Donald Trump relished delivering two devastating words — “You’re fired” — in his role on the reality show “The Apprentice,” and years later, he repeated them incessantly on the campaign trail, much to the delight of his audiences. But the president has a dirty little secret: He does not like confrontation. In real life, he prefers to delegate the unpleasant task to an underling. 

This emerged as a pattern during his first term, when personnel churn was a constant. Trump often had his chiefs of staff — there were several — deliver the bad news, and sometimes he would even fire people on social media rather than confront in person. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, famously learned of his dismissal from his staff via a printed tweet after returning from a diplomatic trip to Africa. FBI Director James Comey saw the news of his firing on TV news reports. Once the person was gone, Trump often publicly insulted them, portraying them as “lowlifes,” “nutjobs” and worse, never seeming to realize the glaring contradiction — that a man with his alleged business savvy should have had better judgment than to hire such people in the first place. According to a Brookings analysis, the president had a 92% turnover rate among his “A team” during his first administration, the highest of any president in history.

Trump’s second term has been much more stable. Where before Trump had hired qualified people — aside from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — recommended by experienced Washington hands, this time around he has surrounded himself with nothing but the most loyal sycophants. As a result, there has been much less personnel drama. Still, there have been a few notable departures. 

The first was the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. After a bromance budded between the billionaire and Trump during the transition period, when Musk essentially moved into Mar-a-Lago, the president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency and take a chainsaw to the federal government. Then there was a rupture in the relationship and Musk departed, although they seem to have mended fences. Since then, Trump has only fired a few people: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. (The latter three “resigned” under duress.) On Friday afternoon, after only a few days on the job and widespread criticism of her tenure, Trump dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zacharia.

The White House has insisted it’s entirely coincidental that all the firings have been women. But as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, “In many instances, the female officials who departed appeared to have failed some kind of loyalty test to Mr. Trump.” (You know how women are.) The departures of these women isn’t because none of the administration’s men have been implicated in misconduct or corrupt dealings. To the contrary: Some of Trump’s male officials and staffers are stunningly incompetent and dishonest, but their behavior has either been overlooked or rewarded with promotions and transfers. 

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So when reports surfaced that another high-profile female staffer may be on the chopping block, it would have come as no surprise — if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in question is the single most powerful female in the administration. 

Susie Wiles has earned the distinction of being Trump’s longest tenured chief of staff, and with good reason: She has managed to stay on the president’s good side by enabling him and never telling him what he doesn’t want to hear. She has admitted that herself, saying, “These seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

One would certainly think that would guarantee her job security. But ahead of the monumental loss Republicans are expected to endure during the upcoming midterm elections, Trump is reportedly raging — and looking for a scapegoat. Apparently, it’s going to be Wiles. According to recent reports, the president has been calling around to friends to see what they think of his chief of staff — a common precursor to a Trump firing. According to POLITICO, plenty of people have their knives out for Wiles, with one person close to the White House saying, “She’s burned a lot of people.” 

This, though, is an occupational hazard for any Trump chief of staff. It’s also not unusual for turnover following a midterm election. But the GOP is facing what looks to be a massive loss, attributed to the president’s historically low approval ratings among the American people. Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026 — along with her partners James Blair and Chris LaCivita — she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone. 

The big question now centers on Wiles’ replacement. POLITICO reported there are three likely candidates. One is Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a fierce Trump loyalist known most recently for spending as much time as possible with the president, feeding him memes and ideas on big white poster boards. Another is Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who once told an aide to fill a jar with only the red Starburst candies for him to give to the president because he had noticed that Trump preferred them, earning him the presidential sobriquet “My Kevin.” Then there is Stephen Miller, the notorious senior adviser of everything.

The choice of Pulte or McCarthy would signal a continuation of current practices, albeit with less discipline and adult behavior in the White House, which may be inevitable no matter who wins the job. Pulte is dramatically unqualified, but since Trump once made him acting director of national intelligence, that distinction is obviously not an impediment.

McCarthy is one of the most incompetent and ignorant leaders in GOP history, but this is likely a plus, since Trump likes people who are just like him. If anyone expects that the president is looking for someone who is stronger than Wiles, the fact that McCarthy is being considered should lay those thoughts to rest.

The most frightening prospect is, of course, Miller, who is already serving as the shadow president and would, as chief of staff, essentially have the full power of the presidency at his fingertips. Trump is obsessed with his legacy projects and making as much money as possible, and the only other thing he cares about is vengeance on his enemies, a desire he shares in equal fervor with Miller. If Miller has the full power of chief of staff, we can assume that he will be ordering and approving the most authoritarian policies the United States has ever seen, and Trump may not even know it’s been done. That is clearly Miller’s mission, and given the power to enact such policies, he will not hesitate. 

Being far more ruthless and determined, Miller would no doubt run a tighter ship than Pulte or McCarthy. Trump, though, will still be in charge, and it’s easy to imagine that Miller’s actions would make him even more unpopular than he is now. That could make the legacy-concerned president uncomfortable as he confronts the possibility that he will leave office with a personal reputation far worse than Richard Nixon’s and a record of failure lower than Jimmy Carter’s.

It’s not too early to start blaming Miller for Trump’s unpopularity, and Democrats would be wise to start doing that publicly as soon as possible. If he becomes the chief of staff wielding power with fascist fervor, it may just be too late.

