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A note from Aaron: Apologies for the delay in publishing this edition of the newsletter on the morning of October 30. I made a mistake while trying to schedule it for publication last night.

“We have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later,” President Donald Trump babbled in Georgia last week.

“And you say, ‘Where’s my son? My son is in the hospital.’ Can you believe it?”

You should not believe it, obviously, because it is egregious, incendiary nonsense; no child is being whisked away by teachers to get surgery for anything without parental consent. Nonetheless, these bizarre lies about healthcare for trans children have become a staple of Republican rhetoric this campaign season.

In fact, vicious hatred of trans people is the core final midterm message of the GOP. One analysis found that Republicans candidates and Republican-supporting organizations had spent more than $100 million on more than 200 digital, broadcast, and streaming anti-trans advertisements between August and mid-October. Around $77 million of that occurred in Senate races in places like Alaska, Texas, and Ohio. Another analysis found that billionaire far-right bigot Elon Musk has alone spent $100 million on anti-trans ads. Republicans have also claimed (falsely) that prominent Democratic candidates like James Talarico and Annie Andrews are trans — often using outright anti-trans slurs.

One big reason that Republicans are doubling, tripling, and quintupling down on anti-trans bigotry is that they have nothing else. Polls find them trailing on virtually every issue, including areas of traditional party strength like the economy and national security. Republicans have lost 20 points on immigration since 2024, and the backlash against ICE makes it difficult for them to run on anti-immigrant bigotry as they often have in the past.

Republicans also love transphobic bigotry, though, because they are bigots, and harming trans people is a core part of their agenda. Trans hate is also a way to push the GOP’s broader patriarchal agenda and justify vindictive control of women, of children, of queer and nonconforming people, of disabled people. Fascism builds on hate to generate more hate.

The GOP wants to dehumanize trans people as a goal in itself, and to target others in an ever-expanding orgy of violent authoritarianism. That is why it is so important for Democrats to stand with trans people, rather than collaborating with the GOP in anti-trans messaging and hate.

Hate as a tactic

The GOP also spent tens of millions on anti-trans messaging in 2024. They claimed, then as now, that trans women have an unfair advantage in women’s sports, though this has been repeatedly debunked. They insisted, then as now, that gender affirming care for trans people is dangerous or harmful, though, again, this is completely at odds with high degrees of satisfaction among trans youth with gender-affirming care. They claimed, as Trump does, that trans care is being forced on children, though this is a lie.

These ads were probably not especially effective. Nonbinary journalist and Vice editor Nico Lang argued that the Republican hyper focus on trans hate was why Republicans underperformed in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, a Data for Progress survey found that 80 percent of voters wanted candidates to talk less about trans issues and more about the economy and inflation. And in fact most analysts, such as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, agree that the main reason Harris lost in 2024 was “that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.”

Nonetheless, winning parties tend to think that everything they did running up to a win was genius. Since they are now in power, ongoing elevated inflation is badly harming Republicans rather than helping them; Trump’s approval on inflation was at a record low 22 percent in a recent Fox poll. And since their other issues are clearly losers, Republicans are once again going to their safe space of vile anti-trans bigotry.

Many Democrats recognize that Republicans are trying to use anti-trans ads to change the subject. Evan Low, President of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the largest PAC focused on electing LGBTQ+ candidates, said last year, “we want to talk about kitchen-table issues, not about identity. We are running to serve the people, not to distract on issues that divide.”

This is messaging that some Democratic candidates have embraced. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, in a Fox News interview, repeatedly pivoted from anti-trans and anti-immigrant questions to talk about the economy, inflation, and affordability. Sam Forstag, a Democrat running in a competitive House seat in Montana, responded to a slew of anti-trans bigotry from his opponent by forthrightly stating, “what I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that.”

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Hate as a goal

The GOP does use transphobic messaging to distract from other issues. But, as many trans people have pointed out, it doesn’t just use hate as a distraction.

Anti-trans ads are not necessarily very successful in swinging election results, but they do have measurable effects in convincing viewers to hate trans people. Ground Media found that people who viewed anti-trans ads were “3.7 percent less likely to support policies ensuring trans access to healthcare and 3.1 percent less comfortable with accepting a trans friend or family member.” That last finding, disturbingly, was true even among those who already had trans friends, family, or acquaintances.

It’s not just random viewers who turn against trans people after viewing these ads. It’s also, in some cases, Democratic candidates.

Long-serving Democratic Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, for example, responded to anti-trans Republican messaging by boasting, “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports.” Kaptur not only targets trans people for bigotry, she actually uses anti-trans slurs. Trans girls are not “boys,” and saying they are is a deliberate effort to misgender and dehumanize them.

Kaptur, unfortunately, isn’t alone. South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, has run an ad in which she says, “I don’t support biological men playing women’s sports and I don’t support — and haven’t ever performed — gender surgery for minors.” Advocating for the federal government to make decisions about gender-affirming care is ugly and cruel, and again, calling trans women in this context “biological men” is a slur. Josh Turek, a Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, has gone even further and said he wants a federal ban on funding for gender affirming care for adults as well as minors.

Political scientists Julia Azari and Christopher Federico both explain that there is very little evidence that these kinds of Democratic anti-trans appeals are going to persuade anyone. But they do dishearten and terrorize trans people. As Jessica Kant wrote for The Nation, “Many of us in the groups being most commonly targeted by the far right are left to wonder if this dogmatic pursuit of the least controversial platform is less a strategy than a cultivated apathy — or, worse, whether our ostensible allies ever cared for us at all if it is so easy to cast us aside.”

Again, pushing Democrats to turn on trans people, and creating a climate in which targeting trans people has broad, even bipartisan acceptance, is why the GOP spends money on anti-trans hate in the first place. The Lemkin Institute has pointed out that the Trump administration “has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a cosmic threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to US national security in the world.”

In the words of trans Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr, anti-trans legislative initiatives “ban our art forms. They ban our literature. They ban our histories, and they ban our healthcare.” This is all of a piece with the millions and millions in spending intended to convince voters, and politicians, to see trans people as less than human.

In that context, the Lemkin Institute argues, it makes sense to see the US as in the process of ramping up a genocide against trans people — which is to say, that the US under Trump wants “to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the US and globally.”

Hitler used hatred of Jewish people to try to build power, and then he used that power to eliminate Jewish people. The Republican Party has a similar relationship to trans hate. They hope it will help them win elections. But they also hope that winning elections, and funding anti-trans propaganda, will allow them to eliminate trans people.

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Trans hate advances patriarchy and fascism

Some Democrats have pointed out that trans hate helps fascists erode resistance to attacks on other marginalized people.

In response to a question from a trans student in Maine, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rebuked Democrats attacking trans rights, and pointed out that “the moment you compromise the rights of a trans person in America, you compromise the rights of every citizen in America.” She noted that Trump has defunded the civil rights division enforcing Title IX and gender discrimination on campus.

“When they attack trans girls in sports, they’re also attacking all women’s ability to stand up against their abusers, their rapists, and their assaulters on campuses across America,” she said.

Others have pointed out that the right to privacy which should form the basis of trans people’s right to healthcare is also at the core of many other protections for marginalized people.

When Steve Forstag said, “Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it,” he was speaking of trans people’s healthcare. But he could just as easily have been talking about abortion rights — or marriage equality, or access to mental health medications and resources.

Trump heads a eugenic Christofascist movement which hates diversity and believes narrow norms of behavior, identity, desire, and appearance should be enforced through draconian, invasive force. From the GOP’s perspective, the fact that trans bans in athletics inevitably require abusive gender inspection of all girls, cis or trans, is a feature not a bug. Republicans want the state to have the power to police all non-normative bodies — including women, children, disabled people, and non-white people. They want to criminalize all identities but that of abusive white male patriarch.

Defeating Republicans means neutralizing trans hate as a tactic and winning the 2026 midterms. But defeating Republicans also has to mean defeating their goal of a world ruled by hate, and their goal of a world without trans people. Fascist propaganda is meant to divide us and destroy us all. If it succeeds, Trump wins, even if he loses a battle or two.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod at 1 p.m. Eastern today, then again with a special edition of the newsletter on Saturday.

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Ashley Hinson claims Iowa kids are having their sex reassigned at school without parental consent. In Texas, Elon Musk spends tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads to boost Ken Paxton’s imperiled campaign, while Greg Abbott accuses his Catholic Latina opponent of wanting to impose Sharia law.

There are two explanations for why Republicans, desperate to save their electoral hides, are peddling an endless buffet of culture war slop at the eleventh hour of the 2026 campaign season.

The first is that Donald Trump and fellow Republicans are culture-warring because they misread the 2024 election and believe these issues, and not inflation and economic angst, catapulted them to victory two years ago. The second is that the GOP knows exactly what happened in 2024, but their candidates have little choice but to launch cultural attacks because the same economic conditions that provided tailwinds two years ago are headwinds now.

Either way, these late-campaign antics confirm the GOP’s widespread panic about the pending midterms. But the 2026 results may also signal the declining utility of cultural war politics to distract voters from the fact Trump is the latest Republican to horribly mismanage the national economy.

Learning the wrong lessons

The Republicans’ key economic message in 2024 was simple and effective: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats caused high prices and crippling inflation. But the GOP paired that economic critique with incessant depictions of Harris and other Democrats as a pack of trans-loving, “woke” sickos who want boys playing girls sports.

Never mind that a new academic study found that people who claim they oppose transgender sports participation to protect women and girls tend to harbor hostile views toward women. These misogynists only care about the trans issue insofar as they can exploit it for political gain, or to generate clicks, eyeballs, and subscribers.

Transphobic fear-mongering may have swung a few marginal races to the GOP in 2024. But the reason Trump won and carried fellow Republicans with him to victory two years ago was voter angst about inflation and the cost of living. The uniformity of the vote shift toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 — both within and across states — cannot possibly be explained by the trans issue, which would cut differently in different parts of America.

Indeed, if the huge sums Musk spent in swing states to run that infamous anti-trans ad were so impactful, the 2024 vote shifts toward Trump would have been greater in the seven swing states than elsewhere. But relative to 2020, Harris actually lost less ground in the swing states than the other 43 states. Though not by much, it is fair to say Harris’s overall messaging was better than Trump’s — that she won the campaign yet lost the election because the economic fundamentals were so heavily tilted against her.

Republicans can convince themselves that transgender politics were crucial to their 2024 victories. And, yes, Pew Research reports that between 2022 and 2025 voters moved closer to conservative positions on trans rights and restrictions.

But issue trust and saliency also matter. And 2026 could turn out to be an inflection point because, on both counts, the transgender policy debate is breaking against the GOP.

According to the October Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week, Democrats now enjoy a 9-point advantage, 38 percent to 29 percent, over Republicans on which party Americans trust more on trans issues. And results from a Pew survey two weeks ago found that “policies related to gay, lesbian, and transgender people” rank sixteenth most important to voters this cycle, with just 23 percent of Americans citing these issues as an important to them.

That figure edges up to 35 percent among self-identified Republicans, but these are base mobilization targets, not undecided voter persuasion targets. For most Americans, transgender policy is not a top-of-their-agenda issue and they trust Republicans less than Democrats to do the right thing.

Musk can spend all he wants on scary ads to help Paxton in Texas. Let Hinson peddle Iowans made-up stories about kids having gender-affirming surgeries between gym class and lunch.

These desperate efforts to win by demeaning the transgender community are unlikely to move the electoral needle this year.

Scary brown people with funny names

Where transphobia lacks punch, Republicans are happy to turn to an old standard: Islamophobia.

Michigan’s US Senate contest featuring Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed is the most obvious place for Republicans to incite anti-Muslim fears. With zero evidence, Republican nominee Mike Rogers insinuated that AES is a terrorist sympathizer. JD Vance piled on with his own racist attack on El-Sayed, accusing him of “explicitly anti-white racial hatred.”

Never to be outdone, Trump called AES a terrorist-siding “jihadist” who, if elected, would “be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”

Consider how hypocritically racist Trump’s crack is: Per language in the federal code, Trump on January 6 organized a domestic terrorist attack on that same Senate chamber mere moments after asking the Secret Service to stop magnometer weapon screenings of his assembled supporters on the National Mall because those who might be armed were “not there to hurt me.”

Islamophobia also reared its head last weekend in the Texas governor’s race when incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott accused his opponent, state legislator Gina Hinojosa, of supporting Sharia law.

Again, consider how bizarre it is to declare Hinojosa, a Catholic, a Muslim sympathizer. Abbott’s attack only makes sense if he thinks white Texans are so hateful, xenophobic, and/or stupid that they believe any person of color shares such a strong, linked-fate connection with Muslims they would willingly subvert the Constitution in order to impose religious rule by another faith’s belief system.

For the record, the United States has more than 90,000 town, municipal, county, and state governments. There’s no need to remove one’s socks and shoes to count how many are ruled by Sharia law because the total is easy to tabulate: Just add the number zero to itself 90,000 times.

Republicans who depict Muslims as religious fanatics bent on undermining secular governance are total hypocrites. The GOP, after all, is the puppet party for white Christian nationalists who incessantly agitate for everything from public displays of the Ten Commandments to inserting Bible verses in school textbooks.

Choose any book penned by scholars of Christian nationalism: Tim Alberta, Robert Jones, Samuel Perry, Katherine Stewart, or Andrew Whitehead, to name a few. All of them explain that Christian nationalists want to subsume secular law to biblical injunctions. These religious radicals not only reject the separation of church from state, but advocate for the unconstitutional elevation of church over state. Well, so long as that church is their own.

Preying on anti-Muslim fears is racial and religious bigotry, simple as that.

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Claptrapped

It doesn’t take a genius pundit or overpaid consultant to recognize what’s happening in the waning moments of Campaign 2026.

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are pushing transphobia and Islamophobia because Trump ruined the economy and Republicans have zero policy achievements the past two years to tout. So they chose instead to demonize anyone who deviates from how white, male, Christians look, act, think, or pray, even if the demons must be invented.

Republicans face a 7-point partisan disadvantage in voter enthusiasm and a generic ballot disadvantage that last week reached 12 points in one survey. The party realizes the same economic tailwinds that propelled its candidates last cycle are frighteningly similar to the headwinds the GOP confronts this cycle. Regular gas and diesel prices have soared and inflation is higher today under Trump than it was when Biden left office nearly 22 months ago.

Republican candidates are selling culture war claptrap because they have nothing else. Let Republicans dissemble and demonize. Perhaps their effort to distract voters from the horrible economy by deploying cultural attacks will spare a few endangered Republicans in close races.

But this late in the campaign season, a desperate GOP’s rancid cultural politics are too little, too late.

That’s it for today

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Yesterday morning, Maurene Comey won her wrongful termination suit against the Justice Department, which fired her after a week of shitposts by Laura Loomer, despite a decade of exemplary service.

But the president’s animus — and his underlings’ willingness to weaponize the judicial process — knows no bounds. And so, even as Comey v. US was drawing to a close in New York, US v. Comey was coming into view in DC.

For the third time in 13 months, the Trump DOJ has lodged criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey, Maurene Comey’s father.

First the DOJ charged him in Virginia with making false statements to Congress. When those charges fell apart because Trump’s Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan was never legally appointed as US attorney, they charged him in North Carolina with threatening to assassinate the president via Instagram post.

And now, with the “86 47” indictment teetering on the brink, they’re grasping for a classified leak charge that is even more defective than the first two forays.

