Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. If passed, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it, rather than a licensing agreement.
It's increasingly common for games sold to require a connection to a server. Meaning that when a company decides to shut down those servers, the games often become unplayable. Rep. Torres singles out NBA 2K25 as a recent example. 2K will be delisting the game from storefronts at the end of the month and shutting down its servers on …
When Donald Trump clinched the presidency in 2016, my wife broke into tears on camera as a local journalist interviewed patrons at a bar in Queens that had advertised a presidential watch party, complete, in its wide-eyed audacity, with Clinton cocktails. As an immigrant and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who had to navigate the cruel vagaries of the U.S. immigration system, she grokked then what it would take many people years to understand. Not long after, Trump attempted to dismantle DACA, the executive order that defended immigrant children in lieu of the DREAM Act. While my wife is now a citizen, the raid of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home is a reminder that not even U.S. citizenship guarantees the safety of immigrants in Trump’s United States.
The case against Omar worries me, not only because it’s bald-faced political vengeance, a grim milestone in our collective lurch toward fascism, but also because of what it means for naturalized citizens in the United States — people like my wife, my sister and my mother. Attacks on citizens who did not arrive on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island is an extension of the Trump administration’s remorseless persecution of immigrants in the U.S. Child of immigrants? Side eye. Naturalized citizen. Well, let’s revisit that paperwork, shall we?
On the first day of his second term, Trump attempted to end birthright citizenship, how I became a U.S. citizen, via executive order. Over the summer, the Supreme Court ruled against the president, but a month later, he signed two more executive orders targeting so-called birth tourism and birthright citizenship. As this latest attack on immigrants faces fresh challenges, the Department of Homeland Security is focusing on denaturalization.
In June 2025, DHS issued a memo about “prioritizing denaturalization,” a process that enables the federal government to strip people of their citizenship, which historically was reserved mostly for Nazi war criminals. At the time, I worried the memo signaled the escalation of an effort to broaden the discretion of the federal government to determine, even retrospectively, who deserves to be a U.S. citizen. Given Monday’s sweep of Omar’s Washington, D.C., home by Homeland Security Investigations agents, my fears appear to be well-founded.
The federal case against Omar follows years of accusations and innuendoes — and even a review during Trump’s first term that reportedly found no issues with her citizenship. But the president has still repeatedly called for her denaturalization and deportation, saying on social media earlier this year that she “should be in jail” and “sent back to Somalia.” He has called people from Somalia “scammers” and “lowlifes.” Vice President JD Vance has also suggested that Omar is likely guilty of immigration fraud. But what is the actual case against her?
Unfortunately, the judicial warrant is sealed, and as usual, the Department of Justice hasn’t revealed much information except to say that it is an “ongoing criminal investigation.” The involvement of Immigration Customs and Enforcement in the search, however, gives weight to comments made by public officials about potential immigration fraud. Is there any merit to the accusation? Not really.
The U.S. government granted Omar’s family, refugees from Somalia, asylum in 1995. Five years later, Omar became a U.S. citizen via a law in which minors are eligible for citizenship once their parents naturalize. Some critics have suggested without evidence that Omar was born a year earlier, which would have made her ineligible for citizenship through the aforementioned law. The bigger question is: Why now?
It’s been over 25 years, and the federal government happened to unearth “incriminating” evidence of a vocal Trump critic three weeks before the midterm elections? It’s dubious at best, and a rank abuse of power at worst.
It’s been over 25 years, and the federal government happened to unearth “incriminating” evidence of a vocal Trump critic three weeks before the midterm elections? It’s dubious at best, and a rank abuse of power at worst. Even in the worst-case scenario, Omar was a girl at the time, so any fudging of numbers would have been done by her late father, who filed the paperwork.
But this is nothing new for Trump. Casting doubt on a political adversary’s right to be in the U.S. was how Trump made his presidential bones. His 2011 birtherism tour, in which he suggested President Barack Obama was not born in the United States but rather in Kenya, was his beautillion ball, laying the groundwork for what would become his primary political strategy: Attack with conspiracy theories. Never bother to substantiate. Repeat ad infinitum. The difference now is that he has a loyal Justice Department and DHS at his back.
The birtherism lie was not unlike the current mudslinging campaign against Omar. But between then and now, a couple of major changes have taken place. One, Trump became president, and two, in his second term, he has, through a series of executive orders, communiqués and personnel rejiggering, weaponized DHS, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, Border Patrol, U.S. Marshals and other federal agencies by affording them a dangerous amount of latitude.
A salient example is the expanded 287(g) program, which allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement, thereby entangling local and federal police, effectively eliminating a peacekeeping backstop against federal overreach. Congress established the 287(g) program in 1996 through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, but in Trump’s second term, the program has so far ballooned from 140 memorandums of agreement to 2,660 agreements in 38 states and two U.S. territories.
Combine that with $70 billion in immigration funding, donning masks, failing to produce identification and eschewing judicial warrants in favor of administrative warrants — nothing more than a performative gesture — and Trump has effectively created a paramilitary domestic force that does his bidding, including going after political foes with impunity.
Denaturalizations are up, owing to this administration’s expressed priority, and naturalizations are down 75%, a consequence of intimidation tactics and the practice of federal agents ambushing immigrants at green card and naturalization hearings.
Omar’s case will be a litmus test for this administration’s authority, both in terms of carrying out political vendettas and processing denaturalization. Even if Trump’s DHS fails to denaturalize and expel the congresswoman from the country, the mere attempt sends a chilling message to naturalized citizens across the country, including my own family: You’re not safe in Donald Trump’s America.
In January, my wife and I will return to the U.S. for the first time in 15 months — the longest time we’ve been away from the country. Before becoming a U.S. citizen four years ago, my wife hadn’t left the country since she arrived as a toddler. Suddenly, she was free to come and go as she pleased, so when her postgraduate program in Versailles accepted her application, we went. Now, as our return to the U.S. approaches, a worm of doubt squirms within us. We’re both U.S. citizens, safe on paper, but what if the value of our papers has changed? What if the manner by which we obtained our citizenships — birthright and naturalization — now invites skepticism and scrutiny?
Before we moved to Europe, we went on a weekend trip to Montreal. Ahead of our return, prompted by horror stories I had seen in the news about people being detained for something as innocuous as a meme, I deleted media on my phone that could be construed as critical of the Trump administration, and I turned my phone off while going through customs. It was the only time in my life I’ve done that.
