President Donald Trump called Norway a “shithouse country” after failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Norway’s tourism officials decided to take that as a compliment.
Visit Norway, the Scandinavian country’s tourism agency, responded to Trump’s insult with a cheeky campaign celebrating its spectacular public restrooms, declaring that Norway makes “shithouses great again.”
The campaign features some of the country’s most architecturally impressive toilets, many situated along scenic routes overlooking fjords, mountains and waterfalls. Some have even won international design awards.
Trump delivered the insult last Sunday during a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, while complaining about the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded earlier this month to international jurist Navi Pillay.
“Norway has become a shithouse country, actually,” Trump told supporters. He also suggested he no longer wanted Norwegian immigrants coming to the United States because he had not received the prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by an independent Norwegian committee, not the country’s government.
Rather than engage in a diplomatic spat, Visit Norway embraced the president’s characterization, promoting restrooms that include the award-winning Stegastein viewpoint toilet overlooking Aurlandsfjord and the triangular Golden Toilet on Senja Island.
The agency repurposed material originally developed for World Toilet Day, which falls on Nov. 19.
The response has been an unexpected tourism success.
According to travel industry publication Skift, Visit Norway’s toilet webpage attracted more than 80,000 views from over 170 countries in five days, with traffic surging to more than 540 times the previous week’s level. Roughly a quarter of visitors were American.
The tourism agency spent less than $10,000 promoting the campaign, with approximately 90% of its traffic arriving organically. A Times Square advertisement was also planned for this weekend.
The campaign marks a reversal from Trump’s first presidency, when he disparaged Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” while expressing a preference for immigrants from Norway.
Now, Norway is making the most of its presidential publicity, inviting visitors to discover some of the world’s most scenic places to answer nature’s call.
Republicans are shaking in their boots about the upcoming midterm elections, according to numerous reports. In a Wednesday episode of his podcast, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said his home state “is excruciatingly close,” adding that “we could lose Texas. Let me repeat that: We could lose Texas. And by the way, not just the Senate race. We could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That’s how close these numbers are.”
According to Politico, House Republicans aren’t quietly discussing whether or not they’ll lose their majority, but are counting how many seats. “It could be quite a brutal evening,” a senior Republican told the outlet. The mood at the White House is “grim,” the New York Times reported as advisers close to the White House anticipate at least losing the House, if not the Senate.
That’s seemingly why the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has dumped nearly half $1 billion into the race, mostly into his own America PAC. The PAC’s spending has focused overwhelmingly in Texas with approximately $48 million, followed by Michigan and Ohio around $9 million and Iowa at $4 million. According to CNN, Musk’s spending streak “makes him the single, largest disclosed donor in modern American politics and one of the Republican Party’s largest-ever benefactors.”
But some people are already looking beyond next Tuesday to see how President Donald Trump may react, and not just by challenging the results, which is more than expected and arguably already being attempted. But the president’s legal options are limited, so even if he does try to seize voting machines, declares a national emergency, or otherwise wedges the federal government into the electoral process, there’s a chance it could fail. Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, told Forbes that the president can “certainly try” to intervene, but there “just isn’t a lot that he can actually do.”
Still, most analysts anticipate that the president will turn the dial up on his dual wars, the trade wars with America’s partners and the Iran war Trump started alongside Israel in late February 2026. The Pentagon is slowly building up its military presence in the Middle East, including drawing up plans to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and missile and drone stockpile.
“It might be difficult for Democrats in Congress to restrain Trump from a course of action which he is strongly committed to, but they can still raise the political costs associated with plowing ahead,” Andrew Gawthorpe, a senior research fellow in the Foreign Police Centre, told The Independent. “Facing a hostile Congress, Trump might become even more willing to simply ignore domestic opposition and plow ahead with controversial and unpopular policies, as he did by attacking Iran or threatening to annex Greenland.”
Laugh or cry, we’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I wonder what a Todd Blanche outfit looks like? The image of Frankenstein’s monster, for some reason, sticks in my mind.
It’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy the elections — a midterm extravaganza featuring two flailing political parties jockeying for supremacy in a nation full of educated young adults working as cabbies and delivery drivers who aspire to be “influencers” while their parents wonder how in the name of God they’ll be able to afford retirement.
To be able to handle that good news, maybe you can channel your inner Hunter S. Thompson, without resorting to dropping a couple of hits of acid or snorting lines of cocaine in Studio 54 while Donald Trump ogles the dancers in tight pants, female and male alike.
Then again, you might need a tall glass of Wild Turkey 101 on ice (Thompson’s favorite) when you hear Trump say that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola should be prosecuted because there are two Dan Sullivans running for office in Alaska, or declares that the country “would be gone” if he hadn’t won the presidency two years ago.
Everything old is new again. At any rate, we’ve seen this carnival roadshow before, though it seems a bit different this time. Trump has less energy as he flails about dancing to the Village People. He plays before smaller crowds every week. He seems to be on stage only to get laughs. “Am I right?” he whispered hoarsely with a big grin last Saturday night in Georgia, after mocking Democrats one more time. He apologized for his raspy voice and kept going with the low-energy insult comedy. His small crowd chortled and ate it up.
In the last week on the campaign trail, Trump has appeared at a livestock arena, a school gymnasium, a hockey rink and, on Thursday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, at a venue that holds just 1,200 people. He doesn’t seem to care. He’s on autopilot. The war in Iran? He’s got nothing. The war in Ukraine? Nothing. Corruption, immigration, AI (sorry, never “SI”), the economy and any other real-world issue? He’s either got nothing, or it’s all nonsense we’ve heard before: The Democrats, Joe and Kamala, and marauding bands of violent dark-skinned immigrants and communists are to blame. As for the economy, he tells us he’s doing great and making billions. We should all be happy.
In the last week on the campaign trail, Trump has appeared at a livestock arena, a school gymnasium, a hockey rink and, on Thursday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, at a venue that holds just 1,200 people. He doesn’t seem to care. He’s on autopilot.
Forget it. He’s done with campaigning, quite literally. The White House confirmed Thursday that two campaign stops planned for Kansas and Iowa this weekend have been canceled. What happens next is what we need to watch. It must be the season of the witch. Or as Thompson himself told us, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Thompson was covering Richard Nixon when he penned that epigram, but it is equally applicable to covering the surreal spectacle of vampires, zombies, ghouls and degenerates awkwardly shuffling across the MAGA landscape. It certainly should be a factor in understanding what Trump does on Nov. 4 and afterward. Ask anyone, Republican or Democrat, and they’ll all say the same thing: Whatever happens is likely to be simultaneously annoying and frightening.
Trump has already filed suit against Alaska’s election results, even though the election has yet to occur. In Missouri, the GOP lost three times trying to gerrymander districts in a case that went to the Supreme Court, all in hopes of gaining one seat in the House. That move may have backfired big time. Not only did Republicans fail to gain a guaranteed seat, but in Missouri’s Second District Democrat Fred Wellman is poised to pull off a miracle against Republican incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner (albeit with little support from party leaders in D.C.). Trump appears ready to file suit there as well. Some insiders say he might try to sue in every state where an incumbent Republican loses. Check your favorite gambling app for the over/under on that.
At the same time, there’s a constant susurrus from Trump about “voter fraud” that surfaces wherever his candidates look to be failing. There are rumors of National Guard and ICE officers roaming the countryside on Election Day hunting and bagging anyone with a good tan who speaks something other than English. Long voting lines and randomly closed precincts are a given. A general feeling of chaos among the electorate, whipped into a frenzy by the president himself, is expected. There’s still stray talk about invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law. What’s the over/under on that move?
I’m actually tired of the talk. We all know Trump will not go gentle into that good night. If the GOP loses control of Congress, his administration will likely see more people convicted and jailed than Nixon’s during the Watergate weirdness that made Thompson “turn pro.”
On the other side of the aisle, the aging Democratic leadership looks as lost and confused as Trump. Some in the party want to remain silent, cross their fingers and hope for the best, fearful of Democratic infighting and hopeful that Trump is really on his last legs. Others want to defeat Trump then turn on the “establishment” Democrats.
I don’t want to listen to this from either side. After covering Trump for 10 years, he reminds me of my children during their pre-pubescence, always cocksure, arrogant and wrong. My children grew up to be adults. Trump never has. The same can be said for some of the more argumentative Democrats.
The Democrats, as is often the case, lack focus and leadership at the national level. The headless horsemen run amok, trying to scream “The Trumps are coming!” while fighting with each other, even before they hold any power. It does not exactly inspire confidence. Younger voters find each party equally repellent, and for good reason. If Democrats win a majority in the House, as nearly everyone expects, and the Senate, as a growing number of Democrats have the audacity to hope, how long will it be before they slice each other’s throats over their marginal political differences while what remains of the GOP looks on with glee?