As Comey said on Substack, “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice — one that we cannot become numb to.”

James Comey

Yet another case in DC

Listen now

4 days ago · 902 likes · James Comey

Old news

The case involves an article by Charlie Savage and Nicole Perlroth entitled “Yahoo Said to Have Aided US Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter.” It was published on October 5, 2016, in the New York Times, which, the government notes breathlessly is “a global paper circulating to a global audience.”

According to the DOJ, Comey "sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before" and "directed staff to speak to Mr. Savage about specific accuracy concerns related to the Reuters article, and thereby illegally transferred classified information."

The government calls this a conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. § 793, better known as the Espionage Act, which is punishable by 10 years in prison.

The details of this episode have been public for years. FBI General Counsel James Baker spoke to Savage on instruction from Comey's chief of staff, James Rybicki, whom Baker understood to be conveying an order from his boss. It’s been thoroughly investigated and rejected by prosecutors, as current FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed last year when he declassified the underlying materials to prove Comey’s supposed perfidy.

In 2017, Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente tasked John Durham, then the US attorney in Connecticut, with investigating the “leak.” Durham was later appointed special counsel, where he spent years fruitlessly trying to build a conspiracy case based on the Russia investigation. But in 2018, his team recommended no prosecution of Comey, Baker, or Rybicki.

Then the US Attorney’s Office in DC took a swing at it, assigning an investigation with the codename “Tropic Vortex.” They didn’t find any crimes either, but lack of crime has never stopped Attorney General Todd Blanche from going after Trump’s enemies. And so he shouted “F--k it, we ball!” (probably) and charged Comey again (kind of).

It’s like an indictment, but not

On October 5, the DOJ filed a criminal information in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. A criminal information is not an indictment — and this distinction is critical to understanding this debacle.

An information is a charging document, written and signed by the prosecutor, without going to a grand jury or a judge. For misdemeanors, which carry a sentence of less than a year in jail, that's enough to start the case.

But the Fifth Amendment says that no one may be "held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury." And so, to charge a defendant with a felony, prosecutors have to convince a grand jury to vote for indictment by demonstrating probable cause to believe that a crime occurred.

The sole exception is when the defendant "in open court and after being advised of the nature of the charge and of the defendant's rights — waives prosecution by indictment," in which case he "may be prosecuted by information." So, in the case of a plea deal, the parties can just walk into court with an information and not bother with a grand jury.

Obviously, that’s not what happened here. And, when pressed, prosecutors pointedly refused to confirm that they weren’t about to get a grand jury indictment and show up to arrest him. So Comey’s lawyers filed an emergency motion for a hearing before Judge Trevor McFadden hoping to head off a public arrest.

In court on October 9, the government admitted that it had planned to do just that, taking Comey into custody after close of business to ensure that he’d remain locked up through the holiday weekend. Deprived of the the handcuffed perp walk they so clearly desired, they eventually agreed to hold off for 30 days while the court considers Comey’s motion to dismiss the case.

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Timing is everything

The problem here — aside from the fact that multiple teams of prosecutors have now passed on these charges — is the statute of limitations.

The default statute of limitations for most federal crimes is set out in 18 U.S.C. § 3282, which says:

Except as otherwise expressly provided by law, no person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for any offense, not capital, unless the indictment is found or the information is instituted within five years next after such offense shall have been committed.

Note that § 3282 allows the government to satisfy the statute of limitations by securing an indictment or filing a criminal information within five years.

But in the case of the Espionage Act, Congress has “otherwise expressly provided by law.” The International Security Act of 1950 extends the statute of limitations to 10 years:

An indictment for any violation of title 18, United States Code, section 792, 793, or 794, other than a violation constituting a capital offense, may be found at any time within 10 years next after such violation shall have been committed.

The DOJ’s position is that, having filed the criminal information on October 5, 2026, 10 years to the day after Comey authorized Baker to speak to the Times, they made it in just under the wire. But unlike § 3282, which refers to both and indictment and an information, the ISA refers to an indictment only.

And so, Comey moved to dismiss the information because it’s been more than 10 years since this “leak” of “classified” secrets, and he hasn’t been indicted.

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Turning the tables

The government’s response is to effectively jam the two laws together and hope Judge McFadden won’t care.

“The case comes down to a syllogism,” they insist. “Section 3282 makes a prosecution timely if ‘the indictment is found or the information is instituted’ within the period that governs the offense. Section 19 does not displace that rule; it supplies only the period. For a violation of Section 793, that period is 10 years. Congress did not need the word ‘information’; it had no reason to write it.”

That logic may sound convincing on social media, but it turns every principle of statutory construction on its head. Courts will presume that Congress meant what it said, and that subtle differences in language between parallel laws are deliberate. Indeed, every case the government relies on involves using an information to toll the five-year statute of limitations under § 3282. No court has ever allowed prosecutors to stop the clock on a 10-year SOL with just a criminal information.

The best argument the government can come up with is a supposedly fatal “concession” by Comey that a defendant could plead guilty in year seven and waive the indictment.

“So how does that case go forward? The motion does not say,” the prosecutors snark. “The silence is deafening, because there is only one answer: Section 19’s 10-year limitations period reaches informations.”

Which would be a big old slam dunk if Comey hadn’t specifically noted that defendants are free to waive the statute of limitations along with “many of the most fundamental protections afforded by the Constitution.”

The question isn’t whether Comey could plead guilty by information today, or next year, or 50 years from now. The question is whether the government can use an information to stop the clock. And the answer is very clearly “no.”

Judge McFadden says he’ll rule on the motion to dismiss “in due course.” And if not for Comey calling the government’s bluff, he might have done so without the public ever finding out. (Set aside for the moment that everyone in DC is leaking all the time.)

The government initially filed the information under seal, putatively to protect “the ongoing criminal investigation” … of a 10-year-old incident that Kash Patel won’t shut up about. In his motion to dismiss, Comey asked the judge to unseal it because “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

So now, the Trump administration doesn’t get its perp walk. Instead, every legal pundit in the country (including yours truly) is going to spend the week laughing and pointing at this garbage case. And, in the likely event that Judge McFadden dismisses it out of hand, the DOJ will have gotten its ass kicked by James Comey in public again.

The fact that it coincided with his daughter’s victory in New York is just icing on the cake.

That’s it for today

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Let’s make one thing very clear: in the hands of President Donald Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department of Justice is a lawless shambles.

Functionally, it exists only to protect Trump and the GOP majority in the House and Senate, and Blanche is willing to greenlight pretty much anything to make that happen.

The lawsuits that the administration has brought against California and Alaska are straight-up election interference, pure and simple. We’re in genuinely uncharted territory here as we’ve never had a federal government go all in on trying to take over elections, Constitution be damned.

Because this is so unprecedented, it’s tough to say what the ultimate chances of success are, especially since every time the administration loses in the lower courts, Trump runs to the Supreme Court to beg for special treatment.

We got a real taste of weirdness over the weekend thanks to a rare Sunday oral argument at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the administration pushed to get a ruling that it can somehow force California to segregate and not count mail-in ballots from tens of thousands of people that the administration says are not citizens. After an oral argument that very much did not go well for the administration, the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 on Monday that it would not immediately order California to set aside those ballots.

However, that’s nowhere near the end of the story for California. The appellate court order only sends the matter back down to the lower court. But the fact that the Ninth Circuit had to consider this in the first place is part and parcel of the DOJ’s absolute lawlessness these days.

So we have to talk about how ridiculous it was that the Ninth Circuit was even in the mix.

Fishing expeditions

On October 13, the administration sent Los Angeles County a random thumb drive with 20,000 names of alleged non-citizens and demanded California investigate all 20,000 within 48 hours.

If you want to know how secure and serious this effort was, know this: The thumb drive came with a little blue Post-it note containing the password. Needless to say, this is not how the government typically shares sensitive voter information. Indeed, Los Angeles County’s head of elections, Dean Logan, declined to plug a random thumb drive into secure election computers, saying it “would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.”

Ultimately, California reviewed a sample of 200 voters from the list. More than 100 had never had ballots mailed to them, 71.2 percent had never voted in past elections, and 38.9 percent were born in the United States. But hey, that’s no big deal, according to Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, who acknowledged that sure, the list might have errors and “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens.” McCotter’s additional remarks did not exactly engender confidence either: “We’re not perfect and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us. These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens.”

Oh, well as long as you’re “kind of the most confident,” things are probably fine. Surely things in California won’t be like the administration’s efforts to hunt down non-citizen voters in Nevada, where the administration claimed it had found 16,000 registered non-citizens, then dropped that number to 185 — quite a decrease. (Nevada investigated those 185 and found they were all citizens.)

When California declined to mass-disenfranchise 20,000 voters because Trent McCotter was “kind of the most confident,” the administration sued the state on October 15.

Federal law bars states from mass-purging voters from rolls during the “quiet period,” 90 days before a federal election. That should really end the whole lawsuit right there, but the DOJ has done this cute little trick where it says that it isn’t asking California to remove 20,000 people from the voter rolls, just not to count their ballots until the administration decides, somehow, which of those 20,000 people are citizens.

That is, of course, a distinction without a difference. Canceling someone’s ballot has the same effect as canceling their registration — it nullifies their ability to have their vote counted.

The DOJ’s entire case rests on the claim that the federal statute banning noncitizen voting gives the attorney general authority to tell states which ballots can be counted, and that this somehow overrides the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on purging voters 90 days before an election.

After filing this clearly illegal lawsuit, the administration filed a motion for a temporary restraining order to bar California from counting those ballots. Somehow, because of all the quality lawyering at the DOJ, they asked for a TRO on both October 19 and October 21, because, sure, why not. Both times, they asked the lower court to rule by November 3. The lower court set a speedy schedule, with a hearing on October 27.

Then things got even stupider.

Late on October 21, the administration filed what it called a “Request for Expedited Ruling on TRO,” and told the lower court it now wanted a ruling by noon on October 22, roughly 15 hours later. Then, when the lower court did not do that, because that is not really a thing, the DOJ ran to the Ninth Circuit that same day, saying that by not ruling on its request for an expedited ruling, the lower court “constructively denied” their motion, so they got to go to the appellate court and ask it to immediately require California to not count the 20,000 ballots.

Like much of the DOJ’s practice, “constructive denial” is a real doctrine, but the DOJ’s use of it here is distinctly unreal. Briefly, if a lower court doesn’t rule on a motion for an extended time and leaves the parties in limbo, a party can ask the appellate court for relief. However, that’s typically a looooong time, as in months and months.

But the DOJ felt 15 hours was plenty, thanks to a ruling in A.A.R.P. v. United States. In that case, the federal government told immigrant detainees that they would be deported “today or tomorrow.”

This is, of course, a genuine emergency, and when the lower court didn’t decide the matter in 14 hours and 28 minutes, the plaintiffs appealed to the Fifth Circuit and to the Supreme Court.

As we learned when the administration deported hundreds of men to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, it was perfectly fine defying an order from Judge James Boasberg requiring it to turn the planes around. So, the plaintiffs in the A.A.R.P. case argued they faced an immediate and irreparable harm. The Supreme Court agreed it had jurisdiction because the lower court had constructively denied the motion.

In the California case, of course, there was no emergency whatsoever, as the majority of the Ninth Circuit panel told the administration. Any emergency here was entirely self-made, as the DOJ could have brought its suit against California months ago. Next, asking for relief by November 3 and then changing that demand on the fly also doesn’t count as an emergency. Finally, where the A.A.R.P. detainees would have been removed from the country for good, making it impossible for them to appeal, California isn’t going anywhere, and the administration can appeal a ruling in the normal course of things.

In any event, Monday’s ruling doesn’t put the matter to bed. The Ninth Circuit declined to exercise jurisdiction and rule on the case, but the case is still with the lower court, and the administration’s motion for a TRO still exists. Additionally, of course, the administration will likely ask the Supreme Court to step in, and who can say what would happen there.

That brings us to the lawsuit in Alaska, where the justification might be even shabbier.

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Vibes-based litigation

In Alaska, the administration is furious that Dan J. Sullivan, unaffiliated with any party, is on the ballot alongside the incumbent Republican, Sen. Dan Sullivan.

You can see the problem, of course, but the Alaska Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over state ballot issues, already ruled on this and held that both Sullivans would stay on the ballot. So, Trump ordered up a lawsuit against Alaska, because we’re not even pretending any longer that he doesn’t control the DOJ.

The DOJ contends that voters will be confused by the two Sullivans and has asked the federal court to block certification of the election — but only if Mary Peltola wins. If that case, the administration wants an investigation into whether people were confused enough by the two Dan Sullivans that the GOP incumbent should just win anyway.

The only law the DOJ cites as giving it authority to do this is the preamble to the NVRA, which says one purpose of the law is “to protect the integrity of the electoral process.” But that law is about voter registration, not about what appears on ballots, and trying to bootstrap a vague statement of purpose from a preamble into a reason for the DOJ to dictate how ballots are counted is absurd.

If you’re wondering how on earth anyone would “investigate” the intentions of voters, keep wondering. The DOJ didn’t bother to explain how that would work, because it really wouldn’t.

The presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot is arguably far less confusing in Alaska than it might be elsewhere, because Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. A candidate can only win if they receive a majority — 50 percent+1 — of total votes cast. If, after the first round of counting, no candidate gets that majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The second choice on those ballots then goes to the remaining candidates, and counting continues in rounds until a candidate gets a majority.

If a confused voter who intended to vote for incumbent Sullivan as their first choice accidentally ranked the other Sullivan first, such an error is almost certain not to matter. That’s because the other Dan Sullivan is likely to receive far fewer votes than both the incumbent Dan Sullivan and his Democratic challenger, Peltola. In the primary, Incumbent Dan won 68,726 votes, while Random Dan got 4,107. Anyone who mistakes the order of their Dans would therefore have their Random Dan vote distributed to Incumbent Dan.

The state has also gone to significant lengths to reduce confusion. Incumbent Dan is listed on the ballot as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent.” Random Dan is listed as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” and has no party affiliation. And despite Trump declaring that “a lot of people don’t know what incumbent means,” they generally do.

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Normalizing malfeasance

Both of these lawsuits are laughable, but the purpose of them isn’t really to win. Instead, as Steve Vladeck explains, the goal is to normalize preemptive election interference: “Its whole point is to have the theories and the filings in place — and the specter of mischief in the air — before the counting starts so that the results can be attacked if, but only if, they don’t come out the ‘right’ way.”

If there were any doubt about that, Trump dispelled it with his Monday Truth Social post about Minnesota’s Senate race:

Let’s all get behind Michele Tafoya in Minnesota. She’s running a great race. Don’t allow them to play with the Votes after the race is over. The Federal Government will be watching closely. The only way she can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots as they come in. We can’t allow that to happen, because I won Minnesota three times but they didn’t give me the Victories, and Minnesota hasn’t been “won” since 1972, when Richard Nixon claimed the trophy.

So, in Alaska, if Mary Peltola wins, her victory is inherently suspect and must be investigated. And in Minnesota, if Peggy Flanagan bests Michele Tafoya, her victory is inherently suspect because Trump has declared that Tafoya can’t lose, period, unless Democrats cheat.

And this is the long, stupid shadow of the 2020 election. Elections where Trump — or any other Republican — wins are fine, but elections where Republicans lose are corrupt. The only solution, of course, is to let the DOJ intervene both before and after any elections that Trump has fixated on.

