Three Moments From Last Night’s Ossoff-Collins Debate

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and Rep. Mike Collins (R) held their second debate in the Georgia Senate race Tuesday, and many of the themes of the first reemerged. Ossoff turned over the many ways in which, even within the context of today’s Republican Party, Collins’ radicalism is on the surface. Collins struggled to return a blow, or to distance himself from the unpopular president.

Who won in 2020?

One of the moderators, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, noted that Collins said Trump “won” the 2020 election as recently as June. Does he still beleive that?

Collins dodged, saying that “Joe Biden went into office” before pivoting to criticizing his presidency.

Ten minutes later, Ossoff returned to the question. “You didn’t answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”

“They know my views on that,” Collins replied. “There was a lot of doubt in that election.”

Fifteen minutes after that, Ossoff returned to it a third time. “You still haven’t answered tonight whether you believe Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election,” he said. “Here’s your third chance. Did Donald Trump really win the 2020 election? You want to answer, Mike?”

“I have said numerous times that Joe Biden was the president in 2021,” Collins said.

“Not what I asked,” Ossoff replied.

OSSOFF: You didn't answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?MIKE COLLINS: You know, the 2020 election. Everybody has seen my views on thatOSSOFF: What are they?COLLINS: There was a lot of doubt in that election OSSOFF: I didn't hear an answer

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:25:10.294Z

What’s up with all the white nationalists around Collins?

Collins’ white nationalism problem was again a theme of this debate.

Moderator Faith Jessie of Atlanta news station 11 Alive reminded Collins of Ossoff’s line last week — that he had “hired half the Third Reich” — and asked for his response. “Are you a white nationalist?” Jessie asked. “And what do you say to Black Georgians who question whether you will represent them equally?”

“I condemn any sort a hate speech,” he said. “Antisemitism, hate of any kind. It’s abhorrent. And I’ve fired people when things happen, fired them,” he added, a possible reference to his former chief of staff, who bragged of his efforts trying to get a Holocaust denier out of prison.

He then went on to suggest a link between people who feel “forgotten” and rising antisemitism. “We do have a problem with antisemitism and war and hate around the world,” he said. “These young people feel like they’ve forgotten and they’re just lashing out. And this hate speech has got to stop and we’ve got to educate them.”

Mike Collins makes apologies for white nationalists like his son in law: "These people feel like they've been forgotten. And they're just lashing out."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:17:57.415Z

About those Pinochet jokes …

Ossoff asked Collins about a joke he repeatedly made online, suggesting immigrants to the U.S. be tossed from helicopters — an allusion to extrajudicial killings carried out by right-wing Latin American dictators, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, a meme that the very online right loves to invoke.

“Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters,” Ossoff said. “I’d like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?”

Collins did not answer the question and pivoted to talking about the Laken Riley Act and border enforcement.

OSSOFF: Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters. I'd like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?MIKE COLLINS: *changes topic*

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:12:17.176Z

The Tina Plan

• The election-denying former Colorado county Clerk Tina Peters, who met with Trump earlier this month, has been pushing an idea that the 2026 midterms will need instant “manual verification.” She’s got a whole website where she lays out “the Tina Plan,” though in fairly opaque language.
• In an interview that has been floating around since September but that I first saw surfaced by Newsweek, her lawyer, Trump’s longtime friend Peter Ticktin, makes plain what she’s talking about: “Her idea is grab, get control over the ballots as soon as the machines spit them through and then do a recount,” he told a right-wing podcaster.
• He went on to explain that, if Trump does not trust the results of a future election, he “is not going to relinquish control again.”
• “It’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin outrageously declared.
• That this is (likely) all big talk, and illegal, does not make it any less wild that these ideas may have been presented in the Oval Office when Peters recently met with Trump. Peters has also reportedly met with the DOJ and Department of Commerce.

Can the Democrats Really Be Doing This Well?

With three weeks until Election Day, those who evaluate the electoral landscape — race raters and prognosticators — are bringing their analyses of various contests in line with the ongoing wave of rosy polls for Democratic candidates. Toward the end of last week, one race rater, Cook Political Report, moved its assessment of 18 House contests toward Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, another race rater, changed its assessment of Alaska’s governor and Senate races, which it had rated as “toss-ups,” to “leans Democratic,” and shifted four House races toward Democrats.

TPM also obtained a not-previously-reported memo from Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy that advises hedge funds and institutional investors about what to expect from global elections, among other topics. It upgrades the odds for Democrats in both chambers of Congress. The consultancy now places the odds that Democrats flip the House at 90% (up from 85%) and the odds that they flip the Senate at 60% (up from 55% at the end of September).

It predicts a growing likelihood (40%) of Democrats winning a 20-plus seat majority in Congress, based in part of Democrats’ growing numbers on the generic congressional ballot. That’s a far cry from the outlook for the GOP last spring, amid its post-Callais gerrymandering onslaught. And the memo predicts that Republicans’ last-minute deluge of money is “probably too late” and will not be enough to save them. “Evidence that spending has swayed voters is scant,” it reads.

This is all going on as the Democratic Party’s approval rating remains not-great, though recent polling shows it to be rising. Here at TPM, we have a theory of what’s going on there: Voters are not happy with how Democrats have fought Trump. That does not mean they are happy with Trump — in fact, the Democratic Party’s low approval, per this theory, is an outgrowth of Trump’s low approval. It leaves room for voters to rally behind new Democratic candidates while maintaining their discontent with the party writ large.

But that could, of course, be wrong, and, under other theories, it may speak to weakness in Democratic support that the polls are not otherwise flushing out.

The Eurasia Group memo sees Republicans’ best hope now as the possibility of a massive polling error. “We think that polling misses in 2020 and 2024 mostly resulted from underestimating Republican support, especially among voters without a college degree, when President Donald Trump was on the ballot, and that there is no reason to expect similar bias this year,” it reads. “However, this kind of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and the possibility that it recurs is a major reason our odds for Democrats are not higher.”

Trump and His DOJ Go All In In Minnesota

This electoral backdrop is essential for understanding the latest travesty in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) house was raided Monday as part of a criminal investigation that “Border Czar” Tom Homan teased a month ago.

• Reports suggest the investigation focuses on immigration paperwork Omar’s father filed on her behalf decades ago.
• The right has been agitating for awhile to denaturalize Omar, with Fox News and the New York Post even publishing explainers on why doing so would be so hard in order to keep their readers’ expectations in check.
• The November election looms over all of this. Some polling has suggested the contest between Peggy Flanagan (D) and Michele Tafoya (R) in Minnesota is close. Trump has, accordingly, been stoking anti-Somali hate in the state, as we noted on Friday. That continued over the weekend, with Trump stating in Ohio: “The Republican Party, we believe that Somalia bandits, third-world gangs, and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they do not belong in America. We got to get them the hell out of here.”
• The DOJ typically has a “blackout” period within 60 days of an election during which it refrains from taking steps in political cases. That was ignored here, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, per the Washington Post, signing off on the raid.
• TPM will have more on this developing story later today.

An Ugly Hate Campaign Returns

As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.

The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”

He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”

Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”

“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”

Trump’s comments are reminiscent of the 2024 smear campaign JD Vance employed against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, seizing on an issue that, as TPM reported at the time, neo-Nazi groups including Blood Tribe and Patriot Front had sought to push to the fore. It’s tempting to predict this rhetoric will backfire in the midterms, but it’s hard to say whether that was the case in 2024: after grotesquely and falsely accusing Haitians of eating pets, Trump and Vance won all seven battleground states and won Ohio by 11 points.

I can imagine, however, that Minnesotans, at this point, are getting tired of this.

Trump Tries Last-Minute Gambit to Pay off Americans

• A series of actions by the Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration have dealt significant blows to health care in America — specifically, to Obamacare and Medicaid which, in turn, support rural hospitals.
• As a solution, the White House has unveiled two schemes to send Americans small checks — one for $90 to Medicare Part B enrollees and the other for $500 to Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace enrollees who do not receive premium assistance.
• That first initiative seriously stretches the law, experts told TPM’s Emine Yücel, describing it to her as a “legally dubious” interpretation of how the executive branch may use the pool of funding it’s tapping into.
• This all became an issue in last night’s debate between Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson. Emine reports:

Tabs

• Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) tore into Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) in last night’s Georgia Senate debate, deploying such lines as, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” Read Layla A. Jones’ recap for TPM here.
• ICE agents shot a man in New York City multiple times Thursday while he was in his car. According to New York officials, a five-year-old child was in the back seat.
• The Trump administration will livestream the killing by firing squad of the Fort Hood shooter, the first U.S. military execution since 1961. Pete Hegseth is super excited about it.