The post A blue wave could take out Susie Wiles appeared first on Salon.com.

Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.

Bobby Pulido is in the middle of everything. 

The famed Tejano singer is trying his hand at politics in his home state of Texas, which is a crucial part of Democrats’ pathway to a potential House majority in Washington. And the blue wave that has made those lofty ambitions more and more realistic has been partially fueled by Latino voters’ shift away from President Donald Trump amid mounting anger with ICE and his mass deportation agenda. 

Donald Trump’s new White House “pep secretary,” Katie Zacharia, introduced herself to America in the Brady Briefing Room this week, to anticipated criticism from Democrats and some unexpected criticism from Republicans.  

At first, the press pool acted like that was just business as usual. It didn’t last long. As of Friday afternoon, multiple news reports indicate that Trump has already seen enough, and has asked Zacharia to step down from her role at the White House after just five days on the job.

According to a post on X by reporter Aaron Rupar, Trump told the press corps he had said to Zacharia that “she was treated very, very unfairly by the news. Let’s call it the fake news. I said, ‘Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.’ We’re talking about doing something. I want her to have a good life. She’s being brutalized by the media.” 

In all likelihood, that will end one of the shortest tenures of any Trump White House official, only about half the length of the notorious Anthony Scaramucci during Trump’s first term.

Maybe Zacharia was just unlucky. After all, she made her debut on Oct. 13. She showed up 15 minutes late. She spent the next eight minutes telling us how great Trump was. She took questions from just three people. She was gone 15 minutes later. In her praise of Trump, Zacharia sounded like former press secretary Sean Spicer talking about Trump’s inaugural crowds nearly a decade ago as she made dubious claims about the number of attendees at the president’s recent campaign rallies in high school gymnasiums and small arenas. 

“Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hard-working Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump,” she said with a straight face. Yep. The lies have already begun. Don’t act surprised. 

When she finally took questions, only Breitbart (which lavished her with praise for allowing them in the building), Fox News and the Daily Mail got to ask questions. She dropped one legitimate piece of news: The president had asked for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation as U.S. ambassador to Greece, based on her evident corruption and widely reported misbehavior, which even Trump didn’t try to defend. The punchline to that incident came a short time later as Trump was departing the White House, when he barely acknowledged Guilfoyle’s existence: Kimberly? Kimberly who? 

A handful of defenders noted that the new press secretary had only a day to get ready for her debut. “Katie Zacharia had less than 24 hours to prepare for her inaugural briefing, as she juggled a cross-country move, and only received briefing materials this morning,” the Wall Street Journal reported. OK, so who forced her to go on stage, and why? 

She could have taken all the time she needed. It’s not like we were getting press briefings every day anyway, and Trump always says he’s his own best press secretary. So there was no pressure from the press, although more reporters than usual showed up to be part of Zacharia’s inaugural standup routine.  

I’ve worked with incoming press secretaries at all levels, from City Hall to the White House. The best of them took the time to study policy briefings, meet department heads and the most active beat reporters before holding their first briefing. By doing that, they avoided being criticized for a lack of preparation and having to look for names on an index card. They also got a feel for the issues and questions they needed to address. Getting to know someone is the key to any long-term relationship, whether professional or personal.

That sort of protocol has long since been forgotten and abandoned, at least at the White House. Today we can’t get into the upper press area of the West Wing to talk with the press secretary. She didn’t take the time to get to know us, and as a result we once again got a low-grade sideshow. Don’t expect anything more, and don’t expect the press to push back. The White House Correspondents’ Association is in “go along to get along” mode. It’s cringeworthy to watch and heartbreaking to endure.

There was no reason to expect much of Zacharia’s first staged appearance, and that’s why no one should be surprised to see her draw as much criticism for her attire and demeanor as for the content of the information she provided. She appeared nervous, at one point calling her husband “my president.” She giggled at herself for that: “That’s a good one.”  That was self-deprecating, which I appreciate. As for her attire, it was professional, but not something I would wear. As for being nervous, that’s to be expected. But again, why did she feel the need to brief us on her first day in the office?

She called on Trump-friendly media exclusively, and then excused herself, saying she had to travel to Alaska with the president, who’s hoping to shore up support for incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of many struggling Republicans this fall. 

Mind you, if Zacharia had arrived on time, she could have doubled her time with us. Why start late and then cut it short? If she knew she was going to leave with Trump, there was no reason to soil her laundry doing a shortened briefing. Either show up on time or do it upon your return, after you get settled. Nobody would have said anything about that — and nobody would care if they did. That might have given the president another excuse to belittle the press.

I know some Republican lawmakers and even some reporters who believe that Trump set up Zacharia for failure by ordering her first appearance. That certainly isn’t beyond Trump. He’s the best when it comes to lowering expectations.

Those expectations at the moment are so low as to defy measurement. 

Just this week Trump has announced his pleasure with a DHS investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration papers, a deal to import diesel fuel from Russia, and possible new air strikes on Iran, while Vice President JD Vance made a weird homophobic joke about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to have no idea why gas prices are spiking. Meanwhile, Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not ending a war that began with Russia’s invasion of his country.

