More than a year after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard into Washington D.C. on a broad crime-deterrence mission, the once unthinkable scene of armed soldiers patrolling American streets has become the daily backdrop. A panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday delved into how long that would continue.
The Trump Justice Department has mapped out its coming attack on mifepristone — much thirsted for by anti-abortion advocates, but deliberately delayed to avoid midterm backlash — in a new court filing.
The first step to imposing new restrictions (or reimposing ones previously lifted) is to conduct a “safety review.” Experts often point out that there are few drugs that have been studied and scrutinized as much as mifepristone, making the pretense of discovering some heretofore unknown risk factor fairly absurd.
“FDA is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026,” DOJ wrote of its review. “FDA will then need to review and evaluate/interpret the results and draft a report. FDA expects to complete that process not later than March 2027.”
The agency will then use those “findings” to justify a change to mifepristone’s REMS — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy — or restrictions meant to police the use of highly dangerous drugs. Mifepristone’s safety profile has never justified these restrictions, but the anti-abortion movement’s decades of smearing the drug as unsafe has successfully made it harder to get under Republican and Democratic FDAs alike.
The Biden administration took the largest strides yet in removing some of these barriers. Most importantly, it lifted the in-person dispensing requirement, which has allowed patients even in red states to be prescribed the medicine over telehealth by doctors in blue ones, and receive it in the mail. So far, blue state shield laws have protected those providers from prosecution by red states, though a massive legal reckoning on these state jurisdictional issues is certainly coming.
That Biden-era REMS change is the crux of a Louisiana lawsuit against the FDA seeking to restrict mifepristone, with the state arguing that allowing the drug to be remotely prescribed and mailed undermines its abortion ban and forces it to expend money on Medicaid patients that have mifepristone-related complications. This week’s filing is part of that lawsuit. Historically, these lawsuits have struggled to amass legitimate examples of such mifepristone-related injuries, and Louisiana’s complaint leans heavily on state sovereignty.
The DOJ filing stated that the FDA is looking at the in-person dispensing requirement in particular.
“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary and, if applicable, initiate any such changes in accordance with established processes,” it said. “FDA anticipates that it will be able to provide an update to its estimated date of completion as more information becomes known, particularly in March 2027 when it expects to complete its report on the final study results.”
This filing is as much a signal to the anti-abortion movement as it is an attempt to get Louisiana to cool it until the midterms are safely finished and the FDA can do the dirty work itself. Activists have been outraged at the lack of movement in President Donald Trump’s second term, though they were somewhat assuaged when he nominated Heidi Overton — who has called mifepristone “dangerous to women” and celebrated Dobbs — as the new FDA commissioner. She has not yet received a confirmation vote.
The Trump Justice Department went to court Wednesday to continue its fishing expedition for the most sensitive information about trans children.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in two parallel cases: one in which a federal district judge in Massachusetts quashed a subpoena of Boston Children’s Hospital, and one in which a federal district judge in Texas upheld a subpoena of Rhode Island Hospital while a federal judge in Rhode Island quashed it.
If you’re confused, you’re not alone. The DOJ sued Rhode Island Hospital in the northern district of Texas, a blatant attempt to try the case in a region full of Trump judges. The child advocate for the state of Rhode Island responded in kind, moving to quash the subpoena in the less right-wing (and more relevant) district court of Rhode Island.
“The government moved to enforce a subpoena in a Texas court 1,500 miles from the hospital, its many patients and the records sought by the subpoena — records including personal information for an entire class of minor patients,” said Eric Olshan, the attorney for the hospital.
“Is forum shopping evidence of bad faith?” asked Judge Lara Montecalvo, as the hospital and child advocate argued that the subpoenas are not part of a legitimate investigation under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — as the government claims — but an attempt to endanger trans kids.
The “quagmire” of the dueling courts, as Judge Ojetta Thompson put it, tangled up the second set of arguments, as the judges tried to figure out what happens if they decide the case one way and the Fifth Circuit does the other way.
But the heart of both cases is clear, argued the hospitals: The government is abusing its broad investigatory powers to attack trans kids under the pretense of probing drug labeling and prescription. And it’s doing so this way to circumvent the reality that policing the practice of medicine is the job of the states — the better to pierce the shield of protection many blue states have erected around gender affirming care. Making life as difficult as possible for trans kids and adults in states Republicans control isn’t enough; the Trump administration wants to stamp out every safe haven. And it’s working: Even hospitals in blue states are dropping gender affirming care rather than fighting the full might of the Justice Department.
