Yesterday brought another ICE shooting, this time in New York City. Yesterday afternoon, officers opened fire on a man they were trying to arrest, 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, an illegal immigrant from Senegal. An officer fired seven rounds into Belgal’s car, striking him in the neck, as his horrified five-year-old looked on from the back seat. Why was he shot? We don’t know: Homeland Security hasn’t claimed he was resisting arrest, attacking an officer, or anything else that might have provoked such a response. Given how often the department has falsely claimed that its victims were behaving violently, the absence of such a claim in this case is notable.

ICE officers aided Belgal at the scene, and he was treated at a local hospital before being taken back into ICE custody. Belgal is a criminal, with a grand larceny conviction and other cases pending against him. That ICE should arrest and deport such people is a good thing. That they should do it so hamfistedly that they empty a magazine into a car with a young child inside is not. Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live today at 12:30 p.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Citizens or Voyeurs?

by William Kristol

Last Friday, I wrote that a recent speech by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was “all political bluster. But it’s a particular kind of political bluster. It’s neo-fascist bluster.” I cited Hegseth’s celebration of irrationalism and machismo, identified by Umberto Eco as two key elements of what he calls “Ur-Fascism.”

Another familiar feature of fascism is the transformation of politics into spectacle. Fascism wants to reduce active citizens to passive observers, indeed into voyeurs—especially voyeurs of cruelty and death. Such degradation of a democratic public is key to fascism’s project and to its success.

This has been understood for a long time. The Roman Empire, to which modern fascism appealed as a model, featured bread and circuses. Among those circuses were spectacles of death, including the killing of criminals—and of others—by wild animals. These spectacles were called damnatio ad bestias—condemnation to beasts—and were part of the inaugural games of the Roman Colosseum in 80 A.D.

Yesterday, the secretary of defense of the United States told far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec that he wanted the execution by firing squad of the Fort Hood mass murderer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, to be a public spectacle. Hegseth said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public.” This wasn’t just Hegseth popping off. The Defense Department followed up a few hours later with an official statement that Hasan’s execution, scheduled for December 3, will be live-streamed for the public to watch.

Hegseth’s claimed rationale for the livestream is ludicrous: “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Really? Would the American people fail to understand that the death penalty has been carried out if the execution of the criminal weren’t live-streamed?

Of course not. The reason this is happening is that the Trump administration wants to join regimes like Iran and Afghanistan in making public executions spectacles. It’s eager to follow the example of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS in livestreaming them.

Tuaut de La Bouverie, an official during the Terror in Revolutionary France, explained the need for public executions in the National Assembly in 1791: “It takes a terrifying spectacle to hold the people in check.”

But this isn’t merely about holding the people in check. It’s about degrading the people. It’s about desensitizing the public. It’s about normalizing cruelty. It’s about turning citizens into voyeurs—in this case, into voyeurs of a snuff film.

The United States military is far better than this. Senior officials should protest, and if necessary resign, rather than being complicit in the voyeuristic degradation of our democracy.

The Nationalist Right Is Done with Israel

by Joshua Tait

This year’s National Conservatism Conference, hosted this week in Jerusalem, should have been a homecoming for its head honcho, the Israeli-American nationalist thinker Yoram Hazony. Instead, it was a catastrophe. Representatives of the various strands of the MAGA new right have taken the opportunity to break up with Israel—and, for good measure, to tell Jews to stop calling them antisemites. “America First,” it seems, doesn’t leave any room for Israel.

On the third anniversary of the October 7th attacks, a panel chaired by Hazony himself and nominally on the “American Right: The Next Generation” went totally off the rails. Matthew Peterson, editor in chief of the Blaze and formerly of the Claremont Institute, began by insisting that America and Israel had no special relationship. It only got worse for Hazony from there. Each panelist—from the right-wing filmmaker Amanda Milius to the racist podcaster Jonathan Keeperman and the Christian nationalist former Trump administration functionary William Wolfe—made the same points with increasing intensity.

Why is the right breaking with Israel? It “has become the perfect symbol of foreign policy excess,” said Keeperman, who is Jewish. Young right-wing Americans don’t have the attachment to Israel felt by their elders. Nor does special pleading work. “The Holocaust, and the on-again, off-again persecution of Jews . . . no longer resonates in the way it did when the Holocaust was still in living memory,” and may actually turn off the vitalist young right. “We want our national sovereignty back,” Wolfe declared. He described right-wing staffers who see congressmen with Israeli flags in front of their offices and think, “They say ‘America First,’ and this looks like sort of ‘America First plus Israel First.’”

Unlike their conservative forebears, young rightists don’t see their interests aligned with Israel, associating it instead with “forever wars” in the Middle East.

But of course, the other great offense was immigration. Peterson suggested the Israeli right needed to support American nativism, while Keeperman complained that Jewish neoconservatives’ opposition to Trump and liberal Jews’ support for mass immigration (and demonization of the right) has damaged any Jewish–right-wing alliance. The panelists seemed to see the Israelis as nationalists who ought to recognize that America has its own interests, while treating Jewish Americans as either part of the new right, with an “attenuated” relationship to Israel, or as a perhaps naive part of the progressive left.

The panelists were united on one specific point: Forget Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the groypers, Jews need to stop calling right-wingers antisemites. “Many of us stopped playing this game a long time ago because it was the left’s central tactic,” said Peterson.

Which is to say that the young right is shameless.

Some panelists pointed out that evangelicals, not Jews, are the main pro-Israel constituency in America. Wolfe, the Christian nationalist, dissented, suggesting that American Jews needed to “know their place.” “Why is it that so much of our national political conversation on the American right is dominated by people who compose one out of seventy or eighty of our voters?” he wondered aloud. After dwelling on Jewish views on abortion rights, Wolfe said that when he thinks of Jews, “I think of people who are my political opponents because they are.”

People used to get exiled from polite conservative society for this sort of stuff.

But Peterson, Keeperman, and Wolfe agreed that there’s no going back to an earlier conservative dispensation. In fact, they allege accusations of antisemitism are really about “the remnants of the prior establishment on the right in America [who] hope that when Trump leaves the scene, they will rise to power once again,” according to Peterson.

Well, guess what? “We support JD Vance. MAGA supports JD Vance,” Wolfe declared about the MAGA new right darling. And, he added, “JD Vance is not an antisemite.”

As for Hazony, who’s spent years attempting to wed a conservative America to a conservative Israel: You sow the nationalist wind, you reap the America First whirlwind.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Bigot Behind Brian Fitzpatrick’s Attack Ads… The embattled congressman has been pushing wild claims made by a family friend with a history of bizarre criminality and despicable social media posts, reports BRENDAN HARTNETT.

• How Vance and Thiel Get the Antichrist Backwards… One is doing a bit of cynical pandering, the other is condemning anyone opposed to the tech future—and neither is willing to look in the mirror, writes MATTHEW D. TAYLOR.

• The Knifeman and the Apparatchik… SONNY BUNCH on Ari Emanuel’s and Bob Chapek’s new memoirs. Plus: Let the Oscar race begin! KATEY RICH and CHRISTOPHER ROSEN, the Prestige Junkies, join to discuss Oscars 2027!

Quick Hits

SOCIALISM IS WHATEVER, MAN: Vladimir Lenin famously declared, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country.” JD Vance, the American vice president, has graced us with what is sure to be an equally legendary definition of socialism. At a presentation on “combating fraud and abuse in work visa programs,” Vance was asked how he defined the term. After some verbiage about socialists not “prioritizing workers,” Vance offered this zinger: “I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”

In other words: Anything I don’t like is socialism. Or, in an acerbic addendum from Cato Institute Vice President Scott Lincicome: “Anything I don’t like is socialism—including capitalism.”

Lincicome also noted that if Vance had accurately defined socialism, he would have had to include the second Trump administration’s grab of ownership stakes in 35 corporations. Indeed, it’s not for nothing that in August, Robert Wolf, a former economic advisor to Barack Obama, called Trump “the most powerful socialist in the country today”—citing not only the state seizures but such market interventions as price controls on pharmaceuticals and farm bailouts. One could add “promising every American a $5,000 payout as a reward for keeping a one-party system in power”: Sounds pretty socialist to me!