During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
Trump seems to be implying that he convinced Google to reflect the name change personally. That would seem to contradict Google's statement on the matter, in which it said that …
Conservatives have long pitched their project as a return to normalcy, a way to set right a world that’s gone off its axis. In theory, it’s an understandable goal. Who doesn’t react to getting older and more removed from the engine of culture with an initial feeling that the next generation is doing it wrong?
In practice, the right’s message is more of a respectable veil covering the fact that they want the power to beat up on minorities and buy anything they want. But there’s one arena where the right might actually be bringing back an honest-to-goodness return to tradition: the multiplex.
The lines between television and the movies used to be rather rigid. There were movie stars and there were television actors, and rarely did the twain meet. Actors without matinee idol looks or sufficient draw could make a living as character actors. Faded stars could scrape out a second act in B-movies and lesser studio offerings without losing the prestige of the silver screen. Television actors traded that type of cachet for steady work and wider audiences. A movie star appearing on television was a sign of terminal decline.
The rise of prestige television and streaming shook up the established hierarchy. If television could hit something approaching the same cinematic highs and emotional depths as a Hollywood movie, even if rarely, then the stigma of going episodic couldn’t last. The prestige TV gold rush inspired plenty of marquee stars to jump ship, taking roles from deep-pocketed streamers for niche audiences. (Somebody must be watching Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them.) The old order and the connotations of each medium had gone post-modern and topsy-turvy.
Enter Ben Shapiro.
The Daily Wire co-founder and conservative political commentator has made several attempts to break into Hollywood. Over the years, he has repeatedly alluded to a script he wrote as a young man at the behest of the late ABC executive Leonard Goldberg, while his dramedy about a conservative student at Harvard never got off the ground. But that hasn’t deterred Shapiro. He’s used his political commentary outlet as a springboard to produce a series of execrable comedies and thrillers, from 2023’s irredeemable and laughless “Lady Ballers,” which centers on a group of former high school basketball players reuniting to compete in women’s basketball by posing as transgender women, to the semi-competent and bloody hatefest “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Written by Shapiro, “Confession” follows an academic in Moscow under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He’s brought in for questioning after allegedly conspiring with a dissident priest, only to find that his interrogator is a former student. In less ideological hands, the film could be an interesting examination of loyalty and state overreach. Coming from the man who accused Baron Harkonnen, the villain in the “Dune” science-fiction franchise, of being a communist, we aren’t holding our breath.
Still, the announcement of “Confession” made a splash, less for its logline than its topline. The cast is chock full of former Oscar nominees and one-time A-listers. The participation of James Franco, Rob Lowe, Brad Dourif and Emile Hirsch make this the most star-studded production Shapiro has ever produced. Beyond the musty Cold War paranoia and production design straight out of the “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” video game, the film is small-c conservative in its appeal to a bygone tradition: giving disgraced actors a mid-budget springboard from which to launch their career revivals.
Franco was once a megawatt star, but his career faltered shortly after several women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In the late aughts, with a Screen Actors Guild-nominated turn in “Into the Wild,” Hirsch was positioned to be the next big thing. But the belly flop of “Speed Racer” and a 2015 assault of a female Paramount Pictures executive at the Sundance Film Festival put his career on ice. Lowe’s scandal-plagued days are long behind him, but he’d settled into a career as a reliable network television star. Most recently, the star of “The West Wing” has been a mainstay on Fox’s campy disaster series “9-1-1.” “Confession” sees him trying out long atrophied dramatic acting muscles, taking a tentative step into Hollywood. Dourif has never generated any significant controversies to our knowledge, but his appearance is notable because it contradicts his 2024 retirement announcement.
Taken with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it starring turn from Jonathan Majors in “Infidels,” The Daily Wire’s gambit becomes clear. In reaching out to disgraced or out-of-fashion actors, the company is getting notable names for their bargain-basement productions. The actors, in turn, can add a few performances for their sizzle reels that post-date whatever controversy pushed them out of the limelight.
It’s not a bad deal for either party. From the actors’ perspective, they’re just following the B-list trails blazed by actors like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, stars who spent decades cranking out direct-to-video duds while seeking the right role to catapult them back into notoriety. What’s new is the ideological bent of a studio like Shapiro’s. Typically, appearing in outwardly conservative fare was the mark of an inwardly conservative star. Think Kirk Cameron’s Christian schlock or Kevin Sorbo’s post-Hercules output. When a name like Jim Caviezel shows up in QAnon-adjacent thrillers, it’s a bit of a “fork found in kitchen” situation.
Shapiro’s comeback machine is something slightly different. Given what we’ve seen from the films he has worked on in the past, the machine is likely to be clunky — but that won’t matter to either party if it works.
Conservatives’ belief that “cancel culture” has gone too far, that men chastised for behaving badly are really victims of a radical mob run amok, allows them to take on names that are not welcome in Hollywood. If the ploy works, it’s proof that they were right all along — that cooler heads prevailed and the initial controversy was an overreaction.
With the Daily Wire’s film arm, Shapiro is bringing back the B-list for a cancel culture age, offering dimmed stars the chance to bide their time until the unistudio of Paramount/Warner Bros. comes calling.
Republicans running for governor across the country are backing away from abortion bans they once endorsed.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, calls his state’s 20-week abortion limit “settled law.” Just three years ago, he co-sponsored a bill that would have banned abortion six weeks into pregnancy.
Stacy Garrity, the GOP’s candidate in Pennsylvania, has said during her campaign that she would “respect” the state’s current law, which allows abortion until 24 weeks of pregnancy. Four years ago, she called on abortion opponents “to engage and make a difference” in state laws after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
In Kansas, where abortion is legal until 22 weeks, Republican Ty Masterson has demurred when asked if, as governor, he would support a statewide referendum to eliminate the Kansas constitution’s abortion protections. Masterson had previously spoken at protests in opposition to reproductive rights and won the backing of state and national anti-abortion groups.
The candidates’ retreat suggests that, even as reproductive rights fade from the national spotlight and polls show voters are far more likely to prioritize cost-of-living concerns, the political ramifications of pushing for new abortion restrictions remain substantial. The rhetorical distancing also moves political conversations away from an issue that overwhelmingly energizes Democrats.
