I had this fantasy as a kid that started with me giving an impressive performance on “Wheel of Fortune.” I’d smoke the other contestants under the watchful eye of a suitably wowed Pat Sajak, crucially solving the prize puzzle and winning the grand prize of seemingly every game show: a vacation package built around “a trip to sunny Florida.”
I’d ride the free plane ticket home and spend a few days with my family in Orlando, just a few hours away from where we actually lived, on a vacation that for once wasn’t spent in relatives’ living rooms. We’d hang out in the Goldilocks Zone, far enough away from home to avoid nagging responsibilities but close enough to sell to my overworked parents. Home was not far away when we needed to return, but why not take a few days off to lounge by the pool?
I never shared that half-baked dream with anyone, especially not with any Latin American authoritarians, but my strategy for stealing some time for poolside lounging seems to be the preferred second act for failed right-wing leaders from Central and South America. When defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Miami earlier this week, he was taking part in a long tradition of conservative losers hopping a jet to the land of gun shows and foam parties.
Thanks to its proximity to the Caribbean and South America, its significant immigrant population and Miami International Airport’s status as a hub for flights to and from points south, many a deposed leader has followed a route familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds. When the rabble in the street gets too close to the presidential palace for comfort, they keep half an eye on Florida real estate, much like Northeast Corridor retirees.
It isn’t surprising that the first notable leader to make the leap in modern memory came from Cuba, an island you can reach from Florida with a suitably kitted-out lawn chair. Facing the collapse of his government amid anti-democratic crackdowns and widespread labor unrest, Cuban President Gerardo Machado hightailed it to Florida in 1933. He would die in Miami just six years later.
Many a deposed Caribbean or South American leader has followed a route familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds. When the rabble in the street gets too close to the presidential palace, they keep half an eye on Florida real estate, like Northeast Corridor retirees.
Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista spent the next several decades seemingly readying himself to follow Machado to the Sunshine State if and when he needed to make a quick exit. In fact, Batista purchased a home in Daytona Beach and lived there for several years following his initial ouster in the mid-1940s. He returned to power via a military coup in 1952, which in some ways lit the spark for Fidel Castro’s toppling of the Cuban government at the end of the decade. Forced out for the last time, Batista flew to Jacksonville and unsuccessfully requested asylum in the U.S. (He’d have done a lot better under our current president, no doubt.) He wound up fleeing to Spain, then in the grip of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and spent the rest of his life in Iberian exile.
Anastasio Somoza was similarly denied safe harbor in the U.S. in 1979, after fleeing Nicaragua in a cargo plane headed for Miami. President Jimmy Carter declined to play host to the last member of a family dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua for 40 years. Somoza made it to Miami as his regime collapsed during the Sandinista revolution, then moved on to the Bahamas and ultimately to Paraguay, then under the rule of military dictator Alfredo Stroessner. It was no safe refuge: He was assassinated there by a Sandinista strike team just a year later.
The pitter-patter of Florsheim-shod feet heading for the Northern Caribbean hasn’t slowed in the 2000s. Deposed dictators, embezzlers and dissent-crushers have flooded into South Florida like the regular king tides. The Miami New Times published a morbid map of the stars in 2010, pointing out the addresses of various subtropical Mussolinis and disgraced generals and boasting that Miami makes “Casablanca look like a Daffy Duck cartoon.”
Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ran to South Florida following revolts over his plans to export Bolivian natural gas to the U.S.. Notoriously corrupt Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli scarpered in similar fashion, though he was ultimately arrested by U.S. authorities in 2017 and sent back to serve a prison term.
With our own fash-flavored president making his official residence in Palm Beach, and his kids nearby in Jupiter, his Brazilian buddies were obvious candidates for taking their talents to South Beach. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro left for the southernmost red state after his defeat in the 2022 election, though he’s now back in Brazil serving a lengthy prison sentence on house arrest. His son Eduardo, also a former Brazilian elected official, landed Florida around the same time, but has now moved to Texas. Flávio Bolsonaro’s whereabouts since he deplaned at Opa Locka Executive Airport a few days ago are not entirely clear.
Florida has long had a significant right-wing Latin American population, thanks in large part to the many Cuban refugees who fled there in the wake of Castro’s 1959 revolution. And for the Bolsonaros, Florida is likely to feel more like home than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. The state is home to more than a fifth of the Brazilian population in the U.S.
Though Flávio Bolsonaro initially boasted of being Brazil’s rightful president after landing in Florida, he seems to have ditched that line subsequently. Recent events have proven that we can never count out Brazil’s first family of fascism, but it isn’t likely they can use Florida as a base of operation for launching a reactionary coup. Outside of Batista’s complicated story, which didn’t end well for him, history has not been kind to those who hope to use an enforced vacation in the House of Mouse as a path back to the presidential palace.
A high-stakes California ballot measure pitched as a fast track for "essential" infrastructure could wind up giving data center developers a loophole to evade public scrutiny, environmental advocates warn.
Proposition 45 would shorten timelines for state-mandated environmental assessments for eligible projects and make it more difficult for residents to challenge those projects in court. Proponents say passing the measure would help alleviate the state's housing shortage and meet rising electricity demand with new renewable energy projects. Environmental groups and some legal experts, however, warn that data center developers backing the pr …
The European Commission has reiterated that Poland’s parliament must have the right to appoint new judges, lending support to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in an escalating confrontation over the country’s Constitutional Tribunal.
The dispute pits Tusk’s government against President Karol Nawrocki over efforts to reverse judicial changes introduced by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government between 2015 and 2023, which drew condemnation from European courts over concerns about judicial independence.
Nawrocki, elected with PiS backing in 2025, has refused to swear in some Tribunal judges elected by the current parliamentary majority, while the court’s PiS-linked leadership has prevented them from working.
The Commission said it was closely monitoring developments and, in a carefully worded statement to POLITICO, appeared to show support for Tusk’s position.
“The Polish Constitutional Tribunal needs to be able to function in accordance with the Polish constitution and the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU,” Commissioner for Democracy, Justice and the Rule of Law Michael McGrath said.
“This matters for every Polish citizen, and it is for the Polish authorities to ensure that,” McGrath added, stating that “the Venice Commission has been clear that appointing the new judges lies within the power of the Sejm [Poland’s lower house of parliament].”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk vowed Saturday night not to back down on the dispute. “In some matters there can be no compromise,” Tusk said in an address to the nation, comparing calls for reconciliation to a thief demanding to keep half the contents of a stolen handbag.
“We have waited too long for the treasure of an independent, democratic Poland to be frightened into retreat,” Tusk said.
The prime minister also targeted Nawrocki, who turned his plane around mid-flight en route to Senegal and returned to Warsaw, where he pushed his way into the Tribunal shortly after midnight Saturday, confronting judges challenging its leadership.
“In a state governed by the rule of law, a politician cannot enter a court or tribunal and give orders or intimidate judges, even if he is the president,” Tusk said.
He pledged to ensure the Tribunal could operate independently and safely.
Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, taking charge of the Tribunal, suspended Święczkowski and Sochański after they blocked judges elected by the Tusk-led parliamentary majority from work for months.
Nawrocki denounced the move as an unlawful takeover and held talks with parliamentary leaders Saturday, boycotted by Tusk’s Civic Coalition and its government ally, the New Left.
Korwin-Piotrowska has convened an assembly of Tribunal judges for Tuesday, potentially setting up another confrontation over who controls the court.
Former British chancellor Rachel Reeves has stated that the U.K.’s future should be in the European Union, arguing Brexit has been bad for Britain.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Reeves, who was sacked as chancellor by Prime Minister Andy Burnham when he entered Downing Street, said: “I am proud of the progress we have already made in strengthening our relationship with the European Union. Brexit has made us poorer, weaker and less secure.
“There is a debate to be had about our future relationship with Europe, and I welcome Andy Burnham’s leadership in facing up to this. No one in the Treasury ever doubted where my instincts were.”