How Many of These Guys Are There?

The latest report about far-right extremists in Georgia Republican candidate Mike Collins’ orbit comes from the Daily Beast, which identified two people associated with the far-right group American Patriots USA serving as campaign-appointed “convoy captains” in his bid for Senate. Convoy captains head up grassroots organizing efforts in Georgia’s counties.

American Patriots USA is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist” group, or a group that believes “white identity should be the organizing principle of the countries that make up Western civilization.” It was founded by a Klan leader who attended the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

One of the two convoy captains identified by the Daily Beast served as a state director of American Patriots USA, and the other as a vice president of the group, the outlet reported.

These two are the latest in a long line of extreme far-right figures who have surfaced in Collins’ orbit. Perhaps most notoriously, Collins’ son-in-law was identified by CNN as a white nationalist influencer with millions of followers who has promoted the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, called for Muslims to be deported from the country, and shared the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews control politics in the U.S. The Washington Post found a former Collins staffer posting a swastika and an image of himself in a Klan robe to Twitter. Slate discovered that Collins’ (now former) chief of staff informed a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer that he was trying to use his influence to spring notorious Holocaust denier and troll Chuck Johnson from prison.

Perhaps — perhaps! — you might be inclined to think Collins is just unlucky, and these guys are turning up all around him by coincidence. But I can’t see these repeated headlines emerge without thinking about Collins’ unique online persona, which includes multiple jokes about killing immigrants through a method far-right Latin American dictators, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, were known to deploy against their political enemies: tossing them from aircraft. These “death flights” have become a jokey meme among online extremists, one with which Collins is seemingly very familiar.

Jose Antonio Ibarra would make a great first passenger for the new Pinochet Air.

— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) February 24, 2024

“Another week, another scandal for Mike Collins, who is surrounded at work, at home, and now at his campaign by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Klan associates,” Collins’ opponent, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), said of the Daily Beast report, adding that Collins will “have to answer” during tonight’s debate “for his extensive and disqualifying ties to white nationalism.”

Trumpworld Reportedly Looking for a Scapegoat

• Politico informs us that, amid indications of a dismal upcoming midterm election, political operatives around the president are turning on two leading figures in his orbit: Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s 2024 campaign managers, and James Blair, who served as White House deputy chief of staff. The two now run the pro-Trump Super PAC MAGA, Inc., through which Republicans are routing much of their midterm spending.
• Ironically, the cause of the fracas is that LaCivita and Blair recently spent several days in the Balkans, advising a pro-Putin party in Republika Srpska. The New York Times broke that story earlier this week.
• Trump reportedly isn’t pleased. His problem here, to be clear, is not that the two were helping a pro-Putin political party, but that they were doing so with a month to go before what is expected to be a GOP rout, during a time when they presumably should have had their hands full back in the U.S.
• “I do not have any idea who else they work for but will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Trump posted to Truth Social yesterday, a reaction to the Times’ reporting that, per Politico, has MAGA world all atwitter.

Tabs

• Don’t miss the Wall Street Journal’s deeply bizarre story about Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle’s insistence that a MAGA donor pay off her American Express card.
• The Trump administration successfully pressured Canada and the EU to drop their sponsorship of a disinformation conference at which one panel would examine the U.S.’s role as a spreader of disinformation, the Guardian reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, about whom Trump recently said, not at all ominously, “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right Russ?”

“He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion,” Trump added. “He’s got some great things happening.”

Ed Martin Tells All (Sort of)

President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.

After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”

“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”

Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.

“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”

Martin, of course, is not the most reliable narrator. The Jan. 6 organizer-turned-pardon attorney was ousted from the DOJ after Todd Blanche reportedly became extremely annoyed with his grandstanding. So, though ABC did independently confirm the news of the Trump-Peters meeting, take Martin’s description of what occurred with a grain of salt.

After the meeting, Trump spoke to the press, making seemingly contradictory statements about mail-in voting. “Vote by mail or vote in person. I’d rather have a vote in person. But they can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice,” he said, adding his usual claim that “there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail.” He did not, however, announce any new, election-related plans.

It’s also not terribly clear from Martin’s description what he and Peters want the president to “do.” Activists in their world have at times tried to pressure Trump to declare a national emergency, and, while that could stoke the chaos in which Trump thrives, experts say it wouldn’t give him any new authority over elections which, as Martin acknowledged, are run by the states.

Everybody’s Thinking About What a Democratic Senate Majority Would Mean for a Supreme Court Vacancy

The big news, as Kate Riga wrote for TPM, came yesterday, with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito insisting to Bloomberg Law that he did not plan to retire in the last months of 2026 should Democrats retake the Senate.

• Ever since both Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas — the furthest right, and oldest, justices on the Court — declined to retire at the end of the Court’s last term, speculation has run rampant about whether they might swiftly step down in late 2026, allowing the White House to work with the Republican-controlled Senate to confirm a similarly right-wing successor before Democrats, potentially, take over.
• Democrats, for their part, are taking a page from Mitch McConnell’s playbook and mulling the possibility of refusing to confirm Trump’s nominee for any opening on the Supreme Court during the last two years of his term. “We’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told NBC, one of several Democrats to express that sentiment.
• Republicans, meanwhile, told Politico they are ready to spring into action, though they doubted they would need to. If a justice has plans to retire, “They would have done it already,” Thune told Politico.

Welcome, Thom, to the Senate ‘Oops’ Caucus

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has a book to promote. In it, he revealed this week, he delves into his greatest regret: voting to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“The president referred to Pete Hegseth as right out of Central Casting — and I agree with that: He’s an actor. He’s not a manager,” Tillis told MS NOW’s Morning Joe.

This confession comes with a hint of déjà vu. An outgoing senator with a brand as a moderate — at least within the spectrum of today’s Republican Party — regrets a pivotal confirmation vote. Perhaps it brings to mind Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the doctor-turned-legislator who, despite his reservations, confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy then immediately broke promises Cassidy said he had made to him, and began acting on his life’s work to undercut the vaccine regimen in America. Who could have seen it coming?

Emine Yücel has a piece out at TPM this morning about another potential member of the “Oops” Caucus in the making: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) who, now that she is locked in a tight reelection fight, is outspokenly critical of White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. Vought’s manifold creative ways to impound congressionally appropriated funds — seen by many experts as indicative of a veritable constitutional crisis — is, of course, a slap in the face of the Senate Appropriations Committee Chair, Collins.

But Collins voted to confirm Vought. Vought was confirmed by all 53 Republican senators. All Democrats voted against him.

As Emine details, Vought’s views, at the time of that vote, were clear. During Trump’s 2024 campaign, Vought, now famously, was caught on tape saying of government agencies, “we want their funding to be shut down.” “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said.

He did not hide these views during his confirmation hearing, during which he said he believed the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, passed to rein in the Nixon administration’s refusal to spend congressionally appropriated funds, was unconstitutional. Collins voted for him after all this was public. Collins’ office did not answer Emine when asked whether the senator regrets her vote.

These “Oops” Caucus stories share a few factors: a senator viewed by much of the media as more reasonable or centrist than their colleagues, and a Trump administration figure taking actions that are exactly in line with who they were publicly known to be. Is it believable that Kennedy, America’s leading vaccine skeptic, would choose not to act on those beliefs once in government? Is it believable that Vought, who declared his intent to starve the government of funds, would then not do so once confirmed? Is it reasonable to believe that a weekend Fox News host, known for his extreme Christian views and lack of personal control, would undergo a total transformation once given authority over the most powerful military in the world?

Tillis’ support for Hegseth was particularly egregious given that he initially urged key witnesses to come forward against the nominee, suggesting that, if they did, the nomination would fail. As the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2025:

Tillis personally assured Danielle Hegseth in a call on Jan. 19, witnessed by two other people, that if she signed the statement testifying that she believed her former brother-in-law Pete Hegseth has an alcohol-abuse problem and was abusive to his second wife, it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes—his own, along with the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), those people said.

Danielle Hegseth did as Tillis asked. Tillis nonetheless cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth.

It takes 51 votes to confirm a member of the administration in the Senate, and in many cases, a two-thirds majority — 67 votes — to remove one. Once these people are in, they are in. The time to examine their records closely is before they are confirmed, not after. The “Oops” Caucus is made up of veterans of the Senate who know how this works. Keep that in mind when assessing their second thoughts.

