Vice President JD Vance just asked Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton out for drinks. Vance’s strange invitation came during a Friday rally in his home state of Ohio for embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. “[Vivek] Ramaswamy is running against a crazy person,” Vance said. “Amy Acton, I have to be honest with you, I don’t know that much about her, other than she was the woman who wanted to mask all of our two-year-olds and keep them from going to school.” Acton served as the head of the Ohio state Health Department from 2019-2020. “Now I did promise Amy that I would meet her at a bar later,” Vance continued. “I understand that she’s into that sort of thing. So I’m gonna try to get to know her a little bit better.” This is yet another shot in a cheap GOP smear campaign to convince Ohio voters that Acton is some raging alcoholic and drug addict. The Ohio Republican Party has run ads calling Acton “unstable” and violent based on a 911 call from 2019 in which her daughter said she was “drinking and throwing things” while on medication, arguing with her stepfather in their home. Police arrived, made a report, and nothing came of it. Seven years later, and it’s the Ohio GOP’s primary dirt on Acton, with Vance even sampling the low-hanging fruit. Acton denies that she has ever had a drug or alcohol problem. She and Ramaswamy, the hedge-fund billionaire and failed pharmaceutical startup founder, are locked in a fairly close midterm race for the governorship.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would lift sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel—a move that will help Russian President Vladimir Putin far more than it’ll help Americans. The Treasury Department announced that the U.S. would waive sanctions on Russian diesel sold to the global market until April 2027. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace. Russia agreed to supply another 500,000 tons in November and then “1,000,000 tons thereafter,” Trump added. Javier Blas, the energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg, observed that these commitments to the United States were too small to make a “meaningful impact” on the nationwide surge of diesel prices. In reality, 300,000 tons is equivalent to only 2.2 million barrels, Blas wrote in a post on X. To give you an idea of just how little that really is, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 3.6 million barrels of refined petroleum products traveled through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Now only 677,000 barrels of refined products are moved through the essential trade passageway every day. Meanwhile, Russia will get the right to sell its oil globally. Congress last month passed a sweeping sanctions bill, which Trump signed, punishing countries that purchase Russian oil. Now it seems the United States is one of them. If Trump thinks his latest move cozying up to Putin will potentially help in the upcoming midterm elections, he has another think coming.

Turning Point USA’s AmeriFest returns this December, and the speaker lineup is once again a proper who’s who of the MAGA-verse. The event, which takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, from December 17 to 20, will again be headlined by Vice President JD Vance. Former press secretary Karoline Leavitt, former White House adviser and far-right activist Steve Bannon, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, former presidential candidate Ben Carson, right-wing provocateur Nick Shirley, former Representative Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., Erika Kirk, and a host of other prominent voices on the right will also be speaking. Notably absent from the list of esteemed speakers is Tucker Carlson, as he was a large part of the reason last year’s AmeriFest—the first since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination—was largely unsuccessful. Carlson got into a back-and-forth with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in 2025 after Shapiro called him and Candace Owens “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Carlson responded by attacking Shapiro’s fealty to Israel, and the entire event became a stark representation of the serious rifts within the conservative movement. This year will follow what will likely be an unsuccessful midterm election performance by the Republican Party, which may in turn impact the nature of the event.

The United States issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court Friday, just hours after President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to one of the institution’s former judges. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions cutting the court off from any U.S.-based financial services, technology companies, and U.S. currency. The Trump administration set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies to wind down their business with the war crimes tribunal. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video statement on social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.” Rubio has previously argued the court has become “radical and extreme,” though Trump has outright admitted Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is meant to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. U.S. officials maintained that these sanctions had been in the works for months, and the timing so close to the Nobel Prize award ceremony was merely coincidental, according to the Associated Press. But these sanctions are exactly the kind of petty behavior we’ve come to expect from a president who’s spent years begging for the prestigious award. Instead, the award went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer with a decades-long career. Last year, Pillay led a United Nations commission that found the Israeli government had committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Nobel committee said Thursday that Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.” Pillay took an immediate shot at Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, causing the room to erupt into laughter. Trump attacked the ICC after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including U.N. Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The White House has chosen its new press secretary: MAGA communications adviser Katie Zacharia. The 42-year-old was previously the senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social. The news of Zacharia’s ascension to the White House inner ring was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by CBS News. Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who exited the role in August to join Fox News as an on-air contributor. _This is a developing story._