Still, the Republican Party at this point looks like a horde of zombies led by Art the Clown. To extend the horror-movie metaphors even further, Trump is such a crude cartoon character that if he isn’t the Terrifier then maybe he’s Pinhead from “Hellraiser.”
For lazy reporters, or those who’ve never covered another president, Trump makes the job easy. He doesn’t hold news conferences. He has no policies. There are no long meetings with press secretaries. Come to think of it, there’s no press secretary.
But our president can still generate media attention, even as his crowds continue to diminish. He may soon be reduced to appearing before middle school PTA meetings across the South, but he’ll still be on TV. As one of the younger members of the White House Correspondents’ Association recently said, in all earnestness, “We’ll miss him when he’s gone.” Some reporters even find his insults of the press amusing. I don’t agree, but I admit that my experience is limited to the Ronald Reagan presidency — and every one since then.
Some of us were here before Trump, and will still be here when he’s gone. For lazy reporters, or those who’ve never covered another president, Trump makes the job easy. He doesn’t hold real news conferences. He has no policies. We don’t have directives to read or position papers to study. There are no long meetings with press secretaries. Come to think of it, there’s no press secretary. Covering Trump is easier than covering a traffic accident, and twice as gory. That’s how he governs.
It’s obvious to even the most casual political observer that Trump’s campaign tactics are the signs of a desperate man with dwindling influence. After he lost control of Congress in the 2018 midterms, he purged his staff and yanked press passes from reporters. Some senior officials quit. Expect a repeat of all that, beginning next week. Only now most of my colleagues in the press pool will wag their tails and bark a bit before waiting for a presidential treat.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, unless he gets appointed as a senator from Tennessee, is most assuredly a goner. Even the Republicans in Congress dislike him, and Trump, who never accepts responsibility for anything, still needs a scapegoat for the war in Iran — the one he has claimed is over on more than a dozen occasions.
While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he’ll do his job and seat every Democrat who wins in the midterms, Trump is eagerly searching for ways to stop that from happening. Some believe he’ll try to stage another insurrection, while others believe he’ll let government funding run out and spend the rest of his presidency presiding over a government shutdown, in effect dissolving Congress.
Whatever he does won’t work. His recent public appearances add up to a tell on how badly he will fail. High school basketball teams in Kentucky are filling gymnasiums better than this president.
White House pool reports from Trump’s campaign stops no longer mention the venue capacity or attendance, but the empty seats in those modest arenas and his listless rhetoric, combined with ever-louder outbursts from protesters, are evidence enough that this guy isn’t what he once was.
While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he’ll do his job and seat every Democrat who wins in the midterms, Trump is eagerly searching for ways to stop that from happening.
Whether he’s complimenting another man’s (or woman’s) behind, berating reporters or making deals with Russia while screwing over former allies, his raging incompetence is still center stage at these increasingly feeble campaign events. We still can’t look away.
I recently watched a documentary about the fall of the Bronze Age civilizations. It was an era of climate change, supply chain collapse, earthquakes, famine, disease, migration, drought and armed incursions and invasions. Stop me if you’ve heard any of that before.
What worries one of the archaeologists in the documentary and causes him to lose sleep is how similar our world is to that one.
We are ripe for catastrophe, and poor leadership exacerbates the problems we currently face. “How resilient will we be? How will we get back up?” the documentary asks. Those are excellent questions to ask now.
After the midterm elections are settled, we may learn some answers. If Hunter S. Thompson was right, maybe there’s some hope. After all, I’ve never seen politics any weirder than this.
Trump looks done, in ways I’ve never seen him look done before. I’ve seen him stumble, fall and constantly deflect reality. He’s always managed to survive those stumbles. Not now. The cancellations, his delusional ramblings, his anger and increasing desperation, the smaller crowds, the raspy voice combined with the collective shoulder-shrug I see from even his closest allies — countered by the quiet optimism of the Democrats and their muted sniping at each other — have created a stew of weirdness that Thompson might find eclipses the waning days of the Nixon administration.
All this leaves us pondering two questions: How far will Trump go to challenge the outcome of the midterms, and what will the Democrats do with power if they get it?
Trump’s waning influence may ultimately be the deciding factor in both questions.
If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. But if the Democrats win both houses of Congress, I don’t think Trump will do much of anything after the midterms. He will make lots of threats. But he has to deal with the zombies in his administration and all the fires they have started: wars, battles with immigrants, court cases, affordability issues, the economy, personal corruption, racism, misogyny, the destruction of healthcare and education and the existential problems brought about by ignoring climate change. That’s too much for almost any leader, and way above his level. For the next two years, we’re likely to see Trump in the White House on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and in Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago the rest of the week, somewhere on the back nine.
Meanwhile, we teeter on the brink, and any one of those issues I just mentioned could push us over the edge. During the Bronze Age, a natural climate disaster led to the decline of the culture. Today we can do that ourselves.
The week ahead will be challenging week, no matter what happens. I need to channel my inner Morgan Freeman, from the film “Se7en”: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
The United States cannot credibly defend freedom around the world while treating the survival of a democracy under attack as a bargaining chip.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is not simply a territorial dispute. It is a test of whether democratic nations will defend the principles that sustain their freedom — or allow an authoritarian aggressor to destroy these principles through military force, terror and economic coercion.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was unlawful. Its conduct has included attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and in March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over alleged war crimes involving the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. All grave allegations that demand accountability.
As Ukraine continues to fight for its survival, current U.S. policy raises a fundamental question: Does Washington understand what is at stake?
If Moscow succeeds in subjugating Ukraine, other authoritarian leaders will also ask whether military conquest can succeed. Can U.S. commitments be trusted? Will democratic nations stand together when the price becomes politically inconvenient?
Ukraine’s defense is not charity. It is a strategic investment in American and European security, Washington’s credibility and the deterrence of future conflicts.
The U.S. emerged from World War II understanding that an international order based on sovereignty, freedom and rule of law serves its interests. And successive Republican and Democratic administrations recognized that unchecked authoritarian expansion threatens both American security and the independence of its allies.
That understanding must guide U.S. policy toward Russia today.
Diplomacy is essential. Negotiations to end the war should be pursued seriously. But peace cannot mean rewarding aggression, compelling Ukraine to surrender its sovereignty or giving Moscow time to rearm for another invasion.
Appeasement does not necessarily prevent conflict. It can encourage aggression by convincing dictators the free world lacks the will to resist them. And a ceasefire without effective safeguards could become merely a pause before the next assault. A settlement that leaves Ukraine defenseless would postpone the conflict, not resolve it.
Peace should be measured not by the speed with which an agreement is signed, but by whether it protects Ukraine’s independence and makes another war less likely. And economic pressure is among the most important nonmilitary instruments available to the U.S. in this process, as Russia’s ability to wage war depends substantially on energy revenues, access to international markets and networks that facilitate sanctions evasion.
On Sept.18, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 into law. Then, on Oct. 16, he issued an executive order waiving specified sanctions, restrictions and duties authorized under the legislation, citing the national interest. This order raises a legitimate question about how Washington intends to use the economic leverage Congress provided.
The measurable objectives these waivers are intended to achieve, why they serve American national security and what conditions would trigger their reconsideration need to be explained.
The U.S. needs to enforce restrictions consistently, close avenues for evasion and impose consequences when countries or companies knowingly provide material assistance to Russia’s war effort in violation of applicable law.
This does not require abandoning diplomacy. It requires a coherent policy in which economic relief advances clearly defined security objectives.
If Washington weakens its own pressure without obtaining meaningful concessions, it risks surrendering leverage while leaving Russia’s aggression unresolved. Every source of revenue helping Moscow sustain its military campaign has consequences for Ukrainian civilians, who bear them in destroyed homes, shattered families and lost lives.
U.S. policy should not make it easier for Russia to finance a war Washington says it wants to end.
American history has a bipartisan tradition of leadership that combines the defense of freedom with strategic judgment.
Harry Truman understood U.S. security depended on resisting authoritarian expansion. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy demonstrated that strength and diplomacy are not opposites. Ronald Reagan understood freedom must be defended against those who seek to suppress it. And George H. W. Bush knew sovereignty and alliances are essential to an international order where nations cannot redraw borders by force.
Though from different eras, the leadership of these presidents reflected a common principle: American security is strengthened when the U.S. combines military strength, alliances, diplomacy and a commitment to the independence of free nations.
A policy that pressures Ukraine more than Russia, offers Moscow economic relief without substantial concessions or asks Ukrainians to accept an insecure future is not a strategy for lasting peace. It risks rewarding aggression and inviting further conflict.
And above all, Ukraine’s future should not be decided over the heads of Ukrainians.
Democratic institutions can be attacked and dismantled far faster than they can be rebuilt. Ukraine’s struggle is therefore about more than one war. It is about whether the democratic world will remain a community of nations bound by common principles or become a collection of states left to negotiate individually with authoritarian regimes.