To his (limited) credit, Tillis goes some way toward capturing the situation in his book, confessing that his and similar senators’ failure to do the job they were elected to do came from the fear of losing it.

“I know for a fact that there are others like me,” he writes, “Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far.”

Trump Says He’ll Pay for Those ‘Government-Funded’ Campaign Ads After All

A rare climb-down from the commander in chief.

• The news came in a Truth Social post: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money.” He claimed (falsely) that this is “a rather standard thing to do” but said he would now “pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.,” a Super PAC.
• The U.S. government has spent more than $10 million on these ads, the New York Times reports. The money came from funding appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.
• The ads appear to violate a provision of the 2026 appropriations law saying money can’t be used for “propaganda.” The new arrangement likely violates the law as well: The Campaign Legal Center, a good government group, has filed a complaint with the FEC over Trump’s claims to control MAGA Inc.’s money — Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the politicians they support. But the FEC is nonfunctional, with four of six commissioner seats vacant, and nothing is likely to happen.

Georgia Election Board Employee Allegedly Goes Rogue, Requests Federal Intervention

Last week, a letter surfaced from the Georgia Election Board, signed by board executive director James Mills, requesting that the federal government intervene in his state’s election. Addressed to attorney general Todd Blanche and cc-ing Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the letter asked that the agencies get involved with and oversee numerous aspects of Georgia’s 2026 election.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office denounced the letter. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the eleventh hour,” a Raffensperger spokesperson told MS NOW.

Then, over the weekend, the story got weirder: Members of the state election board alleged that Mills never was authorized by the board to send the letter, and was essentially using his position to freelance ahead of the election.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” the chair of the board, John Fervier, told reporter Jessica Huseman, who broke that aspect of the story for Votebeat.

The five-member Georgia Election Board, readers may remember, was restructured in 2023 to provide Republicans with a significant majority. President Trump has praised various members of that majority, who have entertained conspiracy theories about the way in which the state conducts its elections. A year before the DOJ launched its own investigation of the 2020 election in Fulton County, the Georgia Election Board ordered one.

Fervier, the chair who accused Mills of freelancing, is a Republican but has frequently clashed with his three Republican colleagues on the board and instead voted with its sole Democrat. He’s also clashed — sometimes very publicly — with Mills, who was hired by the board but is not on the board.

Another Republican member of the board also expressed displeasure with Mills to Votebeat’s Huseman, saying that, though this letter may have been inspired by a resolution the board voted on that urged Raffensperger’s office to begin software updates for voting machines and empowered Mills to seek federal help around those updates, Mills’ requests to the DOJ and DHS went far beyond that. That member, Salleigh Grubbs, also said board members were not given a chance to review Mills’ letter.

“In private enterprise, if I told an employee I wanted to see something before it goes and he did this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Grubbs said. “I thought we were all on the same team.”

This mess is kind of funny, but also very serious. More broadly, this is the kind of thing we should expect heading into the midterms — an official, and perhaps not even an important official, acting on their own to encourage the Trump administration to get involved in an election and take sweeping action. The DOJ and DHS have not yet responded in any public way to Mills, but the administration has valorized similar figures who have gone rogue, such as former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters. Requests like Mills’ give the DOJ material to spin into whatever narrative it wants.

Bolsonaro’s Son Is on the Cusp of Becoming Brazil’s President

Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, came in first place in the country’s presidential election Sunday with 47% of the vote, beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had 45%. Because neither candidate cleared 50%, the race will now go to a runoff on Oct. 25.

• Jair Bolsonaro, of course, was at the center of a Jan. 6-like auto-coup attempt after Lula beat him in 2022. The younger Bolsonaro has framed his campaign around revenge for his father and his associates, who were handed jail sentences.
• The right has been ascendant in Latin America, with reactionary candidates winning several elections in a row. Many explicitly align themselves with Donald Trump.
• Runoff systems, such as the one in Brazil, have sometimes blunted the rise of far-right factions. I’ll be watching to see if that happens here.
• Brazil is often compared to America in that it more successfully addressed a very similar auto-coup, prosecuting the former president behind it. Should Flavio Bolsonaro win election, that contrast will become less clear cut.

A New Chapter in Vance’s Effort to Police Who’s American

JD Vance visited Florida yesterday, stumping for candidates in races that for a few cycles have been safely red. Among them was Republicans’ candidate for U.S. Senate, Ashley Moody, who was appointed by governor Ron DeSantis (R) to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is now running for reelection against Angie Nixon, a Florida state legislator. Nixon is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who won a surprise primary victory over Trump impeachment figure Alexander Vindman.

As Vance attacked Nixon, he cast her as a dangerous radical. “When Angie Nixon calls herself a socialist, I think the right response is to say, ‘Then get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America,’” the vice president declared. The crowd cheered.

Nixon responded swiftly.

“The most ordinary man imaginable came to my home state to tell me to ‘get out of America’ while they enjoyed the comfort of buildings my ancestors built,” she wrote on social media. “Imagine standing on the shoulders of the ppl who built this country & then telling their descendants they don’t belong here,” said Nixon, who is Black.

“Wanting lower property insurance & healthcare for families isn’t un-American; it’s what working people deserve,” she continued. “They can take their tech-bro cash and their weird, intrusive agenda somewhere else, because I’m not going any damn place.”

Recent polls in Florida have shown Nixon running behind Moody, and Democrats’ candidate for Florida governor, David Jolly, neck-in-neck with Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Rep. Byron Donalds (R). Trump won Florida in 2024 by 13 points. Vance’s remarks Thursday were in Polk County, a reliable MAGA stronghold.

Vance, who, famously, once mused about whether Trump was merely a “cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful)” or “America’s Hitler,” has attempted a reinvention as a kind of MAGA intellectual. A key aspect of that has been policing who is truly American. He devoted much of his speech at Republicans’ midterm convention to discussing his view of the American “birthright,” and has articulated the idea that those whose ancestors have been in America for longer have greater claim to it.

Defining Americanism by its idealistic principals alone would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said in a 2024 speech to the Claremont Institute, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that as part of its work spreads information about hate groups.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he added, seeming to suggest that peddlers of hate are more American than members of a group, founded by Jews to fight antisemitism, that denounces them.

Dems Propose to Slash Russ Vought’s Funding if Trump Continues to Violate Anti-Propaganda Laws

A new bill introduced by Senate Democrats seeks to penalize Trump for running campaign ads on the taxpayer’s dime.

• Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, introduced the bill, which would cut the White House Office of Management and Budget’s funding by $20 million each time the Trump administration violates laws prohibiting taxpayer funding of propaganda, as it has been in recent days by running campaign ads as “public service announcements.”
• One such law violated by these ads is the 2026 appropriations bill, agreed to by members of both parties and signed by Trump, which includes the line: “No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.”
• Actions like this turn the spotlight to appropriations committee chair Susan Collins (R-ME) who has often critiqued the administration’s violation of appropriation laws, but done little to rein it in.
• Collins, who is in a reelection fight, has acknowledged that the ads are being payed for with money appropriated to the Department of Homeland Security, and that running them goes “around the appropriations process.”

A Republican Gives a Thumbs Up to White House Effort to Seize Congress’ Power

Yesterday afternoon, TPM’s Emine Yücel got word that Senate Democrats would hold a vote on a bill that would block Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s latest bid to impound almost a billion dollars. Congress had appropriated the funds and President Trump had signed that appropriations bill into law, but the administration later deemed the funding too woke, finding that it helped immigrants, met its contorted definition of “DEI,” or was otherwise unacceptable.

Congress, of course, holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. If Congress writes an appropriations bill, and the president signs it, the funds must be spent in the way Congress laid out. But Vought has found ways to claim he does not, in fact, need to abide by that schema, and has used various maneuvers to not just slash funding to government offices and programs but end some entirely. This latest one is a so-called pocket rescission, exploiting a loophole Vought believes exists in the Impoundment Control Act. I won’t unpack it here, but Emine has reported on it extensively.

So, on Wednesday, Senate Democrats on the appropriations committee put forward a bill to block Vought’s pocket rescission, and all future ones. The vote was held under unanimous consent, meaning a single senator could block it. It seemed inevitable one would — the question was who, and why.

So, around 7 p.m., we got our answer: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to the bill. He did not directly address the way in which Vought’s maneuvering has run roughshod over one of Congress’ most important duties: dictating federal spending. He shrugged that all government spending should be reduced, and then said the law around impoundments was vague. “It’ll probably have to be all sorted out by the Supreme Court,” he said.