Trump may be deluded enough that he genuinely thinks these lawsuits are legitimate, but Todd Blanche and every attorney who signed off on these disgraceful filings know otherwise. And someday, they should suffer the consequences of their actions. For now, however, we’ll settle for both of these ridiculous lawsuits being tossed out.

That’s it for today

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What on earth were they thinking?

It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.

The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.

In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.

A brief recap of events

As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.

This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”

The blowback was instantaneous.

“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”

But it wasn’t just Democrats.

In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)

But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.

Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.

Then President Trump weighed in, posting a long rant on Truth Social which included the assertion that “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse,” and saying, “Lyin’ Amy Acton, who I’ve never even heard of before, has been lying about Vivek for the entire Campaign.”

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The view from inside the bubble

Many a campaign has been undone by a “gaffe” or a late revelation, something unexpected and dramatic that torpedoes a candidate’s bid. But this was different.

Creating this ad required the involvement of multiple people at the campaign’s highest level, including the candidate himself. They would have had time to consider it and weigh the pros and cons. Together, they decided that it was a clever gambit.

According to Axios, “Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign said the ad tested well with ‘persuadable’ voters.” Which may have been true in a laboratory setting with no contextual information provided to those who watched it and whose responses were measured. But ads like this one don’t stay in a lab.

Now, with the torrent of media coverage that has resulted, anyone who sees the ad won’t say, “Jeez, if her own mother says she’s a liar, I’d better not vote for her.” Instead, they’re more likely to say, “Oh, there’s that ad with Amy Acton’s mother, the one who let her daughter get raped by her dirtbag husband. What the hell is wrong with Vivek Ramaswamy thinking this is going to make me want to vote for him?” And even those who will never see the ad know all about it.

When the controversy started blowing up, Ramaswamy could have cut his losses. He could have said “my campaign produced this ad, but as we’ve learned more about Acton and Arthur’s history, we’ve decided not to air it — let’s get back to talking about the issues.” Instead, he blamed Acton for making him do it.

“I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans,” Ramaswamy said. “And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”

So really, did he have any choice but to get Acton’s (alleged) child-rapist-defending mother who hasn’t seen her daughter in almost half a century to attack her?

Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.

But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.

But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.

The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down.

Now look where that has gotten him. If there are any voters who were persuaded to vote for Ramaswamy by this advertisement, they haven’t presented themselves, while local and national media have been full of voters expressing their disgust with him. “We now deserve to lose this race,” one Ohio Republican strategist told Time magazine.

In fact, it was probably the dumbest decision any campaign made this year, or even in many years. We don’t know yet what the ultimate effects will be — as of this writing, no polls have been released on the race since the controversy over the ad blew up — but the Cook Political Report just moved the race from “toss-up” to “Leans Democratic.” Acton has held a slight lead in polls; we’ll see if it expands.

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Being like Trump doesn’t work, especially in general elections

Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image over the last decade in a variety of ways, some of which have to do with policy but most of which are about style. In a typical Republican primary these days, candidates compete to see who can be most like Trump — unrestrained, bullying, misogynistic and racist, obsessed with dominating others.

The widespread assumption in conservative circles is that this is how you win, even when it looks like voters are recoiling in horror. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has said, Trump’s aides “believe there is something almost mystical about him, that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can’t,” and that’s why they should silence their doubts when he starts another social media beef, spends endless hours prattling on about his ballroom, or refuses to listen to cooler heads telling him that some decision he’s making (for instance, starting a war with Iran) might not work out well.

The same goes for much of the Republican Party: Even if they have doubts about a strategy, there’s a voice in their head saying “this is what Trump would do, so it must be a good idea.” We don’t know if anyone in the Ramaswamy campaign raised their hand when the Donna Arthur ad was being produced to say “I don’t know, guys, this could blow up in our faces.” But if they did, they were overruled.

What so few Republicans seem to grasp is that for all his success, if you just look at the scoreboard, Trump is actually an extremely unsuccessful politician. People don’t actually like him — his approval ratings have been weak his entire time in office, and they’re absolutely atrocious right now. This is the fifth national election in which he has been on the ballot or in office since he seized control of the GOP, and one could describe his record as 1-3. He became president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote; his party was slapped silly in the 2018 midterms; he lost in 2020; he got his only win in 2024, and a narrow one at that; and he’s about to suffer another midterm loss.

As much as Trump and his allies like to brag about the coalition he assembled in 2024, they make the mistake of believing that everyone who voted for him the one time he managed to win a majority was doing so because they love everything about him. But that was never true. There were a dozen reasons he won that year, none more important than the hangover of the 2022 burst in inflation. Voters who made the mistake of believing him when he said he’d immediately lower prices weren’t all MAGA converts who cheered his sadism and bigotry.

Whatever dark power Trump has that has enabled him to become president twice while being quite literally one of the most morally despicable human beings on Earth, it’s not easily duplicated by your average Republican candidate for Senate, House, or governor. When candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy ask “What would Trump do?” then do that thing, they often find that the voters respond with, “What an atrocious jerk. I’m definitely not voting for that guy.” It turns out that voters will tolerate a certain degree of negative campaigning — but they have their limits. As Vivek Ramaswamy is now finding out.

That’s it for today

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As a Sunday bonus for subscribers, I connected last week with Matt Gertz, Media Matters senior fellow and an old friend of the newsletter, to talk about the state of Fox News as we approach the midterms, including the network’s role in pushing out Katie Zacharia as White House press secretary after a single disastrous press briefing and two equally bad Fox hits.

“Fox News hosts are professional propagandists. Their job is to help Donald Trump escape from his various crises and scandals. And I think they looked at Zacharia as someone who was not capable of covering for Donald Trump when he gets in trouble, someone who wouldn’t be able to lash out at the media for daring to cover him, and they helped her off stage because of that,” Gertz told me.

I also asked Gertz about his piece, “French riots are the new Hunter’s laptop which was the new migrant caravan which was the new Ebola,” and about what lessons he thinks Fox learned from the $787 million Dominion settlement as Trump once again threatens to meddle with American elections.

“The critical error from a legal perspective that Fox News made back in 2020 was that they made some very specific false allegations about a company that they named, and that is the sort of thing that leads to massive defamation lawsuits,” Gertz said. “I am skeptical that they won’t follow if Trump really goes all in with this. They’re in too deep at this point to not support him if he goes for broke.”

A full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please become one. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible and are the reason everything we publish Monday-Friday remains free for everyone.

Aaron Rupar

Fox News obviously played a role in pushing out White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia, though the nature of it is disputed. Politico initially reported that Zacharia’s brutal Hannity interview was set up by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, but then they retracted it. In any event, Zacharia’s fate was sealed by an equally disastrous interview she did on Fox & Friends the morning after her Hannity hit. What do you think that episode shows us about the dynamic between the administration and Fox these days?

Matt Gertz

I saw those reports as well, and I don’t know quite how to think about them. It’s weird to position the White House press secretary as needing the chief of staff to weigh in or to reach out to a Fox News host to book someone.

But I watched her segments with Sean Hannity and again with Fox & Friends the following morning, and they’re really fascinating rich texts as interviews. I’ve seen a lot of interviews over the years in which various right-wing figures who are in some sort of hot water go on Fox & Friends or Sean Hannity’s show to get out of trouble. Kristi Noem, when the story about her killing her dog was making a lot of waves, went on Hannity’s show to do damage control.

There’s actually a term that Dave Weigel coined a while back, “Cannonization,” for that sort of interview where the host is basically trying to help you over your troubles. This was not like that at all. Neither of those interviews were. They felt to me rather like the hosts were shocked and saddened by what was going on. It was as if they were very gently attempting to speak to someone who had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease and wasn’t willing to come to grips with that.

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Empathy is one of those things that really shouldn’t need defending.

Being aware of other people’s feelings, sensitive to them, and able to put yourself in another person’s shoes is pretty much essential for humans to function as a community. But the current conservative project has zero room for that sort of thing. And it’s not just that they don’t see the point of it. Rather, they see it as an active danger to civilization.

A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute shows just how stark the divide between liberals and conservatives is on this:

While two-thirds of Americans — including 84 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents — agree that “empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society” (68 percent), only 54 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of white evangelical Protestants agree. Notably, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) believe the opposite: that “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”

This is, to put it mildly, bleak as hell.

Like so many other bad things bedeviling us these days, Elon Musk bears significant responsibility for how we got here.

In late February 2025, Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to explain how he was going to save us from “civilizational suicidal empathy.” If you’re wondering what on earth that means, it’s helpful to start with what Musk was obsessing about during the conversation:

If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states. They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.

This is straight-up great replacement theory racist garbage — the conspiracy-addled idea that the Democrats are importing non-white undocumented immigrants who will replace white Americans. Musk shares this theory with Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 people, most of them Black, in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. He shares it with the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” He shares it with Vice President JD Vance.

Musk went on to give Rogan his example of “civilizational suicidal empathy”: California deciding to expand its low-income medical insurance program to undocumented immigrants. And somehow, those sneaky immigrants know exactly how to manipulate the Good White People of the West: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Musk’s antics here really do highlight how far the right has fallen morally. This isn’t some variation on the longtime conservative argument that people will become dependent on welfare or that the free market will provide or whatever. It’s just an unvarnished assertion that non-white people are taking advantage of the good graces of white people and that extending any aid to the former will destroy the latter.

During the same time period as this interview, Musk was putting his ideas into action, bragging about things like “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Musk has continued to tell the laughable lie that destroying USAID caused zero deaths, when in reality it has already caused over 700,000 of them, and that number will continue to increase into the millions.

Musk didn’t invent the phrase “suicidal empathy.” You can thank Gad Saad for the idea that Western civilization is somehow overseeing its own demise by being too kind. Saad, a professor of marketing, even wrote a whole pseudoscientific book about it, and the worst people in the world seem to love it.

Saad believes the “progressive diversity cult” is killing the West and that progressives are “driven by misplaced and hyperactive faux empathy.” But the idea that the empathy progressives espouse is somehow fake or insincere actually says far more about the conservatives spewing this trash. People like Musk and Saad seem genuinely incapable of caring for people who aren’t just like them, and they assume that incapacity is universal. Therefore, liberals must just be lying when they express empathy.

Musk and Saad get to this conclusion in a secular way, but the loathing of empathy has champions in a particularly virulent version of evangelical Christianity. In the past two years, we’ve been treated to not one, but two, tomes from conservative evangelical writers on the sinfulness of empathy.

Yes, sinfulness.

In 2024, Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey gave us “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and in 2025, pastor and professor Joe Rigney gave us “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.”

OK, so it’s pretty obvious from both titles that Stuckey and Rigney share Musk’s view that somehow they are being taken advantage of. But where, exactly, does the sinfulness part come in?

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For Stuckey, “empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies.” Of course, Stuckey and her ilk get to decide what counts as sin, a lie, or a destructive policy. Empathy can be good, she says, but evil liberals have co-opted the idea “to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality.”

The notion that it’s progressives running around saying only their worldview is moral is rich coming from Stuckey. There are indeed people who believe that their worldview is the only morally proper one, but they are Stuckey’s fellow conservative evangelicals. But in Stuckey’s view, it seems, putting yourself in the shoes of someone whose circumstances, values, or lifestyle differ from yours will somehow lead you to affirm their sin and, if you’re not careful, be dragged right down into sinfulness with them.

As sad and cramped as Stuckey’s worldview is, Rigney’s is worse. According to him, empathy can somehow lead to “brazen malice and cruelty.” Rigney is a pastor at Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalist church in Idaho — the same denomination as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s view of Christianity, of course, is actually one of brazen malice and cruelty, one that encompasses murdering fishermen by bombing them, one that calls Iranians “barbaric savages” and relishes the idea of restarting the Crusades.

To the extent that Stuckey and Rigney believe in the notion of empathy, it is only for people just like them.

See also JD Vance, America’s Bestest Catholic, who has managed to tangle with not one, but two, popes.

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“Love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”

Catholic theology has a concept of “ordo amoris,” Latin for “the order of love.” It comes from both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and, broadly, means that the proper hierarchy of love, for Christians, is to love God first, then ourselves, then our neighbors.

In early 2025, as President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigration crusade was gearing up, Vance went on Fox to smugly explain how this works:

As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

You see? Jesus is totally cool if you’re a xenophobe! In fact, you have to be!

It’s sort of impressive that this was such a vast misstatement of theology that the actual literal pope decided to come forward and correct it immediately, albeit without naming Vance directly. Pope Francis wrote a letter to the American bishops addressing it:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups [...] The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

Vance would go on, of course, to manage to get crosswise with Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, over the war in Iran. Vance smugly told the pope to “be careful” when talking about theology said the pope was wrong to say that God is never on the side of the people who wield the sword because “there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just-war theory.”

Ol’ JD is right about the 1,000-year tradition part, though wrong about pretty much everything else. This time, Bishop James Massa, chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, released a statement explaining that “a constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.’ That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war.”

Vance’s worldview — like Musk, like Saad, like Stuckey, like Rigney — is that only people exactly like us are worthy of our compassion and that if we empathize with anyone different, it will destroy us. And, as the PRRI poll showed, it’s a worldview that has taken root with half of the white Protestant evangelicals in the country.

In contrast, Pope Leo, at an interfaith gathering earlier this year, said, “Human compassion and empathy are not something additional or optional but are a call from God to reflect his goodness in our daily lives.” He went on to say that both Christians and Muslims are called to “give voice to those who suffer and to transform indifference into solidarity.”

Right now, we’re living in Trump’s world, in Vance’s world, in Hegseth’s world. It’s the world of Metro Surge, of kidnapped five-year-olds and murdered mothers. It’s the world of 120 dead children, some of the earliest victims of Trump’s misbegotten, unnecessary war in Iran. It’s the world of the gleeful, remorseless murders of over 200 people in boat strikes.

This is what a world without empathy looks like. It’s a world of constant othering, of constant rage, of a constant belief that life is a zero-sum game. But nothing flourishes in that world.

It doesn’t really matter whether someone arrives at the notion that empathy is necessary via secular or religious means, as long as one gets there somehow. The alternative is to dwell in a small, vicious world without kindness or grace or fellow-feeling. And to do that really is a sin.

That’s it for now

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We had a great live audience today of over 1,000 people, so thank you to all who tuned in.

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We’ll be back next Friday at 1pm Eastern for one last episode before the midterms, and we’ll take as many questions as we can during the episode from viewers. Until then, enjoy the show!

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Long ridiculed as too soft, civil, or politically correct to play hard ball, the Democrats are finally showing some spine.

Listen to the way Abdul El-Sayed, Troy Jackson, Angie Nixon, and Jon Ossoff speak at campaign debates, rallies, and town halls. Among others, this quartet of Senate candidates are demonstrating the ferocity liberals and Democrats have been demanding from the party’s politicians. They are also sending a clear signal that the party’s future belongs to those who will take the fight directly to Donald Trump and his beleaguered MAGA coalition.

Maybe the electoral tailwinds produced by favorable generic ballot data and Trump’s plunging approval numbers have stiffened the backbones of these newly-confident Democrats. Whatever the reasons, their aggressive and unapologetic posture is as refreshing as it is overdue.