History will not judge U.S. policy solely by the immediate cost of weapons, energy or sanctions. It will judge whether America stood by a nation fighting for survival, upheld the principles it asks others to respect and helped prevent future wars by demonstrating that aggression does not pay.
Adrian Zuckerman is a former U.S. ambassador to Romania (2019-2021); Mark Gitenstein is a former U.S. ambassador to Romania (2009-2012) and to the EU (2022-2025); Ron Gidwitz is a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium (2018-2021) and acting U.S. ambassador to the EU (2020-2021); Jim Gilmore is a former U.S. ambassador to the OSCE (2019-2021); Kathleen Kavalec is a former U.S. ambassador to Romania (2023-2025); Jim Rosapepe is a former U.S. ambassador to Romania (1998-2001).
POLITICO occasionally publishes opinion pieces from guest authors to offer our readers a range of perspectives on the intersection of power and politics. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of POLITICO.
Jon Husted has a problem: People can’t seem to remember who he is. The former lieutenant governor of Ohio was appointed to be the state’s junior U.S. senator in 2025, after JD Vance became vice president. But Husted hasn’t much of an impression on the Buckeye State’s residents. In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, nearly four in 10 Ohio voters answered “unsure/never heard of” when asked their opinion of the Republican incumbent. Only 14% answered the same regarding his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown. In fact, one in four voters in a Bowling Green State University poll even mistakenly identified Brown, a popular veteran of Ohio politics, as the incumbent. (In fact, Brown lost his seat to Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, in 2024.)
The Husted campaign has tried to spin his forgettability as an asset, hoping to trick voters into thinking of Brown as a failed incumbent, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Brown is pulling ahead in the most recent polls, riding a larger national turn away from the GOP. So Republicans turned to the one person who knows how to get a headline: Donald Trump.
Bringing the president to campaign in Ohio has certainly helped to boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now Husted has become the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment.
The president’s public ogling of Husted started at a Youngstown rally on Oct. 12, when Trump delivered a monologue about how he’d “started examining [Husted’s] body” and had seen big hands and shoulders. Then he said the word “ass.” This caused a reaction of shock and laughter reaction in the crowd and also generated a lot of media attention. So Trump, like a narcissistic rat pushing the “applause” button, turned it into a running joke. At nearly every rally now, whether in Ohio or somewhere else, Trump raves about the 59-year-old Husted’s reputedly spectacular and muscular backside.
Trump is famously a lifelong heterosexual, so many in the media and on the left are confused. They assume that latent homoerotic yearnings are burbling up, perhaps from the disinhibition that can occur among people who take regular tests for dementia, as does our president. But that’s unlikely, and not just because Husted actually possesses the softer derrière typical of a man his age. If genuine same-sex desire was behind Trump’s leering, the overtly homophobic crowds who populate MAGA rallies would be highly uncomfortable.
Bringing Trump to campaign in Ohio has certainly boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now he’s the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment.
Instead, as videos show, they scream with the same laughter they produce when Trump goes on a racist tirade, encourages audience members to commit acts of violence or otherwise showcases his affinity for childish bullying, which remains his main and often sole selling point to his base. It’s a large-scale version of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump tried to impress the show’s host, Billy Bush, with braggadocious claims that he can grab women’s genitals and they have to put up with it.
The MAGA crowd may not favor the term “sexual harassment,” but they get that’s what Trump is doing to Husted. He did the same bit with Nicki Minaj, making the rapper-turned-MAGA shill stand up and show off her backside to the crowd at a Michigan rally. As feminists like to remind folks, sexual harassment is about demonstrating power, not lust. Husted is far from the only man Trump ever catcalls. As the New York Times notes, Trump loves making a spectacle out of men’s looks, for the approval of hooting MAGA audiences who get a vicarious thrill from watching Trump say inappropriate things to fellow Republicans, who have no choice but to grin and pretend they enjoy it. It’s a continuation of the other ways Trump displays his dominance over Republicans with fancy job titles, such as senators and Cabinet officials, by expecting them to flatter him grotesquely on camera or to wear ill-fitting shoes he has “gifted” them.
None of this should make us feel any sympathy for Husted or other Republicans, who could at any point grow an actual spine and reject Trump’s abuse. These people grovel for their failing leader in the vain hope that some of his celebrity stardust will rub off on them and boost their political ambitions. Husted is a classic example of the problem now facing Republicans. Like most in his party, he has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or massive tax cuts. He has no discernible charisma of his own, either. So all that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots will rally enough voters to drag Husted’s empty pair of pants (and his mediocre ass) across the finish line.
Like most in his party, Husted has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or tax cuts, and no discernible charisma. All that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots can drag Husted’s empty pants across the line.
What’s funny about all this is that Husted’s blandness is likely what landed him in the unfortunate spot of getting rhetorically goosed by Trump almost every night. By his own account, Trump knew very little about the Ohio Republican he was there to support at the Youngstown rally, but learned shortly beforehand that Husted played football in college. Trump, whose background is in reality TV, resorted to his tendency to reduce a person to a single defining trait that could fit on a chyron. So even though Husted’s gridiron career ended decades ago, Trump indulged in lame fantasies about how he thinks a football player should look like, complete with broad shoulders and well-defined glutes.
Likely, it would have ended with one iteration if he hadn’t praised Husted’s ass, which elevated a pedestrian effort to define a candidate into the realm of attention-getting weirdness. But of course that remark got everyone’s attention, and Trump will reliably return to any bit, no matter how bizarre, as long as it draws eyeballs. So it was that Husted, who was on the verge of being relegated to “Former College Football Player” in the sprawling reality show cast of Trump’s political orbit, instead became the butt of Trump’s favorite new joke.
It could be worse, of course. Trump has a similar bit he likes to trot out about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for that state’s Senate seat. Except instead of being an imaginary muscleman like Husted, Trump has cast Paxton in the role of ugly loser. In nearly every speech where he mentions Paxton, Trump has to talk about how hideous the guy is and how poorly he supposedly dresses.
With both of these GOP candidates, Trump’s oversimplified, theatrical descriptors don’t have much to do with reality. Whatever he once looked like, Husted doesn’t really have the athletic build Trump fantasizes about. Paxton is nobody’s idea of a handsome man, but it’s simply not true that he dresses poorly. There are many terrible things we could say about Paxton, but his wardrobe appears perfectly fine — especially compared to Trump, who seems to believe that wearing enormously oversized suits will hide his ever-expanding bulk. But these two guys are now characters in Trump’s world, where, as in reality TV shows, individual humans are stripped of all their complexities to be turned into broad, easily consumed caricatures.
Whether he’s inviting the world to stare at these men’s allegedly spectacular rear end or daring them to smile while he calls them ugly, Trump is sending a message: He owns these people. He can define them in reductive, humiliating language, and they have been so hollowed out as human beings that they won’t even defend themselves. Normally, when a leader is both a lame duck and cratering in his approval polls, the way Donald Trump is now, that person’s party will start looking for ways to move on and forge a new identity. It’s a sign of how empty the Republican Party is that they seem incapable of doing that. They don’t just submit to Trump’s continued abuse, but even keep seeking it out. That must be a miserable experience, but clearly they feel that without him, they’re nothing at all. It’s tough to disagree.
In a 2025 investigation, The New York Times reported that officials in President Joe Biden’s administration, in the wake of Biden’s 2020 election win, had viewed rising immigration as “a distraction” best ignored so that the administration could concentrate political resources on more important economic matters.
Scott Shuchart, a Biden appointee who joined the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in 2022, told the newspaper that the White House was “wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about.”
For the past three decades, the Democratic Party and its candidates have struggled to develop and pass new immigration policies and communicate related political messages.
Bipartisan attempts at comprehensive immigration reform died on Capitol Hill in 2006, 2007 and 2013. Since then, a majority of Americans has trusted Republicans more with governing the issue. That has given the GOP an advantage when the salience of immigration policy has risen due to border crises and related high-profile events, even if that edge has recently narrowed.
In a February 2024 poll, 28% of U.S. respondents told Gallup that immigration was the country’s most important problem – matching the largest share since tracking began in 1981. By May 2026, that figure was 8%, a staggering drop in such a short period.
In a different poll by The Economist/YouGov, the share of U.S. registered voters who identified immigration as the country’s most important issue fell from 14% in October 2024 to 5% in September 2026.
Erik Iverson, a Republican Senate campaign pollster, recently told Axios that declining border crossings have reduced the urgency of immigration, depriving Republicans of an issue that previously energized voters and offered conservatives an advantage.
“You become a victim of your own success,” he said.
But this success is dubious. President Trump’s approval ratings on immigration are underwater.