“That might be their strategy there, to try to demotivate Democratic turnout in the state to take abortion off the table as a voting issue,” said Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research, polling and journalism organization. That’s especially true in tighter races such as those in Wisconsin and Kansas, she said.
Tiffany’s, Garrity’s and Masterson’s campaigns did not reply to requests for comment. The 19th contacted multiple Republican-aligned pollsters who also did not immediately respond.
About 60 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, including about two-thirds of independents, according to a poll from The 19th and YouGov.
That said, pushing for abortion restrictions has never been broadly popular. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Republicans seeking general election typically would not campaign overtly on abortion bans, said Molly Murphy, a pollster and president of Impact Research, a Democratically-aligned polling firm.
“It would get discussed in donor meeting hot mics, endorsement questionnaires, etc, but candidates wouldn’t run on the fact that they’d ban abortion,” she wrote in an email.
Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is now calling his state’s 20-week abortion limit “settled law”, when only three years ago he co-sponsored a bill that would have banned abortion six weeks into pregnancy.
(Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Voters largely don’t consider abortion to be “settled law,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, noting that the share of voters opposing abortion bans has increased since the fall of Roe. “They feel like, ‘Wait a minute, it can be taken away again.’”
In some races, Democrats and their allies are trying to push abortion rights back under the microscope — a strategy geared toward energizing liberal voters, Kirzinger said.
Wisconsin’s Democratic nominee for governor, David Crowley, has said that, if elected, he would work with the state legislature to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — though it’s not clear how expansive that protection would be or whether it might supplant the state’s 20-week cutoff.
Pine Tree State Prosperity, a political action committee associated with the national Democratic Governors Association, is running advertising in Maine that highlights anti-abortion remarks made by Bobby Charles, the state’s Republican pick for governor. The Democratic nominee, Hannah Pingree, has led by double digits in recent polls. Charles’ campaign did not reply to a request for comment.
Planned Parenthood’s super PAC, called Planned Parenthood Votes, has focused its resources in states such as Michigan, where the Republican candidate, U.S. Rep. John James, has said that abortion is “decided.” Four years ago, James said he opposed abortion in all cases, and he has compared the practice to genocide. His campaign did not reply to a request for comment.
James’ running mate, Jay DeBoyer, recently suggested leveraging a state constitutional convention to enact a 12-week abortion ban in Michigan, according to recordings of the remarks reported by The Detroit News and Michigan Advance. DeBoyer has since said publicly that abortion is a “settled” issue in Michigan, where voters in 2022 amended the state constitution to protect abortion before fetal viability.
Some gubernatorial candidates are still pushing for abortion restrictions, albeit far less ambitious ones.
In New Mexico, where Democrats are expected to keep control of the governor’s mansion and already control both legislative chambers, Republican candidate Gregg Hull said he was “fully committed” to working with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to reduce the number of Texans coming to the neighboring state for abortions.
Hull has repeatedly called himself “pro-life” but also said that he would not change the state’s abortion law, which imposes no time limits on the procedure, without legislative support. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Abortion opponents are trying to revive the issue in a handful of states. SBA Pro-Life America, one of the nation’s leading anti-abortion groups, is pushing ads that characterize Democratic candidates for governor as well as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as extreme on the issue, including in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan.
But generally, voters are less likely to trust conservatives on abortion, Lake said. And talking about abortion, she added, is more likely to generate enthusiasm among key Democratic voting blocs, particularly young women and college-educated women, who typically support reproductive rights.
“We have in our research people who say, ‘I used to be pro-life, I didn’t support abortion, I would never get one, but I think this is a decision that needs to be made by a woman and her doctor,’” Lake said. “People now feel this is just way too dangerous. This has gone way too far.”
Ukraine struck an oil terminal in St. Petersburg Sunday morning in what Russian state media called “one of the biggest drone attacks of the year.”
Alexander Beglov, governor of St. Petersburg, said on Telegram Sunday that the city underwent a “massive” overnight attack from Ukrainian drones. “The Ministry of Emergency Situations continues to extinguish fires at the Petersburg Oil Terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, and industrial warehouses in the Kolpino district,” he said, adding that one person died and several others were injured in the incident.
The drone strikes come as Kyiv and Moscow ramp up attacks on each other’s infrastructure. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week he had ordered the resumption of strikes on Russian oil refineries following a three-day pause after U.S. President Donald Trump declared he had brokered an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump repeatedly urged Ukraine to halt its attacks and blamed the country for rising fuel prices — while also calling for Zelenskyy to be replaced as president.
Writing on X Sunday morning, the Ukrainian president highlighted Moscow’s continued attacks on Ukraine. “In total, over this past week, the Russians have attacked Ukraine with almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic,” he wrote, adding that the U.S. “should see that Russia is not taking any reciprocal steps in response to sanctions relief or agreements.”
Separately, Vilnius said that a suspected drone may have self-detonated in Lithuania while on a flight path toward Latvia Sunday morning. A spokesperson for the Lithuanian armed forces said NATO air defense mission fighter jets were scrambled in response to the incident near the Latvian border.
The provenance of the suspected drone is unclear, but Robertas Kaunas, Lithuania’s defense minister, said the object was likely a drone which had entered the country from Poland, adding that he had proposed a joint investigation with his Polish counterpart.
Police searches are also underway in eastern Poland after reports of an unidentified object entering the country’s airspace following a Russian attack on Ukraine.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images
Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.
While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face …
In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public.
The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be awarded randomly. Philadelphia's District Attorney sued to stop the giveaway, claiming that Musk was running an illegal lottery. During a hearing, …
“A decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy wrote Saturday.
Yesterday, the Russians carried out one of their largest attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector – more than 15 critical power generation and transmission facilities were targeted across different regions of Ukraine. Restoration work is ongoing, with all necessary services and all available resources of Ukrainian energy companies involved. I thank everyone working practically nonstop to restore power.
The most difficult situation was in Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Shepetivka, Slavuta, and Netishyn. Energy facilities in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and other regions were also hit. The Russians have scaled up their anti-energy operation and are trying to stretch our reserves and repair capabilities as thin as possible. Between 7 p.m. yesterday and 7 a.m. today alone, more than 320 jet-powered and gasoline-powered “shaheds,” along with loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, were used against our energy sector, our cities, and our communities. And although our warriors are shooting down a significant number of them, the sheer scale and unrelenting pace of Russia’s strikes, specifically against our energy sector, are unfortunately having severe consequences.