Three mantras

Former President Bill Clinton famously warned fellow Democrats that voters prefer “strong and wrong” over “weak but right.” His point was that tough talk resonates so powerfully among voters — especially low-information independents and moderates with weak ties to either major party — that strength can mask and even compensate for bad policies or poor governance.

Clinton’s mantra was a thinly veiled reference to George W. Bush’s governing failures, yet his warning is even more applicable during the Trump era.

In 2015 and 2016, Trump did not separate himself from the 18 other Republican presidential contenders with soaring rhetoric and a visionary platform. Nor was he the first Republican to parlay fear, hatred, xenophobia, and divisive culture war claptrap into support. Trump won the GOP nomination and set both the literal and metaphorical terms of debate for the next decade through sheer bluster and norm shattering.

He mocked “Little Marco” Rubio and “low energy” Jeb Bush, fumed vaguely but incessantly about how China was “killing us,” and told scary stories about Mexican immigrants raping and murdering Americans. During the 2015-2016 primary season his tough talk generated an estimated $2 billion in free media. In just 17 months he conquered and realigned the Republican coalition, then beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Trump’s approached worked because he and Republicans scoffed at a different mantra: “good policy is good politics.”

For decades, a core article of faith among party apparatchiks was that if Democrats simply published long, detailed policy platforms and then ran on those policies — or clever bywords like “affordability” or “abundance” — voters would swoon.

Wrong.

The good-policy-equals-good-politics mantra may have applied during the New Deal, when machine politics ruled, unions were strong, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt realigned the American party system. But the New Deal ended six decades ago after Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 win.

Notice that Trump is forever just two weeks away from proposing a healthcare alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s mismanagement of covid led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. As we’ve written here, Trump won in 2024 because of nagging inflation, despite the fact that his two major campaign planks were both inflationary: raising the price of domestic goods by terrorizing the immigrant labor pool, and raising the price of imported goods via reckless tariffs. If voters understood policy and voted accordingly, Trump would not have collected a single non-MAGA vote nor amassed more than 200 electors in any of his three presidential bids.

Pick almost any indicator — GDP growth rates, job creation, even the stock market — and the economy over the past three decades has performed better during Democratic than Republican presidencies. Yet Republicans elected Bush and Trump twice each and controlled one or both houses of Congress as often of Democrats did during the same period.

Bottom line: Democrats are delusional if they continue to believe good policy is sufficient to win elections. Republicans correctly realize good policies and effective governance are not even necessary to win.

Which brings us to the third mantra, courtesy of former First Lady Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Oh, please. Politics is not patty cake, civility is rarely if ever rewarded, and the good guys often lose.

Pugilistic Democrats must adapt to the new rules of political combat. They need not mirror Trump’s crass, racist, and misogynistic rhetoric. But they should attack more fiercely, fight a bit dirtier, and be less apologetic. When Republicans go low, Democrats should step on them.

If they abandon the failed lessons of the latter two mantras and embrace Clinton’s wise counsel, a new generation of “strong and right” Democrats can repel modern conservatism’s Trump-led, strong-but-wrong approach.

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Sharper images

Given the existential threat Trump poses to the survival of both small-d democracy and the capital-D Democratic Party, the days of Democrats bringing knives to political gun fights is over. Ossoff, El-Sayed, Nixon, and even the mild-mannered Jackson seem to get it.

Ossoff has sharp political elbows and sharper rhetorical claws. At a recent campaign event, the Georgia senator needed just two sentences to mock Trump’s coherence, cluelessness, and — dagger of daggers — shrinking crowd sizes.

Trump is “oblivious to the collapse of his presidency,” said Ossoff, who previously caused political paroxysms within the White House and across right-wing media with his “travel with Natalie” dig. “A crowd smaller than this one enduring two hours of senile babbling while the price of oil hit its five-month high.”

El-Sayed avoids personal barbs, with cause. Unlike the wide berth given to white pols — especially Trump, who routinely uses fascist language to dehumanize opponents as “scum” and “vermin” — AES cannot risk being portrayed as Angry Brown Muslim Man.

Instead, El-Sayed calmly buried political plant Tommy Teepell, a white male white Christian nationalist and former staffer for Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, when Teepell tried to trip up AES by asking the Senate candidate if he supported the Muslim Brotherhood. In a methodical yet forceful tone, AES excommunicated Teepell with a divine lecture on the Constitution’s prohibitions against blurring church with state.

Don’t mess with Nixon, either. An African American woman running in a solidly red state, the fearless Nixon recently blistered her Republican counterpart, Ashley Moody.

During a Face the Nation appearance last weekend, Nixon called Moody a “lying, cheating [and] thieving” crook who should investigated by the Department of Justice and “locked up” for mishandling state funds that were supposed to go a children’s charity.

Nixon deftly yoked Trump around Moody’s neck, too, adding: “[T]his is Donald Trump 2.0 here in the state of Florida … I’m wondering how many kids are going to die because $10 million was taken from Medicaid that was supposed to make sure that those sick kids had the treatment that they needed.”

The soft-spoken Jackson is the least pugilistic of this quartet, which is precisely why his refusal to apologize to Susan Collins after telling her to “shut up” during their most recent televised debate succeeded.

It’s a bit rude to tell anyone to shut their trap, especially when a man shushes a woman. But pearl-clutching Republicans and “civility” pundits like David Brooks can issue their complaints directly with finger-pointing Donald “quiet piggy” Trump and his Roy Cohn-inspired “never apologize” standards.

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Fight, fight, fight

American politics has always been vicious. In campaign season especially, civility and decorum quickly yield to name-calling and personal assaults. But even by historical standards, American politics today is unusually rough. Before but especially since Donald Trump’s rise a decade ago, Republicans changed the political-electoral rules of engagement.

Successful Democrats understand the new realities. Because pundits would rather avoid writing or talking about yawn-inducing policy platforms or governing performance, they know that the best way to gain attention, attract donors, and inspire voters is to trigger Trump, Republican politicians, and the MAGA media.

A small but growing number of Democrats grasp these new realities. To meet this perilous moment, they are showing the will and skill to attack Donald Trump and Republican candidates with a mix of ferocity and flair — and without apology. It’s about time they realized that being right matters only if you’re strong, too.

That’s it for now

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As election day approached in 2024, Donald Trump got a little wistful. Whether he won or lost, the end of the campaign would mean no more of the rallies he loved so much.

“It’s coming to an end,” he told an interviewer. “Nine years and now, you know … There have never been rallies like that.”

It didn’t come to an end, though. Trump never stopped holding rallies, so he could drink up the love of his admirers like a man lost in the desert, sucking desperately on the last few drops of water from his almost-dry canteen.

With less than two weeks left before the midterms, Trump is out of ideas; his approval ratings are dreadful, and his last-minute gimmicks — the promise of $5,000 checks, the hope that Vladimir Putin will lower diesel prices — have fallen flat. So all he knows how to do is the thing he has done so many times before: Return to the road, gather the acolytes, mount the spectacle, perform the ritual.

The Trump rally is the defining political event of this era; it is impossible to understand Trumpism without understanding what goes on when he and his most devoted cultists gather in person to reaffirm their commitment to the cause. But we are now witnessing its end.

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Trump’s desultory midterm slog

For a while, it wasn’t a certainty that Trump would hit the road before the midterms, but now he has booked a full schedule. The first thing that jumps out about it, though, is that he is going almost exclusively to red states — not, for the most part, the places where there are key races that will will decide control of Congress.

Last weekend he was in Kentucky; he has recently been to Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Montana. Some of the states he is visiting, such as North Carolina and Georgia, are ones where Republicans have given up on Senate seats they hoped to win; others have no critical contests at all. And everywhere Trump goes, he may be doing his party more harm than good.

Take a recent visit to Youngstown, Ohio.

As Greg Sargent reminds us, Youngstown was ground zero for elite news organizations’ “diner safari” stories, in which they would send a reporter to interview red-hatted, salt-of-the-earth Rust Belters who would explain their love for Trump over a plate of ham and eggs, their devotional quotes filling up endless “In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Support Trump” articles. Yet even there, Trump’s favored candidates are struggling, and enthusiasm for him has faded away.

The Youngstown event was held at the Covelli Centre, home of the Youngstown Phantoms junior hockey league team. The arena has a maximum capacity of 7,000, far smaller than many of the places Trump has appeared over the years. Yet he couldn’t come close to filling it; Semafor’s Dave Weigel posted video of the half-filled arena and noted that with all the empty seats, “he didn’t do the ‘they’re lined up outside trying to get in’ schtick, as it visibly wasn’t packed.”

This is the story again and again as Trump tours the redder parts of the country: The venues are smaller, the crowds are less excited, and the man at the podium is weirder.

Even for the diehards who still come to see him, Trump’s rallies have become a slog as a sleepy president rambles pointlessly from one subject to another, like a musical act whose hit-making days are decades in the past, playing the old songs with little of the verve that made them popular in the first place to an audience that has to work hard to convince themselves they’re having a good time.

One of the purposes of Trump rallies was always so that they could be viewed by the rest of the country, to say Look at how beloved I am, how fervent is the love my supporters have for me. Trump still insists that’s true, even as he bleeds support among those who voted for him in the past.

“When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love,” he marveled at a rally in Tennessee. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”

That much is still true, even if those applauding are smaller in number than they used to be. But one can’t blame them for being tired, given how often they’ve had to perform their part in his show.

According to lists compiled on Wikipedia, he held 323 rallies during the 2016 campaign, 96 in the 2020 race, and 117 in the 2024 contest. At least if you were following the Grateful Dead or Phish in their respective heydays, you knew the set list would change from night to night. Trump, on the other hand, is more like a second-rate tribute band, playing the same songs over and over.

This used to work

When Trump began holding these rallies in 2015, they really were unlike anything we had seen before, simply because he was such a different candidate. Put him in front of a cheering crowd, and Trump is more himself than anywhere else — more vulgar, more cruel, more scattered, and more impulsive.

And while there have been candidates before who held big rallies their supporters loved — think of Barack Obama’s in 2008 — there has never been a political figure for whom the rally was as central to their project as it is for Trump. His rallies were where his image was solidified, where his political style was demonstrated and modeled, where his enemies were identified, where his slogans and insults were tested and refined.

The rallies thrummed with the threat of violence — against protesters, against immigrants, and against the reporters there to cover them. As a result, they were irresistible to news organizations, which often just let the cameras roll for much of the event, amounting to billions of dollars worth of free media coverage that other candidates didn’t receive.

The theory wasn’t different than it is for any candidate. Rallies can have political benefits where they occur: Attendees can be energized and mobilized, and a visit from a president (or presidential candidate) will usually produce days of local news coverage before and after the event.

In fact, there was research (see here or here) on Trump’s rallies in 2016 showing that they did increase support for him in the surrounding areas when they occurred. But those effects disappeared after a week or so. Political scientists have found something similar about TV ads: They can persuade voters, but the effect tends to dissipate quickly.

But that was 10 years ago, when those rallies were new and fascinating. Today, Trump wants to believe that when he comes to town, the effect on Republican candidates is immediate and dramatic.

But of course, that isn’t true. Even if a Trump appearance will still be big news to the local media, the core problem is that he’s so desperately unpopular, even in most red states. The last thing most Republican candidates want is to be associated with him, especially when he is so resolutely determined to insist that the economy is great, the war with Iran has been a success, and people should stop complaining about data centers.

Trump’s allies understand this problem, which may explain why Fox has not been carrying Trump’s rallies live, much to his chagrin.

“Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally,” he wrote on Truth Social earlier this month. “Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!)”

When other news organizations report on the empty seats, he demands that the reporters be arrested.

At this point, almost no honest person in either party thinks that this election will be anything but terrible for Republicans; Democrats taking the House is a foregone conclusion, and they may take the Senate as well. But as Trump limps through the last two years of his term, it’s almost impossible to imagine him not staging more rallies, at least from time to time.

He doesn’t exist if the cameras aren’t on and he isn’t the center of attention, but it isn’t enough to just talk to reporters, those nattering nabobs who so rudely ask him questions about things that aren’t going well. He needs to feel the unconditional love of his people, and he can only go so long without standing before them to soak it in.

At the end of the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” the aging and mentally ill silent film star Norma Desmond imagines that she is acting in a movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille, when in fact she’s being arrested for murder.

“I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio, making a picture again,” she says to the police and reporters who are there to witness her demise. “You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else. Just us. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out there in the dark. Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”

Donald Trump may spend his final years enacting his own version of Norma Desmond’s delusion. He’ll stand in front of smaller and smaller gatherings at Mar-a-Lago or one of his golf clubs and address the dwindling group of admirers as though he was at one of those blazing 2016 rallies. He’ll drone on for an hour or two about nothing and everything, lapping up the forced laughter of the group at another lame joke, imagining that the height of his power and glory is right now, not in a past receding rapidly as he gets closer and closer to death.

That’s still in the future. Yet every Trump rally that takes place today is like a sad echo of the ones that really made a difference a decade ago. There will be more, but they will never be what they were. And even Trump himself knows it.

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Who gives a shit about a golf course?

With everything else on fire, what does it matter if the president takes over a spit of reclaimed land south of the National Mall?

It’s a fair question, and the answer is that we all lose when the president commandeers a public institution and turns it into a monument to himself — particularly when he does it using taxpayer dollars and without congressional authorization.

It matters when Trump tears down the East Wing of the White House, or befouls the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, or shutters the Kennedy Center. And the litigation to stop him from destroying those civic institutions is a key front in the battle over the limits of executive power.

Par for the people

In 1897, Congress set aside East Potomac Park to be "forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people." For a century, the city’s residents enjoyed a cheap, egalitarian course, accessible to players of moderate skill, with mini golf for the kids. But in 2025, Trump set about remaking the nation’s capital in his own image, and that included the city’s municipal links.

Last October, in an act of perverse desecration, the Park Service trucked in tens of thousands of cubic yards of demolition debris from the East Wing to be used as fill for the newly designed course.

The DC Preservation League and two regular golfers sued in February, arguing that the administration had failed to conduct the required historic preservation review and violated the environmental laws by dumping asbestos- and lead-contaminated rubble on the course. Their suit relies on the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows courts to set aside a “final agency action” that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

But for eight months, the government argued that there was no final agency act to challenge, because there was no final plan to overhaul East Potomac Park — even as Trump and his minions posted gleefully about their plans to do just that.

On May 14, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tweeted that he was “Excited to unveil the design for the East Potomac Golf Links renovation from Fazio Design.”

On June 28, after touring the course with Burgum and golf-course designer Tom Fazio, Trump posted that "on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of DC’s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World," adding that “work on the new Course, which will go quickly, will begin on September 1."

But in court, the government told Judge Ana Reyes over and over again that there was no imminent plan to renovate the course, rubbishing Burgum’s post as nothing more than a “rudimentary conceptual design.” And so on three separate occasions, the judge took the government at its word and refused to grant the plaintiffs injunctive relief. All she asked was that lawyers from the government agree to inform the court before any major alteration, defined as cutting down more than 10 trees. Which they did.

Improving the lie

On October 6, acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron attested that “plans for renovating the East Potomac Golf Course remain in the conceptual stage” and “no final decision has been made regarding the nature and scope of any renovations.”

But just three days later, at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend, the government notified the court that the Park Service would begin removing trees the next morning. By Saturday afternoon, crews had felled about 500 "healthy, non-invasive trees,” and were only stopped from cutting down hundreds more by torrential rains.

