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To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary, this week we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep us thriving for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

Late next month, President Donald Trump is hosting the “most exclusive dinner in the world” at Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia — and you’re invited!

Well, only if you can pony up millions to buy his scammy meme coin.

It’s just another breathtaking bit of corruption from Trump that, by now, is depressingly routine.

First, let’s get one of the big fictions about this thing out of the way. Trump and his cronies are pretending this isn’t Trump throwing a dinner where you can pay-to-play with the president, but rather that he’s just attending an event put on by two companies, CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC. In reality, however, both of those companies are affiliates of the Trump Organization.

Remember how back in Trump’s first term, we genuinely believed the emoluments clause mattered?

Trump turned his Washington DC hotel into a quick and easy way for foreign leaders to curry favor, netting him close to $4 million (which seems like small peanuts now). Back then, legal experts genuinely believed his self-dealing, things like charging the Secret Service wildly overinflated rates to stay at his own hotels, could result in his impeachment.

We were sweet summer children.

These days, foreign governments and domestic grifters can get access — and sweet sweet deals of various stripes — if they will purchase oodles of the $TRUMP meme coin, a thing even more worthless than a room at a Trump-branded property.

But before we get to the dinner itself, let’s talk about what this dumb meme coin is so you can understand exactly how bad this is.

These coins are ostensibly a type of crypto investment, but even in the wild world of crypto, they’re an unregulated mess. Meme coins are, well, digital coins based on memes. They’re basically created as a joke. Last year, NPR reported that literally anyone can launch one thanks to a platform called pump.fun, and more than 5 million meme coins have been created.

Remember the Hawk Tuah Girl, Hailey Welch, who went viral for her comments on oral sex? In 2024, she launched HAWK, a meme coin for her fans (who exactly they are remains a mystery for the ages). When it launched, it blew up, hitting $490 million swiftly, but before you could say “Hawk Tuah” it collapsed to $60 million.

Welch and her cronies faced allegations of a pump-and-dump, where someone hypes an investment to drive the price up, only to sell it off as quickly as possible. So, the meme coin creators can walk away with staggering amounts while everyone else is left holding the bag.

You might wonder how this is legal and why the Securities and Exchange Commission wouldn’t step in and regulate what is basically a scam.

Well, once Trump got into office the second time, the SEC conveniently issued a statement saying that meme coins do not count as a sale of securities, and therefore people purchasing them are not protected by any federal securities laws. Trump’s “crypto czar,” Elon Musk crony David Sacks, says meme coins are collectibles, not securities.

The upshot of all this is that if you choose to buy a meme coin, you’re basically on your own, and if the thing collapses, you have no recourse through the SEC. So if meme coin creators pump and dump the coin, engage in insider trading, or omit key information in their disclosures, that’s totally legal and very cool.

Enter Trump. Er, $TRUMP, which Trump launched just a few days before he was sworn in for his second term.

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$TRUMP go 📉

The coin has been incredibly volatile, hitting $73.42 shortly after launch as Trump fans rushed to buy it. By April 2025, it was down to about $7.72, then began a slight climb the following month, as people snapped it up in advance of the May 2025 pay-to-play dinner with Trump. People bought millions of dollars worth of the coin and the top 220 holders got to go to a black-tie dinner with Trump at Trump National, with the top 25 getting a little VIP audience with the president as well.

These days, $TRUMP trades around $1.79, so anyone who bought it when it was first issued, and even those who bought it before the May 2025 dinner, are out a lot of money.

We don’t have a full list of who attended the May 2025 dinner, because of course not, but Bloomberg reported that 19 out of 25 attendees were based outside the United States, including Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun. Sun spent $18 million on $TRUMP, but that was quite a bargain given that shortly after that, the SEC dropped its case against him, letting him settle for a relatively paltry $10 million.

By now, Trump has made serious bank on this meme coin scheme, earning $635 million thus far. So it’s no real surprise that he’d decide to host another one of these pay-for-play dinners. Why wouldn’t he? It’s easy money into his pockets, and all he has to do is spend a night glad-handing the same sorts of rich people he always surrounds himself with anyway.

Much like the previous dinner, there is a competition to get face time with the president. Only the top 185 holders of $TRUMP get to dine with the orange toddler. Such an honor! And honestly, nothing says “naked corruption” like selecting attendees based on how much of the worthless $TRUMP coin they are willing to buy.

The “contest,” such as it is, to get in the door runs from September 30 to November 12, and out of those 185, the top 29 get “a private meet & greet with a legend to be announced,” which we are assured does not include Trump: “No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President.” The only problem is that directly contradicts the website for this scummy scam, which says that the top 20 investors would be “INVITED to a VIP reception with your favorite President.” Who knows!

But wait, there’s more absurdity.

Everyone gets the world’s worst swag bag, complete with a Trump Commemorative Poster, Commemorative Trading Card, and a Fight Fight Fight Trump watch. The weirdest thing in the swag bag, however, has to be the Trump fragrance.

What does the Trump fragrance smell like? Here’s the official blurb from the official site, gettrumpfragrances.com, which, honestly, is just so low-rent, besides being so corrupt.

“For Patriots Who Never Back Down, Like President Trump. This Scent Is Your Rallying Cry In A Bottle. Featuring Trump’s Iconic Image And Raised Fist, This Limited-Edition Cologne Embodies Strength, Power, And Victory.”

It’s not clear if this fragrance giveaway will be sex-segregated, but given Trump’s unending obsession with hating trans women and attachment to the wrongheaded idea of “biological sex,” it seems like he’d find it important to make sure the ladies in attendance get the lady fragrance.

What’s that one like? Well, it’s “inspired by President Trump’s historic win” and “captures confidence, beauty, and unstoppable determination.”

Dunno, man. These sound like they would smell terrible, honestly.

Oh yeah, and all of them come in a bottle that features a gold statue of Donald Trump, because of course they do. And the tippy-top four bribers, whoever they might be, will get an 18-karat Trump watch.

But even as Trump is coaxing people into buying the coin, Trump’s inner circle is getting out.

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The post-pump dump

The Washington Sun found that the single biggest owner of $TRUMP appears to be getting ready to dump $70 million of this trash.

As Zach Everson, who tracks Trump’s crypto grift for Public Citizen, explained, we now have a situation where “regular buyers are urged to hold for a shot at dinner with the president, while tokens reserved for the coin’s creators head for the exits.”

Indeed, through the end of June 2026, Trump meme coin investors have lost $3.81 billion.

It’s the certainty of staggering losses that makes clear this is nothing but a festival of corruption, an opportunity to bribe the president of the United States. No one who spends millions to attend these tacky dinners expects a return on their investment. They’re just giving the president money in hopes it will buy them favors.

Standing by while an incompetent, wholly corrupt leader hijacks the presidency for his own gain is a choice, but that’s exactly what Congress is doing.

They could pass a law to stop this at any time. They could pummel the administration and Trump cronies with investigations. But under GOP control, Congress has been utterly allergic to any form of executive branch oversight. So Trump will continue to have tacky dinners, continue to fleece investors, and trade favors for cash — at least until January, when accountability will hopefully be coming.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod this afternoon and a special Saturday edition tomorrow.

If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks for reading.

To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary, this week we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep us thriving for many years to come.

🥳 PN 5th Anniversary Special 🥳

Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

Almost every psephologist and pollster believes the midterm election in 26 days will deliver Donald Trump a stinging rebuke.

Midterms are typically bad for the incumbent president’s party: In six of the past eight midterm cycles, the presidential party lost congressional majorities in one or both chambers. A seventh midterm, 1998, is moot because Bill Clinton had already lost both chambers in 1994; George W. Bush’s post-September 11 midterm of 2002 is the lone exception.

But recent developments suggest that Trump’s losses may extend beyond mere surrender of Congress.

Trump is bleeding political capital across the board: among independents, non-MAGA Republicans, even among some of his most devout, red hat-wearing followers. A small but growing contingent of Republican politicians have also begun to openly criticize and even vote against Trump before the midterm results.

Should November 3 be the disaster for Republicans that analysts are predicting, Trump will morph overnight into something less than a lame duck president with a ticking, two-year expiration clock: he will become politically bankrupt in ways all-too-familiar to him as a businessman.

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Political bankruptcy

The media routinely bandies around the term “political capital,” but three decades ago presidential scholar Paul Light defined its four components: party support, public support, electoral margin, and reputation.

Across each measure, Trump is hemorrhaging capital.

Party support. Although they are selfishly abandoning him to save their own political hides, a growing list of Republicans running for election or reelection, from Maine to Miami, are like rats abandoning the Trumpian ship.

Seven House Republicans recently voted to curb Trump’s Iran war powers. South Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar openly fumed about Trump’s reckless and dehumanizing deportation polices, which are turning constituents in her Cuban-majority House district against her. A “concerned” Susan Collins criticized Trump’s trade war with Canada because, along with spiking diesel-based home heating oil prices, Trump’s policies and unpopularity are jeopardizing her reelection bid.

And in ruby-red Texas — a state, like Florida, where Trump in 2024 enjoyed record-setting Latino support and where no Democrat has won statewide in three decades — departing Sen. John Cornyn and former Bush adviser Karl Rove refused to back Ken Paxton, Trump’s troubled nominee for Senate. Heck, even Paxton privately complained that Trump’s midterm party convention in Dallas was a “drag” on his campaign.

Public support. Pick a pollster — seriously, any respected survey outfit — and regardless of sampling method or weighting, whether statewide or national, they show Trump’s public support nosediving.