Reeves added that while she believes “Britain’s future lies in the European Union”, it was “incumbent on supporters of our re-entry to make the argument, demonstrate tangible benefits and to get the next steps right.”
Last week, Burnham expressed an openness to restarting free movement between the U.K and the EU. He also said he’d like to see Britain rejoin the bloc in his lifetime — but ruled out a move to reverse Brexit in the current parliament.
At the last election, Labour’s manifesto — which Reeves helped to draw up — said a Labour government would stay outside the EU.
But at the Labour Party’s conference in September, Burnham called for closer links with the bloc.
Reeves’ intervention comes ahead of a leaders’ summit later this month where she said “at a minimum” she hoped to see confirmation of a youth mobility scheme she has been pushing for.
Ahead of Tuesday’s midterms, Democrats are biting their nails and enduring sleepless nights, wondering whether they will be forced to endure yet another election that has so often characterized the Trump era: close races that seem inevitably to go to the Republicans. All the fundamentals and polls indicate a possible blowout and a big one, but after watching Americans shockingly elect Donald Trump the first time, live through his Big Lie and witness his historic comeback only two years ago, no one can feel confident that this era of chaos, corruption and cruelty might finally be beginning its descent into the dustbin of history. We thought we were here before, and it didn’t end well.
There are reasons to be hopeful, though, even if you assume that the polls are underestimating Republican enthusiasm for their leaders once again. While there have been misses in the polling over this past decade, it hasn’t manifested in midterms as it has in the races with Trump on the ballot. In those years, the polling was pretty much on the money. Democrats have done very well in all the off-year and special elections this cycle, and although that’s no guarantee, it has to be considered a good sign.
The big difference this time is that Trump’s approval rating is hovering close to 30%, a lethal number, and he has presided over a high cost of living and a war of choice with Iran, both things he promised would never happen if he were president. The one election he lost in 2020 was the result of his mismanagement of the only crisis he faced, the Covid-19 pandemic, and this second term has solidified the impression among many voters who were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt anyway, that he simply doesn’t know what he is doing.
One sign that should give Democrats some real comfort in these last couple of days is Trump’s performance on the campaign trail. To say the 80-year-old has lost a step is an understatement. Sure, he barnstormed through all the battleground states and even attempted to shore up enthusiasm in places that should not need his presence to get out the vote. But his patented “weave” is unraveling at every stop.
Trump has taken to doubling down on the weirdness, going on about men’s bodies to a truly bizarre degree, being under the impression that because his trained rally goers will ritualistically cheer anything he says, this is a winning message. His recent comments warning people to stay away from Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club, because they would be unable to afford the hamburgers could not be more in keeping with his apparent pursuit of Marie Antoinette’s legacy.
After years of ragging on Democrats for bringing celebrities on the campaign trail and bragging that he didn’t need any to help him fill up stadiums, the president has invited some to join him at campaign rallies — although one could scarcely call them A-listers.
But most embarrassing for the president is that he is no longer the singular star of the Trump show. As POLITICO reported, after years of ragging on Democrats for bringing celebrities on the campaign trail and bragging that he didn’t need any to help him fill up stadiums, the president has invited some to join him at campaign rallies — although one could scarcely call them A-listers. The cast leans heavily on older athletes, from retired NFL players to race car drivers, although Trump did manage to talk at least one genuine country music star, Jason Aldean, to join him in a rally held just a few miles from his home. Rapper Nicki Minaj has become a staple on the trail, and the president’s old friend Mike Tyson is often with him. Trump simply can’t carry the show by himself anymore.
This is the most expensive campaign in history, with Elon Musk alone spending more than $400 million in money he dug out of his couch cushions, but the total spending on both sides has reached upwards of $16 billion, the vast majority of it to benefit the Republicans. The fact is that it doesn’t appear to have done them much good. In fact, their spending is almost all coming from large donors like Musk, while their small donor base has shrunk considerably. That’s usually a sign of a lack of enthusiasm, and it doesn’t bode well for Tuesday’s results.
The election’s stakes are profound. America crossed the Rubicon in 2024 when it invited Trump back into power after he tried to overturn the election, was convicted of fraud, and was revealed to have possessed and leaked classified information after he was out of office. The media and the nation’s elites interpreted that victory as a sign that Trump was some sort of magical superhero, and that it was in all their interests to join with him and reap the rewards. The result has been nothing short of catastrophic, revealing gaping holes in our constitutional order, weaknesses in our democratic system and a void in our society where moral authority used to be. America has never been perfect, and it always falls short of its professed ideals, but this political era has stripped away the belief that we have any at all.
The corruption on display, coupled with a lack of concern for the lives of ordinary people, is breathtaking. And while it remains shocking that tens of millions of Americans still support this administration, it seems that a majority may have finally had the veil lifted from their eyes, allowing them to see the incompetence, grift and megalomania for what it is.
It’s hard to see how a nation founded on the ideas espoused in the Declaration of Independence can survive without even the pretense of ethics or universal values. At the moment, the American creed is simply “to the victor go the spoils,” by which Trump is not just imperiously referring to the foreign countries he seeks to colonize. He’s talking about America itself.
There can be no more questions about what the Republican Party is capable of, and as weak as he appears on the campaign trail, Trump is clearly frustrated and angry. Reporting suggests that he plans to double down on all of it the minute the election is over. If the American people somehow fail to forcefully repudiate Trump and the oligarchs who use and manipulate him, it’s unlikely we’ll get another chance.
PEEKSKILL, New York — Betsy Abrams, a 67-year-old executive assistant, showed up at a political rally held in a park on the banks of the Hudson River wearing a shirt that read, “Sit over there, I don’t need your mansplaining.” She was also holding a stack of yard signs for Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in New York’s 17th Congressional District.
Abrams didn’t support Conley in the primary, but she’s been impressed with her on the campaign trail. Conley, who’s challenging Rep. Mike Lawler in one of the country’s most competitive races, also won Abrams over in an October 15 debate in a heated back-and-forth over a question about whether there should be a federal standard for consent.
Conley told Lawler: “I do not need you to mansplain to me what sexual assault and domestic violence against women is and the appropriate response. Don’t start. Sit over there.”
As a survivor of abuse herself, Abrams said, “It hit a chord with me.”
Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in New York’s 17th Congressional District, speaks at a get-out-the-vote rally in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026. Conley, who’s challenging Rep. Mike Lawler in one of the country’s most competitive races, won over some supporters after a heated debate exchange about sexual assault and domestic violence.
(Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The question was sparked by a bombshell lawsuit filed by a former student at Cornell University, some 200 miles north of the district. The plaintiff, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, is suing the university and seven men she accuses of raping her at a fraternity house in 2024. Lawyers for all seven defendants have denied the allegations. Both the university and the local district attorney, who initially declined to prosecute the men, have come under fire for how they handled the case.
Along with Abrams, Dawn Greenberg, a 63-year-old Conley supporter, and several other women showed up at Saturday’s rally with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Peekskill with T-shirts and buttons referencing Conley’s line.
“One of the things I love about her is her fire in her belly,” Greenberg said of Conley. “That spoke to me.”
Mellicent Dyane, a filmmaker and Democratic district leader in Pleasantville, attends a get-out-the-vote rally for Cait Conley in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026. (Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The cost of living, healthcare and the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies have been the biggest issues in the race for New York’s 17th District and around the country. But in a year where multiple men have resigned from Congress amid allegations of misconduct; the Cornell case brought campus sexual assault back to the forefront of the national conversation; and revelations from millions of files connected to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have led the headlines, the exchange struck a chord with many women supporters.
Mellicent Dyane, a 60-year-old filmmaker and Democratic district leader in Pleasantville also wearing the shirt, is one of many women who were disturbed by those blaming the victim of the alleged assault and what she saw as a lack of accountability for perpetrators.
“Universities need to stop this bullshit,” she said.
Conley, who has served multiple tours of duty overseas as a military police officer, said rates of sexual assault and domestic violence are “unacceptable.”