An apoplectic Judge Reyes summoned the parties to court on Indigenous People’s Day, where the government insisted that the trees were removed pursuant to a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report. It was a mere “coincidence” that it took place after Trump demanded that work start September 1.

Judge Reyes didn't buy it.

"It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course, and not, say, any other time in the last seven years," she wrote. "That asks rather a lot of coincidence."

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Mulligan

After that disastrous hearing, the DOJ went on offense.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter accused Judge Reyes of failing to “maintain an appropriate temperament” — because she dared to notice that government lawyers had lied to her for the better part of a year.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward filed a motion demanding that Judge Reyes recuse herself from the case and accusing her of “histrionics” and “an unorthodox and regrettable show of judicial impropriety.”

Using social media to summon an avalanche of death threats for judges is a tried-and-true Trump litigation tactic — one Todd Blanche defended as a protected exercise of his client’s sacred, First Amendment rights back when he was Trump’s personal lawyer.

But it’s pretty ballsy for a top DOJ official to complain about judicial impropriety in an AI-generated tweet about “ROBES UNRAVELED.”

Judge Reyes denied the motion, noting that “it is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for the government were still insisting that no renovation was imminent. On Friday, October 16, DOJ told Judge Reyes that "the President's mention of a possible project, in a handful of tweets, demonstrates at most that the President has given preliminary thought to it."

This is another play we’ve seen the Trump administration run time and again: Argue that the plaintiffs are too early to get emergency relief, while telling whatever preposterous lies will get the courts to stand down. Then send in the bulldozers and say it’s too late to undo the damage.

In July 2025, Trump promised that his ballroom "won't interfere with the current building." By October, the East Wing was a pile of rubble on this very golf course.

When Judge Christopher Cooper blocked Trump's latest attempt to slap his name on the Kennedy Center, the board voted to close the building, and Trump warned that "it will end up being ripped down."

The DOJ argued that coating the Reflecting Pool in thick epoxy was “routine maintenance and repair” with “trivial aesthetic and environmental impact,” convincing a judge that the work was “both reparable and temporary.” Five months later, it’s still a dysfunctional mess.

In this case, the posting for a "Construction" project to "Rehabilitate East Potomac Park Golf Course" was "not a contract solicitation or advertisement," the government insists, merely a "forecast."

That position became harder to maintain after Trump spent the past weekend posting that the course would be closed starting November 15 and that work would begin “IMMEDIATELY!”

Fore

After Trump admitted that the course is going to be bulldozed in a month, the government staked out an even more aggressive position at Monday’s hearing. Now they claim that separation of powers means that courts have zero authority to constrain the president at all if he decides to undertake a major construction project.

Judge Reyes responded with an impromptu lecture on the three, co-equal branches of government and the judiciary’s role in checking the excesses of the executive. She was clearly gobsmacked that a lawyer for the federal government would claim that the president can do anything he likes with federal land and judges are powerless to stop him.

But shorn of all the prevarication and lies about chopping down trees — fire the writers! — that’s the Trump administration’s position: Trump is a law unto himself, and no court can constrain him.

“The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course. They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that!” Trump posted Monday. “The experts at ‘Interior’ are allowed to do this First Class renovation ‘as of right.’ They do not need an approval.”

And that is why these cases matter. This is about whether the judiciary can constrain this president for the next two years, or whether he will be permitted to simply bulldoze the rule of law en route to bulldozing a public park and turning it into a walled garden for his own amusement.

So who gives a shit about a golf course? Trump does — enough to lie to a federal judge about it, then call her insane when she noticed. The rest of us should care at least that much.

That’s it for today

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Donald Trump has never hidden his infatuation with Vladimir Putin and his brutal dictatorial regime, or his disdain for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s resilient democracy.

Before entering the White House for the second time in 2025, Trump agreed with Putin’s fictional grievances over the expansion of NATO — which provided the pretense for Putin’s assault on his neighbor, saying “I could understand their feeling.” Nonetheless, the Trump regime still purported to be supporting Ukraine’s defense.

But last week, Trump gave up any pretense of being a “mediator” in Russia’s War on Ukraine, and openly threw in his lot with Putin.

The dire significance of Trump’s actions can’t be minimized. Trump has declared his desire to make the United States an ally in Russia’s ever more brutal effort to annihilate Ukraine, including by bolstering Russia’s flagging economy with US funds, and using Ukraine’s dependence on US defense systems against it by hobbling the country’s successful offensive and defensive actions.

But there may be a silver lining in a very dark cloud: Ukraine’s true supporters are being forced to face facts many have long avoided.

Over the past two years, many have clung to the false proposition that pandering and supplication could induce Trump to change his mind and support Ukraine. That baseless theory allowed some Europeans to avoid the reality that they must take on the full burden — including the costs and risks — of supporting Ukraine, or face the inevitability that Russia will come after them next.

The false notion that Trump was not fully committed to Putin also allowed many Republican supporters of Ukraine to justify looking the other way while Trump uttered his endearments to the Russian dictator.

Now that the Trump/Putin alliance has been indelibly formalized, denial is no longer a remotely reasonable option.

The fake peace plan

Trump’s announcement of his full-blown alliance with Putin was preceded by an attempt by his incompetent and absurdly corrupt team of “envoys,” real estate investor Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to advance a predictably bogus Ukraine “peace plan.”

On October 9, Witkoff and Kushner made a show of inviting representatives of Ukraine, as well and European and NATO representatives whom they had previously frozen out of their “mediation” efforts, to a meeting at Witkoff’s Florida golf club.

The purpose, as columnist (and Kushner mouthpiece) David Ignatius explained in a recent column, was to announce a “peace” initiative.

As Ignatius touted, instead of going along with Putin’s demand for all of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, the Trumper plan offered Ukraine the “carrot” of a ceasefire based on the current lines — “guaranteed” by the US (whatever that is worth).

The only problem with the “plan” was that Putin has resolutely refused such terms in the past, and there’s no indication he’s changed his mind.

Ingnatius asserted that the Trumper “envoys” had extended a generous offer of funding the rebuilding of Ukraine once Russia’s campaign of devastation ends. What Ignatius failed to mention, but later emerged from press reports, is that Kushner and Witkoff also demanded (as they have in the past) that Europe hand over to Trump as yet undisclosed portions of the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets currently held in Belgium.

In sum, their “peace plan” was to use those monies — which rightfully belong to Ukraine — to fund the “rebuilding” effort, presumably after skimming a large amount off the top for Trump cronies.

The one-sided “ceasefire”

To cap off this great proposal, Witkoff and Kushner reportedly announced that the “peace plan” would involve an immediate halt on some of the most devastating attacks in the war … but solely by Ukraine.

For months, Ukraine has been striking key elements of Russia’s war economy, particularly its oil and gas industry, by attacking hydrocarbon industry plants and other infrastructure, including refineries and tankers. As a result, Russia’s ability to generate oil revenues on the black market is becoming impaired, as is Russia’s ability to produce the refined fuel that is crucial to the operation of its economy and prosecution of its war of conquest against Ukraine.

One would expect that Kushner and Witkoff, as supposed “mediators,” would want Ukraine to continue its strikes. After all — as demonstrated during Zelenskyy’s notorious February 2025 Oval Office encounter with Trump and JD Vance — Ukraine needs to have such “cards” of its own both to defend itself and obtain leverage over Russia in any actual negotiations.

But the very opposite was true. Over at least the past several months, it has come to light that US representatives from Vance on down have been demanding that Ukraine cease attacking Russian refineries. And during the Florida golf course meeting, Kushner and Witkoff formalized that demand for what Trump later called an “energy ceasefire.”

The problem, of course, is that such a one-sided “deal” would leave Russia free to continue hitting Ukraine’s heating and electrical infrastructure in advance of the winter, as Putin’s regime has been doing with ever greater ferocity — including immediately after Trump announced the “ceasefire.”

The peace “proposal,” therefore, was actually a proposal for Ukraine to hobble its own military and defense activities, while Russia assaults Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure.

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Trump’s “diesel deal”

But Trump himself all but put the kibosh on his purported mediators’ “peace plan” by announcing his intention for the US to join Iran, North Korea, and China in becoming an open ally in — and profiteer from — Russia’s “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine.

The vehicle for that announcement was Trump’s declaration that he had reached a “diesel deal” with Russia, pursuant to which the US would purchase diesel fuel from Russia and facilitate the sale of the fuel by Russia to other countries.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States has cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas and has strongly pressured allies, particularly Europeans, to do the same. Some countries, particularly Germany, have substantially reconfigured their economies to end dependence on Russian hydrocarbons.

Furthermore, just weeks ago, Trump signed into law the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which was to impose massive secondary tariffs on countries that continued to purchase Russian oil and gas, including China and India. Trump’s announcement was, therefore, a complete about-face, rendering the US into a buyer and marketer of the very same Russian oil products the US has pressured others to shun.

It was hard to make sense of Trump’s actions in light of actual energy market realities.

Because of Ukraine’s successful refinery strikes, as Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged during two Sunday interviews, Russia has been experiencing a serious shortage of diesel.

Indeed, Putin has had to turn to other countries, including South Korea, for supplies of the fuel. Furthermore, the US produces more diesel that it consumes, so it’s unlikely that Russian diesel would be imported to the US even if it was available.

But Trump’s actual purpose was plainly not to increase US diesel supplies, or otherwise lower consumer prices, but rather to make clear his intention to definitively change sides and become Russia’s wartime ally — and to undermine the international sanctions regime against Russia that the US worked so hard to implement over the past nearly five years.

This became all the more clear when reports began leaking out that Trump’s “peace” envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, have been working on a plan with their close associate, Russian oligarch Kirill Dmitriev, to pressure Germany to start buying Russian gas again — but this time in a commercial arrangement that will give Trump-associated American firms a cut. This jibes completely with another Kushner/Witkoff scheme that was recently leaked to sell the assets of a large Russian oil company, Lukoil, to an American investor named Todd Boehly who has donated millions to Trump.

If Russia is going to be an ally, why shouldn’t Trumpers get a piece of the resulting gusher of oil profits?

Trump capped off the week by announcing last Friday that he was “implementing” the Graham Act by suspending its provisions and preventing the sanctioning of purchasers of Russian goods, including the diesel fuel Trump has effectively been marketing for his ally Putin’s part.

The Graham Act requires the president to provide certification that any such waiver “is in the national interests of the United States” and to report to Congress on why that’s the case. But Trump made a mockery of these requirements by simply declaring that his about-face in US policy is in the national interest without any substantial explanation.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in typically disingenuous fashion, later said that Trump “wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” despite the fact that the president signed a law calling for those sanctions and tariffs just days ago.

But, of course, by that time, everyone knew Trump’s actual purpose was to help Putin vanquish Ukraine and endanger the rest of Europe.

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The scheme to hobble Ukrainian defenses

Trump’s decision to ally the US with Russia became clear last week, when the Defense Department — which uses its sophisticated aerial intelligence to warn Ukraine of incoming Russian ballistic missile attacks — repeatedly failed to provide such warnings in advance of massive Russian assaults on Kyiv. That came on the heels of reports that Kushner and Witkoff had threatened a complete cutoff of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine during the “peace” talks in Florida.

Then, on October 12 — entirely without warning — the Ukrainian armed forces began to incur sudden speed and connection interruptions in the SpaceX-owned Starlink systems used for navigation of many Ukrainian drones. As a result, Ukraine’s ability to both intercept incoming Russian drone attacks and conduct the midrange attacks the country has been pursuing with great success on Russian military logistics hubs were drastically impaired.

The unexplained cutoff was met with such anger and dismay by Ukraine and its allies that even Putin-friendly oligarch Elon Musk distanced himself from it, stating it was ordered by the US military. Defense Department sources then pointed the finger at, you guessed it, the White House.

Rubio later acknowledged that the US government has wholly cut off Ukraine from the “military” elements of Starlink. Rubio went on to say that it is “under discussion right now how [Ukraine] would want to use” the services Trump has cut off, more than implying that Trumpers are continuing to try to blackmail Ukraine into a one way “energy ceasefire.”

Just yesterday, reports emerged the United States has been holding off on giving necessary approvals to Ukraine of the transfer of Patriot missile interceptors — which provide virtually the only effective defense to increasing Russian ballistic missile attacks. This comes as the US itself has largely refused to provide these interceptors to Ukraine from its own stockpiles.

Also on Monday, Trump opined that Russia "hasn't been doing much" to Ukraine and that its brutal war of annihilation is “fine.”

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Facing facts

During a Sunday morning interview Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked if Ukraine is an ally of the United States. He refused to give a straight answer, but effectively responded in the negative by berating Zelenskyy.

Trump himself is far less cagey than Bessent on the topic of who his allies are. He recently announced that he was going to invite Putin to attend the G20 meeting, to be held in December at his own Doral golf club. It is now clear that if Putin attends, it will be in his newly anointed role as US, or rather Trump, ally.

Trump’s open effort to join nations like Iran, North Korea, and China in aiding Putin’s murderous assault on Ukraine is nothing short of disastrous, and it will leave a lasting moral stain on the United States. But there may be something of a silver lining to this dark cloud.

Since Trump returned to the presidency, many of Ukraine’s supporters — including some allies in Europe and Republicans in the US — have clung to the theory that, despite Trump’s fondness for Putin, he was not ineluctably committed to a pro-Russian position. All that was needed, these “optimists” argued, was continued sweet-talking and submission from Ukraine’s leaders — including a lot of plaintive “thank yous” — and Trump would come around.

This never made much sense, particularly given the ample evidence that Russia helped Trump get elected, and continues to cultivate him through elaborate disinformation campaigns and by offering lucrative financial “deals” to the likes of Kushner, Witkoff and other Trump cronies.

But it was also, in certain respects, a reassuring fiction.

Many European countries have been notably hesitant to take all of the steps necessary to assist Ukraine in defending itself against Russia. Those include sharing weapons systems and stocks of anti-missile defense weapons (if the US allows it), and by providing Ukraine with access to frozen Russian assets, which are needed both to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat and fully fund the country’s defense.

That European hesitation has continued despite, and possibly in some respects because, Russia has been increasing its so-called hybrid war on other European countries, consisting of everything from cyber attacks to kinetic terror attacks on airports and infrastructure. The use of the term “hybrid warfare” itself reflects a form of self-denial by Europeans, many of whom are hesitant to acknowledge that they are now effectively at war with Russia.

Trump’s now open alliance with Russia may increase the impetus for European leaders to take more steps necessary to provide Ukraine — which after all is the frontline defender of the entire continent against Russian aggression — the resources it requires to prevail. But even if such full-throated resolve is forthcoming, it could also be too late given that (with the help of Russia) pro-Russian politicians may soon come to power in France and potentially Germany.

There also remains a chance, albeit a small one, that some of the vast majority of Republicans who have long claimed to support Ukraine against Russia’s murderous assault will finally stand up to Trump, even feebly. Lindsey Graham’s sister, who Trump plucked out of obscurity to become her late brother’s successor, took a first step in that direction last week by opposing Trump’s “diesel deal” with Putin. A drubbing in the midterms and Trump’s descent into the political basement could encourage that process.

Recent history makes it hard to say that optimism is warranted. But continued, and ever greater, efforts by Ukraine’s supporters are nonetheless essential. The stakes not only for Ukraine, but also the world, could not be higher.