Even Republican lawmakers are disgusted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a federal execution. Hegseth confirmed Thursday that the Pentagon plans to livestream the military firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Obviously Democrats were outraged by the plan, but even a few Republicans weren’t on board with turning state-sponsored murder into a spectacle. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis said that Hegseth’s decision was “beyond disgusting.” “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America,” he wrote in a post on X. In his new book, Tillis wrote that confirming Hegseth was the “biggest regret” of his career. Georgia Representative Austin Scott also opposed the decision. “I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” he wrote on X, referring to the violent Islamist ideology. In a response to Hegseth on X, former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it more bluntly: “There will be a day, and soon, when nobody will acknowledge even knowing you.” Meanwhile, Laura Loomer, the self-proclaimed Islamophobe who advises the president, voiced her support for the plan straight out of an extremist’s playbook. “[Hegeseth] is amazing. Truly amazing. I can’t wait to watch Nidal Hasan’s live-streamed execution for his act of Islamic terrorism. We are very lucky to have [Hegseth] ! I voted for more dead jihadists!” she wrote on X. In reality, she voted to make our country more like the violent regimes she claims to hate. Internationally, public executions are rare, but still occur in Afghanistan and Iran, according to The Guardian. In 2025, the Taliban carried out six public executions, and the Islamic Republic carried out 11.

Senate candidate Ken Paxton took nearly 1,000 business trips during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, costing taxpayers millions of dollars along the way. Only one in six of them actually had to do with work. A new report from ProPublica and _The Texas Tribune_ shows that Paxton has taken almost 1,000 trips out of state since 2015, accompanied by Texas police each time at a cost of $3.3 million to his constituents. His security detail alone cost $24,000 a month, while his predecessor Greg Abbott’s cost $7,400 a month. Of those 1,000 trips, research only linked 138 of them to actual business. In fact, Paxton didn’t even record them as such. Paxton took 53 trips to Florida, 24 trips to Utah—where his family trust owns properties—and 19 trips out of the country, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Paxton did not offer any specific explanation for his lack of business records for the trips. “Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” said his office in a statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.” Beyond being a blatant misuse of public funds, especially given how many trips he took to his properties, this is a sign that Paxton cares more about his political office and its perks than he does about his actual constituents, who are paying for those perks. “If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” former National Association of Attorneys General executive director Chris Toth told ProPublica. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.” Paxton has been followed by crises of his own making for the entirety of his time as attorney general, as well as his candidacy for Senate. From his indictment and suspension, to his alleged affair and subsequent divorce, and then his controversial, leak-filled Senate campaign, the GOP couldn’t have chosen a weaker candidate to field against James Talarico in Texas to defend their Senate majority.

With a bit of luck, this midterm election could finally break what we might call the Myth of Multiracial MAGA. That pervasive notion held that Trump’s 2024 gains with Latinos heralded the birth of a new multiethnic working-class coalition anchored around right wing populist ideas. In the ultimate humiliation for liberals, that included immigration restrictionism. A fresh blow to this notion came this week with an NBC poll finding Trump’s approval with Latinos sinking to 27 percent, and Democrats leading among them in the generic matchup by 59-35. But such polls capture only half the story. The other factor to consider? Latino _turnout_. A new analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart—which we obtained before its release—demonstrates something striking: As of right now, the Latino share of the early vote is dramatically outpacing where it was at the equivalent moment in both 2022 and 2024. Here’s the truly wild finding: The _raw number_ of early Latino votes is outpacing the raw total of them at the same point in 2024. That’s a surprise, because 2024 was a presidential year, when voter turnout is traditionally much higher, especially among nonwhites. Yet more Latinos have voted as of now—in this midterm—than at this point in the last presidential cycle. TargetSmart’s analysis looked at the 229 counties across the country that are currently reporting early votes, mostly concentrated in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virgina, New Jersey, and Florida. Here’s the first key finding on vote share: As you can see, as of October 8, Latinos comprise nearly 8 percent of the early vote in those 229 counties, substantially higher than the percentages in 2022 and 2024, per TargetSmart’s analysis. Those gains amount to big numbers, as the second key finding on raw vote totals shows: That graphic is remarkable. As of October 8, according to the analysis, nearly 112,000 Latinos have voted, versus the approximately 106,000 who cast votes by the same time in the presidential year of 2024. “While it’s still early, it’s incredibly unusual to see any group outperform presidential turnout at this point in the cycle,” Tom Bonier, a senior adviser at TargetSmart, told me. “Latino turnout tends to drop more in midterms. So seeing this early surge suggests we’ll potentially see historic levels of Latino engagement.” What’s driving all this? The economy is likely the primary driver: The NBC poll found 74 percent of Latinos nationally disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Latinos prefer Democrats to Republicans on the issue by 21 points—a huge turnaround from 2024, when Trump narrowly led Kamala Harris among Latinos on it. But immigration also looms large. NBC finds 69 percent of Latinos disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration and 58 percent disapprove on border security. Even the Republican pollster who helps conduct NBC’s poll says the issue is a big factor