“I think we do need to relook at how the law enforcement structure around violent crimes on campuses is, and make sure that every victim gets access to quality law enforcement and justice, regardless of ZIP code,” she told The 19th. “America is about freedom, equality, and justice for all, but that’s not what’s happening right now.”
When asked about their exchange in the debate, Lawler said Conley’s charge of mansplaining was “manufactured” political theater.
In the debate, Conley and Lawler sparred over their associations with men accused of misconduct. Conley said she was “disappointed” with Lawler’s support of his colleague Rep. Max Miller of Ohio, who has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife and mother of his daughter; Miller has denied the allegations. Lawler, in turn, criticized Conley for taking campaign donations from former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 after a federal investigation revealed he had hired sex workers; he was not accused of abuse or charged with a crime.
An attendee reacts as Rep. Mike Lawlerspeaks during a town hall on April 12, 2026 in Mahopac, New York.
(Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
“Fact is, she attacked me, and I pointed out her hypocrisy on the issue of taking support from a sexual predator, Eliot Spitzer, and her response is not to denounce Eliot Spitzer, but to say that I’m mansplaining,” Lawler told The 19th. “That didn’t land as well as you or others may think it did, with her made-up T-shirts that magically were produced right away.”
Lawler, first elected in 2022, is running on his record of achieving results and working across the aisle. He’s one of just three House Republicans representing a district that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and has been endorsed by Democratic colleague Rep. Jared Golden of Maine.
“At the end of the day, people know who I am, they know what I stand for. I’ve consistently been rated among the most bipartisan and effective members of Congress, and ultimately, I think people will judge me based on my record and who I am,” Lawler said in a brief interview in Nanuet on Sunday, adding that people in the district “don’t actually know” or care who Jeffries is.
But defeating Lawler is a top priority for other Democrats, including Assemblymember Didi Barrett, who said she’d seen him be “a real jerk,” in the state assembly. That’s also a goal for Jeffries, who is poised to be House speaker if Democrats retake the chamber and called Lawler a “MAGA extremist phony” in Peekskill.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Cait Conley greet supporters at a get-out-the-vote rally in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026.
(Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The firestorm around the Cornell case has also spurred some Democrats to call for changes to New York’s laws around intoxication and consent — and to elect more women lawmakers.
“From Congress to Cornell, it’s clear we need more women,” Barrett said at a rally and canvass launch for Conley and other down-ballot women candidates later Saturday in East Fishkill, about an hour’s drive north of Peekskill.
“I think that everybody needs to understand that if women aren’t at the table, things are going to keep happening like that,” she told The 19th.
To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.
With a number of anti-data-center candidates poised to win on Tuesday, New York provides a glimpse at the tensions around actually having to do something about the digital infrastructure.
Deutschland befindet sich nicht im Krieg, aber auch nicht mehr im Frieden. Was passiert konkret, wenn das Land militärisch angegriffen wird? Dieser existenziellen Frage stellt sich Generalleutnant Alexander Sollfrank, Befehlshaber des Operativen Führungskommandos der Bundeswehr, im Gespräch mit Rixa Fürsen.
Ein konventioneller Überraschungsangriff gilt dank engmaschiger Überwachung als unwahrscheinlich, doch der hybride Schattenkrieg durch Sabotage und Spionage läuft bereits auf Hochtouren. Die Folge beleuchtet, wie der „Operationsplan Deutschland“ greift, wenn das Land im Ernstfall zur logistischen Drehscheibe für zehntausende NATO-Soldaten wird.
Der Verteidigungsfall betrifft längst nicht mehr nur das Militär. Die Analyse zeigt detailliert, wie zivile Behörden, Polizei und Bundeswehr im Krisenfall verzahnt agieren müssen, um eine glaubhafte Abschreckung aufzubauen und die europäische Sicherheitsarchitektur zu verteidigen.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
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More than 40% of people flagged by the Trump administration as suspected noncitizen voters in California aren’t on the state’s current voter rolls, according to a new analysis filed in federal court Saturday, raising fresh questions about the Justice Department‘s efforts to intervene in ballot counting days before the midterm elections.
Researchers with UCLA’s Voting Rights Project examined a list of 20,930 people identified by federal officials as potentially ineligible voters. They found that 8,880 names, or 42%, could not be matched to California’s current voter file.
The analysis also identified at least 22 people who appear to be U.S. citizens, with researchers warning that the number of citizens included on the list could be considerably higher.
The findings were submitted in litigation brought by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which is challenging the administration’s efforts to use federal immigration data to identify suspected noncitizen voters.
🚨 CHIRLA & the UCLA Voting Rights Project have filed a federal lawsuit to defend voting rights ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The case seeks equal treatment under the Constitution for all U.S. citizens, regardless of birthplace.
No second-class citizens. No second-class votes.
The Justice Department demanded that California election officials separate ballots associated with the listed individuals and withhold them from counting until their citizenship can be verified. Federal prosecutors have also warned election officials of potential criminal consequences for knowingly processing ballots cast by noncitizens.
California officials rejected the demands, questioning the list’s reliability and warning that separating ballots could disrupt an election already underway.
On Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s emergency request to force California to set aside the disputed ballots. The court concluded that the government had not demonstrated that such extraordinary intervention was legally justified.
A federal district judge had previously rejected the request, warning that it could disenfranchise eligible voters and create chaos in the election system.
The Justice Department maintains that its efforts are intended to prevent illegal voting, which is prohibited in federal elections. The administration has defended its data and argued that counting ballots from ineligible voters would undermine legitimate votes.
But the new analysis raises questions about whether the government’s list accurately identifies people who are registered to vote, much less whether they are ineligible.
The dispute comes as millions of Californians have already cast ballots ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
President Donald Trump called Norway a “shithouse country” after failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Norway’s tourism officials decided to take that as a compliment.
Visit Norway, the Scandinavian country’s tourism agency, responded to Trump’s insult with a cheeky campaign celebrating its spectacular public restrooms, declaring that Norway makes “shithouses great again.”
The campaign features some of the country’s most architecturally impressive toilets, many situated along scenic routes overlooking fjords, mountains and waterfalls. Some have even won international design awards.
Trump delivered the insult last Sunday during a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, while complaining about the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded earlier this month to international jurist Navi Pillay.
“Norway has become a shithouse country, actually,” Trump told supporters. He also suggested he no longer wanted Norwegian immigrants coming to the United States because he had not received the prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by an independent Norwegian committee, not the country’s government.
Rather than engage in a diplomatic spat, Visit Norway embraced the president’s characterization, promoting restrooms that include the award-winning Stegastein viewpoint toilet overlooking Aurlandsfjord and the triangular Golden Toilet on Senja Island.
The agency repurposed material originally developed for World Toilet Day, which falls on Nov. 19.
The response has been an unexpected tourism success.
According to travel industry publication Skift, Visit Norway’s toilet webpage attracted more than 80,000 views from over 170 countries in five days, with traffic surging to more than 540 times the previous week’s level. Roughly a quarter of visitors were American.
The tourism agency spent less than $10,000 promoting the campaign, with approximately 90% of its traffic arriving organically. A Times Square advertisement was also planned for this weekend.
The campaign marks a reversal from Trump’s first presidency, when he disparaged Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” while expressing a preference for immigrants from Norway.
Now, Norway is making the most of its presidential publicity, inviting visitors to discover some of the world’s most scenic places to answer nature’s call.
Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in France to protest against the rising cost of living and deteriorating school conditions as youth-led protests spread to Italy and Germany.
With six months to go until the presidential election, France’s largest cities including Paris, Lyon and Marseille saw marches for a third consecutive Saturday.
The French interior ministry said 320,000 people took to the streets across the country on Saturday in what were largely peaceful protests. Student unions put the figure at half a million, including 200,000 in Paris.
Arrests were significantly lower than during previous demonstrations, although tensions and clashes emerged in Marseille, Paris and Lyon as marches dispersed.
French authorities described the situation nationwide as “generally calm” in the early afternoon. France deployed 70,000 police officers to contain what it feared would be another day of unrest.
Many protesters wore Halloween costumes despite French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez warning that face coverings could result in fines of €150.