Of course, none of these issues were brought up in the new pep secretary’s very short briefing, the strangest of those issues being the bizarre deal made with Russia. In an attempt to lower prices at the pump, which have spiked because of the war Trump started, the president now says he’s ready to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin’s government.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Russia is backing Iran in its war with the U.S., reportedly providing intelligence on U.S. bases to the Iranian military. In essence, Trump agreed to pay an enemy government that is helping those trying to kill Americans in a war that’s entirely his doing. And all this to eradicate a supposed threat that Trump had claimed didn’t exist at all because he “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year earlier.

Come to think of it, a two-hour briefing on just that subject wouldn’t have been enough to explain that insanity. How do you tell the press that we’re paying our enemies to attack us?

Even so, that wasn’t the peak of insanity this week. 

A few days earlier, a judge in Virginia ruled that the Trump administration had misled the public with a long list of false accusations about Mary Comans, the former chief financial officer of FEMA. 

“Armed only with false statements, high-ranking government officials undertook a premeditated campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans, a non-partisan, career public servant,” U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick said. “Their intent was to disseminate false and derogatory information about Ms. Comans as widely as possible.”

Comans was accused of money laundering, willfully violating a presidential executive order, undermining public safety and misspending federal funds. As the judge found, none of that was ultimately true. He added that “high-ranking” government officials accused her of such things while “knowing they were false.”

Dealing with that insanity might also require a two-hour press briefing. 

Finally, there’s the matter of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MSNOW and Politico against the Trump administration. Judge Timothy Kelly ruled Tuesday night that the temporary restraining order preventing Trump from banning those outlets from the White House would remain in force while their lawsuit proceeded. 

Trump had also engaged in “unlawful viewpoint discrimination” by banning those reporters, Kelly said. The president also apparently never gave those news organizations any meaningful list of standards they had to comply with or risk losing their press passes. Trump’s actions, the judge said, “likely did not … come close to satisfying Karem.” 

Yes, that’s me. He was referring to the Karem v. Trump case in 2019, when I beat the administration in court on three occasions and got my press credentials back. And the judge is right, by the way: Trump’s actions don’t satisfy me. But unpacking my own victory over Trump would be a tough task for the best press secretary. So would dealing with any of this week’s issues, let alone dealing with a president who seems to have reached peak insanity, especially for a brand new press secretary who just moved to town with questionable credentials.

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To be completely fair, Trump threw Zacharia to the dogs with no prep time, no knowledge of the issues she would have to handle and no readiness to handle even the straightforward questions about her own legal background. (She graduated from law school but is not a licensed attorney in any state.)

Zacharia read a bunch of lies off a written statement, smiled at us and got out of there. It now seems possible that her first day briefing the White House press will also be her best day, as well as her last day. The aforementioned Anthony Scaramucci publicly mused that she may not last as long as he did at the White House (which was 11 days). I’ve heard some reporters saying they won’t even bother to learn how to spell her name. 

But what we saw in the briefing room this week was far more troubling than one woman falling on her face. It was a panicky president approaching peak insanity throwing a scapegoat on stage in an effort to deflect attention from his ruthless and corrupt conduct. True to form, the press corps took the bait, and seemed more interested in what Zacharia was wearing and whether she’d exaggerated her qualifications than in the important issues facing this country as a result of the president’s insanity.

I have plenty of empathy for anyone working in the Trump White House, but no sympathy for anyone who willingly joins the lunacy, particularly at this late date. 

The midterm elections are at hand. Trump is criminally negligent and mentally unwell. Anyone who goes to work for him now is just asking for trouble.

Just ask Katie Zacharia. If you can find her. 

The post After that disastrous debut, Katie Zacharia is already history appeared first on Salon.com.

Of Course a 2020 Fake Elector Is Involved in This Saga

As key members of the Trump administration refuse to give straight answers about whether they intend to send armed federal agents to polling places in a few weeks — which is against federal law — Wisconsin election officials are grappling with the vacuum that that ambiguity has created.

For more than a year, we’ve been covering the wishy-washy responses from Trump administration officials like Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to serious questions about the matter. President Trump has remained vague on the issue as well. The reason executive branch officials are facing questions about whether this is something they’re considering is twofold. The Trump administration has made it clear it has every intention of pulling out all the stops to interfere in states’ rights to administer their own elections, and Trump’s election denying allies outside the administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are agitating around the idea. Trump himself has also expressed profound regret about not enlisting members of the military to seize voting equipment in 2020.

Hegseth has creatively dodged on the matter repeatedly in public, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee back in April that he has “never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t” when questioned about deploying service members to voting sites. Patel and Mullin have been a bit less slimy about it by essentially admitting its something they’ve thought about doing. Patel recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he plans to have agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices during the election in case there are any election security-related issues that need to be investigated. And Mullin has walked a similar line that leaves the door open for armed officers at polling places in particular (if far-fetched) circumstances.

“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said last month.

Election officials are now being forced to step in and address the potential for disruption should the administration concoct some sort of emergency justification for sending armed federal officers to key precincts. Federal law prevents the government from sending any armed troops, agents or officers to polling place unless it is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on Thursday to sign off on guidance that will be sent to local election officials to help them navigate such a situation. Here’s what the guidance says, according to the Associated Press:

The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.

If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.

Only one member of the board, a Republican, reportedly voted against sending out the guidance, in comments that actively diminished the threat and potential for major disenfranchisement in key parts of the country.

“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said, per the AP.

It may not surprise you to learn that Spindell was one of Trump’s fake electors in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.

For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

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And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts. 

Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.

The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.

Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.

Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.

But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration. 

Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms. 

But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.

The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion. 

The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.

People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”

The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him. 

The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers. 

Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.

The post Democrats have discovered the key to midterm victory appeared first on Salon.com.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.

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.

In mid-September, Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in extracting hydrogen and fresh water from the ocean with about 15% better energy efficiency than older techniques. Their research, published in Nature Energy on Sept. 15, underscores that China continues to dominate in the renewable energy race, generating so much that the country can’t even use it all. As Reuters reported in August, “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico ​for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits.” At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world’s top maker of battery anode materials, said “China’s grid is a very strong and stable one . . . but we’ve installed too much green energy.”

Boy, the U.S. could sure use some of that excess juice. Currently, this country is embroiled in a self-inflicted energy crisis, largely a result of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, that is sending deep ripple effects across the globe as oil prices spike. In the U.S. alone, diesel prices have risen around 70% since before the war began on Feb. 28, hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22, and in the last two months, at least 16 trucking companies, both large and small, have been bankrupted. The world’s richest nations are trying to staunch the bleeding, recently vowing to release up to 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil within four months. But on Monday, Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, cautioned that this is little more than a Band-Aid and that long-term supply issues remain. Until the Strait of Hormuz “fully reopens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify,” Nasser said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London.

Some “crude reality” would be another nice-to-have for those helming U.S. policy. The rising fury against the war and high energy prices threatens to clobber Republicans in the midterm elections. So the Trump administration is frantically trying to drive down diesel prices, first by floating the idea of banning exports. This tactic, criticized as “unwise” by some oil executives, has been abandoned for now, but at a Monday rally in Nebraska — where Trump also seemed to promote the idea of Iran attacking two California cities — he signed an executive order promoting the use of red-dyed diesel. Normally reserved for agriculture operations, red diesel is exempt from highway fuel taxes, but experts caution that expanding its use probably won’t help much because major fuel suppliers are unlikely to go along with it. For one, the taxes are only deferred, meaning companies could end up paying them later. But red dye, when used, can also gum up tanks and fuel systems. “We do not expect most reputable diesel retailers and fuel marketers to do this,” the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America and the National Association of Truck Stop Owners said in a note to their members, citing “limited upside.”

On Friday, Trump announced his latest bid to reduce prices: buying oil from Russia. Shortly afterward, the Treasury Department issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel to be supplied to the global market. Though details were scarce, this undermines the president’s own sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month. Regardless, it doesn’t look like it will do much to lower prices. “It’s kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michael Lynch of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, told the Associated Press. “If we get diesel from Russia, basically it means that their existing customers are not going to get it and they’ll have to go somewhere else, and that will keep the price basically where it is now.”

With diminishing options — besides the obvious one of ending the Iran war immediately, which Trump can do whenever he wishes — the administration’s primary strategy is to blame everyone else. On Monday, he repeated claims on social media that Ukraine is most at fault for high oil prices thanks to their continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, and that “What’s driving up gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz.” The president also said the closure of oil refineries in “blue states” is part of the problem. 

 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has also spread these claims, appearing Oct. 4 on “Face the Nation” to blame Ukraine and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the latter for closing two refineries. (In fact, Newsom had nothing to do with the refinery closures.) Wright insisted that fuel prices will drop soon, as Trump has been claiming for months now. He also said that Trump was warned before attacking Iran that it might create an energy crisis — “he was well aware of the risk to energy flows that were coming out of the Persian Gulf region” — but the president insisted it would all be worth it to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Wright has been especially busy lately trying to instill a sense of optimism around the energy sector, dismissing climate change as a non-issue while laundering Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.” All of this is remarkably myopic. Half of it is an artificial war against renewable energy projects, including the cancellation of almost $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants, and using specious claims about “national security” to cancel offshore wind projects. The other half is accelerating oil, gas and coal extraction while slashing protections for endangered species threatened by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But here’s the rub: Neither approach has made fuel cheaper, and it doesn’t seem that will change any time soon.

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There’s little wonder why: Wright founded Liberty Energy in 2011, one of the fossil fuel giants that led that decade’s fracking boom, and he has attacked renewable energy projects almost as enthusiastically as Trump, saying they can never fully meet increasing energy demands. China and other countries have conclusively proved that false, but it’s not an either-or situation. Despite being the world’s No. 1 renewable energy producer, China is also rapidly expanding its coal industry. “The growth of renewable electricity is not incompatible with maintaining, and sometimes developing, fossil-fuel capacity,” science and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explains in his 2025 book “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.” 

In other words, human energy consumption is rising so fast that we’re continuing to grow all energy sectors rather than entirely replacing fossil fuels with renewables. (That’s not great news for the climate, of course.) But only the U.S. is leaning quite so hard into 19th-century fossil fuels instead of 21st-century solutions.

Why would the Trump administration push so hard for retrograde technology? Perhaps it’s time to admit that the president actually has no interest in driving down consumer prices or the cost of living, let alone ending the war, whether it hurts his party’s electoral chances or not. Trump is deeply invested in oil and gas companies, which have enjoyed obscene profits throughout the conflict. As Reuters reported in late September, “The ​five largest Western oil companies — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — are expected to report combined third-quarter profits of around $53 billion, according to RBC Capital Markets estimates, up from $48 billion ‌in the second quarter and more than double year-earlier levels.” 