That much is right, and the Court has already shown an openness to what Vought is trying to do.

The Senate then adjourned until the midterms.

Sen. Eric Schmitt Faces Fallout From His Jack Smith Debacle

New details about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) fantastic flame-out during a congressional hearing with Jack Smith continue to emerge. The senator on Tuesday attempted to float a conspiracy theory about the former special counsel meeting with Fulton County DA Fani Willis at an Atlanta Hawks game. That theory immediately collapsed, but not before he accused Smith of perjury for not indulging it.

• Schmitt was warned that the texts he based his allegation on were “unvetted” and that he should proceed with caution, MS NOW reported yesterday. Some Senate Judiciary staff believe the White House had urged Schmitt to undertake his stunt, the report said.
• Schmitt in an interview with Politico was unapologetic, and seemingly confirmed that his misapprehension about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks game or an Iowa Hawkeyes game had to do with completely overlooking the existence of women’s sports, a topic about which the GOP professes to care greatly. “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’s staffer who held up a posterboard during his display was up for a new job at the White House, Politico reports. Now, he may not be.

By now, I assume you’ve read about what happened. Maybe you’ve seen the video. But yesterday was one of those rare days we used to have often maybe 15 years ago, when the political media world, and social media sites — even the site formerly known as Twitter — were all having fun with the same thing. That thing, in this case, was the way in which Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt (R) totally and thoroughly beclowned himself.

So, before we return to our reality of third-country removals and executive branch power grabs and billionaires spouting race science, let’s hang out with Schmitt a little longer.

Let’s start with a recap of what happened.

Schmitt, during a Tuesday Senate hearing set up by Senate Judiciary Republicans so they could yell at Jack Smith, lobbed an accusation of perjury at the former special counsel. Schmitt accused Smith of attending an Atlanta Hawks game, where, he suggested, Smith met with Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who was pursuing her own investigation into Trump. This, for Schmitt, would be evidence of … something.

Smith was bemused. He had never seen the Atlanta Hawks play, he said. Schmitt accused him of committing perjury and called him a “dirtbag.” But after Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) intervened, it gradually became clear what might be going on. Smith had gone to an Iowa Hawkeyes game to see Caitlin Clark play. He had not gone to any sporting event in Atlanta.

And indeed that seemed to be the explanation. Schmitt had as evidence shown texts from Smith’s colleagues saying the special counsel would be sitting in seat “109 Row 1.” TPM’s Hunter Walker noticed that the venue where the Hawks played did not have such a seat, but the venue where the Hawkeyes played did. Soon, a video surfaced of a man that appeared to be Smith at the Hawkeyes game.

Here's footage of Jack Smith at the Iowa vs. Maryland game on February 3rd, 2024 btw pic.twitter.com/yItxkEbbTz

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 29, 2026

Was this all part of a coordinated media moment for Schmitt?

Immediately after Schmitt exited the hearing, Benny Johnson, an omnipresent right-wing poster who is part of the Turning Point USA world, wrote on X that Schmitt had “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself on the stand in his testimony.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, posted on X celebrating how Schmitt had put Smith “on the spot.” Neither man apparently caught what happened moments later, when those claims began to fall apart.

As Hunter noted, Schmitt was soon on a Turning Point USA broadcast where the host declared, “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game … in Atlanta … It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

Schmitt, for his part, seemed to be aware by this point that things had not gone to plan.

“I don’t — you know here’s the thing — my job is to ask the questions. He’s already — and if that’s what his answer is — then that’s what his answer is,” he said. Hard to argue with that.

Schmitt’s icarus moment also came on the same day Axios ran a piece headlined “Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028,” written by the site’s co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei.

Schmitt’s staff may have set their boss up for a big day around his big moment. But, to echo another famous conspiracy theorist, the intel on this wasn’t 100%.

Republicans tried to capitalize on our siloed media ecosystem.

Johnson and Hannity eventually deleted their tweets about Schmitt’s failed effort to do a gotcha, but only after they garnered many thousands of impressions. Their feeds remain full of other, similar posts about the hearing. Many pivoted to posting about questioning of Smith by Schmitt’s Missouri colleague, Senator Josh Hawley (R). Hawley, for his part, found his own reasons to accuse Smith of perjury.

I'd charge Jack Smith with perjury.

He should certainly be disbarred.

This must never happen again in the United States of America pic.twitter.com/TINIcH2Bdv

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 29, 2026

There’s something very of this moment — and of the right-wing media in particular — in how these figures swung into action to celebrate Schmitt’s new conspiracy theory, without noticing or caring that it had fallen apart within minutes of it being floated.

As we know from years of experience, if a claim doesn’t implode quite as spectacularly as this one did, it’s easy enough for these influencers to brazen it out for audiences who may never make contact with reality. Initially, that seemed to be the plan.

Did Schmitt just forget women’s sports exist?

One provocative question I saw raised: was this whole thing the product of Schmitt totally overlooking a topic about which the GOP professes to care quite a bit, women’s sports? “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt confusedly told the Turning Point broadcast. The possibility of WNBA or NCAA women’s games went unmentioned.

Relatedly, enjoy Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) stunned expression as Smith explained he attended a Hawkeyes, not Hawks’, game.

The moment Sen. Katie Britt realized Schmitt’s mistake.

pic.twitter.com/9Fb1CHyBE8 pic.twitter.com/4DVJBhS2lz

— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 29, 2026

Don’t miss Schmitt’s attempt to laugh the whole thing off last night

Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) September 29, 2026

Tabs

• You heard it here first: The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency within the legislative branch, has found Russ Vought’s latest “pocket rescissions” scheme to be illegal.
• The U.S. has joined Russia and Belarus, the only three countries to withdraw from Group of States against Corruption, a European anti-corruption body, the AP reports.
• As AI bosses beg government to make them stop doing what they’re doing, Trump has responded with a rebranding exercise, changing government descriptions of “artificial intelligence” to refer to “super intelligence,” a shift that I am not sure does anything for anyone. The executives also committed to self-regulating, which wasn’t what they had asked for. Mike Johnson, meanwhile, will support some regulations on these companies, he said, but only if they are voluntary.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), seen here on the right with a sly grin as he assists Schmitt in floating his conspiracy theory by gripping the corner of this posterboard Schmitt’s staff seems to have made.

Programming Note

I’ve been gone for two days! I forgot to say on Thursday’s edition that I’d be taking a long weekend to hike Mount Marcy, New York’s highest peak, with friends. More on that further down. For now, I’m back, and pretty much here through the election. Which is in … just 35 days.

A New Reason for Susan Collins to Show ‘Concern’

I wrote earlier this month about the White House scheme to subject National Institutes of Health grants to a panel of political appointees who would ensure that each had been scrubbed of all wokeness. That plan seems to be on ice for now (though I expect it to be revived in some form after the midterms, depending in part on how the midterms go). Now White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has a new scheme to mess with Congress’ ability to appropriate funds. It’s one he tried exactly a year ago: “pocket rescissions.”

A “pocket rescission” is a maneuver in which the White House notifies Congress that the fiscal year is ending without it spending funds Congress told it to spend. It is styled as a request for Congress to “rescind” the funds — a term that usually applies to a congressional vote to undo a previous spending law. But in the case of a pocket rescission, the White House is submitting its rescission request without leaving Congress time to vote on it before the funds expire at the end of the fiscal year. Thus, the year ends without the executive branch spending the funds the legislature told it to spend, and without Congress having a say in it.

“Pocket rescissions,” embraced by this White House, are widely considered to be illegal. The Government Accountability Office, a legislative watchdog agency that vets how congressional appropriations are or are not spent, has said so multiple times. But so far, that issue has not been extensively litigated.

Vought’s most recent “pocket rescission” details nearly $1 billion in funding that the White House did not spend, including money for refugees and immigrants and other programs that the reactionaries around Trump have deemed to be too “woke.” Some Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in squealing about Vought’s move. It’s particularly painful for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes the spending bills the White House is now flouting. “We’re already looking at whether there’s language we can put in the next set of appropriations bills that would prohibit this from happening,” she said yesterday. “But it’s going to take some legal work.”

These dust-ups between Congress and the White House allow Collins, who is fighting for reelection, to make a show of taking a stand. But this has all happened before, and the Republican-led Senate did not do much to prevent the White House from repeating the maneuver. Vought even brazenly told Democrats in Congress in June he “had no plans” to engineer another “pocket rescission.” And yet, right on schedule, with the end of the fiscal year days away, he did again.