Other European cities including Rome, Milan, Berlin and Frankfurt also experienced a day of youth-led protests against the cost of living and, in Germany, military spending.
The protests in over 30 German cities were ignited by a youth-led initiative called Gen Z regelt (Gen Z gets things done) and remained largely peaceful despite the police cancelling a planned march in Cologne after some participants wore face coverings and set off smoke bombs.
In Italy, the police carried out 60 searches across 23 cities targeting people suspected of inciting violence a mass demonstrations on Friday, according to news agency ANSA.
Vladimir Putin’s possible return to a G20 summit in Florida in December risks normalizing Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Saturday.
“Normalizing Russia coming back to these international fora is just normalizing war crimes being committed every day now” in Ukraine, Kallas said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
She added that Russia’s war in Ukraine conflicts “with U.N charter principles that all these countries around the table have signed up to.”
Putin hasn’t yet confirmed whether he would attend the December summit hosted in the U.S. His last in-person attendance at a G20 meeting was in 2019 — three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kallas’ remarks come amid growing frustration among EU countries over Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s attendance at a G20 ministerial gathering in Atlanta.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was hosting the meeting, called off the traditional family photo after European officials refused to stand beside Lavrov.
Kallas said in the interview that “we don’t want to stand next to him [Lavrov] in this fora,” because he’s been placed under international sanctions.
However, she added that Lavrov’s presence meant “we can also immediately fight back on these lies” from Russia.
Kallas hailed the U.S. decision on Friday to sell 500 Patriot missile interceptors to Ukraine as a “very positive development” and called on allies to toughen sanctions against Russia.
A former Prime Minister of Estonia, Kallas has emerged as one of the EU’s most vocal critics of Russia.
In the interview, she rebuffed reported calls from the Pentagon for NATO countries, including the Baltic states that border Russia, to tone down their criticism of the Kremlin.
“The question is if you don’t talk about the threat, is it going away? I think it’s not going away.”
Conservative activist James O’Keefe set out to expose alleged vulnerabilities in Minnesota’s election system. Now, he faces felony charges stemming from the undercover operation.
O’Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas and current CEO of the O’Keefe Media Group, and conservative influencer Cameron Higby were charged Wednesday with unlawful voting and identity theft after allegedly impersonating registered voters at Minneapolis polling places during the state’s Aug. 11 primary.
According to Hennepin County prosecutors, the men wore disguises, used fake accents and provided election workers with the names of registered voters without their knowledge or permission. They filmed the encounters and later posted videos claiming to expose weaknesses in Minnesota’s voter registration procedures.
The operation targeted the state’s *vouching* system, which allows registered voters to verify the residency of people seeking to register on Election Day. The process requires sworn statements and identifying information from prospective voters.
Neither O’Keefe nor Higby cast a ballot or signed the required vouching oath. Prosecutors contend that misrepresenting their identities while beginning the voting process was itself unlawful.
O’Keefe defended the operation as investigative journalism, calling the prosecution an attack on First Amendment rights. Higby also denied breaking the law, saying the pair intended to expose election vulnerabilities.
The charges are the latest controversy involving O’Keefe’s undercover tactics. In 2017, reporters at the Washington Post caught him trying to sell them a false story. In 2009, he collaborated on hidden-camera investigations targeting Planned Parenthood and gained national attention for videos involving the community organization ACORN. He later settled a lawsuit brought by a former ACORN employee for $100,000 without admitting wrongdoing.
But Minnesota officials say the latest operation demonstrated something different from what O’Keefe intended.
Election workers noticed suspicious behavior and reported it, prompting an investigation. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the state’s system for identifying and responding to potential misconduct functioned as intended. This vouching process itself accounted for fewer than 0.6% of votes cast in Minnesota’s 2024 general election, according to state election officials.
O’Keefe and Higby are scheduled to appear in court Nov. 16. Neither has been convicted.
U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he was “open” to calls for the British state to formally apologize for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Burnham offered a “structured dialogue with those affected” by the slave trade in an opinion piece for the Guardian, published ahead of a summit of Commonwealth countries starting Sunday.
“Having these difficult conversations to safeguard the Commonwealth for the future is the right thing to do. It is also the patriotic thing to do,” Burnham wrote.
However, he rejected demands from Caribbean countries for Britain to pay financial reparations for the slave trade, saying that they would be the wrong solution.
“I do not think that British people today can be held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part,” the prime minister argued.
Barbados PM Mia Mottley announced in June a manifesto by Caribbean leaders setting out the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations from former colonial powers.
Burnham will attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, which runs through Wednesday. It will be his first foreign trip with King Charles.
It will be a crucial test for the prime minister, who will try to avoid a fight over slavery reparations that marred his predecessor Keir Starmer’s visit at the last summit in 2024.
"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"
"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."
"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"
"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."
"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."
If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …
On Thursday night, the smear at the heart of the mysterious transgender mailers that have rocked the final weeks of the midterm elections in Texas completed its journey. What began as baseless social media whispers quickly ascended the ladder of conservative influence, jumped into mailboxes across the Lone Star State and ultimately into the comforting prime-time embrace of Fox News.
At a town hall in Fort Worth, a Texas mother of six named Rebekah Smith told Vice President JD Vance that her 11-year-old daughter had received a letter explaining how to transition without her parents ever knowing, and asked how Republicans would keep the government out of her family. “I don’t know who sent that letter to your child,” the vice president said, “but I think the person who sends a letter to an 11-year-old about gender transition, what I call that in my family is a pervert, and that person ought to go to prison.” Host Jesse Watters, never one to let a grievance go to waste, promised that Fox would investigate “this perverted letter.” Vance asked Smith to talk to his staff because he would “like the Department of Justice to investigate that” as well.
Watters rushed to promote the spectacle. “WHOA! Texas MOM tells JD Vance her DAUGHTER received a letter telling her TO TRANSITION TO A BOY,” he posted on X, followed by Vance’s promise. Missing from that framing was the question that should have governed the segment: Who actually sent the material?
Nobody on that stage mentioned that the pamphlet was a fake. Nobody mentioned that the real transgender advocacy group named inside it had disavowed the mailer. Nobody mentioned that sworn testimony filed that same week had tied the text messages that accompanied it to a national Republican organization. The vice president was asking federal prosecutors to chase a forgery that may well have originated in his own party’s orbit — and he was doing it on a network whose viewers had been marinating in that forgery for weeks.
The race between Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic challenger James Talarico has become a crucible for dark-money maneuvers. As polls show the Republican grip on the Lone Star State slipping, conservative campaigns and their surrogates have resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. In early October, for example, Talarico took a brief hiatus from the campaign trail to recover from a severe case of the flu. Rather than accepting a routine human illness, the right-wing echo chamber treated a temporary absence as evidence of mental illness. Within days, the fabricated scandal has collapsed — yet the machinery of right-wing media simply pivoted to amplifying a more insidious operation designed to trigger visceral outrage.
This second October surprise involved millions of unsolicited text messages and a wave of physical mailers sent to Texas households with materials that directed readers to the website of the Transgender Education Network of
It does not need to survive scrutiny. It just needs to circulate upward.
Texas while inserting provocative advice on child emancipation that the real organization says it never authored or authorized. By flooding the electorate with extreme material disguised as progressive advocacy, right-wing operatives appear to have sought to create a fake controversy that could be weaponized in attack ads and campaign speeches. Vance, for instance, told the Fox News audience that Talarico has “a weird fascination with trans kids,” and that “he’ll probably defend the right of the person sending the letter, not the right of the parent who is rightfully creeped out by this.” Vance claimed that Talarico “has actually called it abusive when parents try to prevent their children from transitioning” and that Paxton “has fought hard to prosecute those people, whereas James Talarico has fought hard to protect those people.” Even the distortion had been laundered by then — Talarico called denying a child’s gender identity abusive, a different claim from saying parents must permit medical transition, but at the top of the ladder the difference no longer exists.