It is important that our European partners have already prepared new support packages for Ukraine. I am grateful to them for this. And it is important that everyone in America also sees what is really happening. At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, a decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end. This Act could have helped enormously – and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters.
Russia is trying to cause a blackout in Ukraine – right before winter. Russia is trying to leave millions of our people without electricity and heating. Pressure is needed to stop this. A U.S. sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, financial rewards for Putin – all of this only encourages him to keep attacking. We must not give up ground. We must keep trying to end the war. To end it, not give Putin every reason to continue it indefinitely. I thank everyone who is truly fighting for peace and helping Ukraine!
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 17, 2026
“This Act could have helped enormously — and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters,” he added.
The White House said the waiver was in the national interest. The order suspends the new penalties but leaves existing sanctions against Russia in place.
Moscow, meanwhile, welcomed the decision. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, called it an “important and truly historic moment,” suggesting it could open the door to renewed economic cooperation with Washington.
The move comes as Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine‘s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Zelenskyy said Russian forces targeted more than 15 energy facilities in an overnight assault. Ukraine’s air force reported 332 drones and four cruise missiles launched during the attacks.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., accused Trump of undermining bipartisan efforts to pressure Moscow.
“Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression,” Beyer said.
Trump just waived all of the sanctions on Russia provided for in the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, just as I and others warned he would.
Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.
Trump has proven he will twist this law and abuse the powers it conferred on him, and while he has let the tariff powers lie for the moment, the law as written also empowers Trump to weaponize new trade authorities against our allies and trading partners.
Congress must fix this flawed law to stop Trump from capitulating to Putin and ensure that it truly supports Ukraine.
The Graham Act authorized new economic penalties, including tariffs targeting countries that purchase Russian energy, but also granted the president authority to waive them on national-interest grounds.
PARIS — A wave of mass protests swept across France Saturday, with dozens of peaceful marches taking place alongside scenes of violent clashes between demonstrators and police forces.
The demonstrations were also a battleground for candidates ahead of next year’s high-stakes presidential election: The far-right’s Marine Le Pen sided with law enforcement while the far-left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon backed protesters.
Throughout the day, media reported incidents in the country’s largest cities including Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille and Paris. Dozens of rioters clashed with law enforcement on the capital’s Place de la République, next to a much larger number of demonstrators gathered for an authorized march that started from Paris’s central square.
Media also reported looting across multiple cities later in the day.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted a message on X backing police forces and slamming violent rioters. He accused “ultra-left groups” of “organizing violence” and said looters would be brought to justice. Lecornu is overseeing a crisis meeting on Saturday evening, AFP reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Lecornu’s comments on Saturday evening, although he didn’t mention “ultra-left groups.”
“No place for violence in our Republic,” he said. “We will stand together against those who seed chaos, who only seek to tear down our institutions and who prevent those who peacefully express their demands from doing it.”
Students, farmers and members of the Yellow Jacket movement, among others, took to the streets on Saturday in a “convergence of struggles” to protest rising living costs, sluggish wages and deep disagreements with the government.
About 800,000 protestors took to the streets across the country, according to organizers. France’s interior ministry said 550,000 people took part in the protests.
“A very large majority of people are protesting without violence,” Paris’s police prefecture said on Saturday afternoon.
Around 4,500 secondary school pupils and university students involved in the Yellow Vests movement demonstrated side by side against the cost of living in Pau, south-west of France on 17 October 2026. | Jean-Christophe Chartre/AFP via Getty Images
Saturday’s demonstrations grew out of the student protests that began last month with school blockades and calls for better study conditions, more teachers and more funding. The movement has since spread nationwide — and become a political issue as the campaign for next year’s presidential election heats up.
In recent weeks, the government has struggled to deal with the crisis — which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described as “urban violence” — and is hoping the student movement will now fade because of a two-week school holiday that started Friday evening.
“The mobilization is marked by a very strong involvement of the ultra-left movement, which is only looking to cause disorder,” Nuñez’s office said Saturday, adding that the minister reiterated his “instructions of utmost firmness” to local prefects and police forces.
Footage showed Lyon’s tourist board office engulfed in flames on the city’s Place Bellecour. A police station was vandalized in Marseille, where a group of “rioters” also entered city hall, Mayor Benoît Payan said. He toldBFMTV that “damage was objectively fairly limited,” although the act of vandalism was “unacceptable.” The headquarters of right-wing TV channel CNews in Paris was also targeted, authorities said.
The government has defended the law enforcement response to the student protests despite numerous allegations of police brutality, including incidents that left one teenager with a severed hand and another blind in one eye. Nuñez said the use of “stun grenades” was authorized on Saturday, after a temporary ban on their use against students.
About 163 people had already been arrested in Paris by mid-afternoon, authorities said.
The far-left France Unbowed slammed the police response to the protests.
The party’s presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon participated in the demonstrations in Paris and backed protesters — he also criticized the media for only showing violent clashes while “everything is proceeding peacefully, with tens of thousands of people calmly taking part.”
On the other side of the political spectrum, far-right leaders Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen pledged support for the police. “Legitimate social demands have once again been hijacked by the far left,” Le Pen said, as an increasing number of polls show she could end up in the second round against Mélenchon.
Bardella said on Saturday that protests were made up entirely of “chaos professionals,” adding: “As we said, working France, which is taking the full brunt of inflation and cost-of-living struggles, did not take to the streets today.”
The police and protesters clashed in other European countries on Saturday, too. A student-led protest against corruption and unemployment in Albania’s capital Tirana reportedly turned violent, asdid another one in Brussels.
This story was updated. Victor Goury-Laffont contributed reporting.
“Wwhen you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances,” New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher told Vox’s America, Actually podcast. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.
President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone.
Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.
Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections.
They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?
It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.
And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.
This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.
Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?
Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.
So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.
I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?
Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?
It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.
And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.
Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle.
You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?
Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years.
If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.
I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.
Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?
I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.
There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.
On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?
Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years.
[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.
What should we ascribe that to?
I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?
It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.
By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.
Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?
Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.
One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.
My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?
One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.
Not JD Vance?
I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.
There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.
Donald Trump relished delivering two devastating words — “You’re fired” — in his role on the reality show “The Apprentice,” and years later, he repeated them incessantly on the campaign trail, much to the delight of his audiences. But the president has a dirty little secret: He does not like confrontation. In real life, he prefers to delegate the unpleasant task to an underling.