This stuff is a bit in the weeds, but we cover it because it’s a small piece of the larger Article I crisis in which we find ourselves. The White House continues to take actions, particularly when it comes to spending, that stomp on Congress’ powers under the Constitution. The sprawling war in Iran, which Congress has yet to approve in any form, is the most dramatic example. But in ways large and small, the White House is steamrolling Congress’ power of the purse — its constitutional power to decide how taxpayer money is spent — zeroing out programs that legislators wrote into law while pouring money into airing Trump campaign ads on television. Congress could reassert its power in myriad ways, but does not.

As a coda to that point, here’s Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), hemming and hawing his way to a non-answer on what the legislative body he leads will do here: “Whether you agree in substance or not with what they did, you can argue that they be good stewards, and some of these things may be things many of us agree with, but the process by which they did it is gonna be, I assume, subject to a lot of discussion and probably some litigation.”

Two Key Figures in Georgia Ballots Probe Leave Administration

Andrew Bailey, the deputy director of the FBI, and Kurt Olsen, who once worked as Trump’s director of election security and integrity, have reportedly left their roles. Both were key figures in the raid on Fulton County, Georgia’s election office earlier this year.

• Bailey was at the raid.
• Olsen, a temporary government employee, made the referral to prosecutors that led to the raid.
• Both are staunch conservative warriors. Bailey was the attorney general of Missouri — an office that tends to spearhead lawsuits that engage in various culture war issues — when he was tapped to become co-deputy director of the FBI, helping out Dan Bongino.
• The New York Times reports that Bailey and FBI Director Kash Patel did not get along. His work in Georgia was one of his most visible moments as deputy director.
• Olsen, a prominent 2020 election denier and former attorney for Kari Lake, has also reportedly left the DOJ, where he had worked for months on the “grand conspiracy” case against Trump’s enemies. Olsen faced issues obtaining a security clearance, the Times reports.
• That case appears to have been an attempt to paint an overarching narrative that rolled together the many first term investigations into Trump’s misdeeds into one investigation of the investigators. But the wheels seem to be coming off: You’ll recall the lead prosecutor, conservative warrior Joseph diGenova, quit earlier this month, telling the New York Post, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

White House’s After-the-Fact Justification For Ban Falls Apart

Overnight, U.S. district court judge Timothy Kelly granted the temporary restraining order sought by three news organizations — MS NOW, Politico and CNN — that President Donald Trump had “banned” from the White House.

Kelly, a first-term Trump appointee, found that the White House’s assertion that the stories either “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods,” left open “the possibility that all the stories fall into the later bucket, rather than the former.” The news organizations, he found, were likely to succeed in their arguments that the White House did not use any kind of process in deciding to revoke reporters’ access.

A further bit of absurdity surrounded the White House’s effort to show these reporters were up to no good. All three of the banned outlets got letters saying that they were “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues and publishing sensitive or classified information,” and noting their reliance on “anonymous sources”; the letters then included examples of stories it took issue with.

At least one of those stories, however, was based on a press call the White House set up, and that a White House aide told reporters to attribute to a “senior administration official.”

“The contents of this call are on background, attributable to a senior administration official,” an aide said, according to a recording of the call obtained by the Washington Post. “By remaining on the line, you agree to those terms.”

The media newsletter Status later reported that the “senior administration official” was none other than JD Vance himself.

This may seem odd, but this kind of stuff happens all the time. Government offices and agencies hold formal calls with the press, but ask that the information be kept on background — not attributed to a particular person. I’ve been on dozens of such calls. It’s a little weird that the vice president was the source in this case, and that he was described, somewhat misleadingly, as a “senior administration official.” But the relevant thing here is: These were not leaks jeopardizing national security. They were not leaks at all: the “anonymous source” was speaking at a carefully managed event set up by the White House itself.

This ridiculous twist is not mentioned in Kelly’s middle-of-the-night ruling, but it seems he was nonetheless unimpressed with the amount of due diligence that the White House put into its claims that reporters behaved inappropriately. He had a comical bit of analysis noting that the stories the White House deemed problematic don’t in any way support its solution of banning particular members of the White House Press Corps.

Defendants offer no declarations or other support—classified or unclassified—explaining how any of the reporting they identified in their letters to Plaintiffs damaged the national security. The declarations they do provide include general background about classified information, but the declarants are senior officials in the Department of Defense who have no direct knowledge of how reporters operate in the White House, or about any of the facts at issue here. And supplemental declarations filed by Plaintiffs show that, in most cases, the reporters who authored the stories Defendants identify in their letters did not even hold hard passes. In the remaining cases, Defendants afford no reason to believe that the reporter’s possession of the hard pass was integral to the stories identified.

ICE Operations in Kansas Become a Midterms Issue

Increased ICE activity in Southwest Kansas is prompting backlash.

• Agents in unmarked vans are staking out meat processing facilities and stopping traffic, NPR affiliate KCUR reports.
• “A message sent from Dodge City Public Schools asked families to update contact information and alert the district if people not on a student’s emergency contact list would need to pick up children,” KCUR reports. “We may have students whose family members have been detained,” a message from school administrators obtained by the paper read. The message also noted some students may no longer have anyone to care for them, per the Wichita Eagle. “Please help us keep our students safe and cared for,” it said.
• At least one meatpacking facility shifted its operation schedule, KCUR reports, and other local businesses closed entirely, according to local NBC affiliate KSNW. “We refuse to pretend it is business as usual,” one business noted by KSNW wrote on Facebook. “We refuse to pressure employees into risking separation from their families just so we can sell another plate of food.”
• Democrat Adam Hamilton, the megachurch pastor running for Senate in Kansas, is doing surprisingly well in recent polls. Republican incumbent Roger Marshall addressed the ICE activity in a carefully calibrated X post yesterday, writing, “When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe.”

Pay No Attention to That Man Inside the White House

Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, the Miami Herald noticed yesterday, scrubbed his campaign website of almost any mention of Trump’s name. He is, of course, not the first. Mike Beltran, running in Florida for a U.S. House seat, changed his website so that rather than stating he “felt inspired by President Trump’s 2016 victory,” it now explains he felt “called to public service.” Joe Mitchell, running in Iowa, once described himself as a “trusted voice in the MAGA movement” who would “always fight for the hard-working Iowans who have made their support for President Trump loud and clear.” Now, the Washington Post noticed, he promises to “clean up Washington and put working families first.”

The lack of enthusiasm among 2026 candidates for the Trump-headlined Dallas midterm convention was perhaps the canary in the coal mine. Now, amid dismal poll numbers, Republicans candidates are scrambling to put distance between themselves and the president in ways large and small — though the president is quite hard to ignore.

Some have taken a stand against the Iran War, with Ohio Senate candidate Jon Husted calling for it to “come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” Just before the House left for recess until November, seven Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to end the war.

My favorite example in this is Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor in Wisconsin. At TPM, we’ve highlighted the extent to which his defining characteristic is his election denial and the lengths he went following the 2020 election to keep Trump in office. As recently as May, he was encouraging the FBI to probe how his state conducted the 2020 election, and would not say who won it.

But, asked this month about that election, a spokesperson for Tiffany told a Wisconsin news outlet where he stood: “Joe Biden won.”

State Department Office With White Supremacist Name Does White Supremacist Things

A Washington Post investigation earlier this week provided the most extensive detail yet of the Trump State Department’s new Office of Remigration. The office, which takes its name from a European neo-Nazi concept of ethnic cleansing, has been behind the third country removals that have ramped up throughout the Trump administration, depositing immigrants to the U.S. in countries to which they have no connection.

• The Post obtained documents that detail the deals behind these removals, showing payments of $81 million to 13 foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian regimes.
• The Trump administration has deported a whopping 25,000 people in this way to at least 28 countries, per the Post.
• Many of these migrants have described, to the Post and numerous other outlets, inhumane conditions imposed by both the ICE agents who carry out the deportations and the third countries that ultimately receive the deported, including beatings and a lack of access to medical care.
• I was particularly interested in the details of why and how the term remigration — which comes from the darkest corners of the European right — was given to this office. (I know at this point in the Trump administration this kind of thing can fail to shock, but I really would encourage you to read TPM reporter Chris Mathias’ backgrounder on the term to understand how extreme its origins are, and what the administration is winking at here.) The Post documents how career staffers at the office — which, prior to its Trump administration repurposing, was dedicated to helping refugees — questioned State Department leadership about the name and mission change. “The message we got was that was the exact terminology they wanted,” one staffer told the Post.
• The office’s work is the brainchild of Stephen Miller and his closest administration allies, the Post reports.