That is how a smear works in the closed ecosystem of the American right. It does not need to survive scrutiny. It just needs to circulate upward. An anonymous account posts it; an influencer adopts it; a donor-funded outlet reports the influencer’s outrage as news; an elected official demands an investigation, and the demand becomes proof the story matters; cable news books the controversy; a vice president promises federal action. Each rung launders the one below it. The correction, when it comes, travels in the opposite direction and arrives nowhere.
The paper trail looks like what you would expect from a covert operation. Texas Transgender Student Union LLC was formed in Wyoming on Sept. 2 through a commercial registered agent that helps owners stay anonymous. After CBS News Texas visited the agent’s address in Sheridan, Wyoming, the agent announced it was resigning. The mailers listed a Houston-area post office box. The Texas Observer reported that the barcode on the envelopes traced to a mail-tracking company that has taken federal campaign money from only one group this year, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The committee said it had nothing to do with the mailers, and the company would not say who paid. CBS News Texas reported that the bulk-mail permit belongs to an Illinois printer owned by the Zerrusen family, who have given heavily to Republican PACs and been photographed with Donald Trump.
When the real Transgender Education Network of Texas filed a petition in Travis County court to unmask the perpetrators behind the impersonation campaign, the partisan safety nets of the Texas judiciary eventually snapped into action. A deposition of Infobip, the messaging company that delivered the texts, which a Travis County judge ordered made public, indicated that the texts were sent on behalf of the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund and a man named John Braun. But on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court, composed entirely of judges appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, issued an administrative stay that blocked its release. Chris Hilton, an attorney who previously served under Paxton, defended him during his impeachment trial and was later pushed out of office amid sexual harassment allegations, argued on behalf of the company that the mailers were not political speech because they named no candidate or party.
Dirty tricks are an old tradition of American politics. This cycle, Republican PACs in Nevada mailed a flyer calling a nonpartisan candidate, Danielle Ford, the “AOC of Nevada,” hoping voters would mistake her for the actual Democratic nominee, Aaron Ford. This week also brought word that the group that funded Cornel West’s 2024 ballot drives raised every dollar through a dark-money network bankrolled by Elon Musk.
The president’s party whines about decoy candidates in Alaska while running them at home. Ratf**king is a long and proud Republican tradition, and the Texas operation fits inside perfectly.
ALAMO, Tex. – Eustorgia Santos de Torres has lived here for four decades. Last year, she turned to a trusted Rio Grande Valley nonprofit for help navigating the citizenship application process. The same nonprofit — La Unión del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE — then helped her register to vote, and she cast her first ballot as a citizen in the primary election last March.
Santos de Torres, 67, is retired after years cleaning houses and working as a healthcare aide. She speaks mainly Spanish and is the primary caretaker for her husband, Nemorio, who is blind. “Yo soy sus ojos,” Santos de Torres said — I am his eyes.
But last month, Santos de Torres, a new voter, struggled to help Nemorio, an American-born citizen, understand and cast his mail ballot for the November election. All the information on the ballot is in English, she said, and the letters are small.
So Santos de Torres helped Nemorio to the car and made the familiar 7-minute drive to LUPE’s headquarters in the neighboring town of San Juan to ask for help with her husband’s ballot.
This time, though, LUPE workers reluctantly turned the couple away.
In 2021, Texas’ GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a sweeping and controversial overhaul of election laws known as SB1. Among other changes, SB1 made it illegal for anyone to receive compensation for helping voters fill in their ballots.
That not only makes it illegal for paid nonprofit staff to help voters, but also criminalized common past practices, such as organizations giving volunteers gas money or stipends. Violations are a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
In the wake of the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican currently running in the state’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race, investigated and prosecuted voting rights advocacy groups and organizers in heavily Latino communities across the state.
Groups such as LUPE say they have been forced to alter or stop some voter outreach as they worry about running afoul of the law. LUPE used to send workers out walking blocks to help voters. Now it has to instead ask volunteers to do more limited versions of that work.
LUPE is known for providing one-on-one assistance to people in the Latino community, so the restrictions on helping with voting are a real pain point for the organization, Executive Director Tania Chavez Camacho said. Texas has strict rules limiting who is eligible to use mail ballots, but people over 65 may do so. LUPE helps around 30,000 people a year, she said, including people with disabilities and many older people who, each year, “want to vote by mail and they come in wanting help.”
Now, Chavez Camacho said, when the group holds public town halls for residents to instruct them on how to vote, if a voter pulls out their mail ballot to ask for help, organizers must ask the voter to leave so paid employees aren’t near the ballot.
And if workers for LUPE’s advocacy arm are canvassing for candidates and a voter shows them a mail ballot and asks for help filling it out, workers have been trained to say they can’t and walk away, Chavez Camacho said.
“We literally have to turn them away,” Chavez Camacho said. “We’ve had to do a lot of training with our staff for the past three years because they were so accustomed to helping folks one-on-one and now they can’t.”
Santos de Torres did what she could to help her husband, who mailed back his ballot about a month ago.
“But I don’t think it’s right that LUPE can’t help us,” she told a reporter in Spanish. “That law is not right. It’s excluding people who need help.”
“What if,” she added, “my husband didn’t have me?”
‘A person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own’
The Rio Grande Valley, where LUPE is based, covers roughly 4,300-square-miles across Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy counties along the Mexico border at Texas’ southern tip. It’s a diverse community with some residents who primarily speak Spanish. Younger generations of residents easily switch between English and Spanish in conversation.
Many households are made up of families whose members have mixed legal statuses, including some who have lived in the area for generations. The Valley also has a history of activism as the birthplace of the Texas farmworker movement of the 1960’s. Farmworkers – who harvested cotton, vegetables and fruits — organized and marched for roughly 400 miles from the Valley to Austin to demand fair wages and better working conditions. Mexican-American farmworker labor today remains key to the area’s growth and agricultural economy.
But due to the lack of affordable housing, Mexican Americans for years purchased land they could afford in rural areas outside of city limits, often lacking basic infrastructure and public services. Those communities are known now as the colonias.
Alamo, where Santos de Torres lives, and San Juan, where LUPE is based, are neighboring cities. The landscape varies depending on the side of town. In the southern parts of the cities, closer to the border with Mexico, modest residential homes with green front lawns adorn along palm tree-lined streets. Shopping centers, chain restaurants, stadiums, and commercial developments lie to the north of the cities, along Interstate Highway 2, reflecting the transition from the once primarily agricultural community to a growing metropolitan hub. The Valley has for years relied on its trade of goods and services with Mexico. It has a population of more than 1.4 million people and 90% of them are Hispanic or Latino, according to Census data.
About 24% of people in the Valley live below the poverty line, which is more than double the national rate. And about 30% of Valley residents don’t have health insurance – one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. The area also has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the country; Nemorio Torres’ blindness is a complication of the disease.
LUPE and other advocacy groups have long worked with residents in the colonias and all over the Valley, providing resources to find affordable housing and medical treatment, or helping with complex procedures such as filing taxes. Voter education and outreach was part of the mission.
Now, instead of providing one-on-one assistance, LUPE hosts group sessions with a screen projector showing what mail ballot applications and mail ballots look like. Facilitators point at the screen indicating what the instructions say and explaining how the forms should be filled out.
The limitations are frustrating, Chavez Camacho said, especially “si una persona no sabe leer” — if a person can’t read. “It doesn’t matter that we’re doing those sessions because a person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own and we can’t help them to know where to mark,” she said.
Instead, LUPE’s workers and volunteers now focus on letting people know key deadlines are coming up. They also have fewer volunteers willing to guide and interpret for voters at the polls, she said, because the law now requires such people to sign an oath affirming the voter is qualified to receive help because they are disabled or need an interpreter, and detail their relationship with the voter. They must also affirm they are not being paid by a candidate or political committee, which would be illegal. Volunteers fear any misstep while assisting voters could get them in trouble, Chavez-Camacho said.
“We really feel that the people are not getting the support they need,” Chavez Camacho said.