In the past two weeks, The Wall Street Journal, AP-NORC, Quinnipiac, Reuters/Ipsos, and NBC/Telemundo all pegged Trump’s national approval rating in the mid- to low-30s.

Trump’s support is cratering with key subgroups, too, including independents, non-MAGA Republicans, Latinos, even 2024 Trump voters. State polls too numerous to list confirm that Trump’s low approval numbers are damaging Republican candidates for governor and Congress.

A variety of anecdotal developments confirm Trump’s polling collapse, especially among his longstanding supporters and allies:

• At an arena in Alabama, a state he carried two years ago by 30 points, there were near-empty upper deck sections for a recent Trump rally.

• Voters and listeners are tuning out Trump’s MAGA media allies, many of whom are suffering steep traffic declines on YouTube, X, and Rumble.

• Gullible red-hatters fleeced by Trump’s cryptocurrency are miffed; several Trump merchandise “superstores” recently shuttered from declining sales; and Trump signs and flags are disappearing from even the reddest corners of ‘Murica.

• The lopsidedly white, male, rural, truck-driving farmers of “flyover” America are furious about the doubling of diesel gas prices since Trump took office.

• The “Front Row Joes” — avid groupies who travel across the country to attend Trump’s rallies — are starting to bail on him, too.

• Even longtime supporter and donor Pat Boone no longer wants to write “Love Letters in the Sand” to Trump.

Electoral margin. Trump won the popular vote in 2024, the only time he did in three attempts. Whatever reserves of political capital Trump retains derive from his popular vote victory over Kamala Harris two years ago.

But Trump’s 49.8 percent share and 1.5 percent victory margin were far from resounding. Hold aside Bush’s and Trump’s negative popular vote margins in their respective 2000 and 2016 Electoral College wins, and Trump’s 2024 victory margin is the smallest of any presidential winner since 1968. And the tailwinds so critical to his 2024 victory — inflation, high prices — are now electoral headwinds thanks to Trump’s ruinous and inflationary trade, tariff, and Iran war polices.

Reputation. Presidential reputation is the most subjective form of political capital. To detractors, Trump’s bluster, vanity, reckless behavior, and incessant name-calling are damning personal traits that simultaneously delight his followers.

But two factors in Trump’s second term are destroying his reputation: fatigue and corruption.

Presidential fatigue typically sets in after a two-term president’s second midterm, the pivotal juncture Trump reaches next month. But because his two terms were non-consecutive and he remained in the political spotlight throughout Joe Biden’s four intervening years, Trump has polluted the national discourse for more than 11 years dating back to his June 2015 campaign announcement.

Public fatigue with Trump should therefore be more profound than for a regular, two-term president. His act is getting old and, given how often Trump dozes off at public events, he becomes more “low-energy” with each passing week.

Then there’s the growing stain of Trumpian corruption. A recent Economist/YouGov poll reported that Americans are growing wise to Trump’s self-dealing. In addition to 71 percent of Democrats, 47 percent of independents and even a surprising 18 percent of Republicans said Trump uses the presidency “to enrich family and friends.”

A beleaguered Trump, openly criticized by some Republicans for using government money to pay for his self-congratulatory TV ads, recently reversed course and said he would pay for them with campaign funds (though Politico reported yesterday that he will not reimburse the government for ads that have already run). Likewise, Donald Trump Jr. promised to reimburse the wealthy Russian who paid for his wedding reception. The Trumps seem to be realizing that lining their pockets is politically costly.

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Capital punishment

Donald Trump likes brag that “nobody knows more” than he does about, well, almost everything. Ironically, this boast is true for bankruptcies and cash squeezes, which defined his business career.

Unlike actual capital, however, a president can’t sign an executive order or organize a kickback through a slimy son-in-law to acquire political capital. Political capital must be earned. Yet Trump has done almost nothing since his second inaugural to acquire it and plenty to squander his reserves. His political burn rate rivals the dot-com era collapse of Pets.com and Kozmo.com.

Rather than build party support by helping and funding fellow partisans, Trump hoards campaign money he’s raised. Rather than nurture public support by listening to citizens and translating their wishes and worries into beneficial public policies, Trump builds monuments to himself. Because he’s term-limited, he has no incentive to think about building a 2028 electoral margin mandate. As for his reputation, the nation is increasingly sick of his vulgarity, recklessness, policy failures, and incessant blame-shifting for problems he created.

Some observers worry that, given his volcanic temperament and fragile ego, during his final two years in office a politically broke and broken Trump could become especially dangerous. He will certainly lash out in ways both predictable and not. But the American system only abides the rantings and ravings of those with political capital to burn, and in less than four weeks Trump’s red-hat movement will sink further and irrevocably into the political red.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

🥳 PN 5th Anniversary Special 🥳

Thanks for reading.

To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary, this week we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep us thriving for many years to come.

🥳 PN 5th Anniversary Special 🥳

Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund, the most important Republican super PAC, froze its spending in North Carolina in order to fund a seven figure ad buy in … Kansas.

If you did a double take there, you are not alone. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in North Carolina in 18 years; abandoning the contest there is an embarrassment. But even more unsettling if you are a Republican is the fact the party is in serious trouble in Kansas, a state which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932 — 94 years ago.

How has Donald Trump led the GOP down this dark alley? Part of it is his massively unpopular war, and his relentless commitment to raising prices on average Americans is certainly playing a role too. But another aspect is that Republican politicians, especially complacent red state ones like Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, are uniquely unsuited to withstanding competitive campaigns.

After decades of crawling further and further into the orifice of the right-wing media bubble, GOP candidates no longer know how to distinguish truth from propaganda, much less how to persuade skeptical voters.

Kansas will still be an uphill battle for Democrats. But it’s been a delight watching Republicans scurry around on their bellies like roaches when you turn on the bathroom light.

Except roaches, of course, know how and where to run for cover. Republicans scramble in circles — and even occasionally just flip over on their backs, wave their arms in the air, and wait to get stomped.

What’s the matter with Kansas?

As anyone paying attention to polls or election news is well aware, the big picture for the GOP right now looks bleak.

Trump’s average approval is hovering around 35 percent. That’s driven in large part by deep dissatisfaction with his illegal war of aggression in Iran and the resulting spike in gas and diesel prices. An AP-NORC poll last week found that only 17 percent of adults approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living, and only 26 percent approve of his record on the overall economy. Those are stunningly bad, record low numbers.

Trump’s policies have been especially dire for farm states like Kansas. Thanks to the war, diesel has blasted past $6 a gallon nationally. Farmers rely on diesel for combines, tractors, and other farm equipment as they gather the fall harvest, and they are mostly unable to pass on elevated fuel prices to consumers.

But Trump isn’t satisfied with just one assault on Kansas’s economy. ICE has chosen this moment to ramp up enforcement in western Kansas, where the bulk of the state’s red-meat production is located. One city commissioner, Jose Lare, warned that “you will definitely see a massive economic slowdown … as people begin to hide at home, not travel, not go to work, not go to school.” Livestock associations in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas issued a joint statement trying to get the Trump administration to back down.

And that’s not all!

In order to try to lower beef prices for consumers, Trump declared he would allow 300,000 metric tons of low quality ground beef imports to come into the country tariff-free. But by making beef his one tariff exception, Trump inevitably threatened the livelihood of beef-producing states like Kansas. Kansas Farm Bureau president Glenn Brunkow called the plan “bad for consumers, destructive for ranchers and anti-American in principle.”

Democrats have responded to this perfect storm by fielding a candidate who seems as well positioned to capitalize on anti-Republican sentiment as any Kansas Democrat could be.

Adam Hamilton is the leader of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City; the congregation has 25,000 members, making it the largest Methodist one in the US. Hamilton focused his campaign on the Iran war and high prices.

When Marshall and his allies attacked Hamilton and his congregation as radical for supporting Kansas City Pridefest, 120 pastors from the state signed a letter pushing back.

“When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote.

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What’s the matter with Roger Marshall?

Hamilton has also received surprising Republican support. Two former GOP governors of the state, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have both endorsed him, with Graves noting that he supported Marshall during his initial run for Senate in 2020.

“His first votes were to not accept the results of the elections from Arizona and Pennsylvania,” Graves said. “That was very disappointing to me. Since his time in the Senate, he has been pretty much a yes-vote for anything the administration wants.”

Marshall, in short, believed that he was in a safe red seat, and that as long as he stapled himself to Trump’s orange carcass, he could win every primary, never lose his seat, and get fawning coverage whenever he trotted over to appear on Fox News.

It’s not hard to understand see why Marshall thought this was the best approach. Senators who defied Trump over his Big Lie, like John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, lost primaries against more enthusiastic dumbass dittoheads. Mainstream media largely doesn’t bother to hold senators in deep red states accountable, and when it does they often win anyway. So why not just keep your head buried wherever Trump tells you to bury it and stay a senator for the rest of your worthless but privileged existence?

Republicans are so unpopular now, though, that the usual rules have been upended — including ones about who the mainstream media will bother to investigate. Kansas started to look maybe purple-ish if you squinted, and so the New York Times invested in the major investigation of Marshall’s past conduct as an obstetrician which no one had bothered with on his first election in 2020.

What they found was not good.

Marshall, the NYT reported, had “filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.” He treated poor patients seeking pregnancy care like piggy banks and deadbeats; in 81 cases, patients who missed court dates were arrested. Those who could not pay bills immediately were charged an exorbitant 18 percent interest a year.

Hamilton quickly located one of Marshall’s patients willing to go on camera. The campaign filmed an ad in which she describes how Marshall had her arrested when she was eight months pregnant because she missed a $50 payment. (Watch below.)

“Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas,” his former patient says. “The healthcare system is broken. But not for Roger Marshall. He’s absolutely profiting from it.”

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What’s the matter with Republicans?

Responding to a scandal is difficult for even talented politicians, and Marshall is not a talented politician. He doubled down and then doubled down again on self-righteous outrage designed to keep the story in the news as long as possible.

During a recent debate at the state fair, Marshall claimed it was “common business practices” to send debt collectors to harass pregnant patients and charge them usurious interest rates. He was enthusiastically booed. And that’s far from the only time Marshall has gone viral for getting jeered in public.

Instead of pivoting, Marshall turned around and sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter claiming his ad defamed him. Hamilton’s campaign said they were not taking the ad down, then giggled and rubbed their hands at the prospect of Marshall continuing to draw attention to the fact that he’s a greedy heartless freak.

Why is Roger Marshall so bad at this? Obviously part of the reason is that he is a fool and a bad person. But more broadly, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argues that this kind of flagrant inability to do politics is in part the result of the extent to which the GOP has been eaten by its own propaganda machine.

“If Fox News will buy whatever GOP leaders are selling, and Fox News viewers will buy whatever Fox News tells them, why should GOP leaders work hard to devise intelligent justifications for their positions?” Bernstein asks.

Marshall knows he could go on Fox News and tell them it’s the industry standard to charge 18 percent interest, and the interviewers would nod and smile. So he tried the same thing at the state fair in front of his constituents and then was shocked when they were unconvinced.

Or to put it another way, candidates like Roger Marshall, and Ken Paxton, and Donald Trump all feel entitled to their seats. As the Republican Party becomes more and more authoritarian, its contempt for democracy and for its own voters becomes increasingly blatant. Marshall is genuinely outraged that the media, the Democrats, or average Kansans would dare to question his predatory treatment of his patients. Don’t they know who he is? Don’t they recognize that he is their rightful ruler, entitled to 18 percent interest, a Senate seat, and the obeisance of the press?

Insulated from challenge by right-wing media and structural advantages, the GOP has increasingly gotten high on its own fascist supply. Now, suddenly, accountability is here. May Roger Marshall, his party, and his president receive everything they deserve.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

🥳 PN 5th Anniversary Special 🥳

Thanks for reading.

To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary, this week we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep us thriving for many years to come.

🥳 PN 5th Anniversary Special 🥳

Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once again summoned high-ranking officers to Quantico so he could tell them the Iran war has been an unmitigated triumph (“courageous and historic operations that every red blooded American is proud of”) and peacock with pride about the new, testosterone-maxxed military his purges have created.

“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” he said. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

Then Hegseth announced the creation of “Project Meridian,” a new effort to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” and “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this war department, your war department dominates the future.” Leading this project of ruthless mapping will be “three of our nation’s best minds”: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.

In other words — at the risk of being unkind — a weirdo, a beardo, and a fatty.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to anticipate what the future of war might look like and how to prepare for it, of course. But if Pete Hegseth and this trio are the ones guiding the way, we may be in for trouble.

One commission, three stooges

Let’s begin with the 83-year-old Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who is believed by many to be the individual most responsible for the ugliness of American politics today.

His political and moral judgment may be questionable at best — his speakership came to an end with the Republicans’ disastrous impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998; it didn’t help that at the time, Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair with a congressional staffer 23 years his junior — but he is certainly interested in the future. Or, more properly, he is given to grandiose warnings and pronouncements about the glories and dangers that technological advancement will bring.

During his ill-fated run for president in 2012, Gingrich promised that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” For years before, he warned darkly that America was vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse attack, a threat he said was so great it required preemptive strikes on North Korea and Iran.

In fact, Gingrich’s judgment on matters of war has been consistent, that judgment being “Yes.” He was a fervent supporter of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, had been promoting war with Iran long before Trump took him up on it, and recently tweeted that rather than fighting over the Strait of Hormuz, “a dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”

What could go wrong?

Unlike Gingrich, Palmer Luckey is an actual defense contractor — though that’s part of the problem. After creating the Oculus virtual reality headset as a teenager, becoming a billionaire when he sold his company to Facebook, then falling out with Mark Zuckerberg, he founded Anduril (naturally, a “Lord of the Rings” reference), a company intended to bring the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos to the hidebound weapons industry. Luckey also has a carefully-cultivated image as a disruptive boy genius, with his uniform of Hawaiian shirts, sandals, and spectacularly ill-considered chin beard.

Anduril’s systems have proven to be anything but foolproof, with plenty of setbacks and missteps in testing and deployment. But that hasn’t stopped the young company from snagging billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts for its drones and software.

It’s all driven by a determined PR effort, telling a story that isn’t necessarily wrong in its particulars. Yes, the big, multi-decade weapons systems like the F-35 stealth fighter (total cost: nearly $2 trillion) on which we have relied create problems, and if we could do more with less that would be worthwhile. And yes, drones will undoubtedly play an important part in future conflicts.

But Luckey also wants American defense to go in a particular direction, one that just happens to be in his economic interest.

The man the New York Times called “the It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry” likes to say that rather than being the world’s police, “we have to be the world’s gun store.” He has an oft-expressed faith in the power of autonomy as the key feature of weapons of the future — weapons that will make their own decisions about how to accomplish their goals, including, eventually, decisions on whether and whom to kill.

And it’s hard to imagine that Luckey would not have gotten this role advising the Pentagon were it not for the fact that he has been pouring money into GOP coffers. According to FEC records, Luckey has made over 1,000 contributions to Republican candidates and committees since 2017; 23 of those were for over $100,000.

That brings us to Elon Musk.

If you were looking for lessons to take from the second Trump administration, “Elon Musk should not be allowed anywhere near federal policymaking” would be pretty high on the list. After spending almost $300 million to get Trump elected in 2024, he rode into Washington promising he could find $2 trillion in savings just by trimming the fat from the federal government, and Trump let him go wild. The result was utter catastrophe — the gutting of the government’s capacity to solve problems, thousands or even millions of deaths that will be caused by the withdrawal of vital food and health programs, widespread violations of data security and Americans’ privacy, and gross incompetence from a bunch of 20-something tech bros whose ignorance and arrogance was exceeded only by that of the man leading the effort.

And now he’s back.

Like Luckey, Musk has billions of dollars in defense contracts, in addition to those with NASA and other agencies. The government seems unconcerned that he is without a doubt the world’s most influential white supremacist, which might be an issue were his goals on that subject not in perfect accord with this administration. The Pentagon is already using Musk’s large language model Grok on its internal network, despite the fact that the chatbot that has called itself “MechaHitler” has been used extensively to create child sexual abuse material.

Where is Project Meridian leading?

The Pentagon has long sought input from outside the government; Gingrich himself served on the Defense Policy Board, a collection of civilians who advise the Defense Department on a range of issues. The difference here is the monetary interest Musk and Luckey have in the advice they might give.

As Sen. Mark Kelly told Politico, “forgive me if I’m skeptical of entrusting the future of American warfare to people with zero military experience who stand to financially benefit from the decisions they’re making.”

In short, what we have here is a commission made up of an octogenarian crank and two billionaires who look at a future of chaos as an opportunity to remake the world and accumulate even more billions.

Whatever conclusions they come to (the project is supposed to produce its findings within 120 days), they will be handed off to Hegseth, who believes that wars are won by whichever side’s soldiers can do the most pushups, and whose obsession with creating an all-white, all-male military leadership is dragging the Department of Defense down by the day.

Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich share a faith in the power of fantastical pronouncements and promises of technological whiz-bangery to hypnotize congressional appropriators and Pentagon procurement officers alike, opening up the spigots for infinite future contracts. None of them have shown any particular understanding of the lessons to be drawn from the conflicts of the past, especially the one America is involved in right now.

The most important lesson of the Iran war may be that war is always shaped by politics. If you can’t understand that, you’ll make the mistake of believing that all it takes to prevail is better technology and more of it. It’s a reminder that no matter the capabilities of our military, the decision to go to war — and America will always keep going to war, again and again and again — will be made by civilians. That’s as it should be, but the unfortunate fact is that our civilian leadership is not infrequently made up of fools with delusions about how war works, blinded by the potential of all those fancy machines and powerful ordnance.

Project Meridian had its first meeting soon after Hegseth delivered that speech at Quantico; the Pentagon released photos of the group around a conference table. There they sit, this collection of braggarts and blowhards, guys who’ve lived lives of endless privilege and limitless second chances. They think they have all the answers, that they’re smarter than they really are, and that the future itself will bend to whatever ideas pop into their heads, no matter how inane.

In that, Project Meridian is like so much that characterizes this moment in history: oriented toward a real challenge, but with the worst people given the power to come up with the answers. The best we can hope for may be that their recommendations get ignored and then forgotten.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks for reading.

To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary today, we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep PN thriving for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

Today marks five years of Public Notice, and I want to begin by thanking you, our dear readers. It is because of you that this newsletter has grown from a solo project I started from scratch to a Substack Best Seller featuring contributions from a team of brilliant journalists.

I am proud that Public Notice has become a bastion of sanity amidst an ocean of sanewashing, a place left-of-center readers can reliably turn to for deep understanding of what’s happening in the American right. Leaving Vox to go independent was a big risk, but it turned out to be the best career decision I ever made.

Thank you for helping make this newsletter such a success.