“The government has made explicitly clear its detest for these individuals,” said Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, attorney for Boston Children’s Hospital. “It has said, in connection with transgender military people, that they are incapable of service and honor and dignity.”
“They know that asking for that information is going to keep those people from getting the care they need,” he added.
Justice Samuel Alito said that he plans to stay on the bench through the current Supreme Court session, part of a rare spate of interviews he gave in recent days to promote his new book.
“I intend to stick around through this term,” he told Bloomberg Law. “I made that decision many months ago.” The current Court term will end in June.
The comments run counter to Republicans’ break-glass plan, should Democrats take the Senate: Coerce Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, both in their seventies, to step down so they can be replaced by younger conservatives during the lame duck.
“It’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement,” Alito told CBS when asked about the strategy.
It’s not, in fact, hard to imagine what kind of nominee President Donald Trump would replace the two with, though their reluctance to retire does put Republicans at some amount of risk. If Democrats win the Senate, Alito and Thomas would have to survive until Republicans win it back to maintain the right-wing supermajority on the Court. Alito is 76 and Thomas 78.
If Democrats do get a majority in the upper chamber this November, leadership is saying they won’t greenlight Trump’s judicial nominees, still smarting from Republicans’ theft of Merrick Garland’s seat and ramming through of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination just before the 2020 election.
“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices — MAGA justices — on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told NBC.
Schumer’s inclusion of lower courts is notable, as vacancies there are certain. During his two terms, Trump has appointed nearly 300 federal judges across district and appellate courts (plus his three appointments to the Supreme Court). These courts dwarf the Supreme Court in the number of rulings they issue.
These dynamics up the ante for Democrats to not only win a Senate majority, but a Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)-proof majority. Fetterman became the first Democrat to return a “blue slip,” which lets district court judge nominees from their home states be considered in committee, this June. He’s not alone, though, in his willingness to let Trump reshape the federal judiciary in his image: 19 Democrats have voted to confirm at least one Trump judge in his second term.
This election cycle is rife with “slopaganda” — that is, AI-generated “slop” used for political propaganda. In a fascinating recent piece in the Washington Post, TPM alum Matt Shuham noted that roughly 164 of these ads have appeared on TV or online, mostly in service of Republican candidates. As Matt points out, the ads are bizarre: “Political spinmeisters have used AI to dress candidates in superhero costumes, show a rifle-wielding Donald Trump in a foxhole, depict entire societies as Lego figurines, and also to put words in opponents’ mouths.”
I encountered one of these ads in the wild last month featuring a familiar face: Marshall Rawson, the subject of my first big investigation as a reporter here at TPM. Rawson is the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and, our investigation found, a pretty extreme guy — perhaps the most extreme candidate on the ballot this November. A quick refresher:
He’s running for the state House seat in a deeply conservative part of north central Florida and is widely expected to win in the general election. Rawson hasn’t denied any of my reporting, or distanced himself from his white supremacist activism. I tried my best to find a Republican who would denounce him, but came up empty.
What I’ve seen instead over the past couple weeks is Rawson receiving public messages of support, including from his likely future colleagues in the Florida state House. Perhaps the most excitable support he’s received, however, has come from the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was only reinstated by the university last month, having been disbanded back in March following a photograph showing two of its members giving Nazi salutes.
One of its first orders of business after being reinstated? Producing this deeply bizarre piece of slopaganda: a video featuring an AI-generated Rawson walking through an adoring crowd of Red Hats in sunglasses and a trench coat; coasting along a Florida waterway in a fanboat; and standing in a field, clad in all white, his arms outstretched, Christ-like.
Vote @MarshallRawson for Florida House District 10 pic.twitter.com/qZC7wIjcVy
— UF College Republicans (@UFCR) September 25, 2026
The video is set to the rap song “Already” by Kodak Black — a musical selection that upset at least one of Rawson’s biggest fans. Chandler Langevin is a city councilman in Palm Bay, Florida and the executive director of the American Restoration Coalition, which a Raw Story investigation earlier this week revealed as a “Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government.” Langevin and his ARC cohorts knocked on doors for Rawson during his primary campaign.
“Video is great, music is awful. Play our music to it,” Langevin replied on X (emphasis mine), seeming to state that he didn’t like the use of a Black musician’s song. “An edit to Dixieland would go hard… Freebird goes hard in right wing edits too.”