Election and voting law experts say the courts have interpreted “compensation” prohibited from going to volunteers by SB1 as any type of benefit. That interpretation is so broad that it makes it difficult for voter outreach organizations to know whether they are violating the law, said Zachary Dolling, litigation director at Texas Civil Rights Project, which works with groups to design trainings in voter outreach that comply with the law.
Dolling said some organizations historically provided unpaid volunteers dinner, T-shirts, or pens, and others have given volunteers college credit for their work.
“All of those things are items of value” and could be considered compensation, he said.
Advocates warned state leaders of added burdens for people with disabilities
Texas Republicans passed SB1, the sweeping overhaul of election law, in part responding to false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Republicans claimed the law would increase public trust and confidence in the elections. Democrats argued the legislation would disproportionately burden voters of color and people with disabilities, and staged two walkouts and a 15-hour Senate filibuster in their failed attempt to defeat the bill.
Despite lawsuits from voting rights organizations including LUPE, the League of United Latin American Citizens and organizations representing Texans with disabilities, a federal appeals court ultimately upheld key provisions of SB1, including the restrictions on voter assistance.
Other attempts to expand voting help for people with disabilities were meanwhile unsuccessful.
In 2023, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded vote-by-mail access for people with disabilities — specifically people who are blind or paralyzed and need assistance marking their ballot — by allowing such voters to request an electronic ballot and use a computer to mark their choices. Similar options in Texas are already available for military overseas voters and astronauts, but not for voterswith disabilities.
The challenges Santos de Torres and her husband have faced are an example of what advocates worried about under SB1, said Lydia Nunez Landry, statewide coordinator for REV UP Texas, which works to get out the vote among people with disabilities.
“That was our worst fear and now it’s happening,” she said. Nunez Landry has muscular dystrophy, uses a power wheelchair, and needs help doing basic tasks such as opening the refrigerator.
The state has made voting “just so impossible and so arduous for people — and now people are also terrified of helping us,” she said.
An increased ‘sense of anxiety’
Groups across the state have been changing their voter outreach work to comply with SB1.
Asian Texans for Justice conducts voter outreach in Asian communities, focusing on San Antonio, Houston, Austin, and North Texas.
The stricter rules associated with voting by mail under SB1 have created “a sense of anxiety” in those communities, Executive Director Nabila Mansoor said. She said that the process is now much more complicated for elderly voters, who must provide one of two forms of ID on their application and pay close attention to pages of instructions that are written in font that is small and hard for them to read. In addition, an error could force them to restart the whole process of applying for a ballot.
“That anxiety comes from this kind of fear that they’re going to do something wrong,” Mansoor said. “Whenever you have that kind of fear, it is one more barrier for that person to actually go out and vote.”
Now that Asian Texans for Justice can no longer provide one-on-one help, they’ve turned to providing checklists for voters, she said, which she believes is less effective when some voters may need help reading and understanding the ballot and instructions
Mansoor said she believes that SB1’s goal was to make it harder for people to vote.
“It means that we have to be more careful. It means that we have to dot our i’s and cross our t’s. It means that we have to take good records. It means that we have to be very thorough in terms of our training of our volunteers,” she said, adding that the organization assembled a legal team to defend against challenges to their work as well.
In the meantime, volunteers for LUPE and other groups say they are doing their best to fill the gap.
Maria Gomez, better known as Doña Mary, of Pharr, worked as a farmworker for years in Hidalgo County and has been a member of LUPE since the organization was founded. Gomez, 78, was involved in the farmworker movement years ago. She now ensures her elderly friends and neighbors are aware of election deadlines, know where to vote, and have a ride to the polls if they need one.
After she drops off her grandkids and great-grandkids at school, she makes her rounds around the Colonias in San Juan in her small red SUV. She chats up her neighbors, and asks them what they need help with or if they need resources or a ride. She’s always fielding calls.
“People don’t vote because sometimes they can’t leave their home and because they might not have access to that piece of paper that they need to sign to receive their ballot,” Gomez said in Spanish, referring to voter registration forms and ballot-by-mail applications.
One of her friends, 80-year-old Teresa Corona Garza of San Juan, has relied on Gomez for rides to the polls for some time now. Corona Garza struggles to stand for long periods of time and can’t see very well out of her left eye. Even though she qualifies to vote by mail, she prefers to go to the polls in person.
“There’s so much on there you have to fill out, and those letters are small,” Corona Garza said in Spanish. “No, I prefer to go, quiero ver que mi voto cuenta,” she said – I want to see that my vote is counted.
The laws have gotten so complicated and strict that Gomez worries state leaders may even try to prevent volunteers like her from providing rides to the polls.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, if they’re going to keep making this harder for people,” she said, “but I would like to see people who want to vote to be able to do it.”
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive for the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in New York City on September 23, 2025. | Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
In the last month or so, President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again relationship with Ukraine — which has ranged from kicking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House in early 2025 to promising new air defense missiles this summer — has once again run cold. Trump has excoriated Zelenskyy for successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and gifted Russia a sanctions reprieve.
Trump also hasn’t had much success brokering a ceasefire, much less an end to the war (an announced “energy ceasefire” fell apart-near instantly earlier in October). First Lady Melania Trump, however, has.
She reportedly played a (limited) role in arranging a partial ceasefire for the frontline Ukrainian city of Oleshky, which has been hit especially hard by the war and is currently occupied by Russia.
The pause, which is scheduled to run through the weekend, allows food and aid to get in and for a civilian evacuation. While limited, it also shows that both Ukraine and Russia are potentially willing to come to the negotiating table.
After the Trump-Vladimir Putin rapprochement, though, some critics worry that the US is more likely to take Russia’s side — or at least step away from Ukraine’s — both in the war and in any possible peace talks.
To break down what the Trumps are up to, how serious the concerns of Trump abandoning Ukraine for Putin actually are, and what could come next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Alex Ward, a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Ward, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s start with the most unexpected news out of this war in recent days: that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire.
It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo.
Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?
I think a little bit. Look, this ceasefire is not a small thing. It is a humanitarian ceasefire in the southern Ukrainian city of Oleshky. It allows humanitarian aid to get in. The critics would say this allows the Russians to re-arm and regroup, and I guess at the same time also the Ukrainians.
The question is, does it actually have that much influence over the war? No, it’s a very, very small targeted ceasefire. But it is a potential signal that deals can be made.
The Russians are very much saying, look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this. And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them.
It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence. I don’t want to discredit her. I’m sure she did work on this.
When did she become a negotiator in this war?
From the beginning, she has been trying to get children kidnapped by Russia back to Ukraine. That has been a major focus of hers in this war.
Is she the driving force behind this ceasefire? Is she the number one reason it happened? It’s totally possible. There’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady. Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role.
The ceasefire is just relegated to one city. How come?
That’s all they could agree to. If we’re looking at this war at a bigger scale, there’s been a massive discussion about how to get an end to the Ukraine-Russia war.
The US last week was able to broker a commitment to have trilateral talks between the Ukrainians, Russians, and the Americans with the goal toward ending the war. And you’ve heard President Zelenskyy of Ukraine say, “We can call it ceasefire. We can call stop the killings. We can call freeze the conflict.”
Putin goes, ‘No, thank you. I would like basically a handover of the territory that I want, even though I’ve been unable to conquer it after nearly five years.’ It’s unclear if they’re even going to get into the room for those trilateral negotiations. Even if they do, it’ll probably be at a lower technical level.
So are we ever going to get to the point that Putin and Zelenskyy and Trump get in a room, all hold hands and say ‘war over’? I highly doubt it, but that is the goal they’re after. You see the Trump administration, the Kremlin, and Kyiv all point to this Oleshky ceasefire as, like, ‘Hey, this could be a model for the much bigger deal.’
I want to be clear that this Oleshky thing is important. It really is aimed at a humanitarian ceasefire since there’s a lot of food that isn’t getting in, a lot of people are suffering and this potentially leads to some relief. But there are a lot of people around Ukraine and many bombed-out cities that are going, “Hey, what about us? We are hungry too. We don’t have certain services.”
