rich off it are inclined to agree.

At the White House Thursday, a reporter noted to Trump that his daughter-in-law Lara Trump said that the war “may threaten the midterms for you,” and asked if he agreed with her.

“Well, it’s possible, I don’t know, it should help, because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” the president replied, shrugging. “When you say, ‘Is it OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon?’ I would say a hundred percent of the people say no, including worldwide. So when you say it that way, it would help. If you don’t say that, it could hurt.”

Reporter: Lara Trump said the Iran war could threaten the midterms for you. Do you agree?

Trump: It’s possible. It should help. pic.twitter.com/XipXht0Bql

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2026

The way Republican candidates frame the war in their campaigns is not the problem. The problem is the ongoing closures of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on either side of the Arabian Peninsula, which have led to skyrocketing fuel prices, damaging the economy not just in the U.S. but worldwide.

That in turn has increased inflation, making various goods and services more expensive. Fertilizer costs have gone up as a result of the war, as well as commodities such as helium and ethanol. These increased costs have been passed to American consumers, leading to Trump and Republicans polling at record lows.

The war also continues to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress aren’t helping their own cause by refusing to end the war with legislation, while Trump flip-flops between saying peace talks are going well and making apocalyptic threats against Iran. If Trump thinks all of this doesn’t matter for voters in November, he is sorely mistaken.

Between August 13 and September 19, the Republican Party of Wisconsin funneled more than $24 million into Tiffany’s coffers.

A good chunk of that money likely came from Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the billionaires behind the Uline packaging and shipping company, who each gave $11 million to the state Republican Party that month, according to campaign finance reports obtained by The New York Times.

A third billionaire also contributed a sizable sum to the Wisconsin Republican Party that month: Diane Hendricks, the co-founder of ABC Supply Co. Inc and the state’s largest conservative political donor.

The transfers accounted for 92 percent of all the money that Tiffany raised since the end of June, and have given him an enormous cash advantage in the final weeks of the race. By comparison, Tiffany’s Democratic opponent, Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, raised $10 million in the same time period.

Tiffany’s campaign details mark the first time since Wisconsin reworked its campaign finance rules that a candidate has been catapulted by such a small number of donors.

But it remains to be seen if the billionaire-provided funds will make a difference at the ballot box. A Marquette Law poll published Wednesday placed Crowley with a narrow lead among Wisconsin voters, besting Tiffany’s late-September odds by just one percentage point (46 percent versus 45 percent favorability).

Crowley’s chances were a hair better among likely voters, 49 percent of whom said they were planning to vote for the Democratic candidate, while 46 percent said they would vote for Tiffany. Five percent of likely voters told the pollster that they were still undecided.

The Washington Sun reported Thursday that the website for Trump’s meme coin, GetTrumpMemes.com, is offering invitations to “an evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump” for the 185 largest holders of the cryptocurrency, with the top 29 buyers scoring an invite to a “VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT” and the top four getting an 18-karat Trump-branded gold watch.

The event will be held on November 22 at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.  Invitations seem specifically made to encourage sales of the $TRUMP coin and give the president a hefty profit, and the competition to crown the biggest purchasers began Wednesday. 

Last year, Trump held a similar dinner for his meme coin at his golf club in northern Virginia, as well as another such dinner in April at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. At the Virginia dinner in May 2025, guests reportedly shelled out $148 million to gain access to the president for a substandard steak or halibut dinner, and the full guest list wasn’t made public because the president was attending the event off the clock. 

Some of the known guests included former Los Angeles Laker Lamar Odom; Chinese billionaire and accused fraudster Justin Sun (who is now suing the president); and Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Taiwan-based Kronos Research.

The $2.2 billion Trump made last year mostly came from his cryptocurrency ventures, and he doesn’t appear to be letting up. The latest dinner is chock-full of potential ethical violations, with the president clearly selling access to himself. But while these ventures have been lucrative for Trump, they haven’t worked out well for the people he dupes into investing. 

Trump’s crypto products have lost an estimated $4.7 billion for their investors thus far, according to watchdog group Public Citizen. It’s not clear how much guests will have to shell out to attend this upcoming dinner, but Trump’s largest meme coin account holds about $104 million’s worth. 

Unlike World Liberty Financial, which is owned by Trump’s sons, Trump doesn’t own the firm behind his meme coin, instead only selling the marketing rights to his name. That distance gives him some legal protection. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s ripping off investors to make bank with no fear of consequences.

Inside Washington

On Wednesday, a party line vote of 47–41 confirmed Keith Sonderling as the head of the Department of Labor. To Democrats, it’s one step closer to advancing the Trump-era Labor Department’s anti-worker agenda.

Sonderling has served as acting secretary of labor since April, when President Donald Trump’s then–Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in disgrace amid allegations of—among other things—travel fraud and creating a toxic workplace environment. (In September, the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General released a detailed report confirming the misconduct.)

Since Sonderling took over, he’s taken a number of actions that Democrats see as anti-worker. In May, the department rescinded an overtime rule adopted under former President Joe Biden. The department is currently trying to rescind a different Biden-era rule that addresses the classification of independent contractors. When Sonderling sat before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, in July, Democratic senators grilled him on these issues and other controversies, such as Trump’s purge of federal workers and the firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August 2025 after a weak jobs report came out.

“You are not a bystander to this administration’s anti-worker policies and agenda,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington told Sonderling at the time.

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who also sits on HELP, told The New Republic on Wednesday that he wasn’t impressed with Sonderling and didn’t get the sense that he would steer the department away from its overall anti-worker bias under Trump. “I’ve been very disappointed with the first flameout of the first secretary,” said Kaine. “I think the Trump administration’s Department of Labor is not really great for labor or for working people. I think it’s like a second secretary of commerce rather than a secretary of labor.”

Senators are particularly concerned about how the potential secretary of labor would approach AI in the workplace in a moment of skyrocketing anxiety about AI and AI-related job replacement. “Part of what we want to see from them is understanding what the real impact of this is on job loss [and] job transitions,” said Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, who served as her state’s secretary of labor in 1998. Data on how AI is affecting the workforce have been slim, and some lawmakers are trying to push the BLS to collect more. “How we do things at the Department of Labor needs to be modernized” to meet the AI moment, Blunt Rochester said. Meanwhile, Kaine told The New Republic on Wednesday that he wants to see the department focus on apprenticeship programs and workforce training for workers who could be affected by AI. 

So far, the Department of Labor has done a handful of things to address AI. In his HELP committee hearing, Sonderling told Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri that the department had asked the BLS to examine data on AI and the workforce, but it appears that little has yet emerged from that effort. The department launched a “Make America AI-Ready” mini course, ostensibly to teach AI literacy to workers. Labor advocates were skeptical: “Does this [training] make workers’ jobs better or safer? Will it help people who want to find a job access high-quality, union jobs?” Lauren McFerran, executive director of AFL-CIO’s Tech Institute and a former chair of the National Labor Relations Board, said to NPR in April. 

There are plenty of reasons why Senate Democrats weren’t eager to confirm Sonderling. His lukewarm response to current AI concerns appears to be just another drop in the bucket.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The rush to enact statewide policies to lower fuel prices continues. A limited rundown of some of the happenings this week: In Indiana, Republican Governor Mike Braun on Wednesday extended a suspension on the state’s gas use and excise taxes through November 4, and suspended restrictions on what dyed diesel could be used for on farms. Only two days earlier, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom ended summer gas-blend requirements over a month ahead of schedule, while Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp temporarily suspended the state gas tax and Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a 30-day disaster declaration in order to suspend various diesel restrictions on Texas roads. Ohio lawmakers voted Wednesday to suspend the state gas tax for 90 days, which both Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy have said they support. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Wall Street banks’ estimates for gas prices in the coming months have risen, given the dwindling chances of a peace deal with Iran. Republicans are increasingly worried that voter frustration over gas prices could fuel the so-called “blue wave” in November.