I’m going to get to some broader reflections about five years of Public Notice, but first, let me encourage free subscribers to take advantage of our five year special offer and sign up for a discounted paid subscription. Though we have over 270,000 subscribers total (thank you!), only about 5 percent of them support our work financially, and upping that percentage is essential for keeping Public Notice thriving and free for everyone.

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In addition to perks like having access to all of our coverage (including Thor Benson’s interviews) and commenting privileges, paid subscribers will be able to ask me questions during my new monthly Q&As on Substack Live, the first of which will take place later this month. Paid subscribers are also the reason PN will be able to beef up our coverage with new staff members in the months to come (stay tuned for an announcement on that before the end of the year).

We’ll never bend the knee

Anniversaries are a time for reflection, and with the grim Trump Reality Show seemingly on the brink of cancelation, it’s fitting to think back on the state of the country when this newsletter launched. On October 5, 2021, I hit “publish” on a debut edition that served as a warning.

“Suffice it to say that if 2020 highlighted the grave danger confronting American democracy, 2021 made clear that even after Trump was defeated, that fight is far from over,” I wrote.

Indeed, the political winds were shifting that fall. The January 6 coup attempt that initially seemed to be the end of the road for Trump was already fading from public consciousness, as was Joe Biden’s remarkable effort that year to vaccinate the country and pull the economy out of the ditch.

As the 2022 cycle loomed on the horizon, the delta wave was souring the public mood, and right-wing media was relentlessly using culture war slop like “DEI” and “wokeness” to hammer the administration (remember Glenn Youngkin?). We didn’t know it then, but Biden’s numbers, which had started sliding about two months earlier, would never recover. And meanwhile, Trump was emerging from his brief sojourn in the political wilderness.

“Even as Trump’s political platform is reduced to little more than bald-faced lies about the 2020 election being stolen for him, his hold on the Republican Party is stronger than ever,” wrote yours truly.

Public Notice has spent the five years since that first edition chronicling the United States’ slide into madness. It obviously isn’t a rosy topic to cover — I’ve more than once wondered if I made a mistake not getting into sports journalism or becoming a teacher — but in all seriousness it’s the most important political story of my lifetime, and I wake up every morning feeling grateful to do this for a living.

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Part of the reason I left Vox to launch Public Notice in the fall of 2021 was because despite editorial direction from higher-ups there to treat Trump as yesterday’s news, I believed he was far from a spent force, and I wanted to cover his efforts to remain atop the GOP on my own terms. Reflecting on the 1,282 editions I’ve published so far, I think we’ve delivered on that aspiration and then some. And now, with the president and his party facing what could be a historic rebuke at the polls next month, I’m eager to chronicle the next chapter in the uncompromising way that has become our calling card.

This moment feels a lot more like January 2021, when Trump’s fortunes were at a low ebb, than it does October 2021, when the forces of MAGA were regrouping. In addition to this year marking five years of Public Notice, however, it also marks 10 years of me covering Trump and Trumpism, and one thing I’ve learned over that time is never to count him out or underestimate what he’ll do to cling to power.

But Trump’s second term is already a failed presidency, and at this late date I think it’s extremely unlikely his approval numbers will ever see 40 percent again. So November 4 will mark a new and exciting era — one in which an extremely unpopular Trump is a lame duck. Next year is shaping up to be one of accountability, including the possibility of impeachment proceedings against the president and/or his underlings. And 2028 will be a monumental year featuring two presidential primaries that will shape the first years of the post-Trump era.

I can’t wait to cover this transition here in Public Notice from one of the darkest periods in our history to hopefully better days, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride. Trump 2.0 taught us that the media and tech elites will happily bend the knee to fascism if they think it will help them make money and protect them from retribution, but we never will. Independent media is vital as a check not only on political power but on the CBSs and ABCs of the world, and I’m proud of the work we’ve done over five years to establish PN as a leading liberal voice.

If you also value our work and aren’t already a supporter, please consider clicking the button and becoming one. Paid subscribers not only make it possible for me to continue working with the brilliant contributors whose work you know and love, but will help us take the next step from a daily newsletter into a full-fledged virtual newsroom.

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Thank you for an amazing half-decade. Onward.

Cheers,

Aaron

That’s it for today

We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. If you appreciate PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks for reading.

Ahead of PN’s 5th anniversary next week, we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep PN thriving for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, amid a strong economy President Barack Obama revived after the 2008 financial crisis, Donald Trump lied repeatedly about the national unemployment rate. Although it was roughly 4 percent, Trump repeatedly claimed that it was 30 percent and even 40 percent.

Now Trump faces a paralyzing predicament. There are no public billboards displaying the latest monthly unemployment figures. But Americans can see the real retail price of gas in bright lights displayed at every filling station, truck stop, and highway rest stop they pass.

Petrol politics in the 2026 election cycle are doubly damning for Donald because Americans are suddenly focused on the price of diesel almost as much as regular gas. The price of the latter has risen about a dollar since the start of Trump’s war of choice against Iran, but diesel prices have nearly doubled in the 20 months since Trump took office.

This unprecedented, budget-crippling surge in diesel is tanking — so to speak — not only Trump’s approval ratings but the chances that many petrified Republicans will survive an already bad midterm cycle.

Diesel damage

Because their cars run on electric or regular gas, most American drivers have long ignored the diesel prices listed above those separate, differently-colored hoses on the left side of gas pumps. Diesel prices only affect farmers and truckers, right?

Not quite. The price of food grown on farms and delivered by diesel-fueled trucks, not to mention every other commodity thusly delivered, includes diesel costs. When diesel prices rise dramatically, so do prices for most consumer goods.

In fact, in August when diesel cost at least a dollar less than currently, the US Labor Department reported that consumer prices were already 3.4 percent higher than August 2025; the surge in diesel’s price in September should further widen year-against inflation comparisons in the coming months.

Rising diesel prices also affect what Americans pay for a new car or home. The Federal Reserve excludes the prices for regular gas and groceries when it calculates the “core” inflation rate. But as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains, higher diesel costs translate indirectly via higher prices for the commodities the government does use to calculate core inflation, a key benchmark the Fed consults when setting interest rates. Higher diesel prices will force Americans to pay more for car liens and home mortgages.

American consumers are also suffering a variety of related impacts of Trump’s record-breaking diesel prices. Examples include:

• More than half of school districts are already running over their diesel budgets, and many are cutting or consolidating bus routes to save money. Travelers should also expect ticket fare increases because so many private bus lines, trains, and airplanes depend upon diesel.

• In Maine, which ranks first with roughly half its citizens relying on home heating oil, a “concerned” Susan Collins is begging the feds to double her state’s heating oil subsidy so Mainers don’t freeze this winter now that diesel-based heating oil prices have risen about $700 per 250-gallon home tank.

• To reduce the pain felt by his state’s sugar farmers, Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order to temporarily allow them to use a so-called “dyed diesel” alternative normally banned from highway use to deliver raw sugar cane to refineries. Fellow Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a similar dyed diesel emergency order for Texas farmers.

• To save an estimated $250,000 in diesel costs, starting in November the San Francisco ferry administration will eliminate one daily service between downtown and Vallejo.

This list is growing and hardly exhaustive.

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Red-faced Republicans run scared

Diesel gas problems would be bad enough for Republicans this November were the economic pain of higher prices felt equally in every region and across all demographic groups. But the bitter yet deserved irony is that key constituencies across Red America that elected Trump are particularly hard-hit: men, whites, farmers, rural citizens, and those from the South and West.

The New Republic’s Virginia Heffernan nicely summarized diesel’s disproportionate impacts on Trump’s coalition: “Fully 90 percent of diesel truck buyers are men. More than 84 percent identify as white. Most strikingly of all, truckers have a ram-tough party ID. According to one analysis, Republicans purchase eight heavy-duty trucks for every one purchased by a Democrat.”

Geographically, “deep-red districts” in so-called flyover America are particularly vulnerable because diesel comprises a higher share of their fuel consumption, notes the Washington Post: “This is especially the case in farming communities, where diesel powers the fuel-thirsty tractors and other machinery that the agriculture industry relies on.”

White, farm-state, pickup truck driving men — those same macho MAGAs who supposedly approach Trump with “tears in their eyes” to praise their savior are now crying over the eye-popping digital readouts following their tank fill-ups. Two tractor-trailer truckers, one in Florida and the other from West Virginia, recently went viral on social media after sharing their $1,000-plus diesel charges at the pump.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail panicked Republican congressional and gubernatorial nominees are desperately — and insincerely — trying distance themselves from Trump’s destructive tariff, trade, and foreign policies that have spiked fuel prices.

Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, who snubbed Vice President JD Vance during his recent visit to the Hawkeye State, is especially terrified. Despite voting repeatedly to support Trump’s Iran war, the duplicitous Senate candidate recently pirouetted by calling to end it, citing the war’s effects on rising fuel prices in her state. Two of Hinson’s Iowa US House colleagues, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, wrestled up enough phony courage to join five other House Republicans who recently cast votes for a resolution limiting Trump’s war power authority in Iran.

So panicked about diesel prices are Hinson, Miller-Meeks, and Nunn that all three Iowa Republicans joined the handful of Republicans calling for a US diesel export ban in a desperate effort to lower pump prices before voters head to the polls. Just imagine the angry earfuls these Hawkeye State Republicans are getting from their diesel-dependent farmers, truckers, and other constituents.

For these cowardly GOPers, Trump’s corruption, human rights abuses, vanity projects, bureaucratic destruction, massive deficits, targeting of political opponents, and coddling of China and Russia were insufficient deal breakers. But surging diesel prices? Apparently, that was the step-too-far that caused these vulnerable and self-serving Republicans to finally break ranks.