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On October 9, Newsmax commentator and conspiracy theorist Katie Zacharia was plucked from obscurity and named White House press secretary.

One week later, she was unceremoniously dumped after one disastrous press briefing and a series of brutally bad hits on Fox News.

Zacharia’s meteoric rise and even more meteoric fall is not a surprise. Trump regularly hires lying, incompetent and/or corrupt minions, then fires them if they are women and defends them forever if they are men. (The only tidbit of news Zacharia actually broke was the ousting of comically corrupt Trump retainer Kimberly Guilfoyle from her position as ambassador to Greece.)

Trump hires bad people because he is a megalomaniac and a fool who hires people on one criteria only: sycophantic loyalty to Donald Trump (for women like Zacharia, it helps if you look vaguely like his daughter Ivanka). And anyone who is willing to demonstrate sycophantic loyalty to a lying incompetent fascist is going to be a lying incompetent fascist themselves.

The making of a failed press secretary

Zacharia appears to have been grown in a lab expressly to fail as Trump’s press secretary.

She received her undergraduate and law degree from Christian conservative Pepperdine University, and then pursued a career in various parts of the right-wing griftosphere. She served as a law clerk for Advocates International, a Christian law firm, and as a legal advisor to Fix California, a right-wing California org trying to push the state Trumpward. She’s also been a senior communications advisor at Trump’s far right propaganda social media site Truth Social.

As you’d expect with that resume, Zacharia is an unhinged liar, bigot, and hyperpartisan conspiracy theorist. As reported by Judd Legum at Public Information, she posted repeatedly on Truth Social to promote Pizzagate and QAnon, the dangerous lie that Hillary Clinton, her 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta, and other Democrats and celebrities were involved in a cult involving child sexual abuse, cannibalism, and Satantic rituals.

“Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform,” Zacharia fumed in April 2022.

She also has embraced the QAnon theory that Trump is the all-knowing One chosen to fight the Democratic cabal. She’s speculated that he sends secret codes to supporters through signs like drinking from water bottles.

Obviously, this is exactly the sort of bizarre, debased sycophancy that Trump adores. But there are lots of bizarre unqualified sycophants to choose from. Trump can’t appoint them all to be press secretary, even if they only last five days each. Zacharia needed an extra something.

That extra something was being a Newsmax commentator and a guest on Fox.

Politico reports that Zacharia paid attention to Trump’s public schedule and to his Truth Social posts and figured out when he was likely to be mainlining his daily does of self-flattering lies from the right-wing liar bubble. She made sure she was on air to serve him those lies personally. Trump liked what he saw, inasmuch as Zacharia was flattering him on air and was conventionally attractive, like former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Christofascist warmongering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Other MAGA anchors and commentators vouched for Zacharia as well.

Ineffectual and largely invisible White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was reportedly trying to secure CNN blowhard Scott Jennings for the press sec role. (Politico reported over the weekend that Zacharia was actually set up for her hit interview with Hannity by Wiles.) But Trump was impatient and/or impulsive and/or just hated being told what to do. So he decided to follow his shriveled self-obsessed heart and throw Katie Zacharia out onto the global stage.

Where she immediately faceplanted.

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An epic implosion

Zacharia conducted one press briefing. It lasted 14 minutes. She read awkwardly from her notes and took three questions, from Breitbart, the Daily Mail, and Fox, all right-wing pro-Trump outlets that were studiously non-confrontational. She also bumblingly referred to her husband as the president.

Joe Biden’s former Press Secretary Jen Psaki summed up the response: “Well that briefing was basically an SNL skit … except it wasn’t.”

Zacharia had one more public moment as press secretary.

Standing with Trump on the South Lawn before she was to travel with him to Alaska for a campaign rally, she was asked where she had passed the bar exam. She claimed she did so while working in China, which is impossible. Later she said she’d misheard the question.

But the more important point, as Judd Legum has reported, is that Zacharia has repeatedly claimed to be a lawyer even though she has never passed the bar (as she has now admitted). Her false statements could be prosecutable; a complaint has been filed in California, where Zacharia worked and where misrepresenting oneself as a lawyer is a misdemeanor.

Shortly after this series of debacles, Trump said he asked Zacharia, “Katie is this for you?” and then told her, “If I were you, I’d reconsider.”

The phrasing there, typically, obfuscates Trump’s own role in the disaster; he speaks as if Zacharia had unilaterally hijacked the role of press secretary. He utterly skips over the part where he is the literal president of the United States and that he himself hired Zacharia despite the fact that she was obviously completely unfit for the job.

Trump of course should never have put Zacharia on the podium. That has led some, like Clinton-era press secretary Joe Lockhart to sympathize with her.

“She is in fact a victim here,” he said. “She was thrown out there in a place where she wasn’t prepared.”

But this is nonsense. Zacharia is not a victim. She is a lying conspiracy theorist who desperately maneuvered herself to attract the attention of an image-obsessed fascist in hopes that she could gain money and fame by lying on his behalf. Sometimes fascists and liars harm each other in their scramble for power, but that doesn’t mean you should sympathize with any of them. On the contrary, if they damage each other, that’s all the better for democracy and decency.

By the same token, the fact that Karoline Leavitt was somewhat better at lying on Trump’s behalf does not redound to her credit, inasmuch as her job was supposed to be informing the American people, not telling lies. And if Scott Jennings takes the post and holds it for more than five days, that will not mean he is a good press secretary. It will mean that he is a lying fascist sycophant like all the rest of them.

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Dysfunction is a feature

The truth is that every Trump appointee ranges from bad to catastrophic at their jobs.

Former Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer left office amid scandals about her husband sexually harassing her employees. FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly has a drinking problem and has used department resources to ferry around his country singer girlfriend. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was reportedly involved in a corrupt $220 million sweetheart deal with an ad company that shot spots of her riding around on a horse. (Noem also led ICE as it shot civilians in the street.) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lost a war to a C-level power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is so unwilling to stand up to Trump that he allows the president to outfit him in oversized shoes.

And on and on.

Trump hires people who will tell him what he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear is the sound of his boots being licked. Some of his minions, like Zacharia and his personal assistant Natalie Harp, do seem to be sincere in their worship of Trump — which means they are manifestly delusional and unfit for any task, no matter how trivial.

Other hangers-on, like Rubio, seem to understand that crawling on their bellies like oozing worms is the path to power and self-enrichment. They also hope their cringing will allow them to accomplishing a range of other ugly personal schemes — including immiserating Cuba in pursuit of regime change, in Rubio’s case.

Whatever the balance of foolishness and corruption in each fascist stooge, the outcome is the same. Trump cannot hire good people because he is a bad and undisciplined person — and one important way in which he is a bad person is that he is morally opposed to ever hearing from anyone who disagrees with him, challenges him, or provides him with information which contradicts anything that happens to burble up from his vacuously hateful hindbrain. This is why he still does not know what tariffs are, or how health insurance works.

Zacharia is just the latest in a long line of dysfunctional crooks and bounders who exist to reflect the pathologies and evil of the Bounder in Chief. Incompetent fascist will be served by incompetent fascists. That is their curse, and, unfortunately, ours.

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Perhaps the biggest reason the upcoming midterm elections are so critical is because they represent a last chance for voters to stop the American system of government from sliding into full-blown authoritarianism.

We’ve seen the damage Trump has done over the past two years, enabled by Republican majorities in Congress that have pathetically surrendered their power. The Department of Justice is completely weaponized against the president’s foes. The president’s paramilitary force invades American cities and shoots protesters with impunity. The law is increasingly a mere suggestion for a president who aspires to be among the world’s most brutal autocrats. And institutions like elite media outlets and universities have too often capitulated to the regime’s mob-style extortion campaigns.

Things are bad and getting worse. So it’s absolutely vital that the president and his party lose their majorities and have to face real investigations and accountability.

Steven Levitsky, old friend of the newsletter and author of “How Democracies Die,” recently argued that the US has “crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism during Donald Trump’s second presidency.” We connected with him to discuss why he thinks we’re now on the other side of that Rubicon.

“What matters for us in terms of distinguishing between a democracy and a competitive authoritarian regime is, do you see people’s behaviors start to change, such that the political playing field starts to tilt?” he said.

“When you see the media begin to change its programming out of anticipation of what could happen to them, such as Bezos and Paramount, you’re starting to see a modest tilt of the playing field. I continue to believe it’s quite reversible. But I think we crossed that line.”

While Trump has done great damage, Levitsky points out that his unpopularity makes it unlikely he’ll have success consolidating an authoritarian regime.

“Trump’s unpopular. The autocrats who do the most damage are the ones with 70 percent or 80 percent public support. Putin, Chavez, Bukele, Modi — all of them had strong majority support when they assaulted democratic institutions. Leaders who have 30 percent or 35 percent public support can do damage, but they’re less likely to succeed long term,” he said.

“The fact that Trump has gotten himself to be so unpopular so quickly in this term benefits us. If Trump were a more talented, disciplined politician, he’d probably do much more damage.”

A full transcript of Levitsky’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please become one. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible and are the reason everything we publish Monday-Friday remains free for everyone.

Thor Benson

Tell us why you think America has slipped from democracy and crossed the line into “competitive authoritarianism”?

Steve Levitsky

The United States is obviously a borderline case, and smart people will disagree on which side of the line it falls on. I use a couple of different measures to make the case that the US has crossed it.

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One of the peculiarities of being an American is the widespread national conviction that America is the best at everything.

This is particularly true of Republicans and MAGA, self-identified “real Americans” who consider anyone criticizing the US to be a commie traitor.

Trump takes this a step further by declaring anything he touches to be the biggest, best thing ever. He is convinced he has made America great again, and that the whole world now respects and fears the United States accordingly.

This is, of course, complete nonsense.

Since Trump has returned to office, global approval of the United States has plummeted. This is seen as far back as polling data from early 2025, and it’s likely much worse now.

When Pew Research asked people across 36 countries this spring if they trusted various world leaders to do the right thing, Trump was trusted least — less than Putin, Xi Jinping, and Netanyahu. Gallup found that world opinion of the United States has fallen to its lowest point in 20 years.

Ouch.

Many Americans still think that people must be drawn to this glorious shining city on a hill, and that no one who isn’t an aforementioned commie traitor would ever want to leave what is obviously the best country on earth.

Nope.

For the first time in 50 years, the US experienced negative net migration in 2025. The country isn’t letting much of anyone in, and record numbers of people are choosing to be somewhere else if they have the option (including myself and my family).

There are far more who would leave if the opportunity was there. Last year Gallup found that 20 percent of all Americans would move out of the US if they could, and 40 percent of young women would prefer to leave. A Williams Institute study found that 45 percent of transgender people would like to escape elsewhere, and 75 percent of scientists are considering leaving the United States. The situation is similar to how a lot of the people who built the atomic bomb weren’t from the US originally, because a certain guy with a mustache made it clear that their kind weren’t welcome in Germany anymore.

At the same time, polling shows that the percentage of people globally who would want to move to the US as their top choice has plummeted.

Americans are still broadly supportive of Republican “law and order” policies designed to sweep the streets of criminals, homeless people, addicts, and lesbian soccer moms. Many are surprised that foreigners don’t think that this has made America a safer and cleaner place to visit. Surely the presence of ICE, National Guard troops, and police authorized to use lethal force on a whim must make the US as safe and orderly as Singapore or Japan, right?

The actual data shows that the United States is on its way to being as unpopular a tourist destination as Russia, and for roughly the same reasons. In both countries, a tourist who runs afoul of government officials might spend the next six months in a freezing warehouse without legal counsel, eating moldy bologna sandwiches and praying that they won’t die of disease, neglect, or just an old-fashioned beating by the guards.

The US hosted this year’s FIFA World Cup, which happens only once every four years and involves the most popular sport in the world. Attendance at games was high, but it was driven primarily by domestic audiences. International travel to the United States fell far below expectations due to strict travel restrictions, high costs, visa hurdles, and visitors’ fear of dealing with Trump’s private anti-foreigner Sturmabteilung.

Applicants faced $185 visitor visa fees, mandatory in-person interviews, and strict vetting policies that sometimes included social media account reviews. Even with the introduction of the FIFA Pass priority scheduling system, a visa did not guarantee border entry. Nearly 80 percent of hotels in US host cities missed their booking forecasts for June and July, leading to room block cancellations and a broader decline in expected international arrivals.

The United States is the only place where tourism has been dropping. There are expected to be two million fewer visitors in 2026 than in 2025, down 10 million since the high water mark of 70 million in 2018. There was a 2 percent year-over-year drop in June, a 7 percent drop in July, and an 11 percent decrease in August. The numbers suggest that the collapse of the United States’ tourism industry is accelerating, thanks to Trump, MAGA, the GOP’s extreme xenophobia, and their belief that there’s no problem you can’t brutalize your way out of.

By comparison, travel to Canada from overseas countries increased by nearly 4 percent in July 2026, building on a 5.1 percent year-over-year increase recorded in June. And Americans, despite Trump’s insistence that Canada is the nastiest country on earth, are flocking to visit their more civilized northern neighbor. American arrivals to Canada rose by over 9 percent in July compared to July 2025, despite high fuel and hotel prices. Even tourism in China is up by 20 percent, despite the increasingly repressive regime of President Xi.

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Less appealing than Berlin 1934

Perhaps the bleakest factoid is that the US is even less popular as a tourist destination than Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Hitler tried to depict Germany as clean, orderly, and safe, despite political repression, destruction of democracy, persecuting queers and Jews, and paramilitary beatings of “undesirables”.

According to the United States Holocaust Museum:

In 1933 alone, American embassies and consulates reported at least 36 individual physical attacks on American citizens in Germany. Uniformed Nazi brownshirts or German mobs beat Americans — tourists, businessmen, and expatriates living in Germany for work or marriage — or effectively kidnapped or arrested them. The attacks were almost all unprovoked or for such “offenses” as failing to salute the German flag, for taking photographs, or for failing to submit to extortion.

The US Consul General in Berlin, George Messersmith, and US Ambassador William E. Dodd aggressively protested these actions directly to Reich ministers and Chancellor Hitler. Because Germany was heavily reliant on foreign trade and tourism, Hitler personally assured Ambassador Dodd in October 1933 that “strong measures” would be taken to protect foreigners and that the police would intervene to prevent future attacks. To avoid violence, many shops in Germany began doing a brisk business selling lapel pins embossed with foreign flags to tourists, letting passersby know they were foreigners exempt from the rule requiring “roman salutes.”

Despite the beatings, campaigns in the United States contributed to a significant rise in international travel, including an alleged doubling of American tourists between 1934 and 1937. Foreign tourism grew steadily through the 1930s (including a major boost during the 1936 Berlin Olympics), convincing many international visitors that the regime was benign or even progressive.

The Nazi regime used the Reichsbahnzentrale für den Deutschen Reiseverkehr (RDV) (German Railroads Information Office) to market Germany globally as a modern, affordable, and cultural destination. By 1938, the RDV operated 31 offices across 26 countries. Promotional materials deliberately portrayed the country as peaceful, safe, and non-aggressive to mask or downplay the regime’s brutality and anti-Semitic policies.

Conversely, ICE’s brutal treatment of tourists and other foreigners traveling on visas (including Germans and Canadians) has elicited no response from the Trump administration. Diplomatic protests are ignored. Unlike the German example of tourists wearing pins to avoid a beating or detention in a concentration camp, wearing foreign flag pins in the US would invite such treatment, at least in some parts of the country.