Winter is coming, and the Russians have bombed out a lot of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is going to make this winter potentially very brutal, as a lot of folks will not have heating or the necessities they need to survive really cold temperatures.
Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, which had a lot of people shook because, famously, Vladimir Putin also started this war.
Yeah, it’s like calling Freddy Krueger a nails enthusiast. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Has Vladimir Putin released Americans that he took hostage? Yes. Has he returned some children that his government, his forces have taken? Yes. I don’t know if that makes a humanitarian. That’s kind of like praising the arsonist for throwing a bucket of water on the house fire.
It’s not just calling him a humanitarian; it’s getting rid of the Lindsey Graham sanctions on Russia, which is essentially like handing Russia billions of dollars, right?
There’s a lot of weirdness here. First of all, on the Graham bill, it’s a weird bill, and frankly it’s a pretty bad bill despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans love it.
What it basically calls for is tariffs on countries that purchase Russian energy. The way that Trump explains it is he waived the economic punishments, because otherwise the Russians would not have returned Stephen Hubbard and there might not have been this Oleshky ceasefire and there might not have been a bunch of other benefits.
Another argument President Trump was making for removing these tariff sanctions on Russia was that it would lower diesel costs here in the United States. Has that actually happened?
The Russians agreed to a diesel deal where they would basically export diesel to the United States. And in President Trump’s mind, that will lower costs because President Trump and political allies of his like Elon Musk of SpaceX say that is the reason diesel prices have skyrocketed across the US.
However, when you talk to analysts and look at the data, it is the Iran war that has had a greater effect on diesel prices. Not to say that the Russia-Ukraine war hasn’t had any, but it’s much less because there is just very little Russian diesel in the American market, but also in the global market.
What the US is receiving from Russia is not nothing, but effectively nothing because it’s just not enough to alleviate the diesel concerns across the country and to lower prices to a meaningful amount. And we can see President Trump is effectively scrambling to make good on his promises of lowering prices as the midterms approach, to the point that he’s willing to make a deal with the invading country in the war he’s trying to end in order to lower gas prices at home.
A lot of people see these developments and think that the United States’ allegiances have shifted, that we’ve maybe abandoned Ukraine at the moment. Is that fair?
I don’t think we can say that with any sense of certainty. President Trump has actually been on Ukraine’s side in certain cases, even rhetorically during a UN meeting, I believe it was last year. President Trump was presented with intelligence about how the Russians have been struggling to invade Ukraine. And then he released a statement saying basically, ‘Go Ukraine, go. Russia, you’re kind of losing here.’ And that made people go, ‘Oh, he’s on Ukraine’s side.’
And of course, after that whole Oval Office blowup with Zelenskyy, that relationship improved. But everyone’s always been kind of like, ‘Well, we know where Trump’s feelings are here. He wants a big deal with Russia. He wants an economic deal with Russia. He wants to improve relations with Vladimir Putin, and so he always returns to the mean, even if he flirts with Ukraine.’
But below President Trump’s unique style of dealmaking, the US intelligence community is helping Ukraine to defend against Russia. The US is selling weapons to Europeans for the Europeans to deliver to Ukraine. It is nowhere near the level of weapons support during the Biden administration, but that intelligence support seems to be at a higher level than during the Biden years.
And it’s not like President Trump has purposefully hampered Ukraine’s defenses a lot. There are some questions about sudden intelligence shutoffs and delays of important weapons. I am not saying President Trump has been a staunch defender and a staunch supporter of Ukraine here. But if you look at the grand totality, Ukraine is still being defended by the United States.
It almost seems like President Trump has an inability to pick a side. He’s playing both. In his mind, he thinks that’s the best way to get them both to the table and get a deal. But this is also the man that said he could do it in 24 hours and we’re nearly two years into his presidency. And right now the best we can get is, ‘Hey, maybe we can get the Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans to meet in a room for technical talks.’
It’s not nothing. And also, hey, we got a ceasefire in a town in Ukraine. It’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere near the big, potentially Nobel Peace Prize-winning deal that he’s searching for.
Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. | CBS via Getty Images
When Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday, first stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprisein 1987 in his defining role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Berlin Wall still stood. The Soviet Union would not fall until the fourth season of that show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, had already begun. Yet Picard’s generation of Star Trek franchiseanticipated both events, portraying a post-Cold War world just as the Cold War was ending. It was the quintessential show for an age of American hegemony.
For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Star Trek is primarily a story about Starfleet, which serves as both the military arm and as a kind of diplomatic corps for the United Federation of Planets, a benevolent, democratic union of more than a hundred worlds. In Star Trek’s Original Series, the 1960s episodes featuring Kirk and Spock, the Federation stands in the same shoes as the Cold War United States — vast and powerful, but also harried by other galactic superpowers like the Klingon Empire.
Picard’s Federation, by contrast, is the sole dominant power in Earth’s quadrant of the galaxy. The Evil Empire is now an ally. The Original Series’s writers conceived of the Klingons as thinly veiled stand-ins for the Soviet Union, but on Picard’s Enterprise there was a Klingon, Lieutenant Worf, serving directly behind Picard on the Enterprise’s bridge.
Yet, while the Federation was a metaphor for an American empire victorious after the Cold War, it was also an idealized vision of the United States. The Enterprise spent far more time rescuing people from environmental catastrophes or shuttling ambassadors to peace negotiations than it did battling aliens in space. Picard flew around the galaxy in a ship packed with enough armaments to destroy entire planets. But he more often used that ship to distribute vaccines.
In its best moments, The Next Generation was a meditation on the just use of power. And Picard, as Enterprise’s captain, was the voice of 1990s liberalism — known as much for his eloquent soliloquies in defense of universal rights as for his tactical prowess as commander of the Federation’s most advanced weapon.
Looking back, it’s easy to see Picard’s liberalism as a vestige of a lost era. The Next Generation showcased a just and highly capable Federation that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the current United States government. But, while America has fallen far short of Star Trek’s Clinton-era aspirations, it would be a mistake to abandon those aspirations today.
The children of nearly four decades ago watched Stewart’s portrayal of Picard and saw a role model for how the most powerful people in society should behave. Those lessons are just as relevant today as they were then.
The institutionalist liberalism of Jean-Luc Picard
The decision to cast Stewart, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors of his generation, as the Enterprise’s captain was an inspired choice. Though the show often burdened its actors with heavy-handed dialogue, Stewart delivered his lines with the same aplomb and gravitas he would bring if he were playing Macbeth.
Consider, for example, Stewart’s performance in The Measure of a Man, an early episode focused on the legal status of Lieutenant Commander Data, an android who serves as one of the Enterprise’s senior officers. In it, Data is ordered to report to an expert on artificial life forms who wishes to dismantle and study him in order to learn how to construct more, similar androids, and Picard is tasked with defending Data’s right to refuse this order before a judge that he personally loathes.
The turning point in the episode comes when Picard realizes that he is arguing, not just to save one android’s life, but to prevent the creation of an entire class of people with no more rights than a toaster. “A single Data,” Picard says in the trial that will determine the android officer’s future, “is a curiosity, a wonder even. But thousands of Datas, isn’t that becoming a race?”
“Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery?” Picard asks the judge in his closing argument.
When this episode first aired in 1989, democracy was ascendant. The Berlin Wall would stand for only a few more months. And the United States had emerged from the 1960s and even escaped the Reagan administration with its commitment to civil rights intact. Just a few years earlier, American liberals outmaneuvered opponents of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the law that probably did more than any other to dismantle Jim Crow — and persuaded President Ronald Reagan to sign legislation expanding its scope.
And so the conclusion of The Measure of a Man mirrors this optimistic reality. At the end of Picard’s courtroom defense of his android officer, the judge concludes that Data has the “freedom to choose” not to be dismantled and studied. In the liberal universe imagined by The Next Generation’swriters, institutions are trustworthy and responsive to reasoned argument.