“You right,” the UF College Republicans account replied.
Back in 2017, one week after I covered the “Unite The Right” rally, writer Alex Pareene penned a prescient blog in Jezebel titled “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party.” His thesis — that the extremism of the “alt-right” would go mainstream, taking over the GOP — would become my own over the next nine years. Still, I feel like my head is spinning, staring at this little interaction on X, reflecting on just how radical the party has become. To attempt a summary:
The GOP nominated Rawson, an unrepentant white supremacist who marched in Charlottesville, for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. A recently re-instated college Republican group, disbanded after its members gave Nazi salutes, posted an AI slop video on X — rebranded from Twitter by a trillionaire and GOP megadonor who gave two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration — in support of Rawson. The video used a song by a Black man, which upset a local Republican activist, himself part of a GOP group with white nationalist ties that is trying to put more Rawson-like extremists into Florida government positions. Despite all of this, Rawson is all but assured to be a state legislator in Tallahassee next year.
I really did expect our politics to become this extreme. I’m just not sure I anticipated how bizarre it would be too.
By Christopher Mathias
With every new detail, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) mortifying attempt to make former Special Counsel Jack Smith perjure himself seems more and more bumbling.
As everyone with an internet connection knows by now, the junior senator from Missouri had whipped up a grand plan to prove that Smith was in Atlanta the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) admitted to having a relationship with one of her prosecutors amid the investigation into President Donald Trump’s election interference in Georgia. That’s it. That’s the big smoking gun he was looking for: that Smith and Willis were in the same giant city for one night as proof (?) that the two were colluding in trying to take Trump down.
But he couldn’t even muster that. When he revealed the explosive texts supposedly revealing that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game (in Atlanta!! Where Willis is!!), Smith was befuddled. Eventually, he offered that he’d attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game against the hosting Maryland Terrapins (a game, notably, much closer to Washington D.C.) around that same date to see now-Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark in action.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Schmitt had mixed up “Hawks” with “Hawkeyes,” explaining the error. That turned out to be too generous a guess.
The efforts of Schmitt and his staff to vet the texts — which reportedly did not include the names of the teams, but did include coordination over seat number and location — went only as far as googling which NBA games started at the time mentioned in the messages.
“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
Schmitt simply forgot that women’s sports exist. It didn’t occur to him that Smith might be more interested in watching Clark rain down 38 points on the Terps’ heads amid her team’s run to the title game than to witness the dazzling spectacle of the 36-46, playoff-missing, 2024 Atlanta Hawks.
Let this be a reminder to Republicans: Everyone watches women’s sports.
By Kate Riga
you ok, babe? you’ve barely touched your Mr. Beast’s Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda-Flavored Sparkling Water pic.twitter.com/E7UzFvhRsP
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) September 28, 2026
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Answers below
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“If you’re evil you are at least competent. If you’re evil, you’re not bad. You’re actually maybe kind of good. You’re at least getting something done.” – Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel
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The blows just keep coming for Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton. In new audio leaked to the New York Times, the state’s Republican attorney general admitted that President Trump’s weird September midterms convention in Dallas actually hurt his campaign. “When we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton said at a private event with conservative lobbyists and donors. It is perhaps a bit rich for Paxton to be pointing fingers at Trump, since he’s done a great job at making voters dislike him all on his own. The guy was already unpopular in Texas, where state lawmakers from his own party voted to impeach him over allegations of bribery and unfitness for office. While he survived that effort, the stink of corruption didn’t go away; a focus group of Texas swing voters recently used the words “crook,” “crooked,” “amoral” and “disgusting” to describe him to the New York Times. Paxton only won the primary because of a last-minute endorsement from Trump, and has been languishing in the polls against Democrat James Talarico. The president has lately taken to kicking the AG while he’s down, mocking him at the Dallas convention as not “the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen” and following up with these recent remarks at the White House: “Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this — it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it — you might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country.” Hope it’s all been worth it, Ken!
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The Trump administration has spent months trying to put its thumb on the scale in the midterms, from igniting a nationwide redistricting war to trying to seize detailed voter records from the states. Admin officials have also repeatedly threatened to post federal troops at polling places just, you know, in case. All of this flies in the face of plain constitutional language mandating that the states have primary oversight over election administration.
Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, totally gets that. He is, he said this week, “a firm believer in local elections are state and local level.” He’s such a believer in local elections, in fact, that he thinks it would be “fine” to have federal troops at polling places in order to ensure that people “have confidence in their elections.” Got it!