But Will Lawmakers Finally Act to Rein Vought In?

Top appropriators in Congress responded yesterday to White House OMB Director Russ Vought’s latest attempt to install political appointees as the final arbiters of congressionally appropriated grant money for scientific research.

“Republicans need to join us to put a stop to any effort by this administration to politicize what groundbreaking new treatments and cures we decide as a country to invest in,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top Democratic appropriator, said.

“The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should not be involved in agency decisions on the awards of grants,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Republican chair of the appropriations committee, said.

The most recent scheme, as I wrote yesterday, involves an executive order — which is, reportedly, currently being drafted, to give political appointees control over spending on research by the National Institutes of Health. Vought, per the Washington Post, contends that NIH’s work remains too “woke.” Trump and Vought are both also annoyed, per Politico and the New York Times, that funding continues to flow from the agency to Harvard.

TPM’s interest in this story isn’t only about the fact that a politicization of NIH grants would be an authoritarian disaster — though it would be. It’s also that it is the latest chapter in a theme that has defined the Trump administration: expanding executive branch power, and marginalizing Congress — a campaign by Trump and his advisors to which the Republican-controlled legislature has largely acquiesced.

While Democrats denounced Vought’s power grab, the senator who really matters here is Collins, the top Republican on the appropriations committee. Collins, of course, is fighting for reelection in Maine, and her statement was relatively strong.

“Any attempt to politicize grantmaking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or any other agency, by another means — whether an Executive Order or guidance — is contrary to congressional intent,” she said.

“The Continuing Resolution — which passed the Senate, House, and was signed into law on September 2 – blocks OMB’s proposed rule or any substantially similar one,” she also noted.

Words, however, are cheap. As I wrote yesterday, the continuing resolution to fund the government, passed earlier this month, blocks the Trump administration from installing Trump’s political appointees to oversee research, but only does so until after the midterms. Republicans, Murray said last month, rejected a permanent block on the White House injecting itself into grantmaking.

This question will surface again after the midterms — and, likely, sooner, if this executive order sees the light of day, posing a direct challenge to Collins. We’ll see then if she, and Congress more generally, are willing to reassert their power of the purse in a lasting way.

Missouri Map Heads Back to the Supreme Court Yet Again

The Supreme Court has already twice weighed in on a fight that has been playing out in recent weeks in Missouri, after the state’s secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, chose the route of chaos by effectively ignoring a petition by voters to choose which map the state votes under. At issue are two maps — a 2022 one and a deeply gerrymandered one the state legislature passed in 2025 at Trump’s urging.

• The Supreme Court has twice effectively required the midterm elections to go forward under the 2022 map, and the state Supreme Court blocked the 2025 map. Many experts believed the issue was settled, at least until after the election.
• But an appeals court Monday night ruled that the state must use the 2025 map, opening a new chapter of this chaotic story. The state, Democracy Docket notes, has already distributed ballots.
• The appeals court reasoned that requiring voters to cast ballots in different maps in the primary and general elections — the outcome of Hoskins’ scheme to plow forward with primaries under the new map, despite the voter challenge to it — would violate the Constitution.
• An activist group that has been fighting the 2025 map for a year, People Not Politicians, is seeking emergency review from the Supreme Court.
• Big picture, the fight is over one congressional seat, focused on Kansas City, and the shape of others in the state. The 2025 map would likely flip that Kansas City seat, currently held by Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, from Democratic to Republican.

Tabs

• Speaking of Susan Collins … an FBI probe of a defense contractor bribery scheme was on the cusp of investigating politicians of both parties who had accepted donations from the company in question — including, prominently, Susan Collins, ProPublica reports. Then Trump returned to the White House, and ended nearly all public corruption work at the DOJ.
• Trump and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani met yesterday and emerged before reporters with almost nothing but praise for each other, Politico reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Cornyn, who continues to create some drama — now by headlining a fundraiser in Dallas that will raise money for Republican Senate candidates in Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota. But not Texas, the state where Cornyn and his co-headliner, George W. Bush, are from, and where the fundraiser is being held. The Senate candidate there is Ken Paxton who — of course — beat Cornyn in the primary.

Are We at War?

Just as the Trump administration is trying to quiet the Iran war down before the midterms, Iran, per an MS NOW report, is trying to do the opposite: ramp it up, and drive oil prices as high as possible.

Russ Vought Wants to Veto NIH Funding

The White House’s attempts to clamp down on government funding — in direct defiance of Congress, which has largely rolled over — have become sort of cyclical.

First, there was DOGE. Then, there were a series of efforts by Russ Vought to continue DOGE’s work — if not literally, than in spirit. One particular target of his has been the National Institutes of Health, and for a period of months in 2025 Vought blocked the agency’s research grants until a mostly quiet lobbying campaign by Republican senators forced him to relent. But Vought, the White House Office of Management and Budget director, has reared his head periodically over the last year and a half, each time with a new gambit to slash government grant-making and not spend money Congress had directed the White House to spend.

Another such episode unfolded this weekend, documented in three reports from the Washington Post, which broke the news, then Politico and finally the New York Times.

This story involves Vought attempting to again assert control over NIH grantmaking — the Post reported that he was concerned that despite rounds of cuts to research into LGBTQ issues, women’s health, and other supposedly “DEI”-tainted initiatives, the NIH’s work was still overly “woke.” Politico and the Times reported another motivation for meddling in NIH grantmaking: to screw with Harvard, after repeated, failed Trump administration efforts to do so.

Vought and Trump reportedly summoned Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, who, while a fellow ideological traveler with Trump and Vought in some respects, is reportedly a defender of research into racial disparities in health outcomes and a friend of Harvard’s president. A big argument ensued, according to the three reports, and Bhattacharya refused to let Vought get more deeply involved with his agency’s work.

But Trump apparently thought Vought made some good points. And, so, now we are on track for a new executive order to put Vought or someone similar in charge of this research funding — to move NIH grantmaking, or at least the power to veto individual line items, from the hands of career scientists to political appointees. The Post reported on Saturday afternoon that the White House was looking into an order establishing a “commission to review the NIH’s grants”; Politico then reported on Saturday evening that Trump had directed Vought to draft such an order, and the Times reported on Sunday that work of drafting the order had already begun — it will, the Times said, “create a new external committee with the power to veto awards in the National Institutes of Health’s vast research portfolio that do not conform to Mr. Trump’s political agenda.”

This sounds a lot like another, broader plan from earlier this year to put political appointees in charge of all grantmaking that was roundly denounced by scientists and politicians of both parties, and then, in August, blocked in the Senate (and later in the House). But, typically for this Congress, not forever. Just until after the midterms.

This new attempt at an executive order would be another direct challenge to Congress, one to which Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Republican chair of the appropriations committee, should have to respond. We will see if she considers legislation to block it permanently, and not simply until after her reelection.

German Far-Right Continues to Rise

A new round of German elections Sunday again showed the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland gaining ground, winning a plurality in one state for the second time this month.

• In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, north of Berlin, the party came in first, with 38.3% of the vote. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) came in second at 35.4%.
• Earlier this month, in another German state, Saxony-Anhalt, AfD almost won an outright majority, with 44% of the vote.
• In Berlin, which also held elections Sunday, AfD’s strength grew to 16.3% — significant in the capital. A left-wing party, Linke, came in first place with 25.3% of the vote.
• Chroniclers of the far-right see the party’s rise as a particularly dark sign, given that it is the first time since the 1940s when the far-right in Germany has shown such strength.
• Terrible numbers for Chancellor’s Friedrich Merz’s party in recent elections also raise the possibility that AfD’s rise could challenge the national government.
• AfD is extreme even by the standards of European far-right parties, stridently opposing immigration and LGBTQ rights while also seeking to revise how German history is remembered. The party shares many connection with Trump world.

The Administration Finds a New Way to Scoff at Watergate

Earlier this week, one of our TPM reporters let me know he was tuning into the White House’s press conference. I was surprised when he told me who the fill-in press secretary would be that day: Attorney General Todd Blanche.

I probably shouldn’t have been. Blanche, since winning Senate confirmation, has set about fully demolishing yet another norm: that the attorney general stay out of politics. Not only has he given a White House press briefing — in recent weeks, he’s hit the campaign trail.

The press conference this week saw Blanche affirming that Trump and his family were right on all the issues of the day.