In the RealClear Polling average from September to October 2026, his net approval was at negative 10.8%. In a recent Fox News poll, most Americans believe the Trump administration has “gone too far” in enforcing immigration laws, including 60% of independents.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents patrol Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on March 27, 2026. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Ominously for the White House, Trump’s negative 10.8% net approval score on immigration is actually among his best. On inflation, the economy and foreign policy, his net approval rating is at negative 42.8%, negative 31.7% and negative 27.8%, respectively.
These dynamics bode well for Democrats’ midterm election prospects.
Republicans are now less concerned about immigration – what has been their greatest source of political energy and the left’s greatest political liability – as both parties’ voters are focused on other matters.
According to The Economist/YouGov polling cited earlier, 1% of Democrats named immigration as their top issue in September 2026. In October 2024, 3% said the same.
Remarkably, without Democrats’ endorsement of a single new immigration policy idea, independents now express greater trust in Democrats than Republicans on immigration, 41% to 27%, according to a September 2026 Marist survey.
Democrats’ trial and error
Democrats’ sudden edge arises after a decade of trialing different approaches to counter the nativism and popular discomfort that Trump has harnessed.
Before Trump’s 2016 election victory and immediately thereafter, Democratic leaders sought to ameliorate the image of foreigners in the U.S., by highlighting that immigrants start more businesses, file more patents and commit fewer crimes than native-born U.S. citizens on average.
The Eagle Pass 1 International Bridge at the U.S.-Mexico border is pictured in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Feb. 18, 2026. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images
During this period, Democrats commonly cited immigrants’ acute vulnerability and their willingness and ability to fill critical low-skilled and high-skilled labor gaps. But the praise and pity produced resentment among many Americans who did not want an admissions system that elevated foreigners to a higher pedestal.
Toward the end of the first Trump administration, Democrats
began citing the immense macroeconomic and fiscal benefits driven by immigrants’ long-term settlement in the U.S.
However, the benefits of these relationships for average voters tend to be diffuse and realized in the medium-to-long run. That makes them hard to recognize.
After the global pandemic halted most human mobility in 2020, the Biden administration sought to avoid the immigration issue altogether. It’s a strategy that Democrats have now carried over while the dynamics of being out of power still permit doing so.
It will be almost impossible to pass meaningful immigration legislation in such an environment.
The Biden-era approach was a pivotal electoral liability in 2024. And the Obama administration’s series of immigration executive actions instigated a tennis match of such orders between subsequent administrations ever since.
Democrats will soon feel some pressure to develop bipartisan approaches to immigration governance that ensure order at U.S. borders and a strategy for immigrant selection and integration that is designed with the national interest in mind.
Anything less, and the dysfunctional system – with its massive political risks – will return.
President Trump is warning House Democrats of supposed consequences to come if they vote on articles of impeachment against the bombastic and shameless Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the new Congress, should they win control of the House in a few short days.
“I think it’s terrible,” Trump told the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning before heading out to another rally for Republican candidates in South Carolina who probably do not want him there. “All they do is they talk about impeaching everybody.”
“I mean, honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could play it just as well,” Trump said. “But they’re talking about Pete Hegseth. He’s doing a great job. He’s a great warrior. I think he’s the best at his job in many, many years, and a lot of people agree with him.”
It’s not clear what Trump means by “we could play it just as well,” but he is likely referring to his intention to veto anything that comes his way should Democrats pull off an upper and lower chamber sweep. No one would expect any different.
The fault in Trump’s logic is intertwined with a problem that has plagued House Republican leadership throughout the entire 119th Congress — a problem of their own making, too: Thomas Massie.
With less than a week to go before the midterms, the Republicans’ desperation is becoming obvious. Donald Trump is stumping in Mississippi, where Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is locked in a tight race, and half the Cabinet is running around giving speeches to people who don’t know who they are. But the biggest sign of the GOP’s anxiety is the resurrection of a tried-and-true tactic: racism.
Only months ago, the party went all-in on red-baiting, accusing mainstream Democrats of being communist sympathizers, a reaction to the 2025 victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the primary wins of a few democratic socialist candidates. This came alongside the now perennial attacks on transgender Americans, led by the president who continues to insist that elementary schools are performing gender-affirming surgeries in the nurse’s office without parental consent.
We knew they would rely on xenophobia, which has been the central organizing principle of Trump’s decade of political dominance. He may not have kept most of his promises, such as “no new wars” and “bringing prices down on day one,” but he has delivered magnificently on his pledge to incarcerate and deport as many immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, as humanly possible. In fact, he’s even exceeded expectations.
Since they make up the largest share of immigrants, Latinos have been hit the hardest by this cruel policy, and Trump has long asserted that they are all violent criminals. But as we were warned in the 2024 presidential campaign, Haitians have also been among the top immigrant groups targeted by MAGA leaders, with Vice President JD Vance homing in on the racist right-wing id by declaring that these Black immigrants were eating the household pets of their Real American white neighbors.
For a moment, there seemed to be a new target when a social media post by Bo French, the GOP’s nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, went viral, exposing a growing conservative antipathy to Indian Americans. This was somewhat surprising since Vance, one of the party’s leading race-baiters, is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, and Vivek Ramaswamy, another child of Indian immigrants, is Ohio’s Republican nominee for governor.
But none of these attacks and lies has gotten the traction they were hoping for, so the party has gone back to the deep well to draw up a big bucket of Islamophobia.
In the wake of 9/11, some in the GOP became infected by a strain of anti-Arab bigotry that, to his credit, George W. Bush attempted to fight. It waxed and waned as the attacks grew more distant. Then came Trump, whose demonization of Muslims goes back to the 2016 campaign. At that time, the U.S. was in the midst of an outbreak of “lone-wolf” terrorist attacks, and his violent rhetoric really got the crowds going.
Trump famously said he wanted to take up waterboarding “and worse,” and told lurid stories about dipping bullets in pigs blood to scare terrorists. Declaring that he would ban all Muslims from coming to America “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he executed his infamous “Muslim ban” days after taking office in 2017, an order that became the focus of legal challenges and, after some re-tooling by the administration, was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As a progressive, she has been a fierce critic of the administration, but no more than most other Democrats. But she’s a Black woman, an immigrant and a Muslim who wears a hijab. Omar, who fled Somalia with her family at eight and lived for years in a Kenyan refugee camp, represents Minnesota, which became one of Trump’s bete noirs after Kamala Harris chose the state’s governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate. Trump began attacking Minnesota’s community of Somali Americans with some of the most bigoted comments in American history, and that’s saying something.
Somalia, he said, is “garbage, a “sh*thouse country” that “stinks.” He has even claimed that 98% of Somali immigrants don’t work and that they are all criminals driving around in Mercedes-Benz and BMWs. Reprising his role as inciter-in-chief, the president called for (white) Minnesotans to “fight back” against the state’s Somali population, writing that they “view you as weak and stupid people.”
Another target of MAGA’s anti-Muslim bigotry is Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan-born Democratic nominee for the Senate. Earlier this week, Vance referred to him as “very, very evil,” a “psychopath” who pushes “anti-white racial hatred.” This charge of reverse racism is one of the favorite tropes of the modern right, guaranteed to draw cheers at a MAGA rally. Trump called El-Sayed a violent jihadist, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expanded the attacks, saying that the one billion Muslims worldwide contribute nothing to society, having never won the Nobel Prize or any other prestigious awards, an easily disprovable lie.
The blatant bigotry of these latest attacks is enough to take your breath away, not because they are unprecedented; this is America, after all, and racism is one of our “exceptional” characteristics. But until the last decade, Republicans had learned that it was far better for them to obscure their racism with dog whistles and code words so as not to scare the suburban white people.
The blatant bigotry of these latest attacks is enough to take your breath away, not because they are unprecedented; this is America, after all, and racism is one of our “exceptional” characteristics. But until the last decade, Republicans had learned that it was far better for them to obscure their racism with dog whistles and code words so as not to scare the suburban white people. The famous quote from the notorious GOP strategist Lee Atwater, who recommended referring to “welfare” and “busing” to stand in for overtly racist language, held true for years.
Republicans stuck with that tactic for decades, starting with Richard Nixon, who used the term Trump thinks he invented, “law and order,” as a code word for cracking down on Black protests in inner cities. Ronald Reagan famously talked about “welfare queens” during his 1976 primary bid for president, and four years later he opened his presidential campaign by declaring his belief in states’ rights — another dog whistle — in Mississippi, near the spot where white civil rights workers were killed. Three decades later, Trump turned even more creative with his “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama, combining the party’s burgeoning Islamophobia with classic All-American racism. To this day, Trump refers to Obama using his full name — Barack Hussein Obama — with a childish glee.