Elsewhere:

• Amid a wave of optimistic analysis and polling for Dems nationwide, Chris Pappas’s Senate race against John Sununu in New Hampshire continues to look a bit dicey. Pappas tends to maintain a narrow lead in most polls but is being wildly outspent. AP reporters Steve Peoples, Holly Ramer, and Steven Sloan see it as a sign of broader issues: “For all the Democrats’ confidence, the party’s brand remains deeply unpopular and fundraising is lagging,” they write. “The Republican advantage isn’t as egregious in New Hampshire as some other states, but it is significant. AdImpact finds that Republicans are outspending Democrats in New Hampshire $41.2 million to $35.4 million statewide.” The TNR Blue Book’s Emma Janssen previously reported on the jitters surrounding this race back in early September. 

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Reviewing the new personal consumption expenditure, or PCE, report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, released Wednesday, Groundwork Collaborative chief economist Breyon Williams says in a statement on the organization’s website that “the bleak economic picture offers little hope for Americans desperate for relief.” The report showed PCE inflation increasing 3.4 percent from August 2025 to August 2026, with the economy growing at a 2.4 percent rate so far this year.

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a statement on Wednesday coinciding with court day for the water utilities challenging the Biden EPA’s rule requiring the removal of lead pipes. “Water utilities fighting the lead rule are on the wrong side of history,” says NRDC senior strategic director for health Erik D. Olson. Members of Earthjustice, the Newburgh Clean Water Project, and the Sierra Club chimed in, as well, with NCWP’s Gabrielle Burton-Hill calling the case “outrageous and disappointing” and others pointing out the vast number of households and children that the rule will help protect from lead poisoning if allowed to continue.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted dive into Senator Eric Schmitt’s bizarre faceplant in the Jack Smith hearing this week—all while Axios was reporting “buzz” that he might be JD Vance’s running mate in 2028.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

An actually smart Missouri senator, a Democrat, was known as a vocal foe of Joseph McCarthy; was the first secretary of the Air Force; and refused to speak to segregated audiences in the Southern U.S. during a brief presidential run in 1960. Who was he? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The Bulwark obtained a copy of a script from Shapiro’s right-wing Daily Wire media company that details an ICE raid in Minneapolis—and which spoofs the killing of unarmed protester Renee Good, who was shot four times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross earlier this year in Minneapolis. There have still been no charges filed in her killing, and her family moved to sue the Trump administration over her death on Thursday. 

The movie, titled Pawn Shop, appears to be similar to the company’s recent Run Fight Hide: Infidels, a lazy, ultraconservative fantasy that cast liberals as hysterical, “useful idiots” stopping the morally just right wing from saving society. It starred a post-cancellation Jonathan Majors. 

According to The Bulwark, this film opens with a character meant to be Good slamming her car into an ICE vehicle while other protestors try to stop them from arresting a man who is, of course, revealed at the end to be an MS-13 kingpin. The Good character, named Melanie, described as being “fat” with “blue hair,” is promptly shot and killed by agents. 

Melanie reacts to the drawn gun with panic …

She MASHES on the gas as she throws the car into reverse, accidentally SLAMMING Juan out of the way. He goes flying into the gutter, bleeding …

And as the car reverses, Mike FIRES TWICE through the windshield …

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

Blood SPLATTERS on her PASSENGER’s (40s, female, overweight) forehead and matching covid mask.

The ICE agents are then chased by a mob, and barricade themselves into a pawn shop; the rest of the movie seems to use that as an arena for whatever tired conservative talking points Shapiro and producing partner Dallas Sonnier have to offer. This is an almost identical structure to Infidels, which I unfortunately reviewed last month. 

While it’s unclear when the movie will release, it has begun filming on location in Livingston, Minnesota—much to the chagrin of local residents.  

Shortly before Trump’s return to office last year, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners doubled its investment in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, as well as at least eight other companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.

Affinity Partners doesn’t benefit from any of these companies directly but has reaped massive rewards from its investment in Phoenix Financial. In July, Affinity cashed out a quarter of its stake for more than $340 million, which is more than five times the worth of its initial stock purchase.

Kushner himself has described Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment,” and his firm remains the financial group’s largest shareholder, with a 7.4 percent stake worth more than $1 billion, CNN reported. Last September, Kushner told Forbes that he maintained a “very active dialogue” with Phoenix leadership, and met with them every few weeks.

Kushner has served as a top Middle East adviser during Trump’s second term and has floated his own wretched idea for what Israel ought to do with Gaza’s “waterfront property.”

Kushner’s financial entanglements are a clear cause for concern when it comes to his role as a volunteer envoy leading peace negotiations in Israel, Iran, and Ukraine, Cynthia Brown, chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN.

“There are always people who profit from war or government policies. The difference is that the people profiting should not be the people making the decisions to make that policy. And that is what is happening here,” Brown said.

Kushner’s attorney told CNN that he had “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” and had “no involvement in the decision to purchase, hold or sell any of the nine companies.” They insisted that “any suggestion that Jared’s diplomatic work influenced Phoenix’s investments in the companies you identify, or vice versa, is incorrect.”

His attorney confirmed that Kushner “regularly spoke with Phoenix management about the company, broader market trends and potential strategic opportunities” this time last year, but had wound down the frequency of their meetings as he has become “substantially more engaged in volunteer public service and diplomatic efforts.”

But that doesn’t mean that Kushner’s involvement through Affinity Partners isn’t a damning conflict of interest. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Institute of Peace in a Wednesday court order temporarily preventing President Trump from placing his name onto the building—something former employees of the Institute alleged was coming in an emergency injunction last month, especially given that he had already placed his name on the building’s exterior sign (in removable letters) last December.

Beyond the naming, Trump attempted a complete hostile takeover of the Institute—using Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (and private security) to fire and escort workers out of the building in March of 2025. That takeover was blocked in federal court in May, but lifted in June. This most recent blockage will be retried in November.

Trump has been moving like some middle schooler carving his name into a desk with a pocket knife on the last day of school. He’s unsuccessfully tried to place his name on the John. F. Kennedy Center and was alleged to be looking into doing the same with Ford’s Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The White House denies any plans to actually carve the President’s name into the Institute of Peace—an independent organization established more than 40 years ago. But Trump’s baseless, relentless claims to any old building justifies the sense of urgency accompanying the emergency injunction from the Institute’s employees.

President Trump has yet to publicly comment.

In an interview with Time magazine, published Thursday morning, Trump snapped at reporter Eric Cortellessa after he was asked a question about the health situation of Senator Mitch McConnell, who went missing from the Senate all summer. Trump went off on a tangent about President Joe Biden and lost it at Cortellessa, dropping an expletive.

“It was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that’s just—well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I’m not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe’s allowed to give them? This ain’t gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative,” Trump said.

In the same stream of thought, Trump complained that Cortellessa hadn’t asked him about Venezuela, even though he had, at length, earlier in the interview.

“Do you notice you haven’t asked me a question about Venezuela?” Trump asked, to which Cortellessa said, “We did earlier.” Trump replied, “No, no, I brought it up, and then you said—”

“You beat us to it. But yeah,” Cortellessa said.

Among other gems in the interview is that Trump regrets all of his Supreme Court picks, failing to remember they saved him from prosecution.

“Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too,” Trump said.

Trump also defended his barring of Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from the White House grounds, but he seemed unclear about U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order blocking the ban.

“Well, the court actually said that, if you look at the judge’s decision, he’s been a very anti-Trump judge, which is very interesting. But if you look at his decision, he really said process. He talked about—come back to us with process,” Trump said, to which Cortellessa noted that Kelly was a Trump appointee.

“Yeah, he was. He was. It’s one of those things,” Trump said. Cortellessa asked if Trump thought he was ignoring Kelly’s order, to which Trump claimed he wasn’t.

“I’m not ignoring his order. I’m just saying that when I don’t have to go out of my way, these people write only bad stories. When they say orders, what order? I’m not even aware,” Trump said. White House communications director Stephen Cheung interjected to note that “the judge basically ordered them to renew their access back to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One.”