Vance’s much-derided snark underscores what we all know already: The Trump administration’s anticommunist crusade is not about communism or socialism—it’s about tagging the Democrats with a scary buzzword. I can’t wait for Vance to offer his definition of communism: Insensitive comments about Charlie Kirk and Haitian migrants barbecuing cats?

–Cathy Young

IN ABSENTIA: As they try to shore up their chances of holding their Senate seat, Texas Republicans have suddenly seized on a new line: Where is James Talarico? Ted Cruz tweeted a picture of a missing-person ad on a milk carton: “Have you seen this man?” At a MAGA rally Wednesday, Ken Paxton tried to lead the crowd in a (rhythmless, shambolic) chant of “Where is James Talarico?” A little later, Donald Trump claimed that Talarico had gotten sick from having to eat meat at campaign events—because he’s vegan, you see.1

They’ve got a point! Talarico hasn’t done an in-person campaign event since September 28—the result, he said at a virtual event September 30, of a flu diagnosis that had sent him to urgent care. “If I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself,” Talarico said, “so I thought the best thing to do was to put safety first and put everyone’s health first.”

Texas is a weird place to campaign: It’s so enormous, populous, and sprawling that actual retail politics matters very little, except as a means of generating content. It’s simply not possible to establish a grip-and-grin connection with enough voters to matter. But that doesn’t mean these attacks don’t stand a chance of actually hurting Talarico: You don’t want voters to think of you as the candidate who got knocked out for weeks of the home stretch by the flu.

In a statement, Talarico spokesman JT Ennis said that the candidate would be back on the trail this weekend. “Ken Paxton has been ignoring Texans this entire campaign,” he added. “He doesn’t answer to the people of this state—he answers to his billionaire megadonors and special interests.”

SEE JEFF GROVEL: Being one of the richest people in history only gets you so far. In an interview on Fox News this week, Jeff Bezos accidentally committed a faux pas against the emperor: He referred to AI technology as “AI.” His interviewer, Bret Baier, was quick to press the question: “By the way, the president says ‘SI.’ Are you into ‘SI’?”

Bezos’s pivot was instant. “I do like ‘SI,’ because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring—‘artificial’ sort of means fake.”

Which, yeah: It is fake. It is constructed. AI is an insanely complex computer program performing a very compelling—but ultimately fake—simulacrum of intelligence. Bezos justifiably got roasted online for this servile display. But he knows what side his bread is buttered on, and Donald Trump has decided to make continued use of the term “AI” an excommunicable offense. “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Trump posted yesterday on Truth Social.

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Cheap Shots

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Donald Trump is a friendly boss; he lets his top aides freelance. Two of those aides, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, are spending most of their time spearheading midterms spending for Trump’s PAC. But last week, they both managed to find time for a quick trip to the Balkans, where—the New York Times reports—they have each been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to consult on behalf of the pro-Russian sub-national government in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seems fine. Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live today at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

The Blue Wave. The Rocky Shore.

by William Kristol

It could be the best of elections. So it makes sense to be hopeful. But it’s surely the worst of administrations. So it makes sense to be alarmed.

On the hopeful side: The blue wave shows no sign of abating. Democrats are doing a decent job of getting out of their own way. Meanwhile Donald Trump is traveling around the country and doing his best to make the election about himself.

Which is good.

According to the polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne, President Trump’s job disapproval stands at 61.9 percent, compared to 35 percent approval. The Democratic advantage on FiftyPlusOne’s average of the generic congressional polling is a still impressive but less overwhelming 51.1 percent to 43.4 percent.

There’s a simple lesson here: The more this election is about Trump, the better. The more the generic ballot numbers move towards the presidential approval numbers, the better. The more Trump visits competitive states for rallies that are all about himself, the better. The more ads we see that feature Trump, the better.

Yesterday morning, stung by media reports that his rallies aren’t what they once were, Trump posted:

My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. . . . It’s all happening! The Dumocrats [sic, needless to say] never counted on this. Watch for the “Midterm Surprise!”

About an hour and a half later, Trump had a further thought to share, this time in ALL CAPS:

MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!

Lots of Republicans would beg to differ with the leader of their party. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, apparently has decided not to join Trump’s rally tonight in San Antonio. After all, as Abbott explained, “Because of my schedule, where I go to multiple cities a day doing events like this, I already have events like this scheduled that day and will not be able to make it.”

It will be amusing to see what important event Abbott’s attending that couldn’t have been rescheduled to make room for the president. And it will be interesting to see if Trump takes offense at the slight. A little intra-Republican squabbling in these closing weeks couldn’t hurt Democrats’ chances, either.

So much for Trump and the GOP.

As for the Democrats, they’re doing a pretty good job of riding the wave of voter discontent. They’re keeping the focus on the Trump administration’s failures and corruption, and on the Republican Congress’s complicity in them. They don’t even seem to be over-thinking things and tying themselves in knots nearly as much as they normally do.

Their biggest problem may be that many of their big donors and key operatives don’t seem to realize what a historic moment this year could be. They’re being cautious when their party has a golden opportunity to win senate seats and governorships that have long appeared to be out of reach. Democrats have a chance to turn a shrinking map into an expanding one.

The implications of a Democratic senate majority of fifty-four seats would be very different from getting to fifty-one. And as for governorships, six of the ten most-populous states now have Democratic governors, and Democrats seem unlikely to lose any of them this November. But in the other four of the ten most-populous states—Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Georgia—the gubernatorial races are competitive. If Democrats win, say, two of the four, they’d govern eight of the ten largest states, and twelve of the largest fifteen. This would affect the character of our politics going into 2028 and beyond.

So there’s reason to be hopeful.

But there are reasons to remain alarmed.

The main reason is obvious: Trump and his loyalists will control the levers of executive power over the next two years. You’d have to be crazy not to be alarmed by what they can do during this time—to our nation’s well-being at home and to its standing abroad, to our civil liberties and civil service, to any remaining guardrails against corruption and lawlessness. So Donald Trump and JD Vance, Todd Blanche and Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought in positions of great power remain a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic.

As do their collaborators outside the government. The public has moved pretty decisively in the right direction over the past two years. Our elites have not. Some are eagerly taking advantage of the benefits of crony capitalism. Others, intimidated, are cowering or cutting deals. Few are standing up to autocracy.

And all of this is to say nothing of the threat to free and fair elections in 2028. Trump and his cabinet officials, and all the loyalists they’ve stuffed into government agencies, really do not want to lose power in 2028. They don’t want a new administration to come in and turn over the rocks to uncover their corruption and lawlessness. The threat of election interference in 2026 has been worrisome. But the threats in 2028 will be of a whole different order of magnitude. And the stronger the popular opposition to Trump and Trumpism becomes, the more determined Trump and his authoritarians will be to subvert the democratic process.

So be hopeful and alarmed. And organize, persuade, and vote. It’s our country, after all, either to nobly save or meanly lose.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• MAGA’s Racism Is Blowing Up Its Own Coalition… WILL SOMMER joins SARAH and JVL for a wild, wild NEXT LEVEL.

• Ex-CIA Officer Reacts to Insane Spy Scandal Rocking the Intelligence World… Reporter MICHAEL WEISS and former CIA officer MARC POLYMEROPOULOS break down a staggering spy scandal involving the former head of German intelligence, and discuss an alleged Iranian plot targeting U.S. bombers in Britain.

• Scott Bessent’s Interview Gets Weirder and Weirder… How big is the treasury secretary’s ego? CATHERINE RAMPELL tries to get a sense in Receipts.

• Massive Cash Infusion Coming to Dems, Courtesy of Gun-Control Group… New ads are set to run in key battleground House districts, reports JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.

Quick Hits

NOW WE JUST FEEL BAD FOR HIM: At this point, Ken Paxton may never open his mouth in a private fundraiser again. First it was the New York Times reporting that Paxton had privately admitted Trump’s midterm convention hurt him. Then it was Politico releasing audio in which Paxton complained that “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign” because “it’s all coming from D.C.” And this morning, Axios released even more audio of Paxton lamenting that the Iran war and gas and diesel prices were “dragging” on his campaign.