I don’t think claiming that a whole African country is a “sh*thouse” or saying that Black immigrants are barbecuing their neighbors’ cats for dinner is the kind of subtlety Atwater was talking about. In fact, I will not be surprised to see Trump, who has lost virtually all rhetorical restraint, drop the ugliest epithets of all someday soon. It’s just a matter of time. And if he does, I’m sure JD Vance and all the rest of MAGA’s staunchest loyalists will find a way to rationalize it as something the other side is responsible for.
As frequent readers of Where Things Stand and therefore TPM you don’t really need another rundown from me on just how out of touch President Trump is when it comes to the everyday needs of Americans. We’ve known it for decades.
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democrat, speaks at a public exhibit about the Epstein files in Dallas. | Chitose Suzuki/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again.
He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.
Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)
The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”
When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans.
That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations.
Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office.
Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.”
Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.)
Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.)
These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations.
Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.
One link for later
➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious.
Before you go…
Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — who has repeatedly questioned the polls showing Democrats flipping the House of Representatives — insisted Tuesday there will be a “peaceful transfer of power” following the midterm elections.
Johnson called the question asking him to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January regardless of what the results are “silly,” saying the Constitution will be followed.
Murkowski Endorses a Dem, Denounces Trump’s Attack on Alaska’s Election
Like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the pattern with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a relatively moderate voice in today’s extreme GOP, is that while she may critique Trump publicly, she often votes to support his policies when it matters.
But in recent days, Murkowski has been offering some substantial, pre-election pushback to the president.
On Tuesday, she endorsed a Democrat for governor over Trump’s chosen candidate.
“I have found fault with the Dunleavy administration,” she told Alaska News Source of the current governor, Republican Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited. “I think that they have left federal money on the table. I think in certain areas, where we have worked hard to put opportunities from the federal side, here, into the state, the state has failed with it.”
“I think it’s been a hard eight years in many different areas, and Alaskans are looking for something different,” she added, describing Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the Democrat, as a “young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now.”
JKT, as he’s often called, is up against three Republicans, one of whom, Bernadette Wilson, was endorsed by Trump. He was already favored to win, in part because of the split Republican field.
Murkowski has supported Democrats before — she endorsed Mary Peltola’s campaigns for House in 2022 and 2024. Her more significant move, I’d argue, was on Friday denouncing the DOJ’s pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from certifying its election if a Democrat wins, a lawsuit Trump said he ordered.
“The State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” she said, pushing back on the DOJ’s premise that two Dan Sullivans on the ballot had hopelessly tainted the election.
“The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit,” she said.
That clear-eyed assessment from the most prominent Republican voice in the state predictably triggered Trump to lose it. Over multipleTruth Social posts, he called Murkowski “Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” “a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country,” and falsely suggested she fraudulently won a previous race.
“They’ve been trying to get rid of Lisa Murkowski forever in Alaska,” he claimed.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s Big Escape
Flavio Bolsonaro C, the right-wing Liberal Party candidate in Brazil’s presidential runoff, attends a press conference after presidential runoff in Brasilia, Brazil, Oct. 25, 2026. (Photo by Jin Haoyuan/Xinhua via Getty Images)
When Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro — the recently defeated, Trump-aligned candidate for president — to turn over his passport this week amid a money laundering investigation, he scoffed that he would never think of fleeing the country.
But yesterday morning, news began to emerge in various South American outlets that that may, in fact, have happened.
Its unclear how Bolsonaro ultimately made his escape, with some reports suggesting it was via Argentina, to the south, where President Javier Milei is an ally of the Bolsonaro family and Trump, and others suggesting he left via Venezuela, to the north.
Regardless, it was the Trump administration that offered his family refuge, and by Tuesday evening he was in Florida.
The journey inspired a bit of déjà vu, as his father took a similar trip after a 2022 auto-coup attempt he led, reminiscent of January 6, failed.
Flávio Bolsonaro promised to keep rallying his allies from the U.S.
Donald Trump is bad at a lot of things — negotiations, concealing criminal behavior, standing normal — but he’s not bad at everything. As much as it might bug some of us to admit it, there are a few areas where the president excels. He has an incredible gift for crafting earworms, and his Queens cadence and variable-volume delivery has wriggled its way into American speech patterns. He’s skilled at crafting funny putdowns, pithy nicknames and jabs that hit what his rival politicians are sensitive about and exploit the pressure points of expensive, futile campaigns.
But Trump’s greatest skill is his ability to sniff out a loser. The son of a slumlord coming from the outer boroughs, he was starting with two strikes against him when he attempted to make a jump into Manhattan’s high society. If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment. Trump developed a sharp sense of who was on the wane and on the rise, and he worked hard to only mingle with the ascendant.
It worked. His surname became synonymous with big-money deals, success and opulence despite a string of bankruptcies, casino closures and failed direct-to-consumer businesses. Trump kept away from maiden horses, in part because he ate dirt so often. So you can trust that when he calls Bill Maher a “complete and total loser,” he knows what he’s talking about.
Trump railed against the host of HBO’s “Real Time” on Sunday night in a Truth Social post that expanded beyond essay length. He bashed Maher for his ratings and accused the host of lying about Trump’s approval rating. He pushed back against Maher’s criticism of the war in Iran. Most cuttingly, the reality TV veteran accused Maher of leaning heavily on canned applause and a laugh track to sell the idea that he’s funny.
“[Maher] lies about everything,” the president wrote, “and I believe he lied to me when I asked him, with all the applause and laughter he gets after almost everything he says, about things that aren’t funny or even any good, what Laughter Machine does he use?”
Maher prodded Trump in a monologue last Friday after attending a White House dinner alongside Kid Rock and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The host made a note of Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and recent commentary on men’s physiques at his rallies. “It’s just a little odd that Trump keeps gushing about men’s bodies, and how handsome they are, and their jawlines, and their asses, their physiques,” Maher said. “I’m a little hurt. I was there for dinner for four hours last week, and not a peep. Nothing.”
On Truth Social, Trump accused Maher of turning up looking bedraggled and drunk for the controversial dinner at the “seductive and beautiful” White House. The president said that he “learned nothing” from Maher, but he clearly hoped the host would leave with a more favorable outlook on the MAGA movement. Afterward, Trump said Maher returned to his set and his “laughing machine” and offered slightly tamer critiques in the days that followed, before the host supposedly turned on him for the cameras.
“He reverted back to his former self, and his old ways,” Trump wrote. “What he spouts isn’t what he believes. He has to cater to his base, which is mostly composed of Losers, and people who don’t like working.”
In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for?
In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for?
The snarky libertarian has the carriage of an overeducated yuppie. Despite his frequent protestations, his smarm and suits pushed him to one side of the country’s rigid two-party binary. (He didn’t name his first show “Politically Incorrect” to rile the GOP, after all.) Maher’s outrage over the War on Terror and 2002 cancellation by ABC jammed him into an awkwardly fitting box of “liberal cause celebre.” As neoconservatives pushed an uberpatriotic theocracy in the aughts, his bad faith documentaries, which were aimed at evangelicals, kept up the illusion that he was on the side of progressives. But Maher has never been a lefty, or even particularly committed to any beliefs beyond his freedom to smoke weed.
That particular problem is unsolvable, at least as long as Trump is alive and in power. While the president’s popularity might be waning with voters, he still has the ability to sink Republicans who cross him. That leaves Maher in an unenviable position, inching toward a conservative party that could take or leave him. He’s gotten crankier and more prone to cribbing Fox News talking points at a time where the center of the Democratic Party is rushing to the left. His constant trashing of rising progressive stars will be hard to forget if the expected blue wave materializes in the Nov. 3 midterms.
All this means that the proud libertarian has found himself with fewer friends than ever. Cozying up to Trump only got him publicly mocked by the president as a “hopeless guy” and a “coward.” The liberal commentariat reacted negatively to Maher’s first dinner with Trump in 2025, with Keith Olbermann claiming that the comedian had always been a “shameless opportunist.” This year, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed called out Maher’s history of religious intolerance.
With Trump realizing that Maher’s not worth the effort to woo and the next generation of party stars outright hostile to him, it’s unclear what role Maher has to play. “Aren’t these flyover states stupid?” isn’t enough of a stance to warrant having the mic when the current administration is disappearing people off the street. Maher’s punch-left, pat-right comedy has been stale for years, but he’s still insisting he’s owed a platform. He’s a blunt comic whose rotation of tired jokes have left him with no one to pass his joint to.
Perhaps Trump summed up the problem of Maher best, in a barb buried deep in his Sunday night tirade. Maher clearly views himself as a bold truth-teller, willing to take on both the empty-headed conservatives and the too woke progressives. Trump’s approval-obsessed brain looks at a guy who has alienated anyone who might support him and only sees one thing: “You’re not transformative,” he said. “You’re a loser!”
As soon as former president Barack Obama described Donald Trump’s aesthetic assault on the White House as “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the current president did what he does best: seethe. Ever since Obama’s weekend joke at an Ohio rally, Trump has been complaining non-stop. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that Obama was “a grossly incompetent President” and accused him of “campaigning for a Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist.” The following day, he told reporters that Obama is “not a smart guy.”