“He actually said to the premises of the White House?” Trump replied, dumbfounded.

The entire interview showcased Trump’s narcissism and clear cognitive decline, with him going on tangents, lashing out unprompted at critics, and complaining about the “fake news” going after him constantly. Trump loves the attention, but it’s been clear for a long time that he is unable to handle the duties and scrutiny that comes with being president.

The former FBI agent dodged one such question while collecting a local endorsement in Saginaw on Wednesday, where a reporter asked why two pastors from the Living Word Church were on Rogers’s Faith Leadership Coalition, months after three elders at the church’s Midland chapter were sent to prison for sexually abusing children.

The dubious personnel inclusions involved Brian Ford of Living Word Church in Ludington as well as Tim Cross, the founding pastor of Living Word Church in Muskegon. Ford defended former pastor James Randolph at trial, before he was sentenced to at least 25 years for first degree criminal sexual conduct.

But when asked why Ford remained on his team, Rogers was suddenly much more interested in discussing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and the commentator’s connection to Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (El-Sayed has worked to distance himself from Piker in recent months.)

“This is a guy that came to our students and preaching that we deserved 9/11, that’s a story,” Rogers said, according to ABC News 12. Rogers did not confirm or deny if Ford was still a member of his Faith Leadership Coalition.

He did, however, briefly address his prior connection to Cross, who resigned from Rogers’s team earlier this year after he admitted he initially did not believe the sex abuse victims.

“Our volunteers, the people that volunteer for us, one of those folks have stepped away from his volunteer work, someone is still in the faith volunteer work, we think the most important part here is about who is stepping up and who is surrogates,” Rogers told reporters.

Rogers was in Saginaw to collect an endorsement from Democratic Sheriff William Federspiel, though the local Democrats immediately rebuked Federspiel’s support. Saginaw County’s Democratic Party Chair, Brandell Adams, told ABC News 12 that Federspiel was simply a “Democrat in name” who was furthering his “track record of endorsing losing candidates.”

Republican Senator Tim Scott admitted as much while speaking with Semafor about the Kansas Senate race between Republican Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton on Wednesday.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” the South Carolina Senator said in a surprisingly candid comment. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

President Trump won Kansas by about a 16 percent margin in 2024. Kansas Democrats haven’t sent someone to the Senate in more than 90 years. Scott speaking about their once in a lifetime moment of weakness in the state speaks to both Marshall’s weaknesses as a candidate and the larger, widely unpopular Trump administration record that he and every other GOP candidate is being forced to defend.

Scott’s comment comes as Senate candidate and former district attorney Scott Colom’s campaign begins to pick up steam in Mississippi, further reaffirming that even traditionally deep-red states and districts may not be as safe as they seem.

“The wave doesn’t have to be humongous for us to capture Mississippi,” Colom said to The Washington Post. He’s met with Senate leaders Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Ralph Warnock. “If we try, we win these voters.… They’ve been written off, not just by Cindy Hyde-Smith but also by other people in the Democratic Party. And I’m just not going to write them off.”

While Colom and Hamilton both have uphill battles in spending and messaging, it’s clear that the tide is turning against this current iteration of the GOP. Only time will tell if the Democrats can successfully take advantage.

The lawsuits were filed Thursday by Renee Good’s partner Becca Good, who was targeted by the Department of Justice after she filmed the fatal shooting, and Brent Ganger, Renee Good’s brother who testified about her death in front of Congress.

The first lawsuit was filed against “the United States of America,” and alleges the wrongful death of Renee Good under Minnesota law that is “predicated on the battery, assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence that caused Renee’s death.”

The second lawsuit alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, and was filed against Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Good in her car, as well as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, her adviser and alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski, border czar Tom Homan, former ICE Director Todd Lyons, former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and 10 unnamed federal agents.

Video footage of the January incident showed Good, who was blocking traffic, wave at the federal agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, Ross shot her in the head at least three times.

The Trump administration was quick to argue that Good had deserved to die, but her killing sparked widespread backlash against the government’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

In the nearly 10 months since her death, absolutely nothing has come of the investigation into her killing. Federal law enforcement shut police and other Minnesota authorities out of the initial investigation. Later, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ Civil Rights Division, made clear that she had no intention of conducting a civil rights investigation.

This story has been updated.

Trump announced Wednesday that South Korea had agreed to invest $200 billion in energy infrastructure, including a $54 billion investment in the long-discussed liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska—but South Korea claims they never committed to funding that project.

“What the Korean government agreed with the U.S. is that the Alaska project will proceed only if it is commercially viable,” said Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry and resources, according to Bloomberg.

“What was reported today went beyond what had been agreed,” he said, and expressed Seoul’s regrets to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration was aware that the commitment wasn’t set in stone, or if it believed it could manifest the funds by simply announcing them, or if—in true Trumpian fashion—it doesn’t care whether they’re real or not and this was all for show.

But I’ll tell you one person who definitely should care: Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, the vulnerable incumbent in Alaska’s Senate race.

“This is the project that is gonna keep our kids and grandkids in Alaska with a great bright future. This is the project that our state has been working on to try to get done for almost a half century,” Sullivan said Wednesday during a press conference in the Oval Office, adding that the project would create more than 10,000 jobs and provide low cost energy to Alaskans for 50 to 100 years. (The project has faced legal challenges from environmental groups concerned it will increase fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the climate crisis.)

Whether or not South Korea’s commitment is the real deal could potentially make or break Sullivan’s reelection campaign: Recent polls showed that Democratic challenger Mary Peltola has a slight lead on Sullivan.

This wouldn’t be the first time the president has lied about the amount of investment pouring in from foreign countries, The New York Times reported. Over the course of 2025, Trump claimed to have received up to $21 trillion in foreign investments—nearly twice the amount that the White House’s own tracking website states for foreign and domestic investments combined.

Trump removed CNN journalists from his upcoming trip to Texas and Oklahoma after they were scheduled to fly on Air Force One in order to report on his visit to a truck manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas, and a speech in Durant, Oklahoma. CNN was also barred from traveling with the president last weekend when he went to Tennessee.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order last week preventing Trump from blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW was limited to media access on the White House premises, the president’s actions Thursday are still “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process,” said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing the media outlets, in a statement.

“The White House is persisting in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing the President’s unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as a designated television network pooler—to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public,” Boutrous’s statement said.

All three media outlets had asked a federal court Monday to continue preventing Trump from blocking their access, warning that “the White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico if allowed the opportunity.”

That was apparent last week, when Trump continued to bar media outlets from covering the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and an official state dinner later in the day. It seems that Trump will continue to thumb his nose at the First Amendment as long as he can get away with it.

Then NBC News obtained the draft itinerary for the trip, which included both Republicans and Democrats, and asked Johnson’s office about it. The trip was immediately canceled.

“Senior congressional staff of both parties routinely lead staff delegations to allied countries and trading partners for parliamentary and private sector engagements to strengthen the working relationships between our countries and their key industries,” said Johnson’s office in a statement.

According to a staff memo, the reason for the trip was “to engage European and U.S. government and industry officials related to the impact of U.S. tariffs and taxes.” Such trips are not uncommon, as congressional staffers and delegations often take fact-finding trips to learn about policy issues. But this trip has some apparent warning signs, an ethics watchdog told NBC News.

“In theory, you want members of Congress and their staff to be going into the field and learning something and maybe investigating something, getting some up-close and personal understanding of the issue that they’re supposed to be legislating on. That’s probably a good use of time in a lot of cases,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, said to the news outlet.

“But what they end up being, or at least what they look like, is just a taxpayer-funded vacation to exotic locations. You’ve got the Ferrari racetrack that you get to play around on, or the Louis Vuitton gift bag you might be getting in Milan. I’m sure those are enjoyable inducements to the whole enterprise.”