“So many factors in this federal race are uncontrollable,” Paxton said in the audio. “I don’t make the decisions, and I don’t . . . know what’s behind some of the decisions.”

All of the leaked audio in question is sourced from the same small fundraiser last month, which suggests Paxton was unlucky enough to let a very determined hater into the room: Not only was the leaker eager to release damaging audio, but he or she has been drip-feeding it into the news—different days, different outlets—to keep the story hanging around and maximize the damage against Paxton. I tell you what, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

STILL REFUSING TO LOSE: All this time later, Ukraine is still holding tough. The New York Times reports on Ukraine’s fruitful counteroffensive in the Donbas:

A monthslong Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern part of the Donbas has thwarted Russian efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the region. Russia, Western analysts say, has lost dozens of square miles of territory during the Ukrainian campaign, which Kyiv is calling Operation Vivaldi.

In the southern Donbas, Russia continues to mount furious assaults to break through Ukrainian lines. But Kyiv has reorganized its defense there and has so far kept the Russian military from pressing farther in its efforts to surround the major Donbas cities.

More broadly, Russian gains across Ukraine have slowed markedly in 2026 from their already glacial pace of last year. September was the worst month in net territorial gains for Russia inside Ukraine since June 2023, according to the Finland-based research firm Black Bird Group.

Read the whole thing.

MAINE DEBATE: Sen. Susan Collins has been a unicorn in politics: a GOP senator who has enjoyed consistent success in her blue state of Maine no matter how bad the national environment. But she’s never faced a wave environment quite like this one, and she’s working hard to pull one more rabbit out of her hat.

Yesterday, Collins and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson had a televised debate—their first of four over the next ten days. Unsurprisingly, Jackson’s main strategy was to do everything he could to tie Collins to Trump. He castigated her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said that Mainers shouldn’t trust her to pick the next justice who comes up for confirmation, and scoffed at her track record of voting for Trump’s priorities while using her leverage only to get certain kickbacks and carveouts for Maine. “Sen. Collins is like an arsonist who set the fire and then she wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put it out,” Jackson said.

Read other takeaways from the debate from the New York Times here.

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Cheap Shots

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Ben Parker and Bill Kristol discuss Donald Trump’s increasingly frantic attacks as Republicans face a surprisingly competitive Senate race in South Carolina, including Trump’s use of an anti-trans slur against Democratic candidate Annie Andrews. They examine what the race says about the Republican Party’s standing heading into the midterms and whether D…

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The hot-mic moments just keep coming for Texas GOP Senate hopeful Ken Paxton. Last week, it was leaked audio of Paxton admitting that Trump’s ballyhooed midterm convention had actually hurt his numbers. This week, it’s audio of Paxton complaining about how little control he has over his own campaign strategy—since most of the money behind him is super PAC money from Trump. “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter,” Paxton told a small fundraiser room, “because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.” Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Ben Parker for Morning Shots Live today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

The President’s Palmetto Preoccupation

by William Kristol

The nineteenth-century American writer Henry David Thoreau famously claimed that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I’ve always thought this assertion unfair, even untrue. But it’s neither unfair nor untrue to observe that one man, Donald J. Trump, is today exhibiting clear signs of not-at-all-quiet desperation.

Yesterday afternoon, for example, Trump was engaged in a typical flurry of posts alternately attacking the media and promising $5,000 to Americans if they re-elect Republican majorities in Congress. And then out of the blue came an attack on the Democratic senate nominee in South Carolina:

Annie “Trannie” Andrews is running against our wonderful Darline Graham for the Senate in South Carolina. . . . Darline is a High Quality person, maybe the Highest, and Annie Trannie is not, in particular, as it pertains to representing the Values of the Great People of South Carolina—She is in favor of Transgender for Everyone, Open Borders, Defunding the Police, High Taxes, a Weak Military, and will absolutely fight to take your guns away—In other words, she is against our Great Second Amendment! Trannie is not for South Carolina, and South Carolina must show, in the upcoming Election, that it is not for her. VOTE FOR DARLINE GRAHAM—SHE HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT, AND WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Before going on to explain Trump’s sudden interest in the South Carolina contest, I do want to note that his bigotry is of course revolting. In a civilized era, it would be shocking to see it coming from a president of the United States. But we do not live in a civilized era. In a non-cowardly era, the slur would be denounced by Republicans as well as Democrats. But we do not live in a non-cowardly era. In a better era, Andrews’s Republican opponent, Sen. Darline Graham, would step up to criticize a supporter for using the term. But we do not live in a better era.

Why, though, this sudden attack on Dr. Annie Andrews, of all people? She’s running for a supposedly safe Republican seat. And since she knows that she needs to win Trump voters over to have a path to victory, she’s actually been sparing in her own attacks on Trump. Consider her response to Trump’s post yesterday:

As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina. And I’m going to work with anyone to put South Carolina first, because lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together. If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you.

So why was Andrews on Trump’s mind? He hasn’t been to South Carolina recently, and isn’t scheduled to go soon. When Natalie Harp (presumably) sent the post on his behalf at 5:23 p.m. yesterday, she and her boss were on Air Force One, heading to Nebraska, where Trump was going to campaign for that state’s endangered Republican, Sen. Pete Ricketts.

So why the rhetorical detour to South Carolina? I’d like to think that it was because yesterday, on Tim Miller’s podcast, I went out on a limb and suggested that Andrews had a real chance to win. Could it be that Trump was watching the most recent Bulwark Daily podcast on Air Force One?

Who knows? Only Natalie, I suppose. But. I suspect the explanation is simple: In recent political updates from staff, Trump has been told that South Carolina looked surprisingly competitive.

And it is. The two most recent public polls on the South Carolina race, one of them from a decidedly Republican-friendly firm, have Graham leading by only one point. A news story over the weekend noted that “Republicans, for their part, said they expected Ms. Graham to need a financial boost to secure a win in the end,” and that there were “conversations about getting more help for Darline.” And then, just this morning, Axios reported that the main Republican Senate super PAC is shifting $5 million to South Carolina to help Graham.

It seems President Trump and I are not the only ones who reached the conclusion that South Carolina is in play. And with a wave of the sort we’re seeing, why shouldn’t it be? After all, Trump won Nebraska in 2024 by a wider margin than South Carolina, and he was in Nebraska last night trying to help save that Republican incumbent. And last weekend’s New York Times/Siena polls had Democratic senate candidates up by seven and six points in Alaska and Texas, and South Carolina was only about five points more Republican in 2024 than those two states.

So with a wave this real, and this big, and probably still getting bigger, even South Carolina could be swept away. And so Trump is living a life of noisy desperation.

Thoreau remarks later on in Walden that “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Trump is not a man of wisdom. He will say and do desperate things over the next four weeks, and over the next two years. So while enjoying the change in circumstances that is making Trump desperate, we should also prepare for the dangers we’ll face from a desperate and unhinged megalomaniac in control of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Sen. Annie Andrews—along with her colleagues—will have her work cut out for her over the next couple of years.

EXCLUSIVE: Recordings show Stacy Garrity claiming Trump’s data center plan as her own

by Brendan Hartnett

As Andrew wrote in Morning Shots in August, politicians are suddenly noticing that everybody hates data centers. The data center backlash is moving so quickly that politicians are scrambling to keep up—sometimes contradicting themselves in the process. Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity publicly supported data centers in the summer of 2025. Then, according to audio obtained exclusively by The Bulwark, she voiced the same opinion at a December 2025 Greene County Republicans event, saying that while people hold “mixed views” of data centers, they are a “nice opportunity for rural PA, where we have a lot of space where it wouldn’t be so intrusive.” Two months later, at an Elk County meet-and-greet, Garrity dismissed voters’ concerns about the noise generated by data centers and their impact on energy prices on the grounds that “there’s some misinformation out there,” according to the audio recordings.

Then in May, Garrity called for a pause on construction of new data centers.

Garrity insisted she hadn’t switched at all. In July she stated that her “position has not changed: It’s up to the communities.”

More recently, however, she’s mirrored Trump’s position. Last month, according to the recordings shared with The Bulwark, she told a voter at a campaign event in Westmoreland County that her policy was the same as President Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”—a voluntary pledge without enforcement mechanisms that asks hyperscalers and tech companies to provide their own electricity to avoid raising rates on locals—“except mine was before the president.” She continued, “I agree with Trump, I’m glad he put it out.”