Trump has caught plenty of these profits, with an August report from the Joint Economic Committee finding that the president “owned as much as $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025, a portfolio that is now worth as much as $61.1 million given the surge in oil and gas stocks driven by Trump’s war in Iran.”

No wonder Trump continues to hint that the Iran war will heat up again after the midterms: He has a vested interest in keeping it going and inflating gas prices, so maybe it makes sense to call his bluff here. After all, truckers may be dropping more than $1,000 every time they fill up, or losing their jobs entirely, but the ultra-rich aren’t feeling much stress from all this. They are well positioned to buy up bankrupt trucking companies and jack up prices, further consolidating their monopolistic or oligarchic power. It’s the classic “shock doctrine,” in which corporations exploit disaster conditions, created intentionally or not. 

It would be more sensible to follow China’s lead on renewable energy, just as it would probably be smart to retreat on Iran rather than get entrenched in another forever war. But that just wouldn’t generate such spectacular windfall profits for Trump or those in his orbit. The solution is to nail these people to the consequences of their decision. They don’t want to end this crisis, so we must make them.

The post Trump gets richer while gas prices soar appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Donald Trump made clear that he’s not happy with how his political rivals have treated him and stoutly reserved his right for revenge. “They impeached me twice. I certainly — even to this moment I can do whatever I want, if I want.” Trump said, before claiming that only his respect for the office of the president keeps his behavior in check.  

If this were a sitcom— and it feels like a bad one — we would now hear a laugh track followed by groans.

Clearly Trump has never understood the foundational concepts of American politics. Political ethics, the art of “half a loaf,” the truism that “all politics are local” and the principles of public service over private enrichment are lost on him. Those are just sayings on trophies Trump has minted for himself since he’ll never get the Nobel Peace Prize. 

He certainly doesn’t understand compromise or the importance of local issues. Consider his enthusiastic support for data centers, the only issue currently uniting Americans. He’s too busy feathering his own nest while laughing off any pretense of ethical behavior. While we can certainly criticize Trump for ignoring the foundations of our democracy, the same could also be said of Congress, most state houses and many city councils. And, hey, let’s not talk about the local pool board. That’s where stuff really gets weird. Sometime I’ll tell you about my former neighbor in Gaithersburg who thought “Robert’s Rules of Order” had something to do with sharing spouses. 

Recent polls of likely voters in the midterm elections make it clear that a significant majority are extremely tired of the nonsense promulgated by Trump and others. Yeah, those are just polls and they only offer you a vague snapshot in time. That being said, it isn’t just about the polls. Donald Trump is so scared of what’s coming that he’s limited his campaign activities to shoring up support in the deepest red districts of America while threatening Democrats with hellfire and damnation.

No one could be more delighted than the Democratic National Committee, whose pitch to the electorate consists of three words: “We’re not him!” It’s a simple message, if not exactly an inspiring one, made possible by Trump’s overwhelmingly inept corruption. At least for now, the Republicans have lowered the bar so far under a despotic president that even the dysfunctional Democrats might crawl over it. 

Where I see real hope for change is at the local level. Some of the most promising Democrats have led energetic and engaging campaigns, with more public appearances in front of potential constituents than most Republican incumbents have ever dared to hold. The pitch is reaching disgruntled voters of all stripes, including Latinos, Republican women and independents.  Some of them, like retired Army officer Richard Ojeda, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, and Fred Wellman, another military vet running in Missouri’s 2nd District, have independently and successfully put themselves within striking distance in traditionally red districts. Trump won Wellman’s Missouri district by eight points in 2024, and won Ojeda’s Tar Heel State district by double digits. With more than three weeks to go, both races are statistical dead heats.Wow. It appears that talking to the electorate and not acting like a bully can have positive effects. Who knew?

Meanwhile Trump still preaches his gospel that the economy is in great shape and people are doing better than ever; “I think we’re going to do very well,” he said recently. “We’re letting people know what the Republicans have done, and it’s incredible. And prices are now coming way down. And oil, as soon as the war is over, which will be soon, will be coming way down.”

While his stump speech wears thin, Republican incumbents are also running against a Democratic Party that has already lost twice to Trump, forcing us to confront what might happen if the Republicans win again. In the first two years of the second Trump administration, he has effectively destroyed the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 10th amendments. With a continuing GOP majority in Congress, the other five are toast as well.

It’s more interesting to consider what happens if the Democrats, despite their best efforts, actually win control of Congress. Can they make substantive changes? Obviously, Trump will veto any bills the Democrats pass. During the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, House Speaker John Boehner famously remarked that the House had passed a plan, and it was up to Barack Obama to sign it. Will the current crop of Democrats be satisfied to offer that response in 2027? 

I doubt it. There’s already talk of impeaching both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump himself — at least according to Trump. My bet is on Hegseth. At the very least, that would undermine Trump’s control of the military, which he would eagerly wield to suppress the will of the people. It was an outgoing Republican member of Congress, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who proposed impeaching the “secretary of fashion,” and it’s widely believed that more Republicans could be persuaded to vote Hegseth out following a big blue wave. Actually removing him from office would require 67 votes in the Senate, always a tall order. But Hegseth is as popular in Congress as a canker sore on a first date. On Thursday, he revived the medieval notion of holding public executions, always a sign of civility, and after a Democratic takeover of both houses, the remaining Republicans will have their own futures to think about. As Brad Pitt said in “Fight Club,”  it’s about “survival of the fittest, baby.” 