This emerged as a pattern during his first term, when personnel churn was a constant. Trump often had his chiefs of staff — there were several — deliver the bad news, and sometimes he would even fire people on social media rather than confront in person. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, famously learned of his dismissal from his staff via a printed tweet after returning from a diplomatic trip to Africa. FBI Director James Comey saw the news of his firing on TV news reports. Once the person was gone, Trump often publicly insulted them, portraying them as “lowlifes,” “nutjobs” and worse, never seeming to realize the glaring contradiction — that a man with his alleged business savvy should have had better judgment than to hire such people in the first place. According to a Brookings analysis, the president had a 92% turnover rate among his “A team” during his first administration, the highest of any president in history.
Trump’s second term has been much more stable. Where before Trump had hired qualified people — aside from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — recommended by experienced Washington hands, this time around he has surrounded himself with nothing but the most loyal sycophants. As a result, there has been much less personnel drama. Still, there have been a few notable departures.
The first was the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. After a bromance budded between the billionaire and Trump during the transition period, when Musk essentially moved into Mar-a-Lago, the president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency and take a chainsaw to the federal government. Then there was a rupture in the relationship and Musk departed, although they seem to have mended fences. Since then, Trump has only fired a few people: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. (The latter three “resigned” under duress.) On Friday afternoon, after only a few days on the job and widespread criticism of her tenure, Trump dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zacharia.
The White House has insisted it’s entirely coincidental that all the firings have been women. But as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, “In many instances, the female officials who departed appeared to have failed some kind of loyalty test to Mr. Trump.” (You know how women are.) The departures of these women isn’t because none of the administration’s men have been implicated in misconduct or corrupt dealings. To the contrary: Some of Trump’s male officials and staffers are stunningly incompetent and dishonest, but their behavior has either been overlooked or rewarded with promotions and transfers.
So when reports surfaced that another high-profile female staffer may be on the chopping block, it would have come as no surprise — if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in question is the single most powerful female in the administration.
Susie Wiles has earned the distinction of being Trump’s longest tenured chief of staff, and with good reason: She has managed to stay on the president’s good side by enabling him and never telling him what he doesn’t want to hear. She has admitted that herself, saying, “These seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”
One would certainly think that would guarantee her job security. But ahead of the monumental loss Republicans are expected to endure during the upcoming midterm elections, Trump is reportedly raging — and looking for a scapegoat. Apparently, it’s going to be Wiles. According to recent reports, the president has been calling around to friends to see what they think of his chief of staff — a common precursor to a Trump firing. According to POLITICO, plenty of people have their knives out for Wiles, with one person close to the White House saying, “She’s burned a lot of people.”
Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026, she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone.
This, though, is an occupational hazard for any Trump chief of staff. It’s also not unusual for turnover following a midterm election. But the GOP is facing what looks to be a massive loss, attributed to the president’s historically low approval ratings among the American people. Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026 — along with her partners James Blair and Chris LaCivita — she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone.
The big question now centers on Wiles’ replacement. POLITICO reported there are three likely candidates. One is Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a fierce Trump loyalist known most recently for spending as much time as possible with the president, feeding him memes and ideas on big white poster boards. Another is Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who once told an aide to fill a jar with only the red Starburst candies for him to give to the president because he had noticed that Trump preferred them, earning him the presidential sobriquet “My Kevin.” Then there is Stephen Miller, the notorious senior adviser of everything.
The choice of Pulte or McCarthy would signal a continuation of current practices, albeit with less discipline and adult behavior in the White House, which may be inevitable no matter who wins the job. Pulte is dramatically unqualified, but since Trump once made him acting director of national intelligence, that distinction is obviously not an impediment.
McCarthy is one of the most incompetent and ignorant leaders in GOP history, but this is likely a plus, since Trump likes people who are just like him. If anyone expects that the president is looking for someone who is stronger than Wiles, the fact that McCarthy is being considered should lay those thoughts to rest.
The most frightening prospect is, of course, Miller, who is already serving as the shadow president and would, as chief of staff, essentially have the full power of the presidency at his fingertips. Trump is obsessed with his legacy projects and making as much money as possible, and the only other thing he cares about is vengeance on his enemies, a desire he shares in equal fervor with Miller. If Miller has the full power of chief of staff, we can assume that he will be ordering and approving the most authoritarian policies the United States has ever seen, and Trump may not even know it’s been done. That is clearly Miller’s mission, and given the power to enact such policies, he will not hesitate.
Being far more ruthless and determined, Miller would no doubt run a tighter ship than Pulte or McCarthy. Trump, though, will still be in charge, and it’s easy to imagine that Miller’s actions would make him even more unpopular than he is now. That could make the legacy-concerned president uncomfortable as he confronts the possibility that he will leave office with a personal reputation far worse than Richard Nixon’s and a record of failure lower than Jimmy Carter’s.
It’s not too early to start blaming Miller for Trump’s unpopularity, and Democrats would be wise to start doing that publicly as soon as possible. If he becomes the chief of staff wielding power with fascist fervor, it may just be too late.
The pre-dawn search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday should have prompted a searching national outcry about presidential power and the weaponization of federal law enforcement for political purposes. Federal agents seized her phone and passport and searched her residence as part of an investigation into allegations dating back to her childhood. Authorities have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. But instead of treating this escalation as a major test of American democracy, the mainstream media’s editorial response to the breaking news has been sorely lacking. Rather than interrogating the fascistic implications of a president weaponizing federal immigration agencies to threaten political opponents with deportation, major media outlets platformed the administration’s narrative that something fishy must be occurring.
This is not how the American press normally reacts when armed agents of the federal government knock on the door of a prominent political figure. As media watchdog Adam Johnson noted at the Intercept, the very day of the FBI raid against former national security adviser John Bolton brought scathing editorials from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each newspaper published opinion pieces opposing the raid and leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in POLITICO, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.
The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible.
The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible. For years, the press treated each escalation against Omar as a discrete political controversy rather than examining how the attacks were clearly building toward a confrontation with the federal government. The allegations appeared on right-wing television, circulated through MAGA podcasts and were repeated by administration officials. The investigation was discussed publicly before the search took place. By the time agents arrived at Omar’s home, the political narrative had been prepared. Yet the national conversation too often focused on whether there might be something suspicious about Omar rather than on how the administration had transformed longstanding partisan allegations into a federal investigation.