We reached out to Garrity’s campaign asking if her views on data centers have changed. A spokesperson pointed us to Garrity’s January 2026 remarks at the Pennsylvania Press Club when she said, “There are a lot of areas where you could put data centers where communities would welcome them, but you have to engage with them, you have to talk to them, you just can’t jam it down their throat.” The spokesperson noted that this is “the same answer to a question that the Governor has sliced and diced for his advertising purposes where he leaves out the second part of her statement,” and pointed to “Josh Shapiro’s position and ‘evolution’ on the issue,” accusing him of “selling out the people of Pennsylvania for his own political gain.”

As Garrity’s campaign has pointed out, and The Bulwark previously reported, incumbent Gov. Josh Shapiro has in fact changed his position on the issue. Shapiro started out with a mission to make Pennsylvania an AI haven before signing an order with new restrictions on data center development statewide. The difference is that while Shapiro has held two different positions, he at least admits it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Pete Hegseth Made Six Big Announcements. MARK HERTLIG Has Lots of Questions. Like: Who? And: Why? Among others.

• In Retrospect, the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Marked the End of the Gender Politics Debate… Once America decided openly talking about sexual assault was bearable, it was over, argues ILYSE HOGUE.

• Florida MAGA Candidate Was Against Jan. 6th Before He Was For It… Casey Askar deleted his tweets that called into question his pro-Trump, pro-MAHA credentials, reports BRENDAN HARTNETT.

• Trump’s $500 Checks Come With a Nasty Catch… On Bulwark Takes, CATHERINE RAMPELL and JONATHAN COHN give their takes on Donald Trump’s latest checks to Americans, including $500 payments to some ACA marketplace enrollees and $90 payments to certain Medicare recipients.

• A Small Montana Town Tells Ben Shapiro to F*ck Off… The Daily Wire wanted a backdrop to film an Antifa siege. The filmmakers got a revolt over their own behavior, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.

• Thinking Ahead… If the Russian plague incident threatens another pandemic, should the Bulwark team form a polycule?! BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.

Quick Hits

VIBE CHECK ALASKA: Just how far can the vibes shift ahead of next month’s midterms? When the 2026 cycle began, the political handicappers at Sabato’s Crystal Ball rated Alaska’s Senate contest as “safe Republican.” They then re-rated it as a toss-up. And today, Sabato moved the same contest between GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic challenger Rep. Mary Peltola to “leans Democratic.” Sabato’s article lays out the data:

A recent New York Times/Siena University survey conducted among likely voters has Peltola leading Sen. Dan Sullivan 50%-43%, while a September AARP poll from the bipartisan firms Fabrizio Ward (R) and Impact Research (D) had her ahead 46%-41% on the initial ballot and 53%-47% after accounting for ranked-choice-voting. The NYT poll found Sullivan leading 47%-45% when they looked at the race in June.

Read the whole thing.

MR. MONEYBAGS: Republicans, by and large, have been losing the national conversation to Democrats. But they do still have one major advantage: A reservoir of campaign cash that far outstrips their opponents’. If, that is, they can convince Donald Trump—whose affiliated super PACs are the biggest thing in Republican fundraising—to shell out for the home stretch. Politico reports:

The word on John Thune’s mind these days is “resources.”

“I think the president is sincerely interested in trying to do whatever he can to help the team,” Thune said about his midterm conversations with the president and his advisers. “I also share with him, too, the importance of just the resources in some of these states. You know, some of the states have gotten very expensive.”

As Trump focuses on turning out his own voters—a message the president is taking into his own hands in a series of preelection rallies—Thune is making sure he also has money on his mind: “I . . . just conveyed to him the importance of ensuring that our candidates are well-resourced.”

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Andrew Egger joins Bill Kristol after an extraordinary 24 hours in Ohio: attending the funeral of 20-year-old Haitian immigrant Pierre Bel, then heading straight to a Trump rally, where he found surprising cracks among Trump supporters even as the MAGA faithful rallied around a visibly lower-energy president. They discuss Springfield’s Haitian community, Trump’s immigration rhetoric, and the ominous midterm numbers facing Republicans.

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Just how bad has Donald Trump’s leadership been for the Kennedy Center’s financial health? CNN reports that, after Trump slapped his name on the building late last year, donation pledges plunged more than 100 percent compared to the previous three-month period. That’s so dramatic it sounds mathematically impossible, but it isn’t: “A decline of that size is possible,” a tax expert told CNN, “if earlier pledges were withdrawn.”

But hey, that’s just a building’s economic well-being. How about the nation’s? Well, here’s September’s jobs data, as announced this morning: “The U.S. added 29,000 jobs in September, far short of expectations,” and “The unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.” Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live today at 12:30 p.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Then, at 2 p.m. EDT, join Sarah Longwell for an AMA where she’ll answer questions from the Bulwark community about politics, her new book, and various and sundry topics—live on Substack and YouTube.

The Sound and the Fury

by Andrew Egger

The president of the United States is not all there, upstairs. He is so wicked, so deceitful, and has put in motion so many awful plans that it can be easy to forget. It’s also embarrassing to think about: This gibbering idiot is the guy who twice pantsed the Democrats and brought the global order to its knees? It’d be less humiliating if he were some sort of evil genius.

Still, sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves of the uncomfortable facts of life. Trump gave a lengthy interview to Time Magazine that was published yesterday. Let’s stare into the abyss together, shall we?

On the Fake News

Trump has been trying to ban news outlets from the White House for being too mean to him in their coverage. The official argument—the one his lawyers have made in court—is that CNN, MSNOW, and Politico have imperiled national security. The idea is that this argument is slightly less likely to be laughed out of court than the truth that the president just doesn’t like what they’ve been writing.

Trump, however, can’t be bothered to maintain this polite fiction. Over and over, he makes it explicit: His issue is that they cover him too negatively. If the press isn’t Fake, he asks, why don’t they ever report that he won 86 percent of the popular vote?

“I won the election,” Trump told Time. “I won it handily by massive numbers. I won the popular vote. I won all seven swing states. They said if you won three swing states, I won all seven. I won the counties. It’s very important. 86 percent popular vote.1 Everything, and very conclusively. I haven’t had a good story on CNN in years. . . . If I wasn’t doing a good job, I wouldn’t have won that election by a lot.”

A who-won-more-counties breakdown is about the most useless electoral metric you could think of. But when Trump talks about his 2024 win, it’s plain that he’s allowed that statistic—simply because it’s the most flattering statistic he has—entirely to colonize his understanding of his win. How can he be so bad if he won 86 percent of the popular vote?

Remarkably, despite his own obsession with his press ban, Trump seemed not to know the basics of what the judge had ordered against it.

When Time’s reporter asked whether Trump was ignoring that order by continuing to freeze CNN out of the traveling pool, Trump seemed confused: “No, no, I’m not ignoring his order. . . . What order? I’m not even aware.” His comms director Steven Cheung had to jump in: “The judge basically ordered them to renew their access back to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One.”

“He actually said to the premises of the White House?” Trump wondered.

On Iran

Did you know that Trump never actually said the Iran war would last four to six weeks? You might think you remember him saying that over and over, but that was actually just another one of those media lies. “I feel like most people heard you say four to six weeks,” Time suggested. “No, I think the press fed it to them,” Trump said. Later, on Truth Social, he offered another incomprehensible attempt to clarify: “I stated, numerous times, that it would take 4-6 weeks to get rid of THE IRAN NUCLEAR THREAT, and I did it in one night! The rest of the time is just to make sure it stays that way.”

Time also pressed the president on the, uh, friction between his repeated claims that he desires peace and his repeated threats to “annihilate” the Iranian people. “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world,” Trump said. “With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.”

This is staggering stuff. Trump is saying, in plain English, that the ongoing existence of the Iranian people is an insuperable barrier to world peace—and calling for some sort of Final Solution.