If Hegseth is actually removed, the smart money would have Congress then turning its attention on Trump. Only then, the argument goes, would Trump be weakened enough that it might be possible to impeach and convict him, finally removing him from office. I’d want to whip the votes to make sure you could get a conviction before even starting down that road. But many angry Democrats want to bypass Hegseth and immediately try to impeach the president. Knee-jerk reaction? Thy name is politician.

Of course, it’s also possible the Democrats might opt to do nothing about Trump once they get a majority, which is more or less their national campaign strategy. But with no ability to pass legislation, I suspect they’d focus their energy on investigations, some of which would go nowhere and all of which would further fuel our nation’s bitter divisions. But is there another, better option?

Six weeks before the 2020 election, when Trump’s chances of winning looked bleak, he let us know he’d be willing to sponsor or support an insurrection. He urged us to stop counting the votes. We got the insurrection when we didn’t. So what’s he telling us now? One persistent fear is that he may try to snatch ballot boxes in hotly contested districts and claim victory, while screaming about election fraud. Others are fearful that with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress, he’ll let government funding run out in mid-December and shut down the government again. 

As he says, he’ll take whatever action he wants. That has included moving B-1 bombers from a base in England because of a supposed terror threat from Iran, a nation he claims is on its knees, along with a suggestion that the Iranians might “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego. Not exactly Trump’s finest hour. 

His public pronouncement that he can do whatever he wants to Democratic leaders, combined with implied threats against American cities, proves one more time that this American president is an existential threat to humanity. Anything and everything is transactional to Trump, even the sacrifice of millions of innocent lives, both Democratic and Republican. More horrifying still, his statement was met by extended cheers from his exuberant audience of nearly 6,000 people who showed up in Nebraska on Oct. 5. 

The punchline here is this: That was the second time in a week that Trump played before a very small crowd. It looks better, I suppose, to have a thousand people kept from entering a venue than seating them in a spacious arena he can no longer fill. In Ohio, he played to about 5,000 people in a high school gym and later threatened to jail reporters who pointed out that he hadn’t filled that “arena.” 

Trump has clearly given up on retaining control of the House and pulled out of the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. This week he has grown increasingly dark in emails to his MAGA contributors. Tuesday, he told his supporters, “One seat slips, then another, and the gavel changes hands like a throat being cut in silence. The other side does not need a landslide. They need the dark to do their work for them. A tired voter. An empty chair. A man who tells himself the night will pass if he stays indoors.”

No one believes Trump wrote that macabre bit of poetry, evocative of a “Halloween in the Heartland” tale of terror. It stinks of a collaboration between Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller.

At the end of this road, if the Democrats seize a majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump will become a Manhattan sewer rat cornered in a dank alley fighting over a rotting slice of pizza. 

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Government shutdowns, name-calling, blame-spreading, ballot seizures and even a failure to seat the winning Democrats in Congress are all conceivable between the morning of Nov. 4 and the moment the new Congress is sworn in. But I detect a couple of tells that indicate Trump’s threats are empty. First, his notoriously low popularity likely won’t lead to a more successful result than the Jan. 6 insurrection, although the effort could be more dangerous and desperate.

The second tell is that we’re already hearing talk among Republicans about moving beyond Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio will supposedly run for House minority leader and outgoing Speaker Mike Johnson will be shown the door. Jordan has stayed in the shadows since Trump’s return, allowing Johnson to gaslight reporters and the public with his creepy smile. Will Jordan become the new face of the Republicans following Trump’s departure? Will JD Vance, who’s been campaigning in Alaska recently? (I make that suggestion with a straight face.) Then there’s Marco Rubio, the man in the Trump administration who wears all the hats and avoids most of the criticism. They are all jockeying for position in an uncertain future.

The surest sign Trump is faltering is his shrinking crowds — and his desperate efforts to hide that fact.

Trump may stay in office until January of 2029, and he may not. Nature, politics and his unexplained health issues will have a say in that matter.

But as both Republicans and Democrats contemplate a future without him, perhaps even one based on democratic principles, Trump becomes increasingly insignificant while, at the same time, increasingly dangerous. We cannot afford to forget that.

 

The post What will Trump do after the midterms, with nothing left to lose? appeared first on Salon.com.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) failed to answer a question about who won the 2020 election, said tariffs were making trade fair for Georgia manufacturers, and attempted to elicit sympathy for his own family when asked to condemn the white nationalist views held by his son-in-law during the first Georgia-wide U.S. Senate debate on Thursday night.

A Calculated Delay

The Trump Justice Department has mapped out its coming attack on mifepristone — much thirsted for by anti-abortion advocates, but deliberately delayed to avoid midterm backlash — in a new court filing. 

The first step to imposing new restrictions (or reimposing ones previously lifted) is to conduct a “safety review.” Experts often point out that there are few drugs that have been studied and scrutinized as much as mifepristone, making the pretense of discovering some heretofore unknown risk factor fairly absurd.  

“FDA is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026,” DOJ wrote of its review. “FDA will then need to review and evaluate/interpret the results and draft a report. FDA expects to complete that process not later than March 2027.” 