• Trump’s castigation of Supreme Court justices after a loss as “not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” “merely a shell of their original selves”? “He is very frustrated,” the attorney general said of the president. “He has every right — and indeed he should — communicate his concerns.”
• Trump’s conspiracy theory that the Biden administration tried to kill him in Butler, Pennsylvania? Reasonable, per Blanche: The Biden administration was trying to put Trump “in prison till he dies.”
• Democrats expressing concern about AI? “Nothing but an effort to influence the midterms.”
• A Russian oligarch funding Don Jr.’s wedding? “When you say, ‘Am I investigating,’ am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

Last week, Blanche spoke at the Republican midterms convention, an effort (however questionably successful) to get the base hyped to vote. On Wednesday, he campaign for former RNC head Michael Whatley, who is running for Senate in North Carolina and badly trailing former governor Roy Cooper (D). Blanche’s political campaigning pales in importance compared with the department’s aggressive prosecution of the president’s enemies — from random protesters and social media shit-stirrers to former FBI directors. But it is all of a piece.

The norm of the attorney general remaining apolitical dates back to the ’70s, Charlie Savage writes in the New York Times, when Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell, ran Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns and, in between, played a central role in multiple aspects of Watergate.

Amid everything going on — Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today, as JD Vance so memorably put it — it can feel like weak tea to talk about the vagaries of the Hatch Act, or norms of Justice Department independence. It can feel quaint to remember how Merrick Garland launched an investigation into Biden just a few short years ago. Remember the freakout that ensued when Bill Clinton and Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch chatted for 30 minutes on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation? It may have set off a chain of events that brought us Trump in the first place.

Still, it’s worth keeping sight of how quickly things have changed, just to keep perspective.

When Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) voted to confirm Blanche, he asserted that if Blanche wasn’t the Senate-confirmed attorney general, Trump would likely go find an acting attorney general who was worse. Because Blanche had been Trump’s personal lawyer, he had developed the ability to talk the president out of his worst ideas, Cassidy reasoned. “I am realistic that President Trump can be unrelenting,” he sighed. He, therefore, had not choice but to confirm Blanche, he decided.

That whole line of reasoning may be pathetic, but there’s something to it. And it’s a striking statement on where we’re at.

GOP Sticks by Florida Candidate Who Attended Neo-Nazi Rally, Spent Years Working With Neo-Confederate Group

On Monday, TPM reporter Chris Mathias revealed that Republicans’ nominee for a Florida legislature seat attended the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, part of years of activism alongside a neo-Confederate group called League of the South. Marshall Rawson’s candidacy, we found, had seemingly become a kind of cause célèbre among the furthest-right activists in American politics, who donated at least $15,000 to his campaign. Rawson had personally made it “very clear” to one former Klan lawyer “that he’s taking a stand against discrimination against white people,” the lawyer told us. 

The story was covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, MS NOW, The New Republic, Politico, The Independent, The Guardian, and local outlets including Charlottesville Weekly, the Tampa Bay Times, and the ABC affiliate for northcentral Florida.

So, is the GOP standing by Rawson?

Yes.

• Chris reached out to GOP officials, including 22 who had endorsed Rawson, leaders in Florida who would have to work with him, and the state and national party apparatus.
• Three endorsees replied, saying that they’d stand with Rawson.
• No one else got back to us, let alone unendorse him.
• Last year, a college Republicans group at the University of Florida was disbanded after it’s members were seen giving Nazi salutes. This semester, it was reinstated. After TPM’s story appeared, Chris noted, Rawson posted a photo with the group. “Who cares about the lying media when  the largest and most active College Republican chapter in the United States is behind you!” he wrote.

A New Republican Bill Brings Efforts to Meddle With Apportionment Into Focus

TPM has covered apportionment for years — in part, because right-wing activists are so intent on meddling with it, and in part because of the impact that meddling could have. As we’ve been reporting, the Census Bureau is currently attempting to exclude many categories of immigrants from the count used for apportionment, a violation of the 14th Amendment’s clear mandate that apportionment must count “the whole number of persons in each State.”

That, yes, is a set of phrases that might make the average reader’s eyes glaze over, but what it means is this: Republicans are trying to claim more power in Congress and the Electoral College by counting fewer people in blue states and regions. That power would shift to red states and regions. This plan violates the Constitution, though right-wing lawyers have mobilized a set of arguments they will use to argue before the Supreme Court that it does not. This is another power grab, albeit a wonkier and more statistics-focused one than such things as Stop the Steal. Unfortunately, the planning for this power grab within the executive branch involves terms and concepts that put most Americans to sleep.

Fortunately, President Trump’s allies in Congress are helping to make it all more explicit. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) this week introduced the “Make Apportionment Great Again (MAGA) Act.” It, too, would do what the Census Bureau is attempting to do: exclude categories of immigrants from apportionment. Clyde gave Fox News an exclusive heads up that his bill was coming. “‘MAGA Act’ could rip House seats from Dem states ahead of next presidential race,” Fox’s headline declared, perfectly accurately.

Super helpful in amplifying this drum we’ve been banging.

“While we wait for the Senate to finally take action on the SAVE America Act, we must also recognize that the ballot box is not the only way non-citizens can impact American elections,” Clyde said in a statement. “Counting all residents regardless of citizenship in the U.S. census allows non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to influence the makeup of congressional seats and the distribution of Electoral College votes.”

“Republicans have long warned that Democrats’ intentional illegal invasion and sanctuary policies are rooted in a desire to boost blue states’ power,” Clyde added, a nod to a version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

To clear up something you might be wondering: non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections (and incidents of non-citizens voting are vanishingly rare). But, again, the Constitution explicitly states that the “whole number of people” in a state must be included in apportionment, which determines the number of seats each state gets in the House and, as a result, the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, members of Congress represent the people who live in their area, including immigrants — they do not, solely, represent their voters. Clyde’s bill distorts those constitutional realities.

It would mandate reapportionment ahead of the 2028 election.

Trump’s Fed Chair Goes Rogue

The Fed raised rates yesterday, despite Trump’s repeated demands that it lower them, attempts to exercise control over the Fed, and efforts to take U.S. trade policy hostage in order to force his preferred outcomes.

• “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT… BE PATRIOTS for a change,” Trump had threatened the Fed earlier this month. He is also attempting to fire one of its board members, Lisa Cook.
• Nonetheless, the board, chaired by Trump-appointed Kevin Warsh, voted unanimously to raise rates one quarter of a percent.
• Warsh, who has reportedly spoken with Trump often, refused to comment on those calls in a press conference after the rate decision.
• Trump responded on Truth Social, invoking his threat to “stop trading,” sentiments he echoed almost exactly at a rally in the midterms swing state of North Carolina last night.

Trump Asserts (Without Evidence, of Course) That the Biden Administration Tried to Murder Him

One thing I would not have expected President Donald J. Trump to be spending his time on with just weeks to go until Election Day is creating new conspiracy theories about Tom Crooks, who shot at him in the summer of 2024 from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania. But here we are.

The president yesterday asserted on Truth Social that Butler “was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.”

That the assassination attempt was the work of Trump’s political enemies is a baseless claim that the White House has leaned into for some time. In early January, the White House published a revisionist history of Jan. 6 that, TPM’s Hunter Walker noted at the time, included the following line: “Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him … President Trump emerges triumphant.”

The website suggested, without any shred of evidence, that what happened in Butler was the work of the “Deep State” — the catch-all term for any government bureaucrat who might be behaving in a disfavored way, from slowing deregulation to, apparently, plotting a presidential candidate’s murder.

But Trump himself blaming it directly on a “Democrat Plot” takes the claim to another level. He then went on to castigate former FBI Director Chris Wray, claiming materials about the assassination were “missing, altered, corrupted or gone” and declaring Wray should “pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt.”

It’s unclear what Trump is gesturing toward here, if anything. The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” was provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Among the few things we do know about Crooks, in fact, was that his desire to create a spectacle appeared nonpartisan. He went to the gun range a lot, and didn’t talk very much. He googled the dates of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He researched school shooters, and Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom he is now often compared.

“Neither Oswald nor Crooks were the kind of people who make history, not like Kennedy and Trump,” wrote Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, around Butler’s second anniversary. “But somehow, these two losers found a way to write their names into the fabric of American lore. Something greater had to be at work. There had to be a conspiracy — who was behind it and why would have to be filled in later.”

A significant portion — 24% — of Americans now believe Butler was staged, polls suggest. An additional 32% don’t know what to think. These conspiracy theorists, however, tend not to believe it was the work of Democrats. Rather, they think it was a plot orchestrated by Trump himself.