Does Trump actually believe the world can’t be safe so long as the Iranian people exist? I don’t think so. This has not been his actual policy toward Iran, for one thing: He would be only too happy to get some face-saving concessions on Iran’s nuclear program and/or the Strait of Hormuz and get out of the war there as fast as possible. This is simply life under a president with a half-melted mind: Sometimes the neurons flicker in such a way that the president openly says an entire people will need to be genocided without even seeming to realize what he’s said.

On the debt

The national debt, Time pointed out, just hit $40 trillion dollars. Fully a quarter of that—$11 trillion—has come during Trump’s five years of presidency. Here was Trump’s response:

Well, Biden just killed our country. He had the biggest inflation in history. He allowed 25 million people in that shouldn’t have been here. We’re still getting around—it’s the toughest thing I have to do. If he would have been elected again, or his ilk would have been, or she, anybody, same, we wouldn’t have a country anymore.

Time tried to clarify: “You haven’t lowered the debt because of President Biden?”

Trump again: “No, because they keep paying higher interest rates. We had great job numbers two weeks ago, right? What do they do? Raise the interest rate. . . . We have a very hostile board, and the board says, ‘We want to hurt Trump.’ They’re not doing this for you. They’re doing this because they have Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

There you go. Donald Trump has added $11 trillion to the debt by slashing taxes without slashing spending. In his mind, however, it’s not a matter of spending far more than he’s taken in: All that debt showed up because Joe Biden let inflation happen and let illegals in, and because the Fed won’t push rates down.

On his passion projects

Time asked a number of other questions—on AI, on the Democrats who might run in 2028, on his own terrible polls. (“They’re fake numbers. I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.”) When they started asking about Mitch McConnell’s health and Trump’s plans to pardon his cabinet, however, Trump lost patience. Suddenly, he was brandishing various pictures of his various White House construction projects. Why don’t you fake news jackals ever care about this stuff, he wanted to know.

“You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question,” the president complained:

All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House? . . . It’s actually dangerous. People are walking under, crap was falling off it all the time. Every time it rained, it was leaking, horrible. Now it’s perfect, and I would say that I should be given credit for fixing the White House because I’m also doing very well with the war. I’m doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven’t asked me a question about Venezuela?

Time had, in fact, asked several questions about Venezuela. But we can leave it at that. We’ve got a drooling madman in charge. It’s good to remember, but unhealthy to contemplate for too long. If you’re a glutton for punishment, go ahead and read the whole interview. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Defense Department Duce

by William Kristol

Know your enemy, Sun Tzu taught.

And so Andrew perused the complete text of Donald Trump’s interview with Time. (I’m pleased to report that he’s recovering nicely from the ordeal.) Inspired by his example, I wanted to do my part. So I forced myself to read a transcript (I couldn’t bear to watch) of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s speech Wednesday on “The State of the Force.”

The remarks of both Trump and Hegseth are appalling. They’re alarming. But they’re also instructive. In the Trump interview and the Hegseth speech, these enemies of liberty and law, of decency and democracy, reveal what they believe, and make clear who they are.

On Wednesday, Hegseth issued this call to arms:

We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department.

Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.

Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops. . . . Or as the President says to me, “Pete … central casting. I want central casting.”

The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.

And a bit later in his remarks, Hegseth attacked the press.

A free press is of course important, but partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission they are undertaking is fundamentally anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.

This is all political bluster. But it’s a particular kind of political bluster. It’s neo-fascist bluster.

Here I want to call on the novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, who provided one of the most helpful guides to this kind of politics in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism.”

Eco provides a list of certain key elements or features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. A couple of these are particularly relevant to the emanations of our secretary of defense: Irrationalism, and machismo.

Here’s Eco on irrationalism:

Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. . . . Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”

And it’s no accident, Eco further points out, that “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

And side-by-side with Hegseth’s embrace of irrationalism is his exaltation of machismo.

As Eco explains,

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Eco makes clear that his essay was not intended as merely a historical or diagnostic enterprise. Eco wrote in order to warn that fascism is not a thing of the past. Fascism is a permanent human temptation. It speaks to certain human passions and exploits certain human weaknesses that are always there to potentially be activated.

Fascism is both a permanent temptation and, as history teaches and current events show, a powerful one. As history also teaches, and as current events will I believe show, it can be defeated. First, one has to recognize it for what it is. Trump and Hegseth have helped us in this task.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Who Cut The Cheese? Trump Did… The dairy industry was supposed to be the one sector that benefited from Trump’s trade war. CATHERINE RAMPELL describes how tariffs and pissed-off Canadians are hurting the cheese biz in Receipts.

• The Daily Wire Is Making the Most MAGA Movie Imaginable… SAM STEIN and WILL SOMMER break down the leaked script for the Daily Wire’s upcoming fictional movie, Pawn Shop, a pro-ICE thriller set amid an imagined Antifa siege of a Minneapolis pawn shop.

• GOP Senators Blast Trump’s Gov’t-Funded Ads… Lawmakers see another abuse of presidential power. They’re struggling to find a remedy, reports JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.

• Paramount’s Done Deal, Federal Tax Credits, and More… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, SEAN McNULTY joins SONNY BUNCH to break down a big week in Hollywood news.

Quick Hits

NIXONMANIA: Was Nixon framed? That’s a question the crack minds at the Trump Justice Department are now mulling, per the Wall Street Journal:

The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”

The Justice Department denied that Shepard’s presentation amounted to an investigation, per se. Some people in the building just wanted to hear him out. But it’s not hard to see why our current presidential crook—and his retinue—would feel a kinship toward Tricky Dick. “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Vice President JD Vance said this summer, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people—the same institutions—tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

BOND NAUSEA: Donald Trump wants interest rates to come down. But pretty much everything he’s done as president has had the opposite effect. As Trump-induced chaos reigns in markets around the world, bond rates keep pushing to new and costly highs. Here’s the New York Times:

A global sell-off in the government bond market continued on Thursday after the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes reached its highest level since 2002, driving up borrowing costs for consumers and companies around the world.

The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, which underpins corporate and consumer interest rates, soared as high as 5.34 percent on Thursday, its highest since 2002, before easing back to around 5.24 percent, ending the day at its highest level since 2007.

And, of course, underneath all other economic issues is the $40 trillion elephant in the room: The U.S. national debt, which only gets bigger—and costlier simply to service—year after year.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yesterday, Trump dusted off his old attacks against former Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “He should be forced to resign, IMMEDIATELY! If he doesn’t resign, he should be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government, for either corruption or incompetence.”

It’s all great news for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh: He hasn’t been able to lower interest rates yet, either, but for now, Trump seems content to keep blaming Powell. Happy Thursday.

Ride the Wave, Baby!

by William Kristol

Whoa.

It’s not just that a new Quinnipiac poll shows only 34 percent of voters approving of Donald Trump’s job performance, with 61 percent disapproving. It’s that Quinnipiac has Democrats leading by 12 points on the generic congressional ballot. This is up from 7 points in Quinnipiac’s survey two months ago.

Yes, this poll is something of an outlier. The FiftyPlusOne polling aggregator shows “only” about an 8-point generic ballot lead for the Democrats. But even that’s a ten point swing from 2024, when Republicans won the national vote for the House by 2.6 points. A 10-point swing would be a wave that puts lots of districts and states in play. A 14-point swing, which is what Quinnipiac implies, would be a tsunami.

And I’ll note that Quinnipiac has been on the money before. Their poll in late September 2024 had Trump leading Kamala Harris by 48 percent to 47 percent. I remember seeing those numbers and hoping against hope that they were wrong, that surely Harris had at least a narrow lead. But they were right.

Just as notable as the generic ballot in Quinnipiac’s poll this week was what it found about voters’ views on how our government should deal with the challenge of artificial intelligence. The results were, to say the least, lopsided.

“Seventy-one percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports stricter guardrails for AI development,” compared to 16 percent who preferred a candidate who supports expanding AI development. Even Republican voters preferred stricter guardrails, by 52 percent 29 percent.

What’s more, 79 percent of respondents said that with respect to AI, they think safety is more important than staying at the forefront of innovation. Only 15 percent thought the opposite. Again, even Republicans prioritized safety over innovation, by 62 percent to 32 percent.