At a campaign rally to shore up Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s fledgling re-election bid in Mississippi, Trump chewed on his grievance even more. After calling the Cheesecake Factory a “successful company,” he launched into a confusing defense of his garish White House redecoration. “A guy like Obama,” he said, “doesn’t understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful.”
There are a lot of words for what Trump has done to the White House, but “clean,” “pristine” and “beautiful” are not among them. The president has covered every corner of the Oval Office with cheap-looking gold-paint and elaborate carvings. The once-stately decor now has a cluttered and claustrophobic feel — an embarrassing departure from the dignified appearance that all modern presidents, regardless of party, adhered to, which had a simplicity meant to reflect the sober responsibilities of the citizen-leader.
But to understand why Trump clings to words like “clean” to describe his chaotic and overwhelming design impulses, it helps to look at how authoritarian movements like MAGA relate to kitsch. As I wrote in 2019 about Hallmark films, schmaltz creates a safe space the right can escape to — a cavern where they can wallow in fake feelings and nostalgia, without having to face complex realities that might challenge them. What makes something “clean” or “pristine,” then, isn’t actual clean lines or even a lack of clutter. It’s a conformist fantasy where everyone is white and straight and knows their place in the social pecking order. For Trump in particular, “clean” and “pristine” are racially charged words, building on his long history of equating whiteness with purity and diversity with disorder.
Trump and his fellow MAGA leaders are engaging in performative outrage over Obama’s comments. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth hovers around $600 million, ventured to a Cheesecake Factory in suburban Maryland, where he participated in a photoshoot. It was just the latest in a series of MAGA’s long list of kitsch-related tantrums, which have seen them feign enthusiasm for middlebrow corporate products as evidence of their identity as “real” Americans, unlike those snooty Democrats with their fancy mustards.
This schtick has worked plenty of times to rally the MAGA base because, in this world, “elitism” has nothing to do with money or status. Instead, it’s a code word for the racialized paranoias that unite small-minded white people across the class divide.
Just last year, MAGA propagandists got a huge boost when another restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, tried to change its logo from the overly busy image of a man leaning on a barrel to something more minimalist — or, one might say, “clean” and “pristine.” This update was spun as a subterranean assault on white culture, an effort to smuggle in those “elite” and urbane values into the restaurants cornpone comforts, a place Fox News Grandpa used to feel safe from having to hear hip-hop music in the parking lot.
This time around, my sense is that the Cracker Barrel Panic of 2025 cannot be remade into a Cheesecake Factory October Surprise that will save the Republicans in this midterm cycle. I’m a Cheesecake Factory virgin, but my gracious Bluesky followers and old-fashioned internet research revealed that the restaurant’s marketing is a lot different from the white-bread Christian brunch vibe that Bessent and other MAGA leaders seem to assume it must have. Apparently, it’s a deliberate, self-aware camp rather than dime-store kitsch, appealing to a younger, more modern audience that doesn’t take itself seriously. The Cheesecake Factory is supposed to be silly, which is why its fans don’t think its look is appropriate for the White House. Its famously long and decadent menu is also part of the joke. But at the same time, it reflects the expanding tastes of a diversifying nation, borrowing flavors from all over the world.
It’s not just that the Cheesecake Factory’s wonton chips and chicken shawarma appeal to a different crowd than the chicken-and-gravy offerings at Cracker Barrel. The distinction is a sign of the way that middle America is moving on in general from the rigidly white, rural and suburban conformity so valorized by the Trump administration. The president and his acolytes, particularly during his second term, have been explicit about narrowing their view of what a “great” America should look like. The administration puts out a steady stream of propaganda envisioning a country composed solely of Aryan-looking nuclear families dressed in old-fashioned clothes. But it’s not clear if this has much appeal beyond some elderly white conservatives at Trump rallies, nostalgic for childhoods spent watching “Leave It To Beaver,” or the small number of bitter young men who let social media tell them it was easier to get a wife in the bygone days.
After his narrow win in 2024, Trump and his aides like Stephen Miller convinced themselves that the result was a resounding victory for his fascist fantasy. The president’s rapidly plummeting approval ratings, though, tell a different story: He mostly won because swing voters have short memories and thought he might make good on his promise to bring down prices. Instead, they got more inflation. Likewise, Trump and Miller thought they won on a “no more tamales” platform. But as it turns out, Americans just want those tamales to be a little more affordable. In fact, Trump’s policies are now even threatening to take away free chips and salsa. In the process, we’re learning that, for most Americans in 2026, this traditional Tex-Mex appetizer is considered as all-American as, well, cheesecake.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s love of kitsch mostly endeared him to his voters, who saw themselves in his corny preferences for the musical “Cats” or faux-baroque interior design. The president may be rich, but he connected with his fans in their shared resentment of smarter tastes, which require the very curiosity and intellectual engagement that the president fears. Instead, as Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine at the time, they craved the “evocative empty calories” of “[s]chlock and sentiment and melodrama.” Real art, on the other hand, makes you think and can even inspire empathy for people who are different. Trump promised an opportunity to sink deeply into a bath of nostalgia for an imaginary past.
As the popularity of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl reminded us, the escapist fantasies of authoritarians don’t appeal to most Americans. It was just easier for some to look the other way when there wasn’t a war in Iran, rapidly rising gas prices and paramilitary troops grabbing grandmothers off the street. In good times, kitsch feels like harmless fluff, making its long history of being used for fascist propaganda easier to ignore. But when the president is more worried about redecorating the White House in his schmaltzy self-image than he is about the real struggles of Americans, the kitsch stops being so funny.
Love it or hate it, the Cheesecake Factory cannot save the MAGA movement — no matter how many Cabinet officials get photographed in front of it.
Every president leaves a signature accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt rescued capitalism from itself. Donald Trump’s will be something no predecessor ever attempted: He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly. That dubious achievement belongs in the first line of his obituary.
On Oct. 18, “60 Minutes” reported that in the 21 months of his second term, Trump has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted — more than 150 times.” This is not the grievance of a defeated candidate. It is the drumbeat of a sitting president who won an historic election in 2024, controls the executive branch and still insists that the system that elected him is rotten.
The record is not hard to find. The day before his second inauguration, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Washington, D.C., that he would be president for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — which he would have missed had he won in 2020 — only “because they rigged the election.” In February and again in April 2026, he posted that “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” adding, “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.” In September, at the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, he told supporters, “I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” He doubled down on those claims earlier this month when he posted that vote counts “take weeks to rig, I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!” And on Oct. 16 in Georgia he declared that Sen. Jon Ossoff “lost that election [in 2020], but they gave it to him because it was a rigged election.”
But the centerpiece of Trump’s election lies came on July 16, when he used a primetime address to the nation from the White House to warn that our elections “were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and that the system “falls catastrophically short.” He promised proof. He delivered heavily redacted documents that, according to election officials and security experts, showed vulnerabilities long known and studied, but included no evidence that any American election had been stolen. He cited only some fraudulent registrations in Michigan, which authorities flagged, and no fraudulent voter registrations were processed.
What it all adds up to is this: Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he failed to document a single illegal vote.
I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.
But the accuracy of the count is not among them. Nearly every American jurisdiction leaves a paper trail for ballots. Bipartisan local officials tally them, audit them and, when margins are close, recount them. After the 2020 election, Trump’s own cybersecurity chief called it “the most secure in American history.” William Barr, his own attorney general, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. Georgia, under a Republican secretary of state, counted its presidential ballots three times. More than 60 lawsuits failed, some before judges Trump appointed. Studies of non-citizen voting find it vanishingly rare.
Compare Trump with the presidents who came before him. In 1800, John Adams handed power to his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, establishing the peaceful transfer between parties that defines our republic. In 1864, with the nation at war, Lincoln held an election he expected to lose and privately pledged to cooperate with his successor. Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 all lost as incumbents and accepted the verdict without a word against the count.
Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Al Gore, a Democrat, swallowed razor-thin defeats in 1960 and 2000 rather than tear at the nation’s faith in its elections. Both graciously conceded despite having some basis for challenging results. Presidents have complained about the press, the courts and Congress. None of them made the American voter’s ballot the enemy — until Trump.
That is the damage he has caused. Democracy rests on a simple bargain: The loser accepts the result because both sides trust the count. Each time a president claims, contrary to the evidence, that the count cannot be trusted, he weakens that bargain. He also hands his supporters a ready excuse to reject any outcome they dislike, including the coming midterms. Americans should hold elections to the highest standard and fix what is genuinely broken, starting with how congressional districts are drawn. But they should not mistake a president’s endless repetition of baseless claims for proof of fraud. The evidence shows that America’s votes are counted honestly. The untrustworthy voice comes from the one who keeps telling them otherwise.