Right-wing media had agitated for this result for months, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has documented. In July, Fox News host Sean Hannity told a caller on his radio show that an investigation into Omar was underway. “I can tell you this: There is an investigation going on. I don’t know why it’s being slow-walked,” he said. In September, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson said he had been hearing “rumblings” about Omar and that Vice President JD Vance had told him on the record that something was about to happen.
The administration was not subtle about what it wanted. In March, Vance said on Johnson’s podcast that “we think Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” and then described the project in plain terms: “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud — how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you actually do the thing, how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson there was an “ongoing investigation” into Omar and raised the possibility of deportation, declaring that “something’s going to happen” while stating as fact that Omar “married her brother to try to bring him to the United States.”
But not everyone in the MAGA coalition was satisfied. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist and internet personality who once traveled to Minneapolis in her own fruitless attempt to prove that Omar had married her brother, fumed after the Mullin interview that the congresswoman was somehow being protected from deportation. Fox host Tomi Lahren was angrier still, devoting much of her Sept. 12 show to accusing Mullin of using Omar’s case as a sideshow to distract from the lack of larger-scale deportations. “If they want to do an investigation, do an investigation,” Lahren said, while also noting that whether Omar married her brother wouldn’t “get people out to vote.” What would, she said, was “promises made, promises kept” — mass deportations.
After Monday’s search, the celebration became even more explicit. Johnson opened his show by asking his audience whether they were excited to send Omar “back to her indigenous peoples” before announcing, “We were right. Forgive us. We’re going to gloat just a bit today.” He called the developments his “crowning achievement for life” and presented the investigation as a victory for his program. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reportedly posted “promises made, promises kept” above an article about the search before deleting the post. Even CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s questioning why Omar’s didn’t seek to make a deal with the Biden Justice Department was celebrated by MAGA influencers and right-wing outlets such as Breitbart as evidence that mainstream journalists shared their suspicions.
The federal inquiry apparently reaches back to 1995, when Omar arrived in the United States as a Somali refugee, and to her naturalization in 2000. The warrant reportedly lists conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork and immigration fraud. Officials are examining allegations concerning Omar’s age and her late father’s records. Mullin has also discussed a possible racketeering case, suggesting that a conspiracy theory could connect alleged conduct across different periods. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has said that several investigations involving Omar are underway, including one concerning her financial disclosures.
The scope of these inquiries makes independent scrutiny essential. A congressional watchdog previously cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with financial disclosures that are now reportedly under examination. The Washington Post has also reported that immigration officials scrutinized similar allegations during Trump’s first term and did not find citizenship-related issues. The administration has not publicly demonstrated why the earlier review was insufficient or what new evidence now justifies the extraordinary escalation. These are precisely the questions that a serious press corps should pursue relentlessly.
This pattern extends beyond Omar. Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James faced indictments after Trump publicly pressured his attorney general to prosecute them. Both indictments were later dismissed because of a defect involving the appointment of the prosecutor, although the Justice Department subsequently pursued a new indictment against Comey. Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Fed governor Lisa Cook have faced investigations or other government actions following sustained attacks by Trump. Their cases differ in important respects, but together they raise questions about the relationship between presidential hostility and the exercise of state power.
The consequences of this dynamic extend beyond Omar. When an administration can repeatedly identify enemies, encourage public speculation about their criminality and then launch investigations without facing sustained institutional scrutiny, the boundary between law enforcement and political retaliation becomes harder for the public to discern. The next target may be a different member of Congress, a public official or a naturalized citizen without Omar’s visibility or resources. The danger lies in normalizing a method of governance in which the president’s adversaries are continually placed under suspicion while the administration’s motives receive comparatively little examination.
The press cannot determine the outcome of Omar’s investigation, and it should not prejudge the evidence. But it can insist on transparency where legally possible, investigate the history of the allegations and examine whether officials are adhering to the standards that protect prosecutorial independence. It can also refuse to let the story disappear once the initial spectacle has passed.
Trump’s advantage lies in his ability to make extraordinary actions feel routine. Each failure to examine the cumulative pattern makes the next escalation easier to present as ordinary government business. That is how a media blind spot becomes a political opening. If the media can summon immediate outrage when federal power threatens one political figure but offer only procedural coverage when it threatens another, it risks helping normalize the very abuse it is supposed to expose.
WASHINGTON — After months of being outspent by Democrat James Talarico on the airwaves, Republicans launched a massive rescue mission for Ken Paxton in September, dropping over $200 million to boost their U.S. Senate candidate in Texas.
New campaign finance filings revealed that much of the advertising flurry was funded by one highly motivated donor: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man.
Musk, who lives near the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, appears to have poured nearly $190 million into the U.S. Senate race in his adopted home state. His role in financing Paxton’s air support was disclosed in reports filed Thursday to the Federal Election Commission by Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main super PAC and the biggest spender in Texas’ Senate contest.
On Sept. 9, the first day of the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Musk gave $75 million to SLF. The next day, SLF put $75 million into a new entity called Texas PAC. By the weekend after the convention, the new super PAC was up on the air with a positive spot about Paxton’s work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you.”
Two weeks after cutting his first check, Musk gave an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group’s filing. Sure enough, SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC’s coffers the following day.
Musk’s donations armed Senate Republicans to take over the airwaves in Texas. Using Texas PAC as the vessel to book airtime, SLF has thus far spent over $159 million on TV, radio and digital advertising, double the outlay from Talarico’s campaign, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.
SLF backed Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, estimating that a Paxton candidacy would require $150 million to $200 million to retain the seat — money that could come at the expense of other states. While the prediction proved prescient, Musk’s investment has changed the calculus.
“Thanks to some generous investors who have dedicated money to an affiliate, Texas PAC, we’ve been able to go in and support Ken Paxton,” SLF executive director Alex Latcham told Bloomberg TV Wednesday. “We’ll spend nearly $200 million in that race. But again, thanks to Leader John Thune and the Republican caucus and our fundraising, we haven’t had to subtract resources from other states to do so.”
The Tesla and SpaceX founder got involved in the race after his political team reached out to Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main outside campaign group, to voice Musk’s concerns about Paxton’s standing in the race, according to a person familiar with the conversations. That led to an agreement between Musk’s orbit and SLF — Musk would provide $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main outside group boosting Paxton, if SLF gave $5 million and the PAC raised an additional $5 million. The details of the conversation were first reported by Axios.