Voters seem to have noticed that the Trump administration doesn’t agree with them. Only 25 percent support the president’s handling of the issue, while 58 percent disapprove. And that disapproval has started to spill over to his party. Forty-two percent now prefer the Democratic party on AI, while 29 percent prefer the Republican party. Only three weeks ago, by contrast, a New York Times/Siena poll found basically no gap between the two parties on the issue.

I’ll add that this survey was in the field over the weekend, before Tuesday’s White House lunch for the tech oligarchs. There Trump confirmed he was going to do nothing to pause or safeguard or regulate developments in artificial intelligence.

But Trump did issue an executive order rebranding “Artificial Intelligence” as “Super Intelligence.” The order celebrated the fact that these technologies are “transformative” and will allow us to do “what was previously impossible.” But aren’t “transformative” technologies that allow the “previously impossible” the kind of thing that requires some oversight by government, and some guardrails that depend on more than the goodwill of tech oligarchs?

Apparently not. Indeed, it turns out that the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” released after the lunch of the AI oligarchs was drafted by . . . the AI oligarchs. As Semafor reports:

The idea for what became President Donald Trump’s Tuesday pact with the AI industry came from a conversation between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson at last week’s state dinner . . .

Zuckerberg spoke to Johnson—whom he was seated next to at the dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping—about regulatory concerns around AI . . . The Meta CEO then talked to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about crafting a set of principles that tech executives could use at their next meeting with Trump . . .

Zuckerberg then circulated a draft ahead of Tuesday’s meeting between Trump and AI executives. Huang played a role gathering support for it among the administration’s guests . . . Eventually Trump himself released the document as a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” outlining broad principles for self-regulation.

That story apparently comes from a single source, so it’s possible there’s more to it than that—but it certainly looks like the “White House” executive order was drafted by the AI firms. Trump merely signed it.

It was nice of Trump to throw the glitzy lunch for the AI guys and sign off on their no-safeguards policy. It should make it even easier for Democrats to say for the next month that Trump and his party are bought and paid for big AI.

Maybe the tsunami Quinnipiac forecasts will turn out to be about right.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• 🎥WATCH: A Suspected Terror Plot Just Took a Much More Alarming Turn… Former CIA officer MARC POLYMEROPOULOS and national security reporter MICHAEL WEISS take on the attempted hijacking of a Tel Aviv–bound flight, a suspected plot targeting an air base in Britain, and the troubling signs that Iran may be taking its fight abroad.

• A Big Warning Sign for Trump’s GOP… On Command Post, SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER to share what she learned from Hungary and Poland about post-Trump America.

• How Some TOTAL Unknowns Could F*ck Up Republicans’ Midterms… Libertarian candidates are polling surprisingly well. In close races, a few points could be all Democrats need, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

• Pete Hegseth’s Speech Was a Hyper-Macho Freak Show… On Bulwark Takes, SAM STEIN and BEN PARKER give their takes on Pete Hegseth’s bizarre State of the Force address, from his “no fatties, no weirdos” vision for the military to his fixation on testosterone, wokeness, and American universities.

• Maria Comella and The Trio: Holy Schmitt, That Was Bad… The Trio comes together on the daily pod for the first time to give a little taste of the MAGA-land news Sam, Will, and Tim are covering for The Bulwark.

• Skittish Republicans Discover That ICE Is Bad—for Their Campaigns… Some endangered incumbents are trying to outrun the electoral consequences of Trump’s immigration agenda, writes ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO in Huddled Masses.

Quick Hits

TO BOMB OR NOT TO BOMB: President Donald Trump yesterday reiterated his threat to “blow up” Iran, telling reporters that “we have to make that decision: We blow them up or make a deal.” That followed the president’s comments last week at the United Nations: “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before . . . or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”

Over the weekend, the White House rejected a proposal from Iran that would have reestablished the conditions of this summer’s Memorandum of Understanding, with Iran at least partly reopening the Strait of Hormuz and promising to resume nuclear talks in exchange for the United States lifting its blockade. Trump, possibly responding to one of the major critiques Iran hawks made of the initial MOU, now seems to be pushing for concrete nuclear commitments as part of the ceasefire deal, rather than agreeing to haggle over them later.

A U.S. official also told The Bulwark this week that America is “skeptical of Iran’s promises after they broke the last MOU by firing on commercial vessels . . . so the U.S. needs assurances this time that Iran is serious and it’s not just them trying to get out of the tough situation they are in.” The official added that Trump would still be willing to grant sanctions relief and the release of frozen Iranian funds in exchange for concrete progress on Iran’s nuclear program.

Much of Iran’s nuclear program remains buried under rubble and largely inaccessible to the Iranian government thanks to U.S. airstrikes in June 2025.

NO UGGOS ALLOWED: These are going to be an annual thing, we guess. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave another chest-thumping speech in front of a giant American flag yesterday about his determination to build America the hottest, sexiest, sweatiest military the world has ever known. Here’s the WSJ:

Hegseth said he had eliminated “silly PowerPoint trainings” and “silly drag queen shows.” He touted getting rid of diversity quotas, gender pronouns and “identity months.” He also reprised a refrain from his speech last year: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

“The ideological clowns are out,” he added. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top,” Hegseth said, referring to his recent mandate for male servicemembers over 30 to undergo annual screening for testosterone deficiency.

Hegseth’s tone throughout was combative, and he attacked the press in the opening minutes of the address. He accused the media of “treason,” denying news reports of munitions shortages and blamed reporters for revealing U.S. base locations to “the enemy.”

Hegseth also announced that Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich will lead a Pentagon team called “Project Meridian” on the future of warfare. Isn’t it nice to know we’re in good hands?

A BOTCHED EXECUTION: Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who has been on death row for decades after brutally murdering a classmate at the age of 18 in 1995, was supposed to be executed last night after the Supreme Court declined to intervene on her behalf. But the state botched the job: After two doses of lethal pentobarbital, Pike was still breathing with a beating heart. Eventually, the state suspended the execution, and Pike was taken to a nearby hospital for medical care. The New York Times has the strange story:

It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the drugs, or what Ms. Pike’s medical condition was. In a statement late Wednesday, her lawyers said that she was at a nearby hospital but that they did not know her condition. Tennessee officials confirmed to a federal judge late Wednesday that Ms. Pike was receiving medical care.

“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.” . . .

Ms. Pike’s lawyers had argued the procedure could be torturous for her because she has small veins, a history of sexual trauma and other medical conditions.

“We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy,” they said in a joint statement after the execution attempt.

Read the whole thing.

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For Republicans trying to outrun a blue wave, the verdict is in: The Dallas midterm convention was a stinker. Don’t take it from us, take it from Texas GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton. “To be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” Paxton said in leaked audio reported today by the New York Times. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

Paxton, who made the remark at a private fundraiser, was answering the question: “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” Who might “he” be, one wonders. Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live today at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Hawkward

by Andrew Egger

Poor Eric Schmitt. It had all been going so well. The junior senator from Missouri had been working hard building a MAGA-pleasing brand as a staunch Trump ally who wasn’t afraid to play footsie with the blood-and-soil right. Just yesterday, Axios reported that Schmitt was “seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate” for JD Vance. Then, just hours later, his big break seemed to have arrived—the moment that he thought he was about to launch his MAGA brand into the stratosphere.

And then it all fell apart.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had hauled former Special Counsel Jack Smith in for questioning. Republicans’ goal going in was clear: to harass and belittle a man in the top tier of Donald Trump’s enemies list, and to catch him in a perjury trap if they could.

When Schmitt’s time came to question Smith, he embarked on a bizarre line of questioning intended to link Smith with another Trump enemy: Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis. Hadn’t he traveled to Atlanta in February 2024, just as a scandal was engulfing Willis’s parallel election-fraud prosecution of Trump? Hadn’t he attended an Atlanta Hawks game that very same week? Was it possible he had gone there to meet with Willis, no doubt for some nefarious purpose?

But Smith did something Schmitt hadn’t expected. He denied having attended the Hawks game in question at all. The senator couldn’t believe it. He and his colleagues had hoped to catch Smith in some lie that could be used as a pretext to prosecute him. And now, he thought, he’d been the one to catch him.