Bigotry and Corruption

As Republican senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents or opted not to run again, some reporters at news outlets that cover Capitol Hill closely rubbed their hands together, predicting that now Trump would really have a problem on his hands. The results have been … underwhelming. Honestly kind of lame. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) red lines are confusing, shifting, and often meaningless. Same — but even more so — for Bill Cassidy (R-LA). John Cornyn (R-TX) too.

But, despite the lack of a substantive shift in GOP legislating, it has been interesting to see these senators critique their own party with insiders’ knowledge.

• Here’s John Cornyn, speaking to veteran Hill reporter Igor Bobic about racist tweets by Texas candidate Bo French and all the Nazi staffers in the GOP: “I think too many people are tolerating conduct that in the past would have been disqualifying when it comes to politics, and what’s happened, I think people’s sort of public standards have eroded to where a lot of things that, like I said, that would not have been tolerated before, or normalized.”
• He continues: “Some of the anti-Semitism, some of the bigotry like Bo French’s comments, and some of the corruption, and I think those are those are the death knell for a political party.” Sounds right! Except for the “death knell” part — plenty of political movements worldwide (and through U.S. history) have built their ascendancy on hate.
• Josh Kovensky has a look at the imbroglio around French’s racist and anti-immigrant posts, which is somewhat confusing, as he’s been doing this for months. More broadly, the Texas GOP has built its midterm strategy around fear-mongering about Indian-Americans and Muslim immigrants.

One Crisis Averted

Kate Riga has the details here, but a moment we’ve long been anticipating arrived last night: The Supreme Court ruled on Trump’s mail-in voting executive order. It blocked it, at least for now. That likely settles it — at least for this election. “The ruling is a titanic one before the midterms,” Kate writes, “and a major loss for the Trump administration as it seeks to influence the election by attacking absentee voting.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested he might support the dramatic scheme the Postal Service had cooked up to comply with Trump’s executive order — but not so close to the midterms. “There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority,” he wrote. But “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

There were two justices who wanted the rule to go forward: Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas. In a dissent authored by Alito and joined by Thomas, they argued that the Postal Service had the authority to promulgate and implement the rule, and that that was the end of the story.

It’s hard to overstate the dramatic nature of what the Postal Service was up to; it prompted alarm from election workers and whistleblowers within the USPS itself. The new system featured multiple ways in which not just a single mail ballot but whole reams of ballots could be rejected based on, simply, an error on one. Setting that aside, it created a scenario in which, election experts calculated, ballots would take weeks or even years to be processed. It raises questions about “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” lawyers for the Postal Service whistleblower wrote.

Election law scholar Rick Hasen noted that Alito’s dissent made no mention of what the rule would do to the midterms. “The voters make no appearance whatsoever in Justice Alito’s reasoning,” Hasen wrote. “He, like the government, does not dispute that using the rule in 2026 would disenfranchise millions of our most vulnerable people. He doesn’t care. It’s despicable and antidemocratic.””

Whistleblower Details DHS’ ‘Voter Fraud’ Push

As part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (so far, it seems, not very successful) effort to scrounge up some instances of voter fraud that the administration can tout ahead of the midterms, officers have been scouring states’ voter rolls, and plugging individual voters’ names and other information into states’ public-facing voter websites, which are meant to be used by the voter themselves to check their registration.

As part of this push, a whistleblower alleges, agents may be breaking the law.

• According to the whistleblower, officers received little training — just an instructional video, some links to states’ voter registration websites, and a power point presentation.
• With that preparation, they are expected to comb through “the personal information of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout all 50 states, including US citizens,” according to lawyers for the whistleblower. “Officers are supposed to review and determine if the information belongs to an ‘unlawful voter’ and were given a quota of at least five subjects to be reviewed per hour.”
• In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) demanded answers to a list of questions, including one noting that the slipshod investigation, as described, could lead to baseless criminal investigations. “It equates to approximately 12 minutes per subject – a completely inadequate timeline for investigating and reconciling multiple Alien Registration Numbers mistakenly or inadvertently issued to an individual, increasing the likelihood of error,” the senators wrote. “Individual cases identified by this initiative can then be taken up by HSI for further action, including criminal investigations.”
• The whistleblower also expressed concern that by effectively posing as a voter to plug identifying info into these state websites, officers were breaking the law. Training materials asserted that officers were “not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” suggesting DHS was, in fact, aware of that issue.

Trump Wants Full Speed Ahead on AI

Even as tech CEOs cast AI as a kind of runaway train, Trump is urging full speed ahead. “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” he said over the weekend.

It’s an increasingly rare position, even within the Republican Party. Chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology David Sacks, however, also remains bullish — and went so far as to claim on Fox last week that criticism of AI was an “op.”

“The truth is, this was a well-orchestrated media op,” he said of warnings by Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic safety researcher who quit last week. “And it was designed to scare the public about AI — so they implement their preferred approach to AI, which is a government takeover, to have a very heavy hand in government regulation of AI.”

Trump seemingly echoed that over the weekend. “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he said.

The base isn’t necessarily in the same place. Steve Bannon is set to speak at an event this week to call for greater controls on the technology, alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — the loudest elected, Democratic-aligned AI-skeptical voice — and Coxon. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), too, sounded the mildest note of caution over the weekend, while effectively shrugging off his own role, urging the companies to self-regulate.

Democrats, meanwhile, are noting voters’ concern about this topic, though they, too, are not yet speaking in one voice. Barack Obama, at a fundraiser, urged congressional Democrats to present a clear message on the dangers of the technology.

“If I were running for president next year, this would be one of my central agendas, and I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about this, and I would say, ‘Here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this,’” he said, per NBC News. “‘I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement.’”

AI is often compared to nuclear proliferation, but in Congress’ reluctance to grapple with it, I find comparisons to climate change — a more recent abject failure by the U.S. government — more useful. Oil and coal companies were able to defuse political action in the U.S. with similar talking points — if the U.S. didn’t burn fossil fuels, other countries would, they claimed. Climate change was a fringe issue pushed by activist groups, not a topic for serious-minded politicians, they said.

By the time the U.S. government did take action, it faced structural impediments, with support for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions only rarely having majority support in Congress. Obama’s Clean Power Plan — implemented through executive action — was struck down by the courts. The Democratic-supported climate provisions in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act — arduously passed through the budget reconciliation process to avoid the filibuster — were immediately scrapped by a new, Republican Congress once Trump retook control of the White House. Nearly 40 years after Congress was first warned about climate change, it has done virtually nothing on the topic.

Now, too, there’s a new dynamic in the mix — a Republican-controlled legislative branch that views itself, from issues of war to spending, as subordinate to the executive branch, and, specifically, to Trump. That, coupled with Trump’s dismissiveness toward those who urge caution around the new technology, does not bode well for the U.S. government leading the way on reining in AI.

Bo French’s Latest Anti-Immigrant Post Gets Some Mild GOP Pushback

During a reporting trip to Texas earlier this year, TPM’s Josh Kovensky took note of the tremendously toxic force that is Bo French, now the Republican nominee for the state’s railroad commission, which, in Texas, is an important office, regulating the state’s oil and gas industry and pipelines.

• To give just a taste of who this guy is, last year he posted a poll asking his X audience, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The options were “Jews” and “Muslims.”
• On Sunday, he posted a picture that appears to show young people of South Asian descent celebrating in a stadium. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
• Texas Republicans, as Josh Kovensky saw during his trip, have leaned hard into demonizing both Muslim Texans and South Asian Texans, apparently calculating that doing so will help get xenophobes amped to vote in the midterms.
• French’s post prompted some pushback from elected Republicans in Texas, though Governor Greg Abbott qualified his criticism of French by stating that Texas should have the “toughest immigration laws of any state in America” and to call for “freezing H1B visas at our universities.”
• Attorney General Ken Paxton, asked by Politico for comment on French’s post, did not mention French but attacked James Talarico, his opponent in the Senate race, per Politico.

Tabs

• The political director for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) left his reelection campaign after the Washington Post reported that he had posted pictures of Nazi soldiers to his Facebook and participated in the creation of a public playlist that celebrated Rhodesia, a white-governed breakaway state in Africa admired by white supremacists.
• Trump does not yet appear to be spending money to defend Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, the Washington Sun reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Donald Trump Jr., whose wedding was, reportedly, “heavily funded” by a Russian oligarch close to Putin.

Are We at War?

Militias in Iraq allied with Iran have struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline as the not-war expands in the Middle-East.