According to Johnson’s office, the trip was canceled due to a schedule conflict. But Democratic and Republican staffers traveling together when there are stark, seemingly unsolvable legislative conflicts between the two parties raises eyebrows. And such a trip, when the House is out of session until the midterms, doesn’t look good at a time when Americans are struggling with the expensive cost of groceries and sky-high gas prices, and can’t afford vacations to Europe.

Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Schmitt that the text messages he was planning to use to accuse Smith of holding secret meetings in Atlanta were “unvetted,” MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Schmitt accused Jack Smith during a hearing Tuesday of sneaking to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade, after they revealed their affair in February 2024. The Missouri Republican claimed to possess text messages proving that Smith had plans to attend an Atlanta Hawks game, but unfortunately for Schmitt, the texts were actually about Smith’s plans to attend a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

The Department of Justice shared materials with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee ahead of the meeting, sources told MS NOW. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s team compiled most of the important information into a memo, but did not include the supposedly damning texts in their assessment, one source told the outlet.

Grassley did not share the texts with Democratic senators ahead of the hearing, deepening the suspicion that Schmitt’s failed “gotcha” moment was secretly engineered by the Trump administration, one source told MS NOW.

Democrats aren’t the only ones suspicious of the source of Schmitt’s viral face plant.

A senior Republican senator also believes the Trump administration was working to nail the president’s longtime foe. “I’m pretty sure the White House asked him to do it,” they told RawStory. “And, probably, the White House provided the material.”

Schmitt’s blunder would probably be another blip in the news cycle, except that it came just hours after Axios reported that the Missouri Republican was gaining “buzz” as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028. Clearly, somebody thought Schmitt was about to make waves, but he only made himself a laughingstock.

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

This week brings two related developments. Donald Trump just hit another record low in the polls, and Donald Trump is using taxpayer money to fund propaganda ads in the midterms that are all about himself. He doesn’t seem to see the disconnect with that. The ad scheme is corrupt and probably illegal, and an official just leaked something damning: the corruption of the scheme is in part the point, because it draws media attention to the ads, which amplifies them. We think that says a lot about how Trumpian and autocratic propaganda really work.

So we’re talking to David Corn, who has a good piece for The New Republic exploring how Trumpian disinformation really functions. He’s author of How Russia Won, a book about Trump, Russia, and America. David, good to have you on.

David Corn: Great to be on The Blast.

Sargent: Let’s start with the polling. Quinnipiac has a new survey finding that Trump’s approval is down at 34 percent, and he’s down to 31 percent on the economy, which is an all-time low for both terms in Quinnipiac polling. Democrats are leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 51 to 39. That’s 12 points.

David, I don’t think it’s that high, but we’re getting there. Nate Silver’s average has it at nearly 10 points now, the generic ballot average. All indications are, one, Trump continues to drop, and two, the Dem lead continues to expand. Is that too optimistic? Your thoughts?

Corn: Well, I mean, he’s at lower numbers than Jimmy Carter, right? And they keep dropping. Yeah, it’s showing us kind of where his floor or basement is. And I always thought it was around 30 points. One or two outlying polls have him down as low as 29, but the average is still low-to-mid thirties.

So I think there’s still a little bit further for him to drop. About 30 percent of people look at him as an information source and thus believe what he says. And he’s basically losing almost everybody up to that, because people can see what’s happening.

In my book, and in the piece I have in The New Republic, I write about how he won the messaging war on Russia by saying over and over again it was a hoax, it was a witch hunt, it was a deep state conspiracy, Russia, Russia, Russia—and the Democrats, a lot of the media, gave up. That’s a big part of my book.

But people are seeing the gas prices every day. They see the war is not over. They see what the trade policy did in terms of the economy. They see innocent, law-abiding residents being brutally apprehended. They see fellow Americans being shot. So in the face of all this, Trump’s propaganda—which is endemic to all authoritarians—is not getting traction. And that’s a key point.

Sargent: It really is. And Trump is now using taxpayer money to fund the propaganda. He’s now run three ads that claim to be funded by the U.S. government, in the ads themselves. One shows Trump saying he’s waging a final battle against the Marxists and the globalists. A second shows something similar, with Trump vowing that America will never go communist. A third shows Trump’s July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore.

David, where are these running? And can you explain why this is so corrupt?

Corn: Well, they’re running a lot on football games. You know, they’re trying to reach football watchers, which tells you that they think they’re losing middle America. I have a friend who works for us at Mother Jones, a colleague, who was rained in this last weekend and watched, like, 12 hours of football. And he said the ads were up again and again. College games, pro games, different channels. They’re just pouring millions of dollars.

And I think it’s, you know—while things look good for the Democrats, you have to remember that the Republicans have, at this point, a $222 million cash advantage in terms of what they’re putting out in ads over the Democrats. They’re going to spend close to a billion dollars. Democrats spending a lot, Republicans spending a lot more.

But to use taxpayer money to finance an ad like this is blatantly illegal and criminal. You can put up public service ads. Kids, stay away from drugs. Don’t drive after drinking. We’ve seen this all the time, U.S. government agencies putting up public service announcements. And that’s what they’re calling these ads.

But these ads are political and partisan ads. It’s Trump rallying in a demagogic, authoritarian, autocratic way against his opponents. And so you can’t do that. But we know his Justice Department is not going to do anything about it.

Sargent: It’s worth pointing out as well that the ads, though they don’t mention the midterms, they actually do amplify the Trump and GOP message, which is that if you elect Democrats, the country will slide into leftist pandemonium. I mean, that is their message in essence, and that is what Trump is saying.

There’s an autocratic quality to these ads as well. They really have the feeling of totalitarian propaganda. You know this topic well. Can you talk about that dimension of it?

Corn: Yeah, I mean, they basically are part of the cult of personality. They’re very Stalinistic. If you—I’m not advising you to watch these ads, but if you see them, they show Trump grimacing, in black and white, looking, you know, trying to look fierce and strong. But it’s all about him.

And this is where this may indeed backfire on him. Because, as we started talking about, his numbers are incredibly low. His actions are making Republicans incredibly unpopular. He’s dragging down the ticket. Yet you have the chairman of the RNC, Joe Gruters, saying a couple of days ago, we are going to put Trump front and center in this campaign. To which Democrats can only say, thank you very much.

Almost any other president in the midterms tries to find a way to help the party. Now, sometimes that means not campaigning with certain candidates in certain states and certain districts, but it’s also like, what bill can I sign? What executive order can I put out? Where can I campaign? How can I give you money so you can use it the best way possible for your campaign? Trump is doing none of that.

Sargent: So Axios reports, meanwhile, that Trump is planning to ramp up these ads, and one administration official leaked something remarkable. The official told Axios that they like the media attention to the ads because it amplifies them for free. This official said this: “When CNN takes a segment on it, they play the entire thing and it’s great.”

David, I don’t think we should gloss over what that really means. This official is admitting straight out that the corruption is part of the point here, right? CNN does a segment on these ads because they’re so corrupt. And they like that, because it gets them free airtime for the ads. The level of contempt they have for, I guess you and me, like, we the people, is just incredible, isn’t it?

Corn: Or for the rule of law. I mean, there’s no question that these ads are illegal. They know that, but they also know no one’s going to come after Trump for this. And the Supreme Court has given him immunity on criminal activity that is pursuant to his job. So he can argue that this is pursuant to his official responsibilities.

The thing that’s kind of bizarre here is that I think they’re in a drink-the-Kool-Aid mode—I’m talking about Trump and his inner circle. As his numbers are falling, as we just talked about, you don’t want to make him center stage.

Yes, when you do propaganda and you do disinformation—as I describe a lot about what Russia’s doing in the book, or whether it’s, you know, Americans—one principle is you want people to write about it. You want people to get upset about it online and write about it. You want media to cover it and to show it.

This is not a new piece of the playbook. Campaigns for decades have done what they consider to be outrageous ads, because they’re going to get what they call free media, media they don’t have to pay for. People amplify it, we’ll talk about it and play the ad, show the ad.