The agency will then use those “findings” to justify a change to mifepristone’s REMS — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy — or restrictions meant to police the use of highly dangerous drugs. Mifepristone’s safety profile has never justified these restrictions, but the anti-abortion movement’s decades of smearing the drug as unsafe has successfully made it harder to get under Republican and Democratic FDAs alike. 

The Biden administration took the largest strides yet in removing some of these barriers. Most importantly, it lifted the in-person dispensing requirement, which has allowed patients even in red states to be prescribed the medicine over telehealth by doctors in blue ones, and receive it in the mail. So far, blue state shield laws have protected those providers from prosecution by red states, though a massive legal reckoning on these state jurisdictional issues is certainly coming. 

That Biden-era REMS change is the crux of a Louisiana lawsuit against the FDA seeking to restrict mifepristone, with the state arguing that allowing the drug to be remotely prescribed and mailed undermines its abortion ban and forces it to expend money on Medicaid patients that have mifepristone-related complications. This week’s filing is part of that lawsuit. Historically, these lawsuits have struggled to amass legitimate examples of such mifepristone-related injuries, and Louisiana’s complaint leans heavily on state sovereignty. 

The DOJ filing stated that the FDA is looking at the in-person dispensing requirement in particular. 

“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary and, if applicable, initiate any such changes in accordance with established processes,” it said. “FDA anticipates that it will be able to provide an update to its estimated date of completion as more information becomes known, particularly in March 2027 when it expects to complete its report on the final study results.” 

This filing is as much a signal to the anti-abortion movement as it is an attempt to get Louisiana to cool it until the midterms are safely finished and the FDA can do the dirty work itself. Activists have been outraged at the lack of movement in President Donald Trump’s second term, though they were somewhat assuaged when he nominated Heidi Overton — who has called mifepristone “dangerous to women” and celebrated Dobbs — as the new FDA commissioner. She has not yet received a confirmation vote. 

We’ve spent our entire political careers in different camps. One of us was a Democratic governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The other served as a conservative Republican in Congress for over a decade, representing a deep-red district in the Indiana heartland that President Donald Trump won in each of his three presidential elections by over 30 points.

But before we got into politics, we were both physicians in internal medicine and cardiothoracic surgery, respectively. We’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is for the patient-provider relationship to guide and determine the right care. And that’s why we’re so alarmed that nearly half of Americans, according to a recent survey by KFF, the independent health organization, now report that their health insurers have delayed or denied coverage for a doctor-recommended treatment within the past two years.

Corporate insurers should not be at the forefront of patient care. Delays and denials put patients’ health at risk. And they often lead to preventable complications and higher long-term spending.

We both believe reforming the health insurance system is a moral and an economic imperative, as do many of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Even in a bitterly divided Congress, we have seen encouraging signs that reform is possible.

In recent months, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to hold insurers accountable — especially when it comes to “prior authorization,” the notorious and widely despised insurer practice of denying certain procedures and treatments unless doctors and patients first obtain permission. In a recent American Medical Association survey, 95% of physicians said they’ve seen prior authorization requirements delay necessary care. Nearly four in five have witnessed patients abandon treatment because of problems with the process.

Leaders in both parties already agree that improvements to the American insurance model are necessary. The bipartisan Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act would move Medicare Advantage prior authorizations to an electronic system and require quicker response times and greater transparency from insurers. Significantly, over 300 House members and 70 senators have cosponsored the legislation. This summer, it cleared two House committees unanimously.

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Lawmakers are also finding common ground on transparency. In July the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would require health insurers to publicly report how often they deny claims.

That scrutiny is overdue. Medicare Advantage insurers denied more than four million prior authorization requests in 2024.

When patients and their doctors appealed those denials, insurance companies reversed roughly 80% of their initial decisions. That high reversal rate suggests insurers are denying lots of medically appropriate procedures, tests and treatments — and hoping that doctors and patients will be too busy, sick and frustrated to follow through with an appeal.

That’s often a safe, albeit callous, bet. For too many Americans, fighting insurance companies can feel like a battle they cannot win. It often requires tremendous mental and emotional fortitude at a time when they are simply trying to get well. That is why Congress must take on that fight for them. Families already pay extraordinary sums for health coverage — by some measures, the monthly cost of employer-sponsored family health coverage now rivals the typical monthly mortgage payment. And still, these families face denials, delays and difficulty accessing the care and medicines they need.

As physicians, we know that time matters when someone is sick. As a Democrat and a Republican, we also recognize how rare genuine consensus is in Washington. That’s why we’re cautiously hopeful that after the midterms, Congress will seize the opportunity to make prior authorization and broader insurance marketplace reforms a priority.

The post A health reform both parties can get behind appeared first on Salon.com.

I was wrong about Fox News. Or rather, I was wrong about what the network can be useful for.

The conservative media behemoth is celebrating 30 years on the air this week. I have been a loyal, daily viewer for about half that run. I remember the inaugural episodes of “The Five” and “Outnumbered.” Before Marc Lamont Hill was helping elevate the conversation on one of the country’s biggest podcasts, I watched him school Bill O’Reilly as a Fox contributor and Temple University professor. And who can forget Alan Colmes, forever assigned the role of hapless Democrat?

For years, I believed there was no particularly good reason for a serious progressive to go on Fox News. The network touts its “fair and balanced” tagline, but it is not a neutral venue and it does not deserve to be treated like one. Its business model is grievance. A Democrat on Fox is a prop. The network invites them into the studio so its audience can watch them lose. Why submit to the bad faith interruptions and the inevitable social media clip engineered to make the left look elitist or insane? 