Schmitt could barely conceal his smug glee as he proceeded: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors–Hawks game on February 3, 2024?” he asked, a grin tugging at his mouth. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself. . . . I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” A few minutes later, he wrapped up his testimony by calling Smith a “dirtbag.”

Unfortunately for Schmitt, he was wrong about all of it. Smith hadn’t been in Atlanta for a Hawks game on the day in question. He’d been in Maryland, watching the Terps women’s basketball team take on the visiting Iowa Hawkeyes. Minutes later, a visibly furious Schmitt was blustering wildly as Sen. Amy Klobuchar icily rubbed his nose in it: “I think people should get their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong. You had the teams wrong, sir.” Amazingly, Schmitt refused to apologize, insisting he’d just been asking questions.

I’ll be honest: It was all highly enjoyable to watch. (If you want to watch us having fun watching it, Sam and I did a video breakdown after the fact yesterday.) JVL likes to say it’s great to watch bad things happen to bad people. Sometimes I see what he means.

But to understand just how bad of shape we’re in as a country, consider this: It’s not clear that this humiliation will hurt Schmitt’s aspirations to higher office in the slightest.

On one side of our great informational divide, Schmitt’s blunder is already going down in infamy. It was extraordinarily viral all day yesterday, with many Hill reporters at a loss to remember the last time a lawmaker had whiffed so hard during testimony. For most of professional Washington and for most people with a mainstream-to-liberal information diet, it will likely be their first association when they think of Schmitt for years to come.

Over the divide, however, things look very different. Schmitt’s apparent “gotcha” moment buzzed quickly around right-wing media. Podcaster Benny Johnson tweeted that Schmitt1 had “pulled out the receipts” and “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity shared the same moment. Both later quietly deleted their posts, but neither posted any acknowledgment that they’d gotten the story backwards—or even commented on Schmitt’s mistake at all.

Some went even further through the looking glass. After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on the popular Turning Point USA podcast still called the Charlie Kirk Show. The exchanges on the subject are surreal: The interviewers themselves don’t acknowledge that Schmitt’s original gotcha was factually wrong. In fact, they don’t even seem to know it themselves. “You caught him out, by the way, in this NBA game in Atlanta,” one host says. “Yeah,” Schmitt replies.

“Gotta give you your flowers,” the host added again later. “So you had text messages from his team confirming he was going to a Hawks game, and he sat there acting dumbfounded and completely clueless?”

“It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game at that time going on in Atlanta,” Schmitt replied. “He claimed later that he was at another game. Here’s the thing: My job is to ask the questions.”

AI Is a Test. Our Country Is Failing.

by William Kristol

President Trump was so, so excited to host the world’s most powerful technology executives at lunch yesterday at the White House. He posted the luncheon’s seating chart on social media. He had some of them dutifully stand behind him in the White House driveway for a follow-up press availability. He was ebullient:

• “This is going to be all for the good, and we’re going to have it be nice and safe.”

• “They’re really going to be policing each other, and that’s the way it works.”

• “It is the biggest thing there is, maybe the biggest thing there’s ever been.”

And in a rare compliment not to himself but to others, he called the assembled billionaires “very brilliant.”

So they probably are.

But you don’t have to be very brilliant, you just need to have some common sense, to grasp some elementary facts:

• Scientific and technological knowledge can be used for good and for ill.

• A basic task of government is to create guardrails and regulations that seek to ensure, as best we can, that the progress of such knowledge doesn’t endanger but rather benefits us.

• When dealing with new and not-fully-understood technological progress that is developing at an accelerating pace, it’s good to act prudently and responsibly.

President Trump is, to a truly extraordinary degree, ignoring these self-evident truths. He’s shaping administration policy about artificial intelligence in a way that simply refuses to deal with the real and urgent questions about how AI should be regulated.

And so yesterday’s White House gathering resulted in a vague, voluntary, and non-binding and non-enforceable agreement to commit to safety policies the companies had already committed to during the Biden administration, and that they’ve claimed to be already following.

But Trump did announce one new policy:

We’ve changed the name, officially, today. We’ve changed the name officially to SI. SI instead of AI . . . You know what that means? ‘Super.’ That’s quite an announcement.

Actually, as an announcement, it’s not just laughable. It’s pathetic. One might say super pathetic.

After all, recent months have featured a wide range of news reports about AI spinning out of control.

And less than three weeks ago, we had a thoughtful and sober warning from one of those “very brilliant” men who attended yesterday’s White House lunch. Here’s a reminder of what Anthropic’s Dario Amodei had to say:

Like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. . . . They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. . . .

Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.

And other tech leaders have been issuing very compelling warnings. I recommend this essay by Bill Gates and especially his recent interview with Ezra Klein, in which Gates explains that even before we reach the looming problem of controlling recursive self-improvement, we face an “imminent risk.”

“These are the most powerful tools ever,” Gates says, and our government “doesn’t see how dangerous these things are.” So we are doing nothing to create the “supervisory layer” or regulatory structure that “is needed urgently to prevent bad people from using today’s A.I.s to shut down economies or kill millions of people.”

It’s pretty amazing that Trump and his administration are simply refusing to pay attention to the alarm bells going off in the real world, or to heed the warnings coming from knowledgeable people. It’s almost an unprecedented level of irresponsibility at a historic moment from the executive branch of the federal government.

The Trump administration seems hopeless. But the American public has responded sensibly, and favors government regulation and a pause in frontier AI work. What about our leaders outside the executive branch? Will Congress, business, and civil society step up? We face an urgent and momentous challenge. It’s a real national test. So far we’re failing it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump’s Populist Image Is Dead… That’s the price of corruption, writes MONA CHAREN.

• Jack Smith and the Republican Smear Squad… If holding Trump accountable makes you an enemy of the GOP, the party has told you everything you need to know, observes WILL SALETAN.

• Things Are Going So Badly for Trump… Even JVL has hope on the latest edition of The Next Level.

• An Evangelical Kingmaker Is Lost in the Age of Trump… Four years after Dobbs, evangelical leaders are confronting a Republican party increasingly uninterested in abortion, reports JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.

• GOP Senator’s Jack Smith Ambush Ends in Spectacular Humiliation… On Bulwark Takes, ANDREW EGGER and SAM STEIN discuss Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt exploding on the launchpad of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Quick Hits

A REPRIEVE FOR SALVADORANS?: The White House is currently hard at work uprooting the Haitian immigrants who have lived here for years under temporary protected status, canceling their protection this year and deporting hundreds back to Haiti. This month, the Department of Homeland Security was about to end legal status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, too—until, surprisingly, the administration hit the brakes. Politico reports:

The program had been set to end three weeks ago if it wasn’t extended—so far the administration has punted that decision. DHS and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had cleared a termination notice to be published in the Federal Register, and the abrupt halt from the White House took some inside DHS by surprise, according to an administration official and three other people close to the administration.

“It just came down from the White House,” said Mark Krikorian who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that favors restrictions on legal immigration and greater immigration enforcement. “They may just be thinking, let’s make this go away for six months until after the election, not because it’s going to have any direct effect on the election. They just don’t want the news stories about this.”

There’s another possible reason too: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, of CECOT torture dungeon fame, has petitioned the White House not to kick his nationals out. Politico notes that “the cash Salvadoran immigrants send back home is crucial for the nation’s economy.”

THIRD COUNTRIES: One of the cruelest components of Trump’s mass-deportation agenda has been so-called “third-country deportations”—the shipping of migrants to countries with which they have no ties. That policy had been temporarily blocked by federal courts. But yesterday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume the deportations for now, while teeing up further consideration of the case next term. Here’s the New York Times:

James Percival, the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the court’s ruling. In a statement, he called it a “victory.”

“A bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike,” he said. “It’s not too late to get $3,000 and a flight home.” He ended his statement with a link to department instructions for immigrants on how to self-deport.

Trina A. Realmuto, a lawyer for the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and part of the team representing the immigrants, called the emergency decision “a devastating result.” The court, she said in a statement, “has allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they face persecution or torture.”

But she pointed out that the court had agreed to hear full argument in December, saying that Tuesday’s decision “does not decide that the policy is lawful.”