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Josh Kovensky joined the excellent Posting Through It podcast to talk through some of the “content creators for the authoritarian state.” We’re talking Nick Shirley, Tyler Oliveira, Savanah Hernandez, Nick Sortor and some of the other online influencers who push out propaganda for the Trump administration, particularly on immigration. (Some have even embedded with ICE on ride-alongs and toured detention facilities).
“You can see them giving and taking. You can see the symbiosis, right?” Josh says. “[They’re] with administration officials telling them what they think is happening and the officials are responding in real time, responding with what they’re going to do in terms of federal policy.”
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This summer’s wave of progressive primary victories was met with a flood of articles fretting over whether Democrats were seeing the rise of a “Tea Party of the left.” University of Pittsburgh associate professor Paul Elliott Johnson explained why those comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy.
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why does the WaPo print headline on the botched TN execution read like The Onion
— Chris Ingraham (@cingraham.bsky.social) 2026-10-02T12:43:47.565Z
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Trivia answers: 1) North Carolina, Georgia 2) Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) 3) The Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes
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The Missouri gerrymandering fight felt a lot like old-school Republican politics: boring, procedural trickery to rig the systems of government in their favor.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue deporting people to countries where they have no ties and where they may face violence without even guaranteeing them a chance to contest the removal.
For the third time in just over two weeks, the Supreme Court declined to let Missouri Republicans jam through a maximal gerrymander, this time with an air of exasperation.
There were no noted dissents.
The Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration use its newly-expanded system to verify people’s citizenship status, which the dissenters argue both violates privacy laws and risks disenfranchising voters before the midterms.
Just over a week since the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to take over and/or break mail-in voting, I still don’t think the magnitude of the president’s loss has been recognized.
The Supreme Court will weigh in a third time on Missouri Republicans’ attempts to ram through a maximal gerrymander after twice rejecting those efforts.
The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to take unprecedented control over federal elections Monday, a massive development ahead of the midterms.
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President Trump’s Republican allies in Congress and his own vice president have been spent the past week attempting to sane-wash President Trump’s midterms election bribe.
Shortly after Trump announced that he would give $5,000 checks to every American adult if enough people vote Republican in the midterms to help the party keep the House and the Senate, Vice President JD Vance went on Fox News to place some (relatively) down-to-earth guardrails on the proposal. Vance suggested that the money would come from new tariff revenue and the administration would place income barriers on who can receive it — meaning only working- and middle-class Americans would be the recipients of the political bribe. Experts have pointed out that the $1.25 trillion it would cost to give $5,000 checks to every adult American through tariff refunds is more or less the equivalent of the revenue that the new tariffs are projected to bring in over the next decade.
“What the president is talking about is ultimately a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies but also foreign countries who have been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said, doing clean-up just moments after Trump made the remarks at the faux Republican National Convention last week in Dallas. “What the president’s just saying is, if you keep it going to the American people, if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating in the United States of America.”
Some Republicans in Congress like Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) are really taking Trump’s promise and running with it. Other Republicans in Congress were reportedly caught off guard by Trump’s cash pledge, specifically because he tied the payout to the election results. It’s not as if Trump has not promised checks to Americans before. During the height of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government, Trump and Musk promised they’d cut checks to Americans once all the awesome, epic slashing was over. That not happen, and DOGE end up cutting more than $110 billion in federal spending — a far cry from $2 trillion in cuts Musk promised.
Nevertheless, Trump doubled down while speaking to reporters in Ireland on Monday.
“The $5,000 is gonna happen. 100%. And the reason is because our country has taken in trillions and trillions of dollars,” he said. “And it’s gonna happen. And the people deserve it, they’ve been treated so badly by the Democrats and by Biden.”
— Nicole LaFond
The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is sounding the alarm about the new report in ProPublica you may have seen today, that found that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev funded a portion of Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in May. Kremlev has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Supreme Court stayed a Missouri federal court order Thursday, blocking a maximal Republican gerrymander for the 2026 midterms — at least for now.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark denied Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ (R) request that he stop the Missouri Supreme Court from holding him in contempt.
Louisiana was met with a chilly reception Wednesday, as it pushed to make the abortion pill mifepristone less accessible nationwide.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Missouri Republicans’ attempt to jam through a new gerrymander that would leave Democrats with only one House seat to their seven.
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