But again, showing more Donald Trump does not seem to be helping. People are pissed off at Donald Trump. Independents are against him. I don’t know, the last poll I saw was, like, close to 70-30. He’s bottoming out.

Sargent: In fact, David, it’s even worse with independents. The Quinnipiac poll has Donald Trump at 25 percent approval with independents and 69 percent disapprove. And get this: on the economy, independents, 23 percent approve. I want to go back to something you said in this context, about the RNC chair who said we’re going to put Trump front and center, et cetera, et cetera.

At this point, their best hope is that they can generate very big turnout among his core supporters. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a bunch of reasons, but they seem to think that that’s their best hope. And so when the RNC chair says, look, we’re going to put you out everywhere, that’s what they’re talking about. When they run ads to football audiences, that’s what they’re trying to do. But the problem for them is the 25 percent approval with independents. The more they show him, the more they lose the middle. It’s a real—they’re in a very serious trap here.

Corn: They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And you know, you know this, Greg: getting turnout in midterm elections is always hard.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s just—people for the president’s party.

Corn: For the president’s party, yeah. But even sometimes for the opposing party. But people just are less engaged. But the side that is more upset or engaged tends to do better, and that’s usually, in a midterm election, the opposition party. So this would be the Democrats. Democrats are highly, highly, highly motivated. They are not disappointed by Trump—they come into this being opposed to Trump. Independents a lot of who voted for him have flipped, and getting them out for the Democrats is the key to victory as well.

And so Trump is left with only trying to get record numbers of Republican voters who are still with him, you know, and hoping that the Democrats don’t do as well with independents and even their own voters as you would expect. That is an incredibly hard thing to envision happening.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the Quinnipiac poll for one second. On international conflicts, Democrats are trusted by 48 percent versus 40 percent for the Republican Party. On the economy, it’s 48 percent for Democrats, 42 percent for the Republican Party. On immigration, it’s 47 percent for the Democratic Party, 44 percent for Republicans.

So national security and foreign policy, the economy, immigration—all areas that traditionally are Republican strengths, Democrats lead on all of them. Trump did that whole thing. He absolutely fucked the Republican Party in every which way. And numbers like that are just really, really, really shocking.

Corn: Nothing that he is selling are American voters buying, except his own base. I mean, because you just went down—what are the big things he’s done? Mass deportation crusades, tariffs, you know, and starting a war in Iran, and the illegal actions in the Caribbean, attacking and killing people, and the Venezuela mini war, whatever you want to call it. Everything that is his signature accomplishment that he praises, they are not accepting.

The stuff that’s happened in the last year and a half in his second presidency is so apparent, it’s so in everybody’s face. You can’t deny it. He says we’re living in a golden age. Who believes that, other than people who are in his cult who believe everything he says? No one believes that. No one believes the war in Iran was a smart idea, or that it’s over, except his own people. So he is left with nothing to offer. And he can, you know, keep trying.

But I think all that stuff is baked in, which is why I fear—I’m not obsessive or paranoid about it—that as we get closer, he’s going to try some more extreme measures to fuck with the election in some ways. He’s an odd, psychotic person. And at some times he looks resigned, right?

Like, it’s not up to me what happens in the midterms. And other times everything is about him. And so if he feels he’s in a corner, and he’s going to lose and maybe be impeached again—who knows how he will lash out in the final weeks of this campaign, or after the election when votes still have to be counted and certified?

Sargent: There certainly is a lot to fear there. Democrats, as far as I can tell, know this and are going to be super vigilant about it. Let’s just close on some audio of Donald Trump. Here he’s talking about the midterm elections. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We have to turn this around. For some reason, presidents, Democrat or Republican—they just, they don’t win the midterms. I don’t know why. There’s a deep psychological impact when you—for some reason. But we should—I mean, our numbers are through the roof. We’ve never—the best numbers in the history of our country. We should win. So we have to get out. The main thing I think… maybe they get complacent.

Sargent: So there you have Donald Trump acknowledging the way midterm dynamics work—they usually do favor the out party—but he’s simply incapable of ascribing any blame of any kind to himself for any of it.

And you can see how he can then go out and support, or call for, the use of himself in as much propaganda as possible, and promise to be on the trail in every Republican state or district where he can possibly get to. I just—you know, it’s just so extraordinary to watch this party have to tiptoe around this madman. It’s just amazing stuff.

Corn: Yeah. Well, it’s quite clear that this is how he sees the world. If I win, it’s me. If I lose, it’s you. So here he is already trying to blame other forces. And he’s right, you’re right, this is the dynamic. It’s always an uphill climb for the president in a midterm election against the out party.

But nevertheless, you know, he seems here to be setting the groundwork to say, see, it has nothing to do with me, it’s all everybody else—while at the same time trying to make it all about him. And when he spoke at the midterm convention in Dallas, which was a week or two back, he actually told the crowd, do everything you can, even if you have to cheat. And they cheat. So he was then setting up perhaps this framework, or this narrative, that the election, if he loses, is because of cheating.

So he’s not a consistent, steady person. So he’s throwing a lot of different things out. Poor guy. He probably can’t process all this rationally and clearly. So whatever is in his head at a given moment is what he spurts out. But that’s what’s always made him dangerous. And that’s what makes the coming elections—this period and the post period—a time of potential crisis.

Sargent: Well, look, I think we’ll all feel a whole lot better if we can get past these midterms with a win, and with them being certified. And I think people should just keep their heads in this game, because it’s going to get pretty nasty. But I think we can get there, David. I really do.

Corn: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think he’s tried a lot of ways to mess with the election. You know, the courts have basically said no on the mail-in ballot stuff, which is the most consequential. I mean, he did what he could with gerrymandering, and the courts got rid of the Voting Rights Act so they could do racist gerrymandering.

So he’s done a lot to tilt the playing field in his favor. But a lot of the things he’s tried recently have not worked. And so if, you know, secretaries of state, people locally, all sort of follow the rules in general, we probably can get through this.

But 2020 showed us how fragile our democracy could be. He came very close to overturning that election and, you know, staying in power even though he lost. So that’s why vigilance, keep the head in the game, as you suggest, is important here. Because with Donald Trump, it’s not about democracy, it’s about him. And he’s a dangerous man.

Sargent: The end just might be in sight, David. Folks, David Corn’s new book is called How Russia Won. David, a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much.

Corn: Thank you, Greg.

In 2025, Donald Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive instructing the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to pursue a dramatic effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum also instructs the attorney general to submit a list of groups and entities deemed to be domestic terrorists to the president. 

Among the many indicators of the new violent domestic threat in NSPM-7 are “anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The mechanism for investigating and prosecuting these new thought crimes is a post-9/11 invention that fuses the FBI with state police, local police, the National Guard, DHS, military intelligence components, and sometimes even the CIA into a Joint Terrorism Task Force, or  JTTF. A national network of over 200 JTTFs was expanded through the justification of preventing the intelligence-sharing gaps that allowed hijackers to attack the twin towers on 9/11. 

In the intervening years, JTTFs have been used to deputize state and local police into federal agents, injecting federal directives like NSPM-7 directly into local communities. A study of 14 JTTFs conducted by the Brennan Center described their functioning as “organized chaos,” writing that the network functions as “a sprawling, federally subsidized, and loosely coordinated system designed to share information that is collected according to varying local standards.” 

The Brennan Center report also found that JTTFs’ headlong rush into intelligence work has “created risks that hurt counterterrorism efforts and undermine police work” and that the “lack of oversight, accountability, and quality control over how police collect and share personal information about law-abiding Americans not only violates the civil liberties of Americans, but creates a mountain of data with little to no counterterrorism value.”

That sprawling chaos is now being weaponized by the Justice Department to pursue investigations and intimidation of activists across the country. The FBI has even stood up a NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center composed of 10 federal agencies to organize the JTTFs’ NSPM-7 investigations. According to internal FBI documents first obtained by the nonprofit Property of the People, NSPM-7 investigations began in dozens of blue states, including New York, California, and Illinois.