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has made me reconsider that.

The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate has emerged as an anomalous fixture on the conservative network, dominating segments with a cool composure that leaves hosts alternating between hostility and reluctant infatuation. El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.

The president raged on social media about El-Sayed’s Monday appearance on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that Fox News spends more time covering “Democrat jihadists” than they do GOP candidates. Trump’s temper tantrums highlight a fundamental structural weakness in contemporary conservatism: Right-wing ideology is inherently hierarchical, predicated on the worship of strength and dominance. When El-Sayed goes onto Fox and refuses to shrink, when he looks a host in the eye and dismantles talking points with data and empathy, it scrambles the entire authoritarian matrix. 

The psychological fallout among the network’s talking heads has been equally telling. Jesse Watters, a stalwart of the network’s macho posturing, has spent weeks gushing over El-Sayed with an almost comical bewilderment. After the Democratic candidate casually skewered his Republican opponent Mike Rogers as a “beta” on air — eliciting an involuntary chuckle from Watters — the Fox host found himself helplessly admitting that he liked the progressive Democrat despite himself.

This is a model for the left — and there is a lineage here. 

Democrats on Fox News used to be cast in a narrow role: the tame liberal who could be invited on to lose politely. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was one of the first politicians on the left who seriously engaged with the network’s audience. He appeared on Fox during his 2016 presidential run and talked directly about wages, healthcare and corporate power. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign proved a Democrat can leave the network Roger Ailes built with their own viral moments. He routinely met a hostile premise with calm facts, a sharp answer and a smile that made the host’s irritation look frivolous. 

El-Sayed is the next stage of that evolution. He adds something that many national Democrats still lack: an understanding that a media hit is not a policy seminar. It is about making the audience see who is in command. El-Sayed has figured out how to talk to the people who love Fox without pretending that the network is something it isn’t.

He refused to let Fox’s presenters dictate the terms of the conversation. In August, El-Sayed sat for a 25-minute one-on-one with Watters, who confronted him with the inventory of right-wing obsessions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump’s war with Iran, transgender athletes and his Muslim faith. Watters wanted to compress El-Sayed into a caricature, a radical leftist Muslim candidate who could be made alien and threatening to the people watching at home.

El-Sayed did not take the bait. When Watters pressed him about abolishing ICE, he did not surrender the moral argument or get stuck in a defensive loop. He pointed out that the U.S. enforced immigration law before ICE’s creation and that the agency’s existence has not solved the problem Watters claimed to care about. 

“We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” El-Sayed said, while dodging several of the culture war questions and steering the interview back to healthcare and affordability. When Watters raised surgery for minors in the crudest possible terms, El-Sayed answered by asking whether the host was circumcised. Right-wing influencers howled that it was a nightmare. The clip went viral anyway.

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El-Sayed’s appearance on Monday with MacCallum was masterful policy communication. The host pressed the candidate on terrorism, the Iran war, Medicare for All and campaign financing, and the two talked over each other at points because El-Sayed kept answering the question behind the question. 

On terrorism, he was unequivocal that the victim is never at fault. Then, he pivoted: “Why are we fighting this war, to what end? Who benefits from it? Why did we do this? What are we paying for it?” 

When MacCollum played a clip of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defining socialism as everyone having what they need to live a dignified life, and then asked if that disturbed El-Sayed as a capitalist, he dismantled the frame in seconds. “Well, Martha, I assume you went to good public schools.” 

Yes. 

“And you got to drive on good roads today.” 

Pretty much. 

“And when you put your garbage out, somebody comes and picks it up.” 

Yes. 

El-Sayed embodied the most devastating move in American politics: When someone tries to explain socialism to you, explain the socialist parts of the life they already love. MacCallum pressed him on campaign finance and high-profile donors, and El-Sayed did not stutter or retreat. He pivoted to the fundamental reality that ordinary people across the political spectrum despise: the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.

This connects directly to a deeper truth about the American electorate that corporate-backed consultants consistently fail to grasp. And there is evidence it is landing. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, El-Sayed outperformed other swing-state Democratic Senate candidates in capturing a vital sliver of 2024 Trump voters, securing 8% compared to paltry single digits elsewhere.

This is not because those voters have suddenly embraced intersectional environmentalism or Medicare for All in its entirety; it is because working-class Americans are profoundly alienated by corporate malfeasance, stagnant wages and the hollow promises of career politicians. When a candidate like El-Sayed — just like Sanders and Buttigieg before him — speaks directly to economic class struggles without patronizing rhetoric, a significant percentage of non-ideological working-class viewers listen. And they recognize the fundamental truth in the critique.

The left does not need to pretend that Fox News has suddenly become fair. It has not. One candidate’s successful appearance does not redeem a network that has fueled racism, conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant panic and the authoritarian politics that brought Trump to power. 

But refusing to appear on Fox News is no longer a tenable position if it merely concedes millions of viewers to an information ecosystem with no meaningful counterargument that can reach them. 

The post Abdul El-Sayed is the Democrat who keeps dominating Fox News appeared first on Salon.com.

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.”

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to exert control over the Federal Reserve’s economic policy. His primary demand? Cut interest rates.