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Oil slicks

Trump is scrambling to shift blame for rising diesel prices and peddle short-term solutions.

First, he tried to fault Ukraine for diesel prices, citing the country’s successful strikes on Russian oil refineries. Trump’s excuse is comical, given that he is more than 600 days into a second term during which he promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Day 1.

Next, Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent floated the idea of imposing a 90-day export ban on diesel processed by American refineries. Presumably, their hope is that the ban would temporarily inflate domestic supplies, thereby driving down pump prices before the November midterms.

However, in response to almost every other brilliant Trump economic “solution” from tariffs to trade wars, a chorus of voices immediately warned this foolish idea would backfire.

“The blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn’t work. If you can’t export the diesel that comes out of our refineries, you run out of places to store it, and you have to reduce US refining, which would put upward pressure on gasoline prices and jet fuel prices.”

More biased criticism from some Trump-deranged liberal economist? Nope: That was Trump’s own Energy Secretary and former oil executive Chris Wright. The Economist magazine and the European Union quickly echoed Wright’s warnings.

Pumped up Democrats

The doubling of diesel prices during Donald Trump’s second term is the perfect storm culmination of his disastrous economic policies.

Were he trying to raise the cost of diesel, Trump would be hard pressed to improve upon the combination of trade wars, tariffs, and a Strait of Hormuz-choking Mideast war. At this point, he may as well propose doubling the 24.4 cents per gallon federal diesel tax — at least that would generate new federal revenues to offset his record-setting budget deficits.

Only seven nations consume more diesel per capita than the United States. The doubling of diesel prices during Trump’s term is creating economic pain across the country, especially in the deep-red corners of Trump country. Diesel gas has emerged as the sleeper issue of the 2026 midterm campaign, fueling Democratic hopes of flipping both chambers of Congress, capturing governors’ offices, and gaining state legislative majorities.

As for Diesel Don, a man who probably never in his adult life filled a car tank at a service station, well, he seems to have run out of gas.

That’s it for this week

We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to support the podcast and ask us live questions during future episodes, please become a paid subscriber to Public Notice if you aren’t one already.

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We’ll be back next Friday afternoon. Until then, enjoy the show.

Ahead of PN’s 5th anniversary next week, we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep PN thriving for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

In its current role as a wholly owned subsidiary of President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice continues to make a mockery of itself.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche puffed out his chest and boasted that the DOJ had filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals against all but one district court judge in the District Court of Minnesota.

What “various judicial canons” did literally all but one of Minnesota’s federal district court judges violate and how? Well, they spoke to the New York Times and said things that made Trump sad.

You will not be surprised to learn that this does not constitute a violation of judicial ethics, but that little fact isn’t going to stop Blanche and company, now is it?

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A slippery dope

In September, then-Chief Judge for the District of Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, gave an interview to the Times, which also spoke with six of the seven other judges on Minnesota’s federal bench.

Yes, having a sitting judge talk to the press about how the administration’s behavior imperils the rule of law is unprecedented, but so is having an administration that imperils the rule of law on the regular. Schiltz specifically declined to discuss any ongoing cases, which could have caused some ethical problems. Since he didn’t, the DOJ just decided to invent, wholesale, a new judicial canon judges have to follow: “Judges are ethically prohibited from commenting publicly on cases pending in any court and making political or policy statements concerning matters that are or have been before them.”

The first half of the sentence is true and drawn from Canon 3.A.(6) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. But the second half — that judges cannot make “political or policy statements concerning matters that are or have been before them” — is nonsense that doesn’t appear anywhere in any of the canons.

In fact, it substantially misstates the canons themselves, which include a carveout in Canon 4.A.(1): “A judge may speak, write, lecture, teach, and participate in other activities concerning the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice.”

And just in case that wasn’t clear, the commentary on that canon specifically states that, well, we live in a society: “Complete separation of a judge from extrajudicial activities is neither possible nor wise; a judge should not become isolated from the society in which the judge lives. As a judicial officer and a person specially learned in the law, a judge is in a unique position to contribute to the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice, including revising substantive and procedural law and improving criminal and juvenile justice.”

Schiltz’s comments to the Times are a textbook example of discussing the legal system and the administration of justice. They were broadly about the pressures on the courts from Operation Metro Surge, not a statement about any case or even group of cases.

He even gave the DOJ a benefit of the doubt it most certainly does not deserve: “My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence, not due to conscious defiance of orders.”

So, that’s the first mendacious step here: creating a new rule out of thin air and then whining that judges aren’t following it. Then, the DOJ’s complaint takes text from the Times article and presents it as if it’s a quote from Schiltz himself. This is from the Times:

“In a rare 90-minute interview seven months later, Judge Schiltz said his order had been prompted by concern that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.”

Here’s how this is characterized in the complaint:

“During that interview, Judge Schiltz apparently told a reporter that…This purported ‘disregard’ had ‘clogg[ed] his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city [of Minneapolis] and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.’”

You see the slipperiness here? Without quite crossing the line into an outright lie, the DOJ complaint does everything to lead the reader to believe this is something Judge Schiltz actually said, rather than the New York Times’s characterization of his comments.

Other things in the complaint are, to be perfectly frank, impossible to be read as anything nefarious, even under the unhinged standards of the DOJ. For example, Schiltz told the Times that he needed to check his phone constantly during the surge because “the cost of me enjoying a movie could be somebody waking up in New Mexico the next day when they shouldn’t have.”

Here, Schiltz was commenting on the chaos of the judicial workload during the siege — that if judges were not available to address the slew of habeas petitions clogging the court, an immigrant might be sent to another jurisdiction before their petition could be heard.

This is simply a statement of fact. Detainees were transferred from Minnesota to Texas within hours, often before their intake processing was even complete. Those transfers sometimes violated existing court orders and, indeed, in a January order, Schiltz detailed some 96 court orders the administration had defied in 74 cases.

To be scrupulously fair to the administration, not all of those violations involved ICE transferring people to Texas in violation of a court order. Sometimes, they were entirely different types of violations, like refusing to release someone after multiple court orders requiring them to do so. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like much of a defense here though, now does it?

Here’s another example of what the DOJ alleges is heinously unethical behavior: “They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.” That’s from Judge John R. Tunheim, also a subject of the complaint.

However, this is not a statement about any matter pending before any court. It’s a vague, high-level opinion about ICE’s behavior. It’s also one borne out by actual facts. Of the over 3,700 people people arrested during Metro Surge, the federal government’s own data shows that less than one quarter of them had any criminal conviction on their records at all. Most were arrested for alleged violations of immigration law — which is a civil, not criminal, matter.

Here’s another slippery thing: Much of this complaint relies upon saying that the Eighth Circuit has already weighed in on judges speaking to the press and concluded that doing so in the fashion Schiltz did was impermissible. The complaint stitches together a bunch of quotes from White v. NFL, an Eighth Circuit case about whether the Atlanta Falcons were entitled to recover money from Michael Vick after he pleaded guilty to federal dogfighting charges and was suspended from the league. But the case was in the context of an ongoing, lengthy antitrust settlement consent decree that the judge, David Doty, had overseen decades earlier.

The NFL demanded the judge be removed from the case because he made comments to the press that showed bias. In evaluating that argument, the court did indeed say the things that the DOJ complaint says it did, like “self-interested behavior in submitting to press interviews may also lead to accusations that a judge will be motivated to decide issues in a way that prompts favorable media attention.”

But what the DOJ scrupulously fails to tell the Eighth Circuit in this complaint is that the White v. NFL court denied the demand for recusal, even where Doty had commented on the ongoing litigation. The court concluded that an average person would not recognize Doty’s comments as reflecting bias because they “focused almost exclusively on the well-documented history of the antitrust settlement and did not address the merits of the Vick proceeding.”

The bottom line here? The case the DOJ relies on as the standard for whether Schiltz and the other judges in Minnesota violated their ethical duties specifically held there was no such violation in that instance.

Extracting generic language from the case about assessing bias while omitting how the Eighth Circuit analyzed and applied it is the sort of thing even first-year law students know walks right up to an ethical line: mischaracterizing a case holding.

The DOJ’s complaint is also a thinly-veiled way to attack the Minnesota lower court rulings on habeas petitions. But courts have explained that “a complaint of judicial misconduct is not a vehicle for a disappointed litigant to vent his anger” and that “judicial misconduct proceedings are not a substitute for the normal appellate review process.”

The DOJ seems to believe that if a lower court rules one way and then some Trumpy judges, either at the Eighth Circuit or at the Supreme Court, overturn that ruling, it somehow reflects misconduct on the part of lower court judges. But that’s just how the law works, and everyone at the DOJ knows it.

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Rules for thee, not me

Unlike the crew at the DOJ, it’s pretty clear that Judge Schiltz talked to actual legal ethics specialists before talking to the Times, as he explained in a statement to ABC News:

“As legal-ethics experts have confirmed, I was acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to the New York Times. Indeed, in February of this year, the Committee on Codes of Conduct issued an advisory opinion to emphasize that federal judges may ‘speak[] and writ[e] on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence.’ That is exactly what I did.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time the DOJ has filed a ridiculous complaint like this. They started down this path by bringing the world’s flimsiest complaint against US District Judge James Boasberg, who the administration remains incandescently furious with for pursuing contempt proceedings after the DOJ explicitly flouted his court order to turn two planeloads of detainees around.