Trump has said he would accept the midterm results if they are “honest” — code for Republicans winning. He has already interfered with elections by suing Alaska to overturn results if having another Daniel Sullivan on the ballot allegedly defeats the Republican Senatorial incumbent with the same name. He has also sought to compel California to set aside the votes of 20,000 alleged non-citizens based on an error-ridden database and a dubious matching with registration rolls.
As happened after Trump’s 2020 defeat, we can expect more lawsuits and pressure on Republican legislators and election officials to alter results.
With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.
It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”
But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”
On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.
“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”
Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.
“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”
James Comey speaks onstage at an event in New York City on May 30, 2023. | Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s revenge campaign is getting increasingly desperate.
What’s happening? On Monday, we learned that Trump’s Justice Department is criminally charging former FBI Director James Comey for a third time, in the latest installment of Trump’s ongoing efforts to prosecute his enemies.
Unlike two previous instances, the charges are not in the form of an indictment. Instead, the DOJ filed a two-count criminal information, which allows prosecutors to lodge charges without getting a grand jury involved (but, crucially, does not allow the government to try Comey on those charges unless he waives his right to a grand jury).
What is Comey charged with? The charges allege that in October 2016, Comey unlawfully transmitted national security information about US email surveillance to a journalist. They were filed earlier this month on October 5, exactly 10 years after the alleged disclosure, after which point the statute of limitations would have expired.
Comey denies the charges, and said in a video posted Monday that the case “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice.”
What’s the context? Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, has long been at the top of Trump’s second-term enemies list. He was indicted on scanty allegations of lying to Congress in September 2025, and again this spring for an alleged threat against Trump, in the form of a photo of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” (“86” is broadly understood to be service industry slang for rejecting or removing something or someone).
The first set of charges quickly fell flat after a judge found that the US attorney who brought them — former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan — was illegally appointed. Comey is still seeking to have the second set dismissed.
What’s the big picture? It’s unclear if this third set of charges will stick, though the Trump administration says it still plans to seek a grand jury indictment. But their existence underscores how dramatically Trump has succeeded in politicizing the Justice Department.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
How does creativity work? My colleagues at Vox’s Unexplainable podcast went looking for answers in a fascinating recent episode. You can hear all about what they found here.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
Not all hip-hop feuds are alike. If you’re a lifetime subscriber to the culture, this doesn’t need explaining. If you can’t tell Nicki Minaj and Cardi B apart — and I’ve met enough folks to know there are plenty of y’all out there — last week’s events may have confused you.
I get it: Both dominated social media recently, albeit for very different reasons. Cardi B’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert debut on Monday, Oct. 19, became one of those “break the internet” cultural salvos that rippled across our feeds for days. Backed by a live band led by Emmy-winning producer and musical director Adam Blackstone, the rapper performed a tight setlist that included hits like “Bodak Yellow” and an emotional rendition of “Man of Your Word.”
The following Sunday, Minaj, perhaps answering the call of Donald Trump’s glute-gawking tour, flew with the president on Air Force One to a rally in Port Huron, Michigan. Minaj led the crowd in a chant of “We love Trump,” which had about as much rhythmic flow as people who clap on the ones and threes can handle.
One event may not seem related to another unless you know the two hip-hop stars represent opposing sides in a spiteful cold war that’s dragged on since 2017. This carpaccio of beefs tends to heat up whenever one steps into the spotlight, so you can’t help but wonder whether Minaj would have flocked to Trump if not for Cardi’s grand cultural moment.
When Minaj was in her stride, she earned the moniker “Queen of Rap.” Cardi, however, became the first woman in history to win the Grammy Award for best rap album as a solo artist. Minaj was a judge on the 12th season of “American Idol.” Cardi B has partnered on tracks with a variety of popular artists, including Megan Thee Stallion.
While Minaj has more studio albums, Cardi B is a prolific hitmaker known for her metrical prowess and a kind of braggadocio that’s hard to beat. Some of her hardest-hitting lyrics also make people wonder if she’s speaking to anyone in particular. Take this line from Cardi’s newest track “Don’t Chart,” her contribution to “Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album”: “First thing first, ho, know your part/ Act like an old-a** whip and don’t start.” That’s fire, the kind that makes you want to cozy up under a blanket with your favorite mug of tea. And spill.
(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The one thing Americans love more than a celebrity feud is taking sides and declaring a victor after each round, even if the opponents don’t realize they’re being pitted against each other. The ‘90s East Coast-West Coast rivalry was manufactured by competing record labels and claimed the lives of two of hip-hop’s all-time greats, but fans still declared allegiance to one side or the other.
Only much later did some people recognize that such parasocial loyalty led them to back a violent criminal currently serving prison time, Suge Knight, and Sean Combs, who used his friend’s murder as a springboard to fame, has been accused of multiple rapes and sex trafficking and is also doing time.
Team Drake versus Team Kendrick Lamar emerged from the former poking at the latter until Lamar smacked Drake down in his diss track “Not Like Us.” After it became a hit, Lamar swept up multiple Grammys as if they popped out of the Canadian rapper like coins flying from a “Mario Kart” loser.
The Cardi B-Minaj rivalry is different. Cardi is just the latest high-profile woman Minaj has gone after over the years, having previously picked fights with Mariah Carey, Lil’ Kim and Remy Ma. But her Cardi vendetta is more famous in no small part because of Minaj’s public MAGA turn. As Minaj told Time magazine earlier this year, she’s long harbored conservative views but didn’t feel comfortable expressing them for fear of alienating her fans. Then, in 2025, she made anti-trans statements and sat down for a chat with Erika Kirk at a Turning Point USA conference. In early 2026, she appeared at a U.S. Treasury event, declaring herself Trump’s No. 1 fan.
She has plenty of competition for that title in Trump’s inner circle. Still, right now, that pledge of allegiance gives White House communications director Steven Cheung’s Sunday video post a level of credence we wouldn’t otherwise take seriously. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary!” Cheung said on X.
Between that and Trump’s callout from the rally podium praising Minaj’s backside – “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful a** before… Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss!” – recent events have led to frenzied discussion as to whether Cheung was joking. One can’t rule anything out in a presidency willed into existence by punchlines and enraged laughter at visions of liberal tears. Minaj meets several of the president’s main qualifications for such a front-facing role: she’s famous, sycophantic, and apparently devoid of self-respect.
Questions remain about whether the performer, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, has secured citizenship yet, but that hasn’t stopped her from advocating for legislation requiring Americans to show ID to vote.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Plus, after Katie Zacharia’s calamitous five-day stint in that job, it’s hard to imagine Minaj doing worse. In fact, I can’t think of a better way for Trump to show his open disdain for journalists than to put the “Starships” singer in front of the press corps, then sit back and watch the Barbz, as her toxic fandom is known, go to work harassing any reporter who asks tough questions.
In contrast, Cardi B is a history buff fascinated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency and the lasting impact of Eleanor Roosevelt. In a 2023 Hot Ones episode, she said she’s obsessed with learning about wars. Cardi was also one of many performers who appeared on the campaign trail in support of Kamala Harris and has gone on record with her feelings about Trump.
More recently, the New Yorker has thrown her weight behind local issues like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s universal child care program.
Nothing was overtly political about her Tiny Desk appearance other than what some might read into the details. Blackstone, for instance, bills himself as Minaj’s musical director, but it’s been a while since the Harajuku Barbie dropped a new track. (Her last studio album came out in 2023.) Cardi had her choice of backing talent. She picked him. Fascinating, no?
We can’t discount the identity politics at work here either. Cardi B proudly flaunts her sexual agency and power but never allows anyone to denigrate her for that. Meanwhile, Minaj’s willingness to showcase her rump for the pleasure of Trump’s followers is disturbing, generally and specifically. Trump and MAGA have a long history of insulting Black women’s appearance, intelligence and abilities. Of course, that never kept Stacey Dash, Omarosa Manigault Newman or his one-time sidekicks Diamond & Silk from supporting his first presidency.
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But Minaj’s twirl for Trump differs from his fixation on the physiques of Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted or Kentucky congressional candidate Ed Gallrein. Weird as those instances are, they aren’t attached to a history of objectifying Black bodies dating back to slavery.
On Monday’s edition of “The Breakfast Club,” host Charlamagne Tha God wondered whether Minaj is content to trade her legacy of demanding respect in proximity to power. “If a Black executive told her to stand up and show her body and spin around, she’d go crazy,” he said, later adding, “I just don’t want her to think just because she got a seat at the table, she’s not also on the menu.”
Whatever the case may be, it sure looks like Minaj is willing to sacrifice her dignity to get back on somebody’s stage. Meanwhile, Cardi’s career campaign keeps chugging along fiercely. “I can name this song, ‘Don’t Chart, it’s gon’ chart,” she brags on her new track, making it clear how much respect she’s earned and that anything less is unacceptable. That’s the side I’m backing.