How the Supreme Court will finally rule on the case remains to be seen. But the fact that the case remains ongoing is cold comfort for those who may now be shipped anywhere the White House wishes.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF MOROCCAN SPOOKS?: A curious story from up north, where an up-and-coming conservative Canadian pundit named Daniel Robson was recently outed as an AI fabrication. Not that he was a writer who used AI to compose his columns, mind you—that the writer himself was something the computer made up.

That’s embarrassing enough for the publications that have since had to remove his byline from their websites. But the story gets weirder and darker. Yesterday, Türkiye Today—an outlet that Robson pitched at the beginning of September—published a story that argues the AI commentator may actually have been a Moroccan influence operation intended, in part, to target dissidents and international critics of the Moroccan regime, including one specific former senior Moroccan intelligence official who now lives in exile in Canada.

As the managing editor of one of the sites that had published Robson put it when Türkiye Today approached him, “Canada as a middle power is prone to foreign interference. Journalism in Canada can be used as a soft underbelly to influence Western decision-makers. Our industry is suffering financially. And I think that’s a wake-up call.” Read the whole thing.

– Martyn Wendell Jones

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Cheap Shots

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The less popular Trump gets, the more shameless his open lawlessness becomes. This weekend, an old Trump campaign ad was back on airwaves across the country, with Trump railing against the “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” vowing to expel the “deep state” and “warmongers,” and declaring this “the final battle.”

In 2024, the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign. Now, the ad discloses, it is “paid for by the U.S. Government.” Your tax dollars at work. Happy Monday.

Do Not Look Away

by William Kristol

When Pope Leo XIV speaks, Americans tend to listen. He is, after all, the first American pope.

On the other hand, there’ve been scores of American cardinals since the first was appointed in 1875. Those of us who aren’t in the Church don’t necessarily hear much about what they have to say.

I read about what Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, said yesterday thanks to Christopher Hale’s excellent newsletter, Letters from Leo, which covers developments in the Catholic Church. Last night, Hale reported on McElroy’s speech at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.

A word about McElroy. He was born in San Francisco in 1954 and graduated from Harvard in 1975, where he studied history. He took an M.A. in American history the next year at Stanford. He then attended seminary and was ordained in the priesthood in 1980. As a priest, he pursued further studies, earning a degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. His dissertation was on the great liberal American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, whose writings in the mid-twentieth century sought to reconcile Catholicism and American liberal democracy and to ground a defense of religious pluralism and religious freedom in both liberal and Catholic thought.

After rising through the church’s ranks to become bishop of San Diego, McElroy was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2022, and then archbishop of Washington in March 2025. A couple of months later, he participated in the conclave that elected his fellow American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, pope.

As Hale explains, the occasion for McElroy’s speech was the church’s annual day of recognition of migrants and refugees. The cardinal’s text was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he pulled no punches. We as a nation have not been good Samaritans.

For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.

Indeed, McElroy explained, we have failed to live up to the two great legacies that shape America’s duty to the stranger: the command in Deuteronomy that “you shall not violate the rights of the alien or the orphan,” and the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. The cardinal deplored the fact that, in the last eighteen months, our country has traded that legacy for “suspicion, division, cruelty, and violence.” And in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty, “we are losing our soul as a nation.”

McElroy noted that there are more than a million people who had been living here legally who have now lost or are losing temporary protected status. “These refugees never broke any law,” he said. They are being deported because “the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigration history is rampant once again in our nation.”

McElroy’s words particularly hit home for me. I’d returned the day before from the Bulwark event in Dayton, Ohio, on behalf of the Haitian Support Center in nearby Springfield, where we visited Friday afternoon.

It was inspiring to see the fortitude of immigrants we met there. It was heartening to see how many citizens are rallying to their support, coming from elsewhere in Ohio to bring food packages to Haitian families who have lost their work permits so have no income, and who now can’t venture outside their homes for fear of ICE.

It’s also inspiring that so many of you in the Bulwark community have contributed to support the Haitians in Springfield. When I wrote Friday morning, donations amounted to an already impressive $85,000. This morning they stand at more than $340,000.

So that’s all uplifting. But I must also say that it’s depressing and infuriating to see the city of Springfield and its people suffering under a cruel and unjust assault from our own government.

Our government’s policies are appalling and shameful. And so, as Cardinal McElroy put it yesterday, we need not to avert our eyes but to “recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name and fight every dimension of it.” And we need to “seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil, or replace them.”

In five weeks, we can replace a whole bunch of them.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Could a Wave THIS Big Actually Happen? Dems who lived through past bloodbaths see something similar happening—in reverse, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

• Suddenly, Democrats Have a Path to a HUGE Senate Majority… Live from Dayton, Ohio, JVL, SARAH, and TIM recorded a bonus Buckeye edition of The Next Level.

• Trump Said It Out Loud. His Cabinet Says It Never Happened. WILL SALETAN meticulously breaks down Todd Blanche’s defense of Trump’s press crackdown, Mike Waltz getting confronted with the president’s own words, and the shifting story about the war with Iran.

• Reddit AMA with Catherine Rampell: Monday from 2 to 4 p.m. ET. This is your chance to ask her anything about prices, housing, jobs, tariffs, immigration and the policy debates shaping the economy. Go to r/politics on Monday to join in.

• Just How Crazy is the White House Right Now? On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL talks with former Trump White House deputy press secretary SARAH MATTHEWS about Republicans distancing themselves from Trump and why she fears things could get more reckless after the midterms.

Quick Hits

BLOOD MONEY: Ever since he decapitated Venezuela’s government last year by arresting President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pursued a policy toward the South American nation that can best be described as ‘Make Colonialism Great Again.’ The White House didn’t just help itself to Venezuela’s oil reserves—it also immediately began opening up U.S. access to the country’s notoriously corrupt gold market. The New York Times reports:

In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.

The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.

Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.

On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.

The Times investigation is full of staggering details about how Trump has brokered deals between U.S. business interests and, functionally, Venezuelan criminal interests—so much so that Venezuelan gold is now piling up in U.S. warehouses, with refiners unwilling to touch it lest they violate laws about financing gangs, environmental destruction, or corruption. Read the whole thing.

WHEN DONALD MET DARIO: Donald Trump’s position on AI existential risk is simple: What, you worrywarts don’t think I can handle it? Days after insisting that he wants to leave the regulation of AI development “exactly where it is”—in other words, not regulated at all—the president again said last night that “we will straighten it out if and when a problem occurs.”

“I don’t worry about it,” Trump said. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, you know, trillions of dollars worth of places. And why should we give that up?”

Will meeting with one of America’s leading AI worriers change his mind? Last night, Trump reportedly had dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei is in a strange position: He’s head of a company that leads an industry that Trump consistently champions and defends, but he’s also repeatedly feuded with the Trump administration—in fact, that government still considers the company a “supply chain risk.” Furthermore, many in MAGA are convinced Amodei is a left-wing wacko. We’ll be eager to hear how that meeting went if we get reporting out of it today.

YOU GET A BAG OF CASH! AND YOU GET A BAG OF CASH!: Companies investing in the AI boom, blindsided by the spike in public opposition to data center development, are now pulling out every carrot they can think of to woo communities into accepting new construction. But many of those communities are still saying, “no, thanks.” The Wall Street Journal reports:

The letters started arriving in June, from a big developer who said he would give $10,000 to every family in town. They could spend it on anything. “Really whatever you want,” the developer wrote.

To get the money, the township just needed to let NorthPoint Development build its data center, the first of 15 buildings the firm planned on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills. Then, $10,000 checks would go out to each of the 4,500 households there. It would be a $45 million payout, the developer wrote.

For many in Hazle Township, which has a median household income of about $60,000, a payout of $10,000 would be a significant sum. Even after taxes, it could cover about six months of rent for a two-bedroom apartment or many more months of groceries or fuel.

But regardless of income, job status or location, few of the people in Hazle Township interviewed by The Wall Street Journal indicated that they are eager to welcome the data center for the payout.

Read the whole thing.

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Cheap Shots

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Trump’s White House is racking up losses, picking fights with the press, and increasingly operating without anyone willing to tell the president no. Bill Kristol talks with former Trump White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews about what’s happening behind the scenes, why Republicans are suddenly putting some distance between themselves and Trump, and why she fears things could get even more reckless after the midterms.

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