Indeed, for a show about naval officers tasked with securing a hegemonic power, Star Trek spends a surprising amount of time on courtroom drama. In another episode, The Drumhead, Picard battles an admiral who is pulled out of retirement to investigate allegations of sabotage aboard the Enterprise — and who eventually leads a witch hunt into a largely innocent crewman whose only crime is hiding his Romulan ancestry (the Romulans, like the Original Series’s Klingons, are a longtime enemy of the Federation).
Like the trial of Commander Data, The Drumhead is best known for Picard’s speech in favor of universal rights. “When the first link of the chain is forged,” Picard tells the admiral, “the first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, it chains us all irrevocably.”
And, in keeping with Star Trek’s belief that institutions can be forces of good, the episode ends with Starfleet’s head of security storming out of the admiral’s inquisition and putting an end to it.
There have been several attempts to revive Star Trek during the Trump era, and they’ve often fallen flat in an age when US institutions can no longer be trusted to defend universal rights and freedoms. Star Trek: Discovery, which launched during Trump’s first year in office and aired for five seasons, featured sinister captains with hidden agendas, and culminated in two seasons about a collapsed, distrusted Federation struggling to rebuild itself.
Indeed, when Stewart revisited his breakout role in Star Trek: Picard, an uneven series that opens with its titular character as a retired admiral, Picard is less a crusader for justice than a relic of a more enlightened age. In the series’s first episode, a reporter asks why he decided to resign from the Federation’s corps of warrior diplomats, and an angry Picard responds, “because it was no longer Starfleet!” He then denounces the Federation’s descent into prejudice against artificial life forms like Data, the very lives he fought to protect in The Measure of a Man.
Picard might as well have been speaking about the United States. In 2020, when this episode first aired, the institutionalist liberalism that defined The Next Generation was hard to defend. Donald Trump, a man who launched his campaign by labeling Mexican immigrants rapists, was president of the United States. He’d already transformed the US Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for his own biases. And the world was about to be plunged into a global pandemic that showcased the US government’s incompetence.
With its focus on artificial life forms as a potential new enemy, moreover, Star Trek: Picard anticipated the techno-pessimism that now defines an age of addictive social media platforms and artificial intelligence models that may take all of our jobs — or worse.
The Next Generation imagined a utopia, but it was a utopia built on military might, advanced technology, and institutions capable of eradicating hundreds of billions of lives. The heroes of Star Trek embrace hierarchy — most of the important characters literally wore their rank on their collars — and they held no illusions about what hegemons must sometimes do in order to maintain peace and prosperity.
In one of the franchise’s greatest episodes, In the Pale Moonlight, a Starfleet captain spends 45 minutes confessing to a murder he committed in order to trick the Romulans into joining a war against an enemy that threatens to eradicate the Federation.
And yet, Star Trek’s message has always been that power can be wielded justly, even by superpowers. And that people who do so, like Picard, are the only ones who can build utopia.
Star Trek is right
One of the hardest parts of living in Trump’s America is that the man never gives us time to grieve. Every day can bring a new executive order that thousands of people must mobilize to fight. Institutions, like the federal judiciary, that exist to uphold universal rights are rapidly being corrupted into tools of the regime. A pandemic is overshadowed by a crisis of democracy. Even Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election could only pause the parade of outrages. We are constantly being shuffled from one crisis to the next, without any time to pause and reflect on what we have lost.
And so, as we mourn Patrick Stewart, we must also grieve the optimism that his portrayal of Jean-Luc Picard embodied. What if the United Federation of Planets was always a fantasy, and Trump’s America is inevitable?
Yet, while the United States may never become the utopia imagined by The Next Generation, Star Trek is not wrong about the role benevolent institutions must play in building a just and prosperous society. In their magisterial book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, the Nobel Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that successful nations share two traits. One is “inclusive economic institutions” that “encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make best use of their talents.”
These nations, the two economists write, feature secure property rights, an unbiased legal system, and public services such as universal education that prepare citizens for economic success.
But it is not enough, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, for a nation to simply aspire to inclusion. It must also centralize power in a strong government that can enforce the rule of law and even, when necessary, use force to prevent the mighty from trampling on the weak. As the economists write, without a monopoly on the legitimate use of force “and the degree of centralization that it entails, the state cannot play its role as enforcer of law and order, let alone provide public services” that require taxation, or “regulate economic activity” by wealthy businesses.
Without a strong federal government, humanitarian US institutions like Medicare or Social Security cannot exist. America owes its prosperity to police forces that protect individuals from theft and assault, and to a military that, like Starfleet, secures us against external adversaries.
Star Trek’s core insight is that there will always be powerful institutions, just as there will always be militaries capable of exterminating human life. Anarcho-communist notions of a world without hierarchy or state-sponsored violence are nothing more than fantasies. There are only institutions, which can be led by good or evil individuals.
Which is why it is important for American children to grow up with fictional role models like Jean-Luc Picard — or perhaps like Atticus Finch, the model of white rectitude taught to so many American schoolchildren — who teach people who are destined to wield power to do so inclusively and justly.
In Trump’s America, such role models have become unfashionable for two reasons. The first, as I’ve already laid out, is that it is hard to tell a hero’s story about good men achieving justice by working within noble institutions when this story is so much at odds with how institutions function in the real world. A closely related reason is that, even before the rise of Trump, there were myriad examples of powerful, well-meaning individuals fostering death in the name of democracy. The Iraq War, and the broader neoconservative foreign policy project, was a failed effort to spread liberal democracy through warfare.
Given these failures of American institutions, it is easy to dismiss fictional heroes of liberalism — like Picard or Finch — as white saviors whose idealism cannot work in the real world, and to conclude that efforts to emulate them will only lead to an Iraq-style disaster. And it certainly is naive to think that evil can always be defeated by reason and good intentions. The world of To Kill a Mockingbird, where Finch ultimately fails to save an innocent man from conviction and death, often bears far more resemblance to the actual world than The Measure of a Man.
But even if just institutions are not inevitable, they are still the only way forward. As Acemoglu and Robinson show, the only thing that has ever built a sustainably prosperous and egalitarian society are strong governments that empower individuals to share their talents with their countries.
And so we should teach children to emulate characters like Jean-Luc Picard, because someday many of those children will wield unimaginable power — and because they can, by wielding that power justly, sustain the closest thing humanity has ever known to utopia.
WARSAW — Polish President Karol Nawrocki forced his way into the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw shortly after midnight on Saturday, in the latest escalation of the rule-of-law tussle between the PiS-allied president and Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
A video published overnight showed Nawrocki pushing through people gathered at the court’s entrance, including Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, the judge whose disputed nomination as the court’s acting president triggered the crisis on Friday.
Another judge of the top court, Maciej Berek, accused the president of physically confronting Korwin-Piotrowska. Presidential aide Rafał Leśkiewicz claimed it was the judges, whom he called “usurpers,” who had obstructed and manhandled Nawrocki.
Inside, Nawrocki told Korwin-Piotrowska and other judges that were recently elected by Tusk’s parliamentary majority: “You are not judges [of the Tribunal].”
The confrontation marked a dramatic escalation in the struggle between Nawrocki and Tusk’s government over how to reverse judicial changes introduced under the former nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government.
Korwin-Piotrowska suspended the court’s president Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy Bartłomiej Sochański — both named by PiS and seen as loyalists — claiming authority to take over the court’s management. Święczkowski rejected the move.
In a statement issued around 5 a.m., Nawrocki accused the government of “forcibly seizing a constitutional institution”, demanded that police leave the court grounds and summoned emergency consultations with parliamentary parties for Saturday, citing a “threat to Poland’s internal security.”
Police remain deployed outside the tribunal, where PiS supporters had staged an anti-government protest camp for weeks.
The broader dispute stems from Tusk’s efforts to reverse controversial moves by former PiS governments to fill the court with judges aligned with the nationalist party. These efforts have met stiff resistance from PiS and Nawrocki, who refused to swear in some judges elected by the Tusk-led parliamentary majority.
The judges subsequently took oaths in parliament, in a ceremony Nawrocki considers null and void, while Święczkowski barred them from hearing cases.
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