That’s the complaint where the DOJ said it was misconduct for Boasberg to have expressed concerns to his fellow judges that the administration might not follow court orders, which is, of course, exactly what the administration did. That complaint, similar to this one, was an attempt to intimidate a federal judge and relitigate a judge’s ruling. But in that one, the administration based its complaint on some “Attachment A” that it never provided to the court and refuses to provide to anyone else, which just highlights how flimsy and made up the whole thing is.

At the same time the administration has been demanding judges adhere to some newly invented ethics code — the core of which seems to be that you can never rule against Trump — it’s fighting to exempt DOJ attorneys from any ethical obligations whatsoever. Yes, the DOJ does not believe that misconduct should have any consequences — indeed, that state bars should not even be allowed to investigate, much less discipline, any of the motley crew still remaining at the agency.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the administration does not see itself as a litigant before the court and does not see its attorneys as bound by court orders. It sees DOJ attorneys as somehow coequal with the Supreme Court justices, the only attorneys in the federal system not bound by ethical rules.

Like so many things in the Trump era, you can thank Chief Justice John Roberts for this entire mess. Had the worst chief justice in history not overseen the wholesale degradation and kneecapping of the lower courts, we wouldn’t be here. Just as much as Todd Blanche, Roberts owns this, and it should stay a shameful millstone around his neck forever.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod this afternoon and a special Saturday edition tomorrow.

If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks for reading.

Ahead of PN’s 5th anniversary next week, we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep PN thriving for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.

To use a generous word, it’s audacious.

Over a song called “Love Me” (naturally, used without permission from the artist), the TV ad features Donald Trump vowing to “defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America” while quick cuts tout his supposed accomplishments, followed by UFC chief Dana White saying, “he’s the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves!”

Then, with a flourish of trolling, the words “Paid for by the US Government” appear at the bottom of the screen. (Watch below.)

That ad, indeed paid for by tax dollars, was one in a series produced by the White House and aired across the country. They are unambiguously illegal — and that’s part of the point.

Again and again, this administration has broken the law not just to accomplish some immediate goal, but as an assertion of power, a dominance display, to say to everyone: Donald Trump does whatever he wants, and nobody can stop him.

The good news is that while the ads are meant to help Republicans stave off disaster in the midterm elections, they will likely do just the opposite. The bad news is that they further degrade the rule of law in America, making the task of imposing accountability all the more urgent.

A fascist aesthetic

The ads follow the now-familiar Trumpian aesthetic, toggling back and forth between high production values and low-budget slop, and treading right on the line that separates fascism from camp.

While the first ad with Dana White is all about Trump himself, the second one takes a bit of a detour to argue that God and Trump have together delivered America to heights never before seen in human history. Featuring footage from one of Trump’s trips to Mount Rushmore, it could have been directed by a modern-day Leni Riefenstahl.

“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump says, over imagery meant to evoke vastness, distance, and power: helicopters flying over the mountain at sunset, an audience gazing up adoringly at him, enormous screens with his face on them, and then, shot from below, him pumping his fist before a final ejaculation of fireworks.

The last ad in the series repurposes one Trump used in the 2024 campaign, and may be the purest and most arresting of all:

In a time of voter unease and disgruntlement, political consultants advise their clients to communicate empathy and understanding, to show voters that the politician empathizes with their struggles and is working to improve their lives. But Trump will have none of that.

He is not here to help. He’s distant, angry, a figure of nothing but venom and vengeance. He walks toward the viewer like a serial killer stalking his prey, his face a mask of contempt and barely-contained rage. His visage in this ad is reminiscent of the glowering pictures erected on gigantic banners hanging from government buildings in DC, almost a parody of a dictator trying to inspire terror and subjugation (Trump likes that picture so much he made it his official portrait).

The words are just as horrifying.

“This is the final battle,” Trump says, and we know that final battles inevitably involve death and destruction even if they end in triumph.

“With you at my side,” he goes on as horror-movie music plays, “we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, marxists and fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

Who thought this would be the right message to send, with voters fed up with high gas prices and yearning for an end to the idiotic war Trump started? The answer is unsurprising: Trump himself.

The president “has personally driven the controversial, taxpayer-funded video ads,” CNN reports, “including helping select the imagery and videos used.”

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“Pretend I’m on the ballot”

Trump often claims that when he’s on the ballot, Republicans do much better than when he isn’t, and he’s not completely wrong (even if he lost the popular vote in two out of the three elections he has run in). There are at least some voters who turn out to vote for him but don’t get to the polls in midterm elections, and his strategy is to encourage those voters to mobilize.

“What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said at a recent rally. “Just come and vote. It’s so important.”

The trouble is that for every passive Trump fan who responds to this call, there may be many more voters who will hear that message and be more likely to vote for Democrats.

Right now, Trump is spectacularly unpopular; his approval ratings hover in the mid-30s, and he is under water on every policy issue. That’s especially true with the issue that tops voters’ agenda, the economy and prices. His ratings on the issue are abysmal in every poll; a recent one from Marquette University found his approval on inflation at a stunning 19 percent.

In the face of that kind of popular disgust, the president might employ any of a number of strategies. As The Atlantic reported last month, the path he chose “was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself.” Hence the ads. And while they might have gone for a more empathetic message, they’re pure Trump: angry, self-aggrandizing to the point of absurdity, utterly unpersuasive, and strategically misconceived.

Democrats probably couldn’t be happier to see these ads aired as widely as possible.

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This is all illegal

Trump could have paid for the ads with the gargantuan war chest his super PAC has amassed, helped by seven- and eight-figure contributions from corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals his administration has amply rewarded with government funds and policy changes.

Instead, the White House decided taxpayers should foot the bill.

The White House claims these are just “public service announcements,” comparing them to when previous presidents encouraged people to keep an eye out for terrorism or sign up for Medicare’s prescription drug program. The obvious difference is that there is no federal policy involved in Trump’s ads, which are just about how he’s great and his enemies must be destroyed.

Some Republicans are willing to acknowledge that the ads are a bad idea, even if they stop just short of acknowledging that what Trump is doing is illegal.

“It shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

“I think there ought to be a rule that you can’t — well, there probably is a rule,” said Sen. John Kennedy on Face the Nation. “You can’t spend public money to promote yourself.”

In fact, the ads likely violate multiple provisions of the law. There’s the “publicity and propaganda” rider Congress has inserted into every appropriations bill for the last 75 years, forbidding money to be spent on just this kind of thing. There’s also the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on the job.

While the president and vice president are not covered by the Hatch Act, everyone else in the government is subject to its provisions — meaning anyone involved in the production and distribution of these ads could be subject to prosecution. That might be an unlikely outcome, since Hatch Act prosecutions are rare. But that fact in itself is a sign of how respect for the rule of law has been degraded under Trump.

Early in his first term, adviser Kellyanne Conway, warned that she was committing a Hatch Act violation by promoting Ivanka Trump merchandise on Fox News (which the Office of Special Counsel later found that she did repeatedly), replied contemptuously: “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

The message was clear: We work for Donald Trump, and that means we’re above the law. Trump later held his 2020 convention at the White House, a four-day-long Hatch Act violation no previous president would even have contemplated.

In the time since, the administration has deployed a particular strategy when it finds the law inconvenient: Break the law, then wait for someone to stop you. Shut down entire agencies, refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, declare that you’ve changed the Constitution, ignore judicial orders, and even if the courts eventually order you to stop, by then you might have gotten the policy outcome you wanted.

That spirit of lawlessness has infected the federal government at all levels, and correcting it must be a key component of the rebuilding effort Democrats undertake the next time they control the government. The idea that the law is optional is a cancer Trump and his allies have injected into the government, and it must be excised.

Simply announcing that henceforth the law will be obeyed is not enough. There must be consequences for those who participated in the abuses of this administration, starting with exposure — including through extensive congressional investigations — extending to the immediate firing of anyone who is complicit and remains in their position after January 20, 2029, and extending to prosecutions where it’s necessary and appropriate.

“This is dumb, dumb, dumb beyond belief,” one former Trump campaign official told CNN in response to the ads the White House is now airing. “These guys are all gonna get subpoenaed. It’s gonna be bad.”

Clearly, however, Trump’s White House staff doesn’t think so. They seem to believe they have the same immunity the Supreme Court gave Trump himself in one of the most corrupt decisions in American history. But once they start getting hauled in front of the cameras — and perhaps some of them, hauled away in handcuffs — we can begin to restore some respect for the law.

That’s it for today

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Former Special Counsel Jack Smith spent four hours testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday about his investigations into President Trump’s election interference and theft of national security information.

Republicans mostly used their time to shout at the witness while affecting to clutch their pearls over his supposed attack on the rule of law. Sen. Darline Graham crying “Shame!” over her dead brother with all the affect of a Southern-fried catfish was a highlight.

But the purpose of this exercise was more than mugging for the cameras. Senate Republicans hoped to discredit Smith’s prosecutions of Trump and foster a narrative that he weaponized the Justice Department at the behest of the Biden White House. And they hoped to catch him out in some way that could be fashioned into the perjury indictment Trump has publicly demanded over and over and over.

These two objectives stand in ironic tension, particularly with Attorney General Todd Blanche leading an unabashed campaign of retribution against Trump’s enemies and publicly insisting that the president has every right to direct DOJ investigations. And Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s embarrassing f*ckup didn’t help the cause either.

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Third verse, dumb as the first

The template here isn’t new.

In 2018, Republicans seized on texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page as proof that the entire Mueller investigation was a plot to take out Trump. There was no evidence that they’d done anything inappropriate, other than use their work devices to conduct an extramarital affair. And indeed the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the investigation was properly predicated, while two separate prosecutors handpicked by Bill Barr to find wrongdoing came up essentially empty.