But the governors from all three of those states equivocated in response to The New Republic’s inquiry about whether they were taking any action to stop the implementation of NSPM-7. 

Gavin Newsom of California shirked the question, telling The New Republic in a written statement only that “California’s security efforts operate wholly under state law and appropriate safeguards.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office attempted a more acrobatic maneuver, claiming that “New York State Police assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force focus only on genuine criminal or terrorism investigations, follow New York’s laws, and do not participate in civil immigration enforcement or the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center.” That answer is misleading. The FBI Joint Mission Center is the central hub for administering NSPM-7, but its participants are only a few dozen federal employees based in Washington, D.C.

As the map of NSPM-7 investigations makes clear, the New York JTTF—which is chock-full of NYPD intelligence officers—is actively pursuing NSPM-7 investigations. The governor’s office also acknowledged that New York State Police members and command staff are assigned to the New York JTTF and that those members work in partnership with the FBI and the other agencies represented on the JTTF under the supervision and oversight of state police command staff.

“Governor Hochul’s top priority is public safety, and she expects all law enforcement agencies to utilize resources responsibly to fight crime and keep communities safe, while respecting New Yorkers’ right to exercise their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly,” her office said in a statement. 

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also demurred on the question of how exactly local and state police are participating in the FBI’s ongoing Illinois NSPM-7 investigations, telling The New Republic, “Regardless of any actions taken by federal officials under the direction of the Trump administration, Illinois remains committed to maintaining the integrity of its own processes and will continue to ensure law enforcement information is handled appropriately and focused on legitimate public safety purposes, not political agendas.” 

The Illinois State Police, or ISP, who also provided a statement, wrote that the JTTF information process is a critical state asset but that the current gubernatorial administration does not tolerate abuse of the process. “The State of Illinois is committed to protecting free speech and ISP officers do not participate in the potential targeting of First Amendment rights. ISP personnel assigned to JTTFs remain under the authority of ISP, are subject to Illinois law, and are bound by the U.S. and Illinois constitutions. Any violation of the ISP rules of conduct is subject to discipline, up to and including termination, under the independent ISP Merit Board process.”

How this firewall squares with the FBI’s ongoing Illinois investigation remains unclear. 

The office of Hawaii’s Governor Josh Green simply responded to questions about NSPM-7 with: “This is not relevant to Hawai’i state law enforcement or National Guard personnel.” The office of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill told The New Republic, “I’d refer you to the NJ Office of the Attorney General on this.” The office of Delaware Governor Matt Meyer said they’d respond, then never did. 

The universal support for FBI JTTFs makes sense given the fear most elected officials have around the scaling down of the national security establishment. Should an attack take place under their watch after a downsizing or reduction in budget and scope, they could end up catching the blame. 

But earlier this year, there was one democratic gubernatorial candidate who broke with the ranks of the Democratic herd to proffer that the FBI’s JTTFs scouring the country for dissidents should and could be kicked out of Wisconsin—the home state of the progenitor of the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties,” Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong told KLIP News in July. She also said that the memorandums of understanding that authorize state and local police to work with the FBI “are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

Wisconsin’s current governor, Tony Evers, did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment. 

These numbers are driven by public anger at the state of the economy, the increasing cost of living, and Trump’s poor leadership. A plurality of voters says that this midterm election is a referendum on Trump (who isn’t on the ballot), with independents saying this the most. As a result, the generic congressional ballot favors Democrats by 12 points among registered voters in one poll, and by 11 points among likely voters in another.

To put these numbers in context, the 2018 election’s blue wave saw Democrats win the national vote in the House by “only” 8.6 percent, and by 10.6 percent in 2008. The latter happened under a Republican president about as popular as Trump, at the height of the Great Recession and the flailing war in Iraq. Democrats ended up carrying 257 seats to 178 that year.

But tucked away in all this relatively good news are some disturbing trends that say a lot about both Republicans and the United States in general. Many of Trump’s most violent, authoritarian policies remain broadly popular with his base, and are his most popular ones among the public in general. Notably, for example, the public in general approves (barely) of his policy on deportations.

The same Verasight poll found that the public gives Republicans a one-point advantage on their handling of deportations, a five-point edge on crime and public safety, and an 11-point cushion on border security. These would seem to show public support for Trump’s most violent and authoritarian policies, including ICE murders of civilians, airstrikes on random boats, and ensuring “public safety” by forcing transgender people out of public life.

For anyone who has forgotten, Trump has assembled a brutal, unaccountable national police force that operates in secrecy and arrests anyone it wants to based on skin color or how they speak. There is no effective oversight to be found. They’re running concentration camps with a significant body count, with at least 57 people dying in ICE detention in Trump’s second term, according to the ACLU, and torture rooms at the infamous and since-closed Alligator Alcatraz.

American citizens, and those in the country legally, are routinely and violently detained and experience great bodily injury and even death. ICE has shot and killed two Americans who were no threat to them. After Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered by officers, they were initially labeled as domestic terrorists. ICE agents also murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Houston. ICE claimed he tried to run over an agent, but multiple witnesses contradicted that statement. The Trump administration has blocked states from investigating ICE when its agents randomly kill people.

It is disturbing that roughly half the U.S. population is OK with all this and 77 percent of Republicans are all for it. Sixty-one percent of Republicans want no pathway to citizenship, and instead prefer deporting everyone, including those brought into the country as children. For these individuals, deportation to places where they neither speak the language nor have any connections is effectively a death sentence. In some cases, people who were in the country legally and face deportation are committing suicide rather than returning.

Republicans are still trusted more on “crime and public safety” than Democrats. Though this is somewhat ill defined in the polling, the most prominent “crimes” that Republicans are seemingly interested in fighting are transgender people receiving health care, using bathrooms, renewing their passports, or playing kindergarten T-ball. What Republicans aren’t interested in fighting are white-collar crimes, child rape (if the perp is a Republican donor or owns an island), public officials taking bribes, or attempts to overthrow the government.

Polling on all these issues shows that a majority of the public have adopted Republican anti-transgender talking points. Even Democrats are starting to fall in line behind them. It is the number one issue Republicans are campaigning on this election cycle, and they see it as a political winner.

Republicans in Congress and in state government are increasingly framing transgender people as dangerous, mentally ill degenerates who should be locked away in mental institutions against their will. The internet roundly mocked GOP Senator Tuberville for bemoaning “furry airline pilots,” but lost in the social media buzz was the fact that it was part of a 20-minute tirade against transgender people where he demanded their involuntary commitment. Republican policies for transgender people have direct parallels to Germany’s policies between 1933 and 1945, and Republican calls for institutionalization should be an uncomfortable reminder of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 program, which institutionalized and killed people with mental illness and disabilities.

The other keystone of the Republican “law and order” focus is their support of airstrikes on boats suspected of drug smuggling. In days past, a Navy or Coast Guard helicopter would disable the craft with a single rifle round to each engine, after which they’d board the boat, inspect the cargo, and take people into custody. Today, over 230 people have been killed by the U.S. military in airstrikes against vessels only suspected of having drugs on board. More Americans approve of this than disapprove (48 percent to 41 percent per a YouGov poll), which includes  83 percent of Republicans.

The United States has become judge, jury, and executioner on the high seas, which is likely a crime against humanity. A plurality of Americans approves of this, despite the strikes having no measurable impact on the supply of illicit drugs to the U.S. It is performative cruelty, the government knows it, and far too much of the American public likes it.

The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that many Americans would (and did) happily vote for authoritarianism and cruelty, so long as gas stays under $3 per gallon and ground beef below $4 per pound. Trump broke the bargain by attacking Iran, disrupting and draining global energy supplies, starting perhaps the stupidest trade war in history with Canada, and raising the price of everything in the process.