Trump always wants to be seen as the biggest and best. He lies about everything, including his height and weight. He even strokes his ego by cheating at golf. But we’ll give him credit: only he could make his own country look like a less attractive place to visit than Nazi Germany.

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The standard crack about gerrymandering is that it empowers politicians to pick their voters, rather than voters picking their representatives. But during wave elections, redistricting efforts can backfire if greedy politicians draw districts with too-narrow partisan margins.

Will the GOP’s unprecedented mid-decade US House district gerrymanders create a spate of these so-called “dummymander” losses? And if so, how many districts might flip, in which states, and what voting group will be most pivotal to turning Republican-designed districts into Democratic House seats?

Packing and cracking

The state party that controls the redistricting process — let’s call it the “advantaged party” — gerrymanders House district maps to create as many winnable seats as possible, given their state’s overall partisanship. To dilute the opposing party’s voting power, the advantaged party uses two strategies in tandem — “packing” and “cracking” — to maximize the number of seats it is favored to win.

Packing stuffs as many voters who identify or lean toward the disadvantaged party into one or a few districts with overwhelming and inefficient majorities of, say, 75 percent to 95 percent. Packing allows the advantaged party to then “crack” the disadvantaged party’s remaining voters across the state’s other districts, creating thin-yet-comfortable majorities for the advantaged party of, say, roughly 55 percent.

But those narrow-margin districts are potentially vulnerable to adverse, short-term effects. The advantaged party’s candidate in such a district may retire, resign, die, or suffer a debilitating scandal, turning a marginally safe district into a pickup opportunity for the opposing party. These cases are rare, but wave elections can threaten many more narrow-margin seats, creating the possibility for dummymanders.

Coined by political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell, “dummymandering” suggests that foolhardy mapmakers drew district lines without properly surmising the risks. But politicians and their consultants draw these high-risk districts precisely because they promise the higher reward of winning more seats in their House delegation. “Riskymander” might be a more apt label.

Sensing an opportunity to insulate the Republicans’ razor-thin US House majority, Donald Trump in 2025 started pressuring state Republicans to redraw their House maps mid-decade. With notable exceptions like the Tom DeLay-led redistricting of Texas following the 2004 election, mid-decade redistricting until last year was rare and usually triggered by court edicts. Per tradition, parties waited until after next census to redraw the maps.

But the party that blocked Barack Obama’s Supreme Court appointee Merrick Garland and repeatedly assaults ballot access long ago stopped caring about political traditions or norms. On cue, several GOP-controlled states in 2025 began redrawing their House maps.

Six states voluntarily redistricted mid-decade: California, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. The Democrats’ new 52-seat map in California partially offset gains by Republicans, who redrew the 94 combined seats in the other five states. GOP efforts in two other states were thwarted: In Indiana by Republican state senators who rebuked Trump’s demand to redraw their state’s districts; and in Missouri, after the US Supreme Court rejected the Republicans’ proposed new map. (State laws or court rulings forced four other states to redraw or restore their House maps.)

In the immediate aftermath of these mid-decade gerrymanders, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP had successfully buffered itself against potential House losses this year. The Washington Post even went so far as to declare in July 2025 that the Texas redistricting alone could “help ensure a GOP House majority” in the 2026 midterms.

That conventional wisdom steadily eroded as Trump’s approval numbers collapsed over the past 15 months.

“Nationally, analysts are now pegging net GOP gains from redistricting anywhere from six seats to none,” The New Yorker’s Joe Allsop wrote in a new piece handicapping the GOP’s expected gains from its mid-decade redistricting efforts.

The total number of GOP seat gains are now projected by analysts like Sam Wang, Elliott Morris, and others to be half or fewer than the roughly dozen seats that Republicans originally hoped.

But the GOP’s declining midterm prospects do not imply a spate of dummymander pickups for the Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball election expert Kyle Kondik cautions that any gains Democrats make must account for the fact the districts before the mid-decade redrawing would likely have elected more Democrats anyway.

“I don’t really see much potential for dummymanders based on the states that redrew for 2025-2026,” Kondik explained to me via email. “The reason for this is that if the Republicans lose seats in gerrymandered states, they probably would have lost them on the old map, too. A good example is [Republican] Maria Salazar in FL-27 — if she loses on this map, she would’ve lost on the old map in all likelihood, too.”

In other words, any Democratic dummymander wins this November should be regarded as gains relative to the GOP’s ambitions for its new maps, but not necessarily net gains relative to the expected 2026 partisan results had the mid-decade gerrymanders never occurred. Keep in mind, too, that narrow Democratic victories in competitive districts during favorable 2026 conditions immediately become flip-back targets for Republicans in 2028 or 2030, when the electoral environment may be less brutal for the GOP.

Simply put, the Republicans got away with it: If their mid-decade maps work, they make gains, but there’s little to no chance they will backfire in 2026 or the two remaining House cycles this decade.

“I actually have Republicans netting two to five seats from redistricting overall — a net change that takes into account all of the new maps, including California,” Kondik predicts. “It’s possible that the final number will fall outside that range if it’s a megawave, but it would be more about gerrymanders not working as opposed to ‘dummymanders’ backfiring.”

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Latino voters are no dummies

Although Trump has seen his approval ratings plummet among groups including base constituencies like non-college whites and rural voters, no group has defected as much since 2024 as Latinos, who are expected to wield outsized power in the 2026 midterms.

I asked pollster Matt Barreto, co-founder of BSP Research and an expert on Latino opinion and voting behavior, where the Latino backlash against Trump’s second-term policies might hurt Republican House candidates the most. He cited three races each in Florida (CDs 9, 27 and “maybe” 13) and Texas (CDs 9, 15, and 35), all of which were drawn to be Latino-influenced districts the GOP expects to win.

The ethnicity and countries of origin for the Latino populations in these districts vary. Mexican Americans dominate the Rio Grand Valley-based TX-15; Puerto Rican voters can tilt the outcomes in Tampa-Orlando I-4 corridor districts FL-9 and FL-13; and, of course, Latinos with Cuban and South Americans backgrounds wield substantial electoral clout in South Florida’s FL-27. But Barreto says two forms of voter remorse transcend these disparate Latino communities: their fury with Trump’s ICE and immigration enforcement policies, and their discontent with enduring inflation and rising costs of living that Trump promised to rectify.

Trump’s 2024 Latino support was an “outlier,” says Barreto, because “Trump did not earn it, but it was instead a Latino vote of desperation with post-covid inflation.” Even Latinos who voted for Trump because of his promises to secure the border are horrified by the ICE roundups.

“Results from our recent seven-state battleground poll show that Latinos — including Latino Republicans — are very unhappy that ICE and immigration overreach has gone too far, especially attacks on non-criminals,” BSP finds.

Barreto forecasts at least a 12-point net national Latino shift back to the Democrats in 2026, erasing the GOP’s 2024 gains. A bigger shift of 15 to 18 points would return Democrats’ Latino support levels to the Barack Obama years and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But Barreto said such a reversion requires a massive surge in Latino Democratic turnout coupled with a mix of lower turnout and some conversions among Latino Republicans.

The larger the pendulum swing, of course, the more Latino-influence House districts Democrats will flip in November. If Democrats claim any dummymander wins next month, expect Latino voters to propel these seat-flips in Florida and Texas.

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Risk-free gerrymandering

Both parties’ exposure to dummymandering is far less today than three decades ago because the electorate is more predictable.

The dramatic red-blue partisan sorting that began during the late 1980s and early 1990s eliminated most of the liberal Republicans from the Northeast and Pacific Coast, and conservative Democrats from the Southeast and Plains states. Political firms today also possess more sophisticated redistricting software and massive voter databases full of predictive demographic and consumer information. Because voters are easier to identify and target, so too is pooling them into legislative districts with highly-predictable outcomes.

If mid-decade redistricting is the new political normal, the only way for Democrats to avoid or mitigate a similar nightmare in the coming decades is to gain control of as many state governments as possible — and hold those majorities all decade long. But every dummy knows that.

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Any list of the worst candidates running for office in 2026 would have to start with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Utterly lacking in charisma, Paxton is a flaccid campaigner with a stunning history of corruption whose greatest professional achievement may be staying out of jail. With just weeks to go before the election, a series of embarrassing stories has dogged him, the latest of which is the emergence of a video of him partying in Dubai with his mistress and a couple of fugitives from American justice.

Paxton only defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary because of President Trump’s support — yet Trump can barely speak his name without saying that Paxton is inarticulate, ugly, and a terrible dresser.

The answer to the obvious question — how could someone as unappealing as Paxton get as far in politics as he has? — lies in the internal dynamics of today’s Republican Party.

But the GOP’s problem goes far beyond Paxton. They are confronting a political emergency in this year’s midterms, and doing it with an absolutely stunning collection of lemons, lunkheads, and losers.

From a risky election to a potential catastrophe

At the start of 2026, the idea that Democrats would have had even the tiniest chance of taking back the Senate in the midterm elections was almost absurd.

Needing a net gain of four seats to take control, Democrats have to defend two seats in states Donald Trump won in 2024 (Michigan and Georgia), plus another five seats Kamala Harris won by single digits. Meanwhile, Republicans have to defend only one seat in a state Harris won (Maine), and one in a state Trump won by double digits.

The opposition party always does well in midterms, but in order to take the Senate, Democrats will have to nearly run the table, winning every close race — an extremely tall order.

Yet today, it appears more likely than not that they will do just that.

FiftyPlusOne puts the odds of a Democratic takeover at 72 percent, while the Cook Political Report rates six Republican-held seats as Toss-Ups and one (North Carolina) as Likely Democratic; just one Democratic-held seat (Michigan) is in the Toss-Up category.

The most important reason Republicans are in this position is, of course, Donald Trump. But in race after race, Republicans would be in a far better position if their candidates weren’t so poor.

Paxton is the most obvious, but it’s happening all over the country. A brief tour:

• North Carolina: With Trump’s endorsement in hand, former RNC chair Michael Whatley cleared the Senate primary field. But he has struggled to gain any traction against former Gov. Roy Cooper, and Republicans have now essentially given up on him, pulling their money out of a state they haven’t lost in a presidential race since 2008 to send it to candidates who might have a chance.

• Kansas: Facing a serious challenge for the first time in his career, Sen. Roger Marshall is proving to be a hapless campaigner. Though Trump won the state by 16 points two years ago, Republicans have had to rush in with money to shore up Marshall, who has been unable to deal with stories about him relentlessly pursuing patients with overdue bills — 700 of whom he sued — when he was a practicing doctor.

• Georgia: When the cycle started, Sen. Jon Ossoff was supposed to be the most vulnerable Democrat running. But Republican Mike Collins has proven to be such a weak candidate that Republicans now consider the race a lost cause.

• Ohio: The Republican Senate nominee in Ohio is Jon Husted, who, believe it or not, is the incumbent. Haven’t heard of him? Neither has almost anyone in Ohio, though now that Trump went on a long riff about Husted’s rockin’ bod (“I looked at his ass”), perhaps more voters will notice him.

• South Carolina: When Trump appointed Darline Graham to fill the seat of her late brother Lindsey, everyone assumed she’d glide to victory in this deep-red state. Instead, she has proven to be an embarrassment as a candidate. Asked a question about Taiwan in a primary debate, she said “I’m not that informed on national security, but I do support the military,” adding that “national security is not my thing.” Points for candor, I guess, but polls have shown her with a lead narrow enough that the party has had to divert funds to help her.

• Michigan: Former congressman Mike Rogers has run an uninspired campaign, unable to separate himself from the president and leveling “Jerk Store”-quality attacks on Abdul El-Sayed. While the much more dynamic El-Sayed has no doubt been hurt by anti-Muslim bigotry, keeping the race close, Rogers has also been harmed by the fact that he moved to Florida after retiring from the House. Speaking of which:

• Florida: Sen. Ashley Moody — who was appointed to the seat when Marco Rubio joined the Trump administration — has been running a campaign that verges on invisibility, to the point that members of her party are getting increasingly concerned. Politico reporter Kimberly Leonard, who is based in Florida, recently said that Republicans in the state privately call it “a basement campaign similar to Joe Biden’s” in 2020. “There’s a lot of frustration by [Republican] elected officials throughout Florida that Senator Moody hasn’t been more active on the campaign trail.”

That’s just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the GOP has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado.

Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!

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A longstanding problem gets worse

Both parties find themselves weighed down by problematic candidates from time to time; “candidate quality” is a perennial challenge, and something difficult to measure. Intelligence, eloquence, energy, a lack of skeletons in the closet, natural magnetism — all combine to separate a good candidate from a bad one. Some just have it, and some don’t.

Democrats have had their share of untalented politicians, even some who managed to get their party’s presidential nomination. But they tend to be of a particular type: smart, earnest wonks with a deep understanding of government and policy, but with limited charisma. Think Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry.

The profile of a bad Republican candidate, on the other hand, is very different.

While the Democratic base has grown more liberal but also more highly educated in the last couple of decades, the Republican base has become more ideologically extreme but also more committed to a particular style of politics: loud, angry, violent in its rhetoric, encased in a deranged media bubble, and indulgent of almost any idea, no matter how ludicrous. Candidates who embody that style then wind up winning primary campaigns, and many of them have ugly ideas or are just outright buffoons — or both.

This has been true for some time, but the problem has grown more acute in recent years — particularly after the Tea Party movement rose up in the wake of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and even more so eight years later when Trump took over the party.

In modern Republican primaries, candidates compete to see who can be the most extreme, not just ideologically but temperamentally as well. Since Republicans have contempt for government, their primaries don’t favor experienced candidates. Since the conservative movement is awash in conspiracy theories, their primaries don’t weed out conspiracy theorists. And since right-wing media is so central to Republican politics, those who appeal to it are more likely to succeed — and those tend to be people who are bombastic, dishonest, and crude.

In other words, GOP candidates compete to see who is the most like Trump, even before his Eye of Sauron alights on their race. When it does, he puts his thumb on the scale for whoever has demonstrated the most abject loyalty to him — whether that person will make a good general election candidate or not. That’s what he did with Ken Paxton, and what he’s done with many other candidates.

We saw this four years ago, when Democrats managed a surprisingly good midterm performance not only because of backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, but because Trump’s influence produced some epically bad candidates. Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, and Mehmet Oz all had Trump’s support, and all lost winnable Senate races. Nevertheless, those were seats in swing states; this year, bad Republican candidates could lose in heavily Republican states like Texas and Kansas.

This is not a problem from which the GOP will free itself once Trump leaves office in 2029. Even if he withdraws quietly to Mar-a-Lago and stops promoting candidates loyal to him (which is highly unlikely), he has given birth to a generation of Republican politicians who want to be like him, or worse. And he has trained Republican voters to expect just that from their candidates.

Right now it’s hard to imagine the GOP raising up candidates with crossover appeal like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. And it’s going to stay that way for some time to come.

That’s it for now

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On August 8, 2022, after more than a year of trying to cajole Donald Trump into voluntarily returning government property he’d stolen, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago at a time when they knew Trump and his family would be elsewhere.

They convinced a federal magistrate judge there was probable cause to believe they’d find wrongfully retained national security information at Trump’s private club … which they did.