Barely noticed among all the talk in the election campaign about great asses, shithouse countries and commie jihadists running for the Senate was a report from The New York Times warning of “heightened levels of tension and risk” surrounding Israel’s parliamentary elections, slated for today, and America’s Nov. 3 midterms due to the countries’ war with Iran, which has “entered a new phase.” They also offered this bracing observation: “This is how countries can escalate into full-scale war, several diplomats and outside experts noted.”
How’s that for a wake-up call?
In fairness, Donald Trump has mentioned in passing that he plans to “finish the job” after the midterm elections, with CNN reporting that the president “appears to be leaning toward major action.” On Oct. 15, the outlet revealed that the U.S. is considering using the “mother of all bombs” on Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. (They admit that such a strike would be “performative,” since it would not actually accomplish anything, but would supposedly allow Trump to declare victory.)
If anyone had the idea that a midterm election campaign would be the place where serious people of goodwill debate the major issues of the day, they were mistaken. For the most part, the war with Iran has hardly come up, and to the extent that it has, it’s been in the context of high gas prices.
If anyone had the idea that a midterm election campaign would be the place where serious people of goodwill debate the major issues of the day, they were mistaken. For the most part, the war with Iran has hardly come up, and to the extent that it has, it’s been in the context of high gas prices, not the possibility of the conflict turning into a major conflagration from which the United States will not be able to walk away after putting on a fireworks show. We may be at a turning point, and nobody’s paying attention.
The U.S. has received credible intelligence, according to the Times report, that Iran has “advanced” plans to attack Americans at home and abroad. According to Reuters, the State Department has ordered non-emergency government employees and their family members to leave U.S. diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia and has reduced staff in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan. NBC News revealed that “the U.S. military has been quietly scaling back its troop presence at bases across the Middle East as well.” It certainly sounds as if something is afoot, which the Times characterized in fairly alarming terms:
The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Trump are facing critical elections that could dramatically affect the balance of power in their countries feeds into the complex set of calculations that all sides are making. Even if he is defeated on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu could decide to launch one last strike that he may believe his successor would hesitate to execute. Similarly, Mr. Trump, who knows how unpopular the war is even among his strongest supporters, may want to show that at least when it comes to his powers as commander in chief, his authority is undiminished.
Trump has claimed dozens of times that we have already won the war. This is not out of character; his habit is to prematurely declare victory in everything, apparently assuming that the force of his declaration makes it a reality. In the lead-up to the U.S. and Israel’s Feb. 28 attacks on Iran, Trump was apparently so pumped up by his historic political comeback and success at cruel mass deportation, murder on the high seas and the conquest of Venezuela, an oil-rich country, that he assumed he could succeed at what every former president knew was a fool’s errand: take over Iran, seize its oil and dominate the world’s oil supply. And, as Haberman and Swan reported in their book “Regime Change,” Trump had been convinced by whom he called a presidential historian (actually a caddie for Gary Player) that he was “the most powerful man who’s ever existed on the planet by far” — more powerful than Mao, Alexander the Great, Stalin, Hitler, all of them.
What Trump has succeeded in doing is making Iran a global power, capable of re-ordering the world through control of one of the most important waterways on the planet. In the process, he has exposed the U.S. as a second-rate military power, at least compared to the country’s previous reputation, by insisting on fighting an unnecessary war of choice without a strategy while being low on munitions and proving that it lacks the capability of fighting on more than one front. Having let down our Middle Eastern partners who assumed that by allowing bases in their countries they could count on America to defend them — not to mention the administration’s destructive tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine — the world knows that the U.S. is unreliable, and they are looking elsewhere for alliances and economic partnerships.
All this brings to mind historian Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly.” Published in 1984, the book examines tragic wars of choice that needn’t have been fought but, because of hubris and ignorance, were waged anyway, despite being against the best interests of the countries that started them. As Tuchman put it:
To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight . . . Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available . . . third . . . the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader.
Among the conflicts Tuchman chronicled in the book are the errors of the Catholic Church that led to the Reformation, as well as King George III’s epic misunderstanding of the dynamics driving the colonists (and England’s other enemies) to rebel against the British Crown. She also turned her keen historical eye to the big kahuna of her era, Vietnam, in which the U.S. squandered its power and moral authority on a war that began as an ideological experiment, escalated for political reasons, and ended in failure and embarrassment only 51 years ago. You’d think that lesson would still be fresh enough that we wouldn’t indulge in such a folly again.
But, of course, we have. While Afghanistan had at least the fig leaf of justification after 9/11, Iraq and now Iran have both demonstrated that the U.S. has learned nothing from its own recent history. Eight months in, Trump’s misadventure in the Islamic Republic has proven even more irrational than the others. As with all the follies, Trump indulged his fantasies, failed to understand the adversary and ended up working against his country’s own interests.
A delusional, psychologically unfit president started a war based on shifting rationales, finally landing on the idea that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. This was the same country that had been complying with an agreement not to pursue a nuclear weapon, but which this president tore up simply because it had been negotiated by the man he succeeded in office.
We don’t yet know whether these latest threats will lead to an escalation by either party. But either way, the deed is done. The world has been fundamentally changed by Trump’s daft decision to start this war, and there is no going back. That’s how all these follies end, and it’s very rarely a happy ending for the countries that started it.
The episode illustrates a larger development in Trump’s second presidency. Across disputes involving federal spending, government agencies and military operations, the administration has asserted authority that is either restricted by law or that the legislative branch has reserved for itself.
But responsibility for enforcing those limits is increasingly falling to organizations, institutions and individuals outside of the legislative branch.
As a scholar of the American presidency and deliberative democracy, I pay close attention to how the nation’s chief executive exercises power and communicates with the public.
When presidents are allowed to break rules and disregard democratic norms without consequence, I worry that citizens will grow cynical and lose faith in the idea of self-government.
As this happens, citizens may come to see the law as something that applies selectively, depending on who holds power, and lose confidence in the institutions responsible for holding their leaders accountable.
They may also begin to accept the absence of accountability as a normal feature of political life, weakening the public expectations on which democratic government depends.
Practical immunity
Congress is not the only branch of government demurring from holding the president accountable.
In “Trump v. United States,” the court held that former presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for actions taken under powers the Constitution gives exclusively to the president. Along with this “absolute immunity,” the justices also granted “at least presumptive immunity” for other official acts.
In their decision, the court’s conservative majority extended the meaning of official conduct to the “outer perimeter” of presidential responsibilities and prohibited courts from examining a president’s motives when determining whether an act was official.
The ruling only addressed criminal liability and did not curtail Congress’ constitutional authority to investigate presidential conduct, control federal spending, enact statutory restrictions and, in serious cases, pursue impeachment.
Their acquiescence is helping create a new form of official protection, which I call “practical immunity.” In using this term, I am borrowing from the work of scholars who study abuse in the American penal system.
Those thinkers argue that legal obstacles, institutional hesitation and political incentives sometimes make it difficult to hold public officials accountable, even when the law suggests there has been illegal conduct.
That is what appears to be increasingly happening now with Congress, the courts and the president.
When Congress stops defending its laws
The television ads case illustrates the conundrum of practical immunity.
In opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration’s attorneys did not contest the argument asserted by the plaintiffs – Common Cause and two unions – that the expenditures violated federal appropriations law. Instead, they said the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. They also argued that the case was moot because the advertising campaign was ending.
Those arguments failed in court. Yet the administration’s defense demonstrated how elusive enforcing a law can be when Congress fails to assert its constitutionally granted role, even when the underlying legal restriction is clear. To win, a plaintiff must establish a concrete injury and persuade a judge to intervene. While this happens, the disputed conduct often continues.
An ABC News story on the political ads praising President Donald Trump, who used taxpayer money to air the ads.
The separation of powers divides authority among the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government to prevent too much power from becoming concentrated in any one place.
The architects of the Constitution anticipated that officials in different branches would compete to preserve their authority. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison argued that maintaining the balance established by the separation of powers depended on the ambitions of public officials coming into conflict. Members of Congress could be expected to resist presidential encroachments because those encroachments diminished their own power.
Fierce partisanship has complicated this arrangement.
Legal scholars Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes have shown how political competition mostly now happens inside and between parties, rather than among branches of government. When one party controls Congress and the presidency, legislators may become more invested in advancing their party’s agenda than they are in defending their institution’s constitutional authority.
The result is a political system in which a president can act in ways that may violate federal law, undermine democratic norms and encroach on Congress’ constitutional authority.
Madison’s constitutional design assumed that public officials would defend the powers entrusted to them. The danger to the American constitutional system emerging in Trump’s second term is that congressional leaders have begun to regard those powers as expendable, allowing the president to exercise authority under conditions of practical immunity. He faces little fear of meaningful institutional consequences.
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