Republicans campaign on two platforms: brutalizing Untermenschen, and pursuing tax cuts and policies friendly to corporations. They absolutely swear their economic policies will improve standards of living. Which, quelle surprise, they do not. Even Republicans feel like they cannot get ahead financially, which is causing the downturn in Trump’s approval rating with them. A New York Times/Siena University poll showed that the share of Republicans saying the economy is better than a year ago dropped from 72 percent in January to just 29 percent by September 2026.

This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that, like average Russians, many Americans would be largely OK with fascism so long as they felt the economy was improving for themselves personally. The problem for the GOP is that fascism caters to the wealthy elite, causing average Americans to suffer economically.

History shows that fascism promises economic rewards to the herrenvolk but instead gives the spoils to the elites and cronies. The Nazis slashed taxes, outlawed labor unions, privatized much of industry, and the elites grew far richer. In the process, they drove 20 percent of small businesses under. Wages were frozen, and the average workweek increased by 20 percent in just a few years. One has to wonder when, or even if, the American public will ever figure this out. Rather than delivering bread and circuses, the only thing fascism delivers is heaping misery on disfavored groups.

It is an open question how long it will take for the MAGA base, as well as much of the American public, to realize a fundamental truth about the Republican Party: They will happily hurt the people you hate, but if you’re not one of the oligarchs at the table when it comes to economic matters, eventually, you’ll be on the menu, as well.

And while I know that the overwhelming majority of Democrats don’t subscribe to the Times, they are still influenced by the paper’s perspectives. Why? Because other news outlets that Democrats consume, both left-leaning places like MS NOW and more centrist ones such as ABC and CNN, take their cues from the Times on what to cover and how. (The Times isn’t so important among Republicans, who tend to distrust both the paper itself and other mainstream media.) 

The power of the Times isn’t new. But American politics has changed in fundamental ways. And that makes the American left’s attachment to the Gray Lady more problematic. A liberalism that forcefully confronts authoritarianism, oligarchy, climate change, and the numerous other enormous challenges that we face will almost certainly be one that is less attuned to the views of America’s most influential paper. The Times implicitly and at times explicitly advances a centrist, status quo politics, and that’s exactly what liberals must abandon to save the country. 

The Times has been the most influential news outlet in America for decades. But when I started out in journalism in the early 2000s, that power was more contested. Back then, I remember people would say a story was really important if it were “on the front page of the Post or the Times.” But The Washington Post’s influence had waned even before owner Jeff Bezos shifted the op-ed pages rightward and the paper laid off dozens of journalists the last couple of years. I worked at the Post from 2021 to 2025, and our pieces got nowhere near the same attention from the public or follow-up from other outlets as those in the Times. 

I am not sure exactly how or why the Times became the national news outlet. My theory is that the American political economy of today creates one megawinner in every industry. That’s Google in web search, Apple in smartphones, and the Times in national media. 

But the problem isn’t that lots of people read the Times. The problem is that lots of liberal activists and elites are having their perspectives shaped by the Times in 2026. The Times believes deeply in the nonpartisan, nonideological form of journalism that has dominated in the United States for the last eight decades or so. In prior eras, news outlets were more open about their ideology and policy preferences. Even as television networks and newspapers such as the Post and the Times embraced this more neutral approach in the twentieth century, Black-owned newspapers in particular took a different tack, leaning into their concerns about segregation and white supremacy. 

Times leaders describe their approach as being an “independent” news operation. They don’t explicitly state this, but I suspect those leaders are quite aware the paper’s audience is largely Democrats and otherwise left-of-center readers. So the paper is signaling that it’s independent from the Democratic Party. But the coverage of the Times is best described by other words and phrases: nonpartisan, bipartisan, centrist, neutral, a “view from nowhere,” and, at its worst, false equivalence. 

However we describe this vision, in practice the Times’ news coverage (meaning outside of the opinion section) avoids consistently describing the Trump-era Republican Party as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist, and plutocratic. The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right. The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy. 

The paper’s opinion section, while overall left-leaning, similarly often whitewashes the political conflict in the United States. The correct treatment for Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind all the bans on teaching about racial issues in schools and universities, should be constant columns and editorials blasting him as an authoritarian, not extended interviews that treat him as a normal political actor. Klein’s infamous column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” encapsulated this approach. 

The Times has the right to cover America in 2026 this way. And there is nothing inherently wrong with centrist, nonideological media, or coverage that doesn’t use blunt language to describe today’s Republican Party. The problem is the paper’s coverage approach combined with its huge influence on Democrats and liberals. The mistakes that Democrats have made in fighting the MAGA right have been numerous and deeply costly: believing that Trump won in 2016 largely because of economy anxiety, trusting that Joe Biden’s conciliatory approach would bring politics back to normal, refusing to push Biden to stop fully supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, spending much of last year not fighting hard against Trump’s destruction of federal agencies and radical immigration policies. 

In my view, the Times helped lead Democrats to all of those fateful decisions. The paper’s coverage hints that the Republican Party is reasonable and parts of the Democratic Party base are unreasonable. That approach pushes Democrats away from the reality: The MAGA right must be defeated, not negotiated with. 

If the biggest problem is that the Times’ approach is ill suited for liberals fighting against a radicalized GOP, a smaller but important problem is the Times’ approach to skepticism toward progressives. As progressives gain more influence, the intraparty fissures among Democrats are more important than at any time in decades. And the Times, in my view, is very much on the side of an ineffective center-left. 

The paper’s editorial board has strongly embraced the center-left argument that moderate candidates reliably do better in general elections, despite research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach and others that question that conclusion. The paper’s skepticism toward Mamdani during his campaign was obvious. The editorial board, which had previously announced it would no longer endorse candidates in local races, published a column urging New York Democrats not to rank the socialist upstart among their top five candidates in the ranked-choice election. The paper’s news section used documents obtained from a hack of the computer systems at Columbia University to write a story that implied Mamdani was being deceitful because he checked “Black or African-American” on his application to the school. Mamdani was born in Uganda and was not admitted to Columbia.  

The Times coverage of the post–October 7, 2023, conflict was heavily skewed toward Israel’s perspective, according to reporting from journalist Adam Johnson. For example, the paper used terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” far more to refer to Israeli deaths than those of Palestinians. 

Again, there is nothing wrong with a newspaper, particularly its opinion section, having points of view. The problem is that Democratic activists and politicians are taking their cues from the paper. The Democratic left has been prescient and correct on so many issues in the Trump era: the dangers caused by billionaires, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency, and local police departments; the weaknesses of Biden’s political approach; the electoral challenges caused by his Gaza policy; the problem with so many of the party’s leaders being in their seventies and eighties; Mamdani himself. I think the Democratic Party would have listened to progressives more had the Times not regularly cast the left as unrealistic and impractical. 

For America to right itself, we need changes on the scale of Reconstruction and the New Deal. And I worry that’s not going to happen if Democrats and the broader anti-Trump left are taking their cues about what’s necessary and politically possible from the Times. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg win a few of the early primaries in 2028, will the paper portray Democrats as facing a choice between a candidate who will clearly win the general election (Buttigieg) versus one who will clearly lose (Ocasio-Cortez) or acknowledge Bonica and Grumbach’s research and the inherent uncertainty of projecting election results? I worry the Times will take the former approach. 

To be sure, the Times provides reliable and impressive coverage of events in the United States and abroad. It often breaks news. The paper’s news and opinion sections have at times been a critical bulwark against Trump. I say this as both a reader of the paper and occasionally a contributor to it. (I am part of a group of political analysts writing short pieces each month about the midterms for the paper’s opinion section.) 

What I am calling for is for liberals to expand their news diet. If the Times is implicitly and at times explicitly pushing an incrementalist, centrist, MAGA-tolerant agenda at a time when America needs a fundamental shift in the direction that Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are urging, liberals largely relying on that paper to shape their worldview are misguided.