Nevertheless, Rep. Louie Gohmert sneered during a hearing that Strzok was obviously lying, since he was such a skilled prevaricator the he “could probably pass a polygraph.”

Compare to Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy scoffing yesterday at Smith’s claim that no one from the Biden White House instructed him to go after Trump:

Republicans have produced exactly zero evidence that Biden interfered in Smith’s investigation. The best they can come up with is that Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith just three days after Trump’s 2022 announcement that he planned to run in 2024.

Here’s Sen. John Cornyn who (unlike Gohmert) is not an actual idiot and (unlike Kennedy) doesn’t usually play one on TV, calling it yesterday “the original sin of this ill-conceived prosecution.”

In reality, 28 CFR § 600.1 requires the appointment of an outside prosecutor when the AG determines that an ongoing investigation “would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances” — an eventuality triggered by the target declaring his intent to challenge the sitting president.

Perjury trap

The plan to get Smith charged with perjury for lying to Congress is also a rerun of old GOP seasons.

In 2025, Trump's former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan — an insurance litigator with zero prosecutorial experience whom he installed as US Attorney in Virginia — charged former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress during an exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz. (See below.)

As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Anna Bower pointed out, “I stand by my testimony” cannot possibly be a lie, even if that prior testimony was false, particularly when Cruz’s question was a confusing garble of accusations and innuendo. That’s why the experienced prosecutors Trump pushed out refused to charge it in the first place.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan ran this exact play in July when he referred Smith to the DOJ for making "willfully and intentionally false statements" during closed-door testimony. Smith told the committee he never sought a search warrant for the content of legislators’ text messages — which was true! But some of those text messages with White House staff were preserved by the National Archives and turned over to Smith, so Jordan then demanded that he be prosecuted for having given “the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of Members' privileged text messages."

Thus far, Todd Blanche hasn’t taken the bait. But since he was willing to indict Comey over a picture of seashells, it’s a fair bet that he’s cooking up something.

Meanwhile, Sen. Schmitt spent yesterday’s hearing showing that he’s even less competent than Jim Jordan!

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“Hawks”

It started so well for Schmitt. He even managed to coordinate his big moment with an Axios beat sweetener by Jim VandeHei calling him “a tough-on-crime state attorney general,” seen as “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator” who “has grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate.”

Schmitt cast Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and former special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whose secret affair torpedoed the Georgia case against Trump and his co-conspirators, in the Strzok-Page role.

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” he said, as staffers briefly hoisted a poster bearing Willis and Wade’s faces next to text messages from Smith’s staffers.

Smith looked genuinely puzzled.

“What would you say if I showed you the series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors–Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” Schmitt thundered in self-righteous indignation. “I don't think you know that we have this stuff, so I will give you a second to process it so you don't perjure yourself.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had clearly clocked Schmitt’s catastrophic blunder, broke in to insist that Smith be allowed to look at the texts in question.

“I'm a former prosecutor too, and I've never seen anyone just say ‘what do you think of this’ and put it down. We need a copy of the actual texts,” she said, barely able to contain her glee.

“I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game. Caitlin Clark was playing, right around the time, and the Marshals Service was there with me,” Smith said, just about managing to hold his poker face. “You can check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, in February of 2024.”

Schmitt (or whichever staffer is currently packing his belongings and trying to find someone to take over his lease) had clearly confused the Atlanta Hawks NBA team and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes NCAA team.

“He was at an Iowa game. Is that correct?” Klobuchar asked.

“It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play,” Smith agreed.

Schmitt was momentarily thrown off his game.

“I’m glad you’re trying to rehabilitate the witness, but it’s not your time,” he spluttered, furious over the implosion of his big, made-for-TV gotcha. “I presented him with text messages about him wanting to meet with people that could obviously have been related to the prosecution that was coordinated with his office in Atlanta!“

Schmitt did not explain how attending a basketball game in Atlanta would be evidence of Smith cahootsing with DA Willis. But the GOP playbook relies on an absolute lack of shame, and so Schmitt dutifully bellied up to the microphone to celebrate his flawless victory with the chuds keeping the grift alive in Charlie Kirk’s old studio.

Schmitt says he stands by his claim that Smith is a “dirtbag” and a perjurer. And with that kind of commitment to the bit, he’s definitely a shoe-in for the VP spot.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Thanks!

The recent months of Democratic primaries frequently appeared to be battles among factions for control of the party in advance of 2028.

But, as the end of the Trump era approaches, the question should not be which faction will prevail, but whether a broad and resilient Democratic coalition can be forged in a time of political and economic crisis, as happened nearly 100 years ago during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — resulting in the New Deal policies that remade the nation for the better for decades.

The plague of growing economic inequality, and a growing national recognition that decades of radically regressive GOP policies have utterly failed, can provide an historic opportunity for Democrats to establish a “New New Deal.” The question is whether the party and its leaders will be up to that task.

Taking on fear

In 1932, FDR accepted the Democratic nomination for president by promising “a new deal for the American people” in the midst of a catastrophic Great Depression that had crushed the lives of virtually all but the wealthiest Americans.

Upon entering office, Roosevelt famously declared “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and called Congress into a special session to commence the first tranche of what was to become a remaking of the federal government, and with it the nation.

By 1936, the New Deal Congress had enacted, among many other things, the comprehensive regulation of the banking and financial systems, Social Security and the nation’s first robust protections of labor rights, ultimately overcoming opposition from some of the most powerful constituencies inside and outside the government.

But more importantly, the New Deal Democratic Party established — through hard-fought political battles, but also coalition building — a national consensus that government had an essential role to play in improving Americans’ lives.

While the New Deal was intrinsically liberal, it was constructed with buy in from every constituency. It was the pluralism of the New Deal coalition that proved to be its strength and source of resilience. It welded together constituencies that had long been in tension, and even kinetic conflict — including farmers and urban laborers and Easterners and Southerners — because all of them had substantial stakes in key elements of the programs FDR’s administration implemented.

The political and normative impact of the New Deal was extraordinary. It set much of the agenda of the federal government for decades, as the nation accepted the once radical liberal proposition that government has the authority — and even the duty — to blunt the abuses of concentrated power and wealth, attempt to end the scourge of poverty, and promote the growth of a middle class that achieved relative prosperity based solely on wages.

Republican presidents inevitably governed within the New Deal framework, even as they criticized it, and sometimes added to it — as Richard Nixon did in establishing the EPA, and with it the first comprehensive federal environmental regulations.

Democratic presidents, with varying success, sought to expand on FDR’s ambitions, most notably through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which established Medicare and Medicaid. So while LBJ’s ambitions to complete FDR’s project were blunted by his war in Vietnam, the moral and political core of the New Deal remained largely unchallenged for decades.

All of that began to change, however, in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Breeding cynicism

Reagan came of age as an actor (and an FDR Democrat) during the New Deal, but devoted his later political career to attacking and delegitimizing the New Deal project.

As Reagan’s own Depression-era generation faded away, the ideology of Reaganites — proudly rooted in the free market views of the failed president who preceded FDR, Herbert Hoover — came increasingly to prevail.

Reagan and many of his acolytes were steeped in a libertarian-tinged ideology that imagined “market forces” would bring the broad-based prosperity that the New Deal and Great Society had failed fully to deliver. But, ultimately, it was cynicism, not idealism, that turned out to be the greatest weapon in their arsenal.

Right-wing opponents of “big government” found that when they starved the government of resources and ballooned the deficit by cutting taxes, particularly for the wealthy, voters began to accept their claim that government was presumptively destructive, if not evil.

In this fundamentally changed political environment, even Democratic presidents like Clinton and Obama found their abilities to preserve the still-unfinished project of FDR routinely frustrated. The ambitious, and ultimately popular — but always economically and politically tenuous — Affordable Care Act has exemplified the problem of trying to use the levers of government to solve intractable problems after so many Americans had come to mistrust them.

The GOP’s reliance on Americans’ cynicism to power an endless assault on government was, however, always problematic.

The inevitable byproduct of ever more aggressive deregulation and increasingly regressive tax cuts was an increasingly economically unequal nation, thus putting the lie to Reagan’s promise of a shiny and universally prosperous city on a hill.

Then came the Trump GOP’s chaotic hacking away at programs intended to protect the ability of poor and working Americans to obtain healthcare, food, and shelter, with the resulting “savings” used to fund yet another tranche of deeply regressive tax cuts. Actions like the termination of enhanced ACA subsidies, which middle class self-employed voters (many of them Republican) relied on simply to stay above water, seemed almost calculated to put a thumb in the eye of the very “forgotten men and women” that Trump and his party cultivated.

The current economic situation — in which the American economy continues to grow, but working Americans have an ever-shrinking share of the wealth — has been a long time coming. But Trump’s nihilistic policies have starkly put the lie to the Reaganite promise of prosperity through assaulting the government.

America’s wage earners now receive the smallest share of the nation’s income since relevant records began to be kept after World War II. Meanwhile, Trump’s incessant paeans to the stock market actually serve to remind frustrated Americans that corporate profits continue to grow, along with the wealth of a small number of investors, while they are falling behind.

It is squeezed wage earners who bear nearly the full brunt of increased inflation, particularly the youngest members of the work force, who are largely locked out of the opportunity to buy homes and otherwise obtain the fundamental building blocks of middle-class life. Hence the palpable rage that has seen its expression in the many highly educated and relatively prosperous young people who have embraced self-declared socialist candidates during recent Democratic primaries.