That windfall was badly needed. Lone Star Liberty PAC had only $35,000 in the bank at the end of June, having drained its coffers on Paxton’s hard-fought primary win over Cornyn. Talarico, meanwhile, was continuing his torrid fundraising pace and was poised to keep dominating the political ad spending battle if help did not arrive for Paxton.
Talarico posted another record quarter amid Paxton’s SLF-powered ad surge, hauling in $64 million between July and September — a third-quarter record among all U.S. Senate candidates. The Austin Democrat has maintained a polling lead for months in averages of nonpartisan public surveys, an alarming sight for a Republican Party whose unbeaten streak in Texas statewide races spans more than three decades.
With Musk’s donation and the matching funds, Lone Star Liberty PAC spent $17.5 million on broadcast TV advertising in early September, by far the most significant pro-Paxton ad buy of the general election. By the end of the month, a handful of outside groups led by SLF had dropped over $217 million on ads in the Texas Senate race.
X not a part of Paxton’s Big Tech crusade
Paxton has not commented publicly about Musk’s support.
In the past, the attorney general has praised Musk for backing Republicans in 2024. He spent hours at Musk’s home two days before that year’s election hearing Musk recount all his efforts to boost GOP candidates, Paxton said at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in 2024.
“Aren’t you all glad he’s on our side?” Paxton said to cheers. “I am convinced that whatever he did, whatever rocket science thing he did, made a huge difference in this election.”
Paxton has also aligned himself with Musk through his role as Texas attorney general — and largely skirted scrutinizing Musk’s companies as his office has increasingly taken on Big Tech.
In 2022, as Musk sought to buy Twitter, Paxton opened an investigation into the social media company for how it reported the number of accounts on the platform that were fake or bots — inspecting whether the service was inflating the number of its actual users to boost its value for revenue. At the time, Musk was raising similar questions. He ultimately bought Twitter and renamed it X.
In 2024, Paxton opened an investigation into World Federation of Advertisers, an organization that represents marketers, to assess whether its members were conspiring to boycott specific social media services. TechCrunch reported Musk’s X, which had filed an antitrust suit against the group, was likely among the social media platforms.
Meanwhile, Paxton has taken on tech giants including Netflix, WhatsApp, Discord, and Meta — probes he has touted on the campaign trail.
“As attorney general, I’ve sued some of the largest companies in the world … for taking advantage of our kids by exposing them to dangerous, addictive material,” Paxton said after defeating Cornyn in May. “In Washington, I will not stop fighting to protect Texas children from Big Tech.”
But Paxton has taken arrows from critics who’ve accused him of turning a blind eye to X and Musk. In January, a group of Democratic state representatives demanded the attorney general investigate the platform’s artificial intelligence agent, Grok, and its creation of exploitative content about children and women. Paxton did not respond to the letter publicly.
The same month, a group of attorneys general from across the country sent Musk’s company a letter demanding that it address its AI agent’s creation of child sex abuse content. Paxton was not among the signatories.
Funding the GOP ground game
Musk’s political operation is also deeply involved in the Republican ground game in Texas, from canvassing to mailers, across several key races. America PAC, which he seeded with nearly $90 million last quarter, had pumped $18.8 million into the Senate race through Tuesday, per FEC filings, which capture efforts like text messaging, mailers and ads but not in-person canvassing such as block-walking and phone-banking. Over 80% of that money has gone to anti-Talarico messaging.
The tech mogul has significant business interests in the Lone Star State. Musk has moved the state of incorporation for many of his companies to Texas in recent years. Boring Company and X are headquartered in Bastrop, SpaceX is near Brownsville and Tesla’s corporate headquarters is now in Austin.
And it’s not just the Senate race. Musk’s PAC has spent about $800,000 boosting Republican candidates in the five most competitive U.S. House races in Texas. The biggest share has gone to the 35th Congressional District, a San Antonio-area seat Republicans redrew last summer with the intention of flipping, but which has proven highly competitive.
Musk spent hundreds of millions in 2024 to boost Republicans, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Trump rewarded Musk by tapping him to lead the controversial Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The two had a public falling out later that year, when Musk disparaged the president’s signature legislative effort and alleged Trump was in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The dustup did not appear to sap Musk’s appetite for bankrolling Republicans’ political spending. The world’s wealthiest man has already surpassed his 2024 political spending this cycle, with Texas the largest focus of his operation.
Other GOP groups are fundraising off of Musk’s Texas spending bonanza as well.
“Elon Musk understands what it’s like to live under far left Democrats,” reads one National Republican Senatorial Committee fundraising email, which notes that Musk has spent $276 million in the midterms and directs readers to a WinRed fundraising page. “He fled an oppressive regime in California that crippled the state with a radical agenda before finding a new home in Texas. But now, the same Far Left Democrats that ran California into the ground are coming to SEIZE Elon’s new home!”
While far from reaching Musk’s investment levels, some prominent Texas GOP donors also came off the sidelines for Paxton in recent months, new filings show.
West Texas oil billionaire Farris Wilks, who has supported Paxton in his state campaigns and directed millions to hardline Republicans, donated $250,000 to one of Paxton’s joint fundraising committees in mid-August, his first federal expenditure of the cycle.
Amarillo billionaire Alex Fairly, meanwhile, had maxed out to Paxton’s direct campaign account with a $7,000 donation in the spring; in late August, he gave $274,300 to Paxton’s joint fundraising committee.
Paxton also received large sums this quarter from the Dallas Cowboys brass. Team president Stephen Jones and chief sales and marketing officer Jerry Jones Jr. gave $122,000 and $100,000, respectively. Their father, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, donated a six-figure sum in the second quarter.
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MADRID – Parties on Spain’s far left have failed to reach an agreement to run on a joint ticket in the November 29 election, in a setback to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who would need their support to form a new governing majority.
The Frente Amplio (or Broad Front), an alliance of several parties to the left of Sánchez’s Socialist Party, had hoped to recruit Podemos, which was a junior partner in government from 2020 to 2023. But with the deadline for electoral coalitions falling at midnight on Friday, the parties were unable to reach a nationwide accord.
Instead, the Broad Front and Podemos will run together only in the Canary Islands and the Valencia region.