At 6 a.m. on October 12, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations banged on the door of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s DC residence, rousting the legislator’s family, including two of her children, ages 14 and 21. The government sought evidence that her deceased father falsified his own immigration paperwork in the mid-90s, when Rep. Omar was a teenager, thus invalidating her naturalization as a US citizen.

This is not a “crime” that could be prosecuted today, and there is no indication that the government tried any less-intrusive means of retrieving the information.

Guess which one of these Republicans are furious about?

Every accusation is a confession

Trump howled for years that every charge against him is a hoax, but the case against Omar is literally a conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

As right-wing-watcher Will Sommer explained at the Daily Beast, an anonymous user on a Somali diaspora forum claimed in 2016 that Omar married her brother to get him a green card. The story became conservative dogma, despite a total lack of evidence that it’s true.

This year AJ Kern, a crank who ran for election in Minnesota as both a Republican and a Democrat and got clobbered both times, spun up a couple of new theories to un-person her erstwhile rival.

In 2023, Kern filed a FOIA request for Omar’s father’s naturalization paperwork and got back a notice that USCIS couldn’t locate it. From this she concluded that he was never naturalized at all, and thus could not have been the source of Omar’s citizenship. Alternatively, Kern claims that Omar lied about her age, meaning that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and thus could not derive citizenship through her parent.

Republicans aren’t too pressed about the details — they just know that Rep. Omar, like the nation’s first Black president, cannot possibly be a real American.

“You know there was immigration fraud involved,” America’s racist uncle Tom Homan grunted on Newsmax in December, complaining that the Biden DOJ had allowed the statute of limitations to expire.

“We know that she’s committed immigration fraud,” Vice President Vance assured plagiarist podcaster Benny Johnson in March, lamenting that the government would have to go to the trouble of actually proving it in court.

“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blustered to Johnson last month at the Republican midterm “convention,” vowing that “something will happen.”

It’s not clear which of these crackpot theories HSI went with, but something did indeed happen on Monday.

The Justice Department says that HSI “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” According to the New York Times, the warrant lists false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, plus a general conspiracy charge. With the caveat that we haven’t seen this document, these legal claims appear shaky at best — particularly in light of the five-year statute of limitations for most federal crimes.

As former prosecutor Joyce Vance notes, Omar arrived in 1995, and was a child when her immigration paperwork was filed, so good luck proving criminal intent. Omar’s father died in 2020, and so, even if you credit the theory that her “crime” is ongoing (so as to defeat the statute of limitations problem), it's not clear whom she could have conspired with in the last five years.

As for the marriage fraud, Omar was married to Ahmed Elmi — who is not her brother — in 2009 and divorced in 2017, so any “fraud” charges related to the marriage would also appear to be time-barred.

Meanwhile, the threats against Omar are all too real. On January 27, Trump told a crowd in Iowa that immigrants need to be proud of America, "not like Ilhan Omar." Hours later, a man charged her at a Minneapolis town hall and squirted her with a syringe full of apple cider vinegar. That night, Trump sneered that Omar "probably had herself sprayed, knowing her."

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IOKIYAR

When Trump’s legal team went looking for evidence of malicious prosecution, the best they could come up with was an article in the New York Times wherein Biden allegedly “confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted.” According to Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, this was a subliminal message to Garland to take out Trump — something so inappropriate that the Judges Aileen Cannon and Tanya Chutkan should immediately dismiss all charges.

Here, Trump and his Cabinet publicly brayed for Omar’s prosecution for years on end. But Attorney General Todd Blanche insists that it’s entirely appropriate for the president to direct the prosecution of his enemies. Luckily Blanche suppressed his capacity for shame, and so he feels nary a twinge at staging a pre-dawn raid on a sitting member of Congress while simultaneously calling the search of Mar-a-Lago as a gross abuse of law enforcement.

On October 2, the White House invited a hand-picked cadre of reporters to a briefing on DOJ “weaponization.” It was led by John Solomon, who was drummed out of The Hill for laundering discredited sources to help Trump gin up lies about Hunter Biden in Ukraine. Solomon wandered off to launder conservative talking points at his own site, Just the News. And now he’s moonlighting as a “special government employee,” chairing a White House “transparency” task force wherein he feeds reporters decontextualized tidbits in an effort to prove that Trump was wrongfully framed by evil Joe Biden.

On Sunday, the Times’s Charlie Savage stripped the bark off of Solomon’s “revelations.” The headliner was a July 2022 email from the FBI’s Washington field office questioning whether there was probable cause to search Mar-a-Lago. Republicans claim that internal debate over the relative merits of executing a warrant or continuing to negotiate with Trump is evidence of the impropriety. With respect to Omar, Blanche felt no need to engage in such accommodation.

In reality, Sen. Chuck Grassley published the FBI email last December. And Solomon conveniently forgot to mention that the message predated the discovery that Trump’s henchmen were moving the boxes of stolen documents around the club to evade both the FBI and Trump’s own lawyer Evan Corcoran — which entirely resolved the probable cause question.

“It isn’t an effort at subterfuge,” wheedled Solomon, who has the nerve to refer to himself as a “pool reporter.”

“It isn’t an effort at not giving you something in context,” he told the Times. “It’s giving you what the government made available and then giving you a chance to go find the rest of the story.”

Solomon similarly mischaracterized the government’s effort to minimize the disruption for Trump’s wife and son.

“The first family’s trips were traced as the bureau plotted the best time to search Trump’s Palm Beach home,” screeched the New York Post after the presser.

With Omar, HSI seems to have deliberately staged the raid so as to traumatize her family, including her children.

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Speech or Debate is for Republicans

Congressional Republicans are currently demanding that Jack Smith be prosecuted for subpoenaing the toll records of at least nine members of Congress who were in contact with Trump’s team before and during the attack on the Capitol. Toll records are logs of numbers and call lengths, with no content. And since the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland, no one, not even a senator, has had an expectation of privacy in them.

And yet, Republicans responded as though Smith had kicked down the door of the Capitol himself. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Sen. Mike Lee said Smith’s conduct made “what Richard Nixon did with Watergate look like a Sunday picnic.” Sen. Katie Britt accused him of deliberately depriving members of the chance to assert their privilege under the Speech or Debate Clause. Sen. John Kennedy said anyone who knows “a law book from a J. Crew catalog” could see the violation. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn actually sued Smith in Tennessee.

Ironically, Blackburn’s lawsuit leans heavily on United States v. Rayburn House Office Building, the DC Circuit’s 2007 decision holding that the FBI violated the Speech or Debate Clause when it searched Rep. William Jefferson’s office and reviewed his papers without first letting him claim legislative privilege.

That case is of zero use for Blackburn, since the toll records belonged to Verizon and did not implicate legislative matters. But it might well help Omar, whose house is in Northeast Washington, squarely within the DC Circuit.

Strangely, Blackburn, Lee, Britt, and Kennedy are unbothered by the raid on a fellow legislator’s actual home.

60 days

Rep. Omar is in no danger of losing her seat. And she’s clearly not backing down.

But this aggressive act of intimidation on the eve of the election violates longstanding norms, as well as the DOJ’s own internal policies.

This is something Blanche used to be quite the stickler for. In July 2023, he warned Judge Cannon that “even Department of Justice policy cautions against taking prosecutorial action for the purpose of affecting an election or helping a candidate or party.”

By February 2024, Blanche and his law partner Emil Bove — now Judge Bove of the Third Circuit — insisted that “a fair trial cannot be conducted this year.” Putting the president’s chief political rival on trial before November “would also violate Justice Manual § 9-85.500, which applies to the Special Counsel’s Office, and prohibits ‘Actions that May Have an Impact on an Election.’” They even invoked DOJ’s “longstanding policy of non-interference in elections.”

And yet, 22 days before the midterms, with early voting already underway in Minnesota, Blanche’s DOJ searched a candidate’s home over paperwork a dead man filed three decades ago.

For four years, Republicans insisted that the search of Mar-a-Lago was the most shocking abuse of power in American history. A former president who stonewalled the National Archives for a year, ignored a grand jury subpoena, and had his staff hide boxes from his own lawyer got searched when he and his family were safely out of town.

With early voting underway, Ilhan Omar got agents at her door at 6 a.m., when her 14-year-old was inside, over a theory cooked up on an anonymous message board and a FOIA response to a failed candidate — a theory the administration’s own border czar admits is far outside the statute of limitations.

Republicans never objected to weaponizing the Justice Department. They just wanted custody of the weapon.

That’s it for now

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Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth further embellished his ghoulish record of craven violence and cruelty by announcing that the US will livestream a public execution by firing squad.

The man scheduled to be executed on December 3 is Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in a horrific mass shooting in 2009. The US has not conducted an execution by firing squad since World War II or a military execution since 1961. It has never broadcast a live execution; only a handful of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran do so.

Most nations avoid public executions for the pretty obvious reason that turning a person’s death into public entertainment and propaganda is an assault on human dignity. It creates perverse incentives for jackals like Hegseth to target individuals for spectacular acts of violence in the name of self-aggrandizement and polling boosts.

As Trump made clear on Friday, he approved the plan to broadcast the election because he is also a moral vacuum.

Many others, though, rushed to condemn it.

Archbishop Paul Coakley, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the plan a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said, “Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant, and we continue to do so today.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he believed that Hasan should be executed but streaming it was “beyond disgusting.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy also said he supported the death penalty but that Hegseth seemed to be “mimicking ISIS executions” and characterized the idea to livestream it as “medieval.”

Murphy’s comments suggest that a public execution is anachronistic and that we have progressed beyond them. But, as the Trump administration keeps reminding us, we have not, unfortunately, come as far as we’d like to think.

The proposed livestreamed execution of a Palestinian Muslim man is in fact in line with the white supremacism that has shadowed (or more than shadowed) American history, and which Trump loves to pick up, brush off, and supercharge.

Spectacular violence and white supremacy

The immediate precedent for Hegseth’s bloody livestream fantasies is not Europe in the medieval period. It’s the US history of violence against Black people.

Scholar Kellie Carter Jackson writes that following the suppression of a slave rebellion in 1811 in Louisiana, “the rebels’ heads were mounted on stakes along the road leading into New Orleans as a warning to stave off potential uprisings.” Novelist and critic Robert Jones, Jr. notes that

On November 11, 1831, Nat Turner was publicly hanged in Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia, for leading an uprising comprised of enslaved Black people. After he was executed, his body was dissected and his skin was flayed and used to make things like purses.

Lynchings from the 1870s into the 1950s were performed under a thin pretense of mob violence, but the truth is that law enforcement de facto sanctioned them. Often police or sheriffs participated enthusiastically. Police would accuse Black people of crimes for any reason or no reason, then white mobs would break into the jails (or walk in, since they were often left unlocked) and hang and burn victims. Lynchings were conducted in a carnival atmosphere; people would take pictures with the dead body and take parts of the corpse as souvenirs.

Hegseth claimed in an interview with far right podcaster Jack Probosiec that his motive for livestreaming the execution was that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

But this is not a very convincing excuse.

People are generally aware that committing mass murder will lead to punishment; those who commit mass shootings often expect to be killed during the commission of their crimes. Hasan was not, but he has been in prison for 17 years and is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot during his attack. You don’t need to create a grotesque spectacle for people to understand that there are serious consequences for committing heinous crimes.

Violent public rituals like the hanging of Nat Turner or lynchings in the Jim Crow south are not just, or even primarily, meant as deterrence. Rather, they are meant to dehumanize their targets and entrench the entitlement and sadistic empowerment of viewers and participants.

Public executions serve the same function as forcing Jewish people to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany, or as forcing Black people under Jim Crow to sit at the back of the bus. They vividly separate those in the community, worthy of respect and dignity, from those outside it, who are entitled to nothing, not even life — not even a decent death. They identify certain people as dangerous outsiders to fear, and then use that terror and disgust as fuel for violent brutality.

Or, as historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in discussing the proposed execution, “this is an escalation of an attempt to normalize extreme violence, ritualize violence, militarize the country, and make violence entertaining so when they ask you to commit violence in their name, you will be ready.”

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Terror is at the core of Trumpism

Ben-Ghiat says Hegseth’s proposal is an escalation because Trump’s entire political career has involved normalizing and ritualizing extreme violence and selling that violence as a form of entertainment for right-wing media viewers and gutter trolls.

In 2018, Trump and Fox News egged each other on with panicked, vengeful rhetoric about a group of migrants from central America seeking refuge in the US. Fox hosts like Laura Ingraham referred to it as an “invading horde.” Trump and other Fox hosts insisted falsely that the refugees included Middle East terrorists, that they were spreading disease, and that they were funded by Jewish liberal billionaire George Soros. Conspiracy theories like these inspired a far right antisemitic shooter to murder 11 people at a pro-immigrant synagogue in Pittsburgh just before the midterm elections.

Similarly, in 2024, Trump and his running mate JD Vance spread vicious lies that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets. These conspiracy theories prompted a stochastic terror campaign of bomb threats and intimidation which forced evacuations of schools and public buildings. Trump has continued to attack Haitians while in office, revoking their legal status, leading to job losses and threatening them with deportation to Haiti, which is undergoing escalating gang violence and where they would likely face extreme violence.

You could multiply incidents almost infinitely. Trump has threatened to “annihilate” Iran; he has urged people in Minnesota to “fight back” against Somali immigrants who are living peacefully in their communities.

He has accused media outlets of “treason” for reporting on the war in Iran. He and his administration have defended ICE immigration enforcement agents kidnapping and shooting people on the street. In each of these cases, individuals and groups are singled out by leaders speaking on behalf of the government and/or the body politic as legitimate targets for hatred and extreme violence by mobs, by agents of the state, or by both.

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The cycle of violence

Often these moral panics/two-minute hates are presented openly, and even ostentatiously, as campaign gimmicks.

It’s not an accident that Hegseth and Trump are trumpeting a public execution in the run up to the midterms, just as it’s no accident that the Republican Party is spending millions right now on repulsive anti-trans propaganda. Trump and his fascist toadies believe their base is motivated by fear and hate and status threat. Identify outside groups to despise and subjugate, promise to smite them with murderous, genocidal violence, clean up at the ballot box. Rinse, repeat.

The good news is that these tactics are not in fact especially effective. Virginia and New Jersey were deluged with anti-trans ads from Republicans in 2025, yet Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill both run their gubernatorial races by wide margins.

Support for the death penalty has been slowly falling for decades, though a majority of Americans still say they support it. Many people who support the death penalty though — like Thom Tillis and Chris Murphy — don’t support turning executions into public spectacle. And there’s no evidence that Trump has gotten a bump in approval from backing Hegseth’s ritual murder plan.

The less than good news is that the failure of this tactic as an electoral gambit is not going to dissuade Trump, Hegseth, their goons, or their supporters. That’s because violent spectacle and terror aren’t just tactics to build power. They are goals in themselves.

Hitler targeted Jewish people to rally supporters and build power — and he built power so that he could more horrifically target Jewish people. White people in the US under Jim Crow lynched Black people to secure white power and they secured white power so that they could continue to murder Black people with impunity.

Trump follows the same logic. Violent spectacles targeting marginalized people are meant to use prejudice and demonization of outgroups to build power. And the power is used to fuel violent spectacles targeting marginalized people.

Hegseth and Trump are embracing a public, livestreamed execution because the America they prefer is one in which vaunting hate and communal violence are the norm. That isn’t a new vision for the United States. But it’s one we need to defeat this November, and every day after that.

That’s it for now

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