It is no coincidence, then, that the reputation of a Democratic project the GOP devoted decades to defaming has begun to be revived. Democrats are increasingly taking to lionizing the New Deal and calling for its revival. And it now seems not just possible, but likely, that the next Democratic presidential candidate could effectively campaign on a program of delivering a New New Deal.

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Defining the New New Deal

Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes recently asserted that, in order to regain political momentum, “Democrats must put themselves on the side of Americans who feel as if they don’t have any power” in the way Roosevelt did at the convention in 1932. That is certainly a worthy goal. The question is how to build the kind of broad-based Democratic coalition out of the ruins left by a failed Republican project, as FDR did nearly 100 years ago.

Rhodes dismisses “establishment” Democrats’ focus on “restoring congressional tariff authority, reinstituting Obamacare subsidies and reversing Medicaid cuts” as “cloistered” and unduly “rooted in the past” — and insufficiently “populist.”

Yet it is largely the resilient popularity and importance of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (as well of the ACA) at a time of increasing economic insecurity that makes calling for a New New Deal politically salient. Put otherwise, being rooted in past Democratic successes in making American society more broadly prosperous is part and parcel of what makes such an appeal potentially effective.

Indeed, self-described progressive candidates — such as Troy Jackson in Maine — are placing initiatives like restoring the GOP’s Medicaid cuts (which are overwhelmingly unpopular) at the center of their campaigns.

That is not to say that entirely new elements won’t be essential to the success of a New New Deal. After all, the economic and political realities of the current moment are far different from those FDR confronted in the 1930s.

For example, as progressives contend, the time has long passed for fundamental reforms to the funding of medical care; though, like all intractable problems, it is one without easy solutions. Champions of “Medicare for All” often ignore the fact that the existing Medicare program is on the road to insolvency. Even more radical reforms, which limit the profits of the massively profitable healthcare sector, are probably required, though they will be politically difficult to achieve.

Second, reforming the housing market — which is currently skewed in class terms, but also by age, with the growing class of seniors owning an outsized portion of the nation’s residential property — also presents a massively challenging political and economic puzzle.

Finally, redistributing the increasing concentration of wealth that now threatens to equal that during the Gilded Age will be both the most politically challenging, and essential, element of any New New Deal.

The “AI revolution” is projected to consume a greater percentage of the nation’s GDP than the railroad industry during the later 19th century. And, absent reforms, the vast majority of the wealth resulting from this new tech revolution will be captured by a small cohort of the super rich, further increasing the nation’s economic inequality.

The massively wealthy do not give up even fractions of their wealth easily, particularly when they have spent as much time and effort wiring the government in their favor as they have during the Trump era. Yet the surprisingly universal outbursts of opposition to AI data centers is an initial indication that Americans are losing their patience for the ever-growing concentration of wealth in the hands or a handful of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and the companies they control.

It is that kind of well justified anger that could provide the starting point for the broad-based coalition Democrats long believed had passed beyond their reach — if party leaders now start doing the hard work of determining how to productively harness it, as President Obama recently suggested.

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Coalition building, not factionalism

The very nature of the evil Trumpism has exacerbated — a country facing an ever-growing gap between the extremely rich and most everyone else — creates the potential for building a broad-based Democratic coalition on a scale unseen in decades. And despite the urgency of the circumstances, there is little doubt that the US has the economic resources to improve the quality of life of virtually all of its citizens.

But diverse coalitions like FDR’s are rarely successfully built for a reason. They require balancing the interests of, and inevitably regularly upsetting, extremely divergent cohorts of voters and interests. The success of them comes from sustaining a recognition of broader common interests and a willingness to compromise to achieve them.

Most notably, FDR had to balance Southern and Northern Democrats in an always fractious alliance, which forced him to make some uncomfortable compromises. That alliance ultimately collapsed decades later in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, setting the stage for the election of Reagan.

A certain way for Democrats to lose the political opportunity presented by the end of the Trump era will be to descend into factionalism, as the infighting within the party during recent months have sometimes appeared to threaten. As in 1932, much will depend on who the Democratic nominee for president is in 2028. The candidate will have to have the extraordinary political skills necessary to lead the party to victory and to a New New Deal, and constituencies will have to be willing to make the hard compromises required to achieve such a result.

That’s it for today

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China is all but openly working to help Iran in its war with the United States. Beijing has aided the Iranian leadership in avoiding billions of dollars in US sanctions on its oil sales, sent the regime components and chemicals for use in drones and military systems, and even reportedly has helped Iran kill American troops.

But you would never know that China is an adversary from the welcome President Trump gave Chinese President Xi Jinping at their summit last week.

Trump personally met Xi at the airport and literally rolled out the red carpet.

The Air Force marching band played while planes executed an honorary flyover. Later, Trump showed Xi a mocking portrait of an autopen supposedly associated with former President Joe Biden. The two laughed together, bonding over their shared contempt for Trump’s Democratic predecessor.

Trump’s obsequious performance before an authoritarian ruler actively aiding an opponent in wartime drew bipartisan exasperation. It also provoked a certain amount of bafflement. Trump throws tantrums and damaging trade wars at utterly imaginary sleights from close allies like Canada. Yet he falls to his orange belly to abase himself before a country that is directly endangering US troops.

What is he thinking?

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As an American expat living in Canada, I have a front row seat to the destruction of the United States’ international reputation. It shows up in all sorts of little ways in my day-to-day life that most Americans wouldn’t see.

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We’ll be back next week. Until then, enjoy the show.

A note from Aaron: We’re running our first ever member drive ahead of Public Notice’s fifth anniversary on October 5. To read our coverage this week, please support PN by taking advantage of our special offer and signing up for a yearly paid subscription for just $40 (or about 16¢ per edition).

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At a campaign rally in Arizona almost exactly two years ago, Donald Trump promised that interest rates on home mortgages would fall if he was again elected president.

“Today the mortgage rates are at 10 percent, 11 percent, 12 percent,” Trump said at the rally, incorrectly inflating rates that were around 7 percent at the time. “We will drive down the rate so you will be able to pay 2 percent again, and we will be able to finance or refinance your homes drastically at much lower costs.”

Not only has Trump failed to lower rates, but those rates will now almost surely continue to rise higher than the 7 percent Trump complained about in 2024. That’s because Treasury yields recently touched numbers not seen since just before the 2008 financial crash, and the Federal Reserve raised interest rates last week in an attempt to lower inflation that is ravaging Americans’ day-to-day finances. On Thursday, mortgage rates topped 7% for the first time in a year.

Both developments will result — at least temporarily — in mortgage and other interest rates for loans on things like credit cards and cars to continue to rise.

Just weeks out from midterm elections that are shaping up to be a bloodbath for Republicans, Trump and his minions are resorting to blaming Biden at each and every opportunity for the fact most Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the economy.

But the fact of the matter is Trump has no one to blame but himself.

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Earlier this month at the poorly attended Republican Party midterm convention in Dallas, Donald Trump yet again said the quiet part out loud.

He asked his assembled followers to raise their right hands and pledge to him: “I will go out with my family, my friends — I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not — I’m gonna try and cheat like hell like they do.”

Was Trump’s call for MAGA voters to cheat in the November midterms another trigger-the-libs comment to be taken neither literally nor seriously? Maybe. But this is the same Trump who in an infamous call on January 2, 2021, asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes — one more than his deficit to Joe Biden in the state’s popular vote at that point.

Having learned at the elbow of his crooked surrogate father Roy Cohn, Trump believes in a scam-or-be-scammed world in which only suckers refuse to lie, cheat, and steal. Throughout his life he has tried, and often succeeded, to cheat at almost everything.

He is America’s commander in cheat, a politician who rarely plays by the rules and who lustily fleeces friends and foes alike.

Cheaters win plenty

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One of the defining features of politics in this era is the iron grip Donald Trump has on the Republican Party.

It’s fair to say that no modern president has enjoyed this kind of near-unanimity of support from his party for so long. With only occasional exceptions, Republican politicians do not criticize him, they do not question him, and they do not express doubts in public about him.

This loyalty did not emerge organically; it took time for Trump to create it, mostly through fear. Every GOP officeholder knows that dissent may be met with ostracism, vicious personal insults, and a primary challenge. No backbench congressman wants to find themselves suddenly famous because the president has singled them out for an attack on Truth Social.

Consequently, the rational strategy for Republicans hoping to survive — and survival is the most fundamental goal for any politician — has been to stay by Trump’s side.

But with just six weeks to go before Election Day, that edifice of loyalty has begun to crumble. Multiple Republican candidates — even some who not long ago donned red MAGA hats — have decided that their survival calculation has been flipped upside-down, and now the riskiest move isn’t to break from Trump; the riskiest move is to stick with him unequivocally.

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President Trump is mad at the media again. And, as with all things, he’s handling it super well, with a measured, sober, totally legal response.

OK, wait. He’s doing the opposite. He just arbitrarily barred three outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — because he doesn’t like their coverage.

It is eternally wearying to say this sort of thing, but this isn’t normal, and it isn’t how government has worked for, well, forever. It’s also not how the Constitution works, which is why the outlets are suing.

Your uncle who likes to forward hyperbolic emails from conservatives probably already sent you something about how former President Biden did far worse and removed press credentials from over 400 news agencies. You will not be surprised to find out these things are not remotely the same.

But it’s useful to look at what Biden actually did to see exactly why what Trump’s doing is so, so wrong.

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All presidents in the past have asked Americans for their support. Trump, in contrast, rarely speaks to voters, or to anyone, without threatening and bullying.

His conduct at a rally in North Carolina last week was case in point.

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