The Broad Front is made up of Sumar, the current junior partner in the Socialist-led government, the Catalan Comuns, the Communist-led United Left and Más Madrid. Some smaller local parties have also joined the ticket. The lead candidate for prime minister will be Ada Colau, the former mayor of Barcelona.
Sumar, the dominant force in the alliance, has seen its vote share more than halve since 2023, to 5%, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Although Podemos has only been polling at 3%, its full involvement in the Broad Front would have meant a greater overall share of seats for the far left, according to analysts.
The PSOE has been trailing the conservative People’s Party and would need a strong performance by parties to its left in order to keep Sánchez in office. The more likely scenario, polls show, is that the PP will be able to form a majority with the far-right Vox, whose support has been rising.
“The Spanish left is caught up in a game of thrones that demobilizes [voters],” said Irene de Miguel, coordinator of Podemos in the western region of Extremadura, as the deadline loomed.
Es war eine Chaoswoche für den Kanzler Friedrich Merz. Das Rentenpaket entwickelt sich zur weiteren Zerreißprobe für die Koalition. Der neue Arbeitsminister Alexander Schweitzer macht es für den Kanzler nicht einfacher. Warum der SPD-Pragmatiker plötzlich auf Konfrontation geht und wie diese Machtkämpfe die Regierungsarbeit lähmen, steht im Zentrum der Analyse.
Gleichzeitig brodelt es an der SPD-Spitze. Gordon Buchsteiner und Rasmus Buchsteiner analysieren das personelle Vakuum der Sozialdemokraten und diskutieren, ob Hubertus Heil in die Bresche springen könnte. Zudem wird beleuchtet, welche Rolle die Ministerpräsidentinnen wie Manuela Schwesig und Anke Rehlinger im Hintergrund spielen.
Während die SPD mit sich selbst ringt, läuft der Deutschlandtag der Jungen Union in Bonn. Friedrich Merz positioniert sich in der Rentenfrage mit dem Versprechen stabiler Beiträge. Ob und wie das verfängt, diskutieren Repinski und Buchsteiner ebenfalls.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.
**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Die Auffindbarkeit von Qualitätsjournalismus ist entscheidend für eine lebendige Medienlandschaft. 79 % der Medienunternehmen, die YouTube nutzen, an, dass digitale Videoplattformen ein wichtiger Vertriebskanal sind, so Oxford Economics. Und 81 % der Medienunternehmen mit YouTube-Kanal erreichen darüber weltweit neue Zielgruppen. Hier klicken und mehr erfahren.**
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White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia speaks during a news briefing at the White House on October 13, 2026. | Chip Somodevilla/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: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is out of a job after only five days.
What happened? Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews.
The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot.
“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.)
What’s the context? Zacharia’s remarkably short stint behind the podium unfolded as the White House is engaged in an unprecedented attack on press freedom: The administration is still trying to ban three media outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, though as of earlier this week, a judge is still blocking the ban from taking effect.
The diminished nature of the press secretary job was on full display in Zacharia’s sole briefing on Tuesday, when she took questions from just three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail.
Why does this matter? Zacharia’s no good, very bad week is not likely to leave much of a lasting mark in its own right — other than, perhaps, as pub trivia — but as NBC’s Garrett Haake points out, it’s a very tangible manifestation of a White House that seems to have no idea how to spin itself out of crisis with just weeks until the midterm elections.
Most recently, Trump has landed on flat-out lying about the state of the economy — but like Zacharia’s time as press secretary, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go all that well.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
The underlying trend — municipal inaction — may be infuriating, but I loved this story about “tactical urbanism” from my colleague Sara Herschander.
As she writes, vigilante activists have taken to painting their own crosswalks, building benches, and even installing makeshift bike lanes in their neighborhoods — and every time they do, “they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live.”
You can read Sara’s full piece here, no gift link needed. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!
Photojournalist Heidi Levine is transferred on a stretcher into an ambulance after she was attacked by Israeli settlers while photographing Palestinian farmers harvesting their olives on October 16, 2026. | Ahmad Gharabli/AFP 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.
On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.
Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.
Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.
Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.
Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank
As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent.
Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians.
The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach.
That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.
One link for later
➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.
Before you go…
Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).
The short-lived White House press secretary was listed as an adviser to a Kristi Noem–linked company that aims to use AI for mining. Both the company and she say she never worked there.
Well, that didn’t last too long. Katie Zacharia became White House press secretary just five days ago, but after President Donald Trump told reporters she should “reconsider,” the New York Times reported she’d been fired Friday afternoon.
Zacharia held the position for less than a week, but generated considerable controversy in that short time. Her first briefing on Tuesday lasted only 14 minutes as she took questions from just three reporters at Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail, appearing flustered and disorganized. Meanwhile, questions about her credentials took center stage, as she identified herself as a lawyer but in fact had never passed the bar exam. Her long history of pushing far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon also resurfaced.
Then, Zacharia made two appearances on Fox News, both of which did not seem to go well. Sean Hannity grilled her on her false credentials Thursday night and told her, “I can give you some unsolicited advice. That’s never going to be a friendly room to you,” referring to the White House press pool. The next morning, she appeared on “Fox and Friends” and was asked if she still had the “confidence” of the president. “I-I-I’m standing here and I was able to travel with him through all of the midterm convention — or, excuse me — the midterm rallies, and I hope to be able to build the trust and confidence of everyone around me,” she replied.
Apparently, she did not have Trump’s confidence. Speaking to reporters at the White House Friday, the president said he told her “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.” He added that he would leave the decision to her, according to CNN, but said they would speak when he returned to the White House. “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this,” he said he told her. A few hours later, she was out.
Numerous people online compared Zacharia’s short tenure was compared to Anthony Scaramucci, who was appointed White House Communications Director in 2017 during Trump’s first term, but just lasted 11 days. “To put it more precisely: a Zacharia is about .4 of a Scaramucci,” Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare, posted on Blue Sky. The Mooch, as Scaramucci is popularly known, posted on X that “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”
Zacharia replaced secretary Karoline Leavitt, who resigned from the position in August.
😳 Zacharia flames out on Fox News for the second time in 12 hours 😳
With the wreckage still smoldering from her debacle on Hannity, Katie went on Fox & Friends and received another grilling from Fox hosts
LAWRENCE JONES: It’s been a tough week for you. Do you wish you would’ve disclosed to the president about not passing the bar?
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