So if you’re listening to Klein’s podcast, make sure to listen to Johnson’s Citations Needed too. Hannah-Jones writes brilliantly on race and racism, and so does Michael Harriott. The New Republic’s breaking news team doesn’t have much access to Trump and his aides. And that often means its coverage of the president is more blunt and frank and prescient than that of Haberman and people who talk to Trump’s team. If you want another catchall news source, The Guardian covers everything without seeming to worry much about being too mean to Republicans. 

The correct way to practice politics in 2026 is to read The New York Times but remember that much of the essential news to save our democracy has been fit to print elsewhere. 

Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019. It was, and remains, a radical piece of television. Pulling the critique of white supremacy that was latent in Moore’s comic to the surface, this Watchmen looked hard at America’s legacies of racial violence. The Tulsa Race Massacre, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, a compulsorily masked police force tracking down masked vigilantes—this new Watchmen came to life as an evisceration of the institutions of racism in U.S. society and as a reminder of how recently Jim Crow was the law of the land. TV Twitter was obsessed, the think piece industrial complex whirred overtime, it was crowned an achievement of unusual complexity and even importance. And its spectacular finale aired right around when a novel coronavirus started passing from person to person in Wuhan.

So, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, and a few months before the U.S. would be gripped by new protest movements and police conflicts in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, HBO ran a limited series about mask politics and the racial animus of the police state.

Watchmen’s transition from speculative to reflective has been almost too much for it to bear. When I’ve shown it to contemporary college students—many of whom began college during the pandemic—they often read it as too on the nose, a cringe relic of Woke 1.0 earnestness. It’s hard, even knowing its release date, not to see it as post-Floyd, pandemic media.

The reason a show like Watchmen has this kind of power is because of its desire to use the format (and valuable IP) of a superhero show to tell a story way bigger than a series of capers or battles with archvillains. In this way, it shares a conceptual approach with other big franchise swings like Star Wars’ Andor, a show likewise tethered to a political moment with which it only kind of lines up. These were shows that took on the rich lore of their franchises and crafted something new with it. Shows about fascism and revolution, power and emergency.

Lindelof’s newest prestige superhero series Lanterns—co-created with Chris Mundy and Tom King—seems unlikely to carry that kind of uncanny resonance. Based on the Green Lantern comics, the show is clearly meant to be a mash-up of the DC Studios mythos and the HBO sensibility—much like its recent predecessor, The Penguin, which transformed the canonically silly archvillain into the anti-hero of a premium cable crime saga. Numerous reports have cited True Detective as a model for Lanterns, and it indeed has a similar format and Instagram filter. But, though Lanterns is about intergalactic gumshoes, it’s missing much of True Detective’s cosmic inquisitiveness. Green Lanterns may fly, but this show is defiantly ground-bound, in ways that are both compelling and confusing. In an era of franchise TV production that veers wildly between ambitious experiment and fan service hackwork, Lanterns is content to chart a middle course. It hurtles forward with purpose, but it never quite takes off.

I don’t know anything about the Green Lantern comics. The aspects of Lanterns that run counter to the established lore are essentially unknown to me and while I’m sure DC Studios would prefer I catch up by, at minimum, watching James Gunn’s Superman, I have no real contextual knowledge of the show’s broader universe. As a viewer of the show, this is both a liberation and a constraint. Lanterns is both made for me, and not.

The show introduces itself as a buddy cop detective series, and, for all of the cosmic kinks that twist up that genre structure, that’s basically the show it stays. At the center is John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a young, chiseled recruit to the Lantern Corps, an intergalactic law enforcement agency. He is  apprenticed to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the aging, creaking Green Lantern whose precinct is Earth. As Green Lantern, Jordan carries a ring that makes him essentially omnipotent, though, as Jordan readily admits, carrying such an object takes a toll. What both men know, but neither will say, is that Stewart is being primed to replace Jordan, rather than inherit his position once the older Lantern retires or dies. Jordan carries this knowledge crankily, belittling Stewart, sending him on absurd and dangerous errands, sabotaging the “training” he’s ostensibly there to receive. Meanwhile, Stewart carries this knowledge with a clenched fist and a chip on his shoulder. Pierre plays him as a man who is constantly in the midst of a breathing exercise.

The good news is that Chandler and Pierre are among the best in the business at playing these respective responses. Chandler doesn’t try to escape his iconic role as coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights so much as he uses it as the raw source material for his Hal Jordan. Hazy eyed and heartsick, his Green Lantern is a loser, and he handles his current situation without a wisdom and maturity commensurate with his great power. (Chandler also plays an outdated hologram of Jordan, who is still gruff, but much friendlier, even more fatherly.) Pierre, on the other hand, is a born action hero, able to oscillate between quietly mournful charisma and yippee-ki-yay dynamism. They are a great pair, and much of the show’s pleasure comes from watching their fraught chemistry develop and devolve.

All of this takes place in 2016, just one of this show’s three timelines. In this 2016 timeline, there is supposedly a rogue interstellar robot hiding out amongst the survivalists, militiamen, and high school football players of Rushville, Nebraska, and Stewart and Jordan jet in to smoke it out. The second timeline takes us back to Stewart’s childhood in the late 1990s during which his parents train him to handle a series of nail-biting scenarios—including playing William Tell with his father—with a single-minded focus on his one day donning the Green Lantern’s ring. His father, it seems, was the preferred candidate, back when Earth received its first member of the Lantern Corps, but, due to his fearfulness, the ring passed, instead, to Jordan. The Corps’ representative (a welcome Laura Linney) treats this decision as something like a clerical error, solvable by putting the young Stewart next in line for the job that, by rights, should have belonged to his father. Of the handful of storytelling risks the show takes, this timeline’s detailed depiction of perilous parental expectation and willful loss of innocence is among the show’s most affecting. Showing us John Stewart as a Black child bearing the weight of his family’s dreams—and his father’s regrets—gives the show an emotional texture that the hayseed noir of its 2016 timeline struggles to provide.

The third timeline, though, unfolds in 2026, when we quickly learn both that Hal Jordan is dead and John Stewart is still not the Lantern. The meat of the show remains the 2016 tale, as Jordan and Stewart ingratiate themselves with the skeptical townsfolk, poking and prodding to find the alien intelligence hidden among the locals, but the knowledge of that 2026 endpoint hangs over everything. In some ways it reminds us always that we’re heading towards disappointment. The good guys will win—or survive, at least—and we have to imagine that Stewart’s ring cycle is not quite over, but the future is bleak anyway. HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?

The show that Lanterns resembles most, far more than Watchmen or Andor, Game of Thrones or Succession, is Surf Dracula. In a now-infamous 2021 tweet, a writer named Topher Florence posted,

back in the day if you did a tv show called surf dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gonna be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale

Lanterns is HBO’s Surf Dracula.

Rather than escaping the pressure of its source-text’s mythology or making itself an engine of that lore, Lanterns finds a niche deep within the DC televisual universe. But the show is neither freed by its distance from the core nor buoyed by its nearness. Instead, Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops. You don’t need to know much about the DC universe to understand its plot, but, not knowing anything about that universe also makes it hard to care who’s in charge of policing it. More than that, though, it’s hard for viewers—even casual ones—to dwell this long in anticipation of an outcome whose, presumably, spectacular payoff lurks just offscreen. As the critic Joshua Rivera put it, “If this isn’t a story about John Stewart becoming the Green Lantern, then what is it?”

Even as Lanterns lurches, in this final week, toward some resolution of that arc, the dawning understanding that this is a show about disappointment might be, for some, disappointing. Not every show needs to tell the future. Not every show needs to seethe with ambition, either. But a show with an identity crisis can only be fun in spurts. Lanterns is a cop show, and it’s a show about a family, and it’s a show about surrogate fathers, and it’s a show about small towns and authoritarianism (only a little bit), and it’s about corrupt hiring practices at intergalactic corporations, but all of those shows remain adjunct to a show about a big, glowing MacGuffin. Stewart’s ambivalent feelings about the ring aside, we know, as well as he, that he’s destined for it. It’s a lot to ask viewers to be disappointed along with him for a whole season. Sometimes you just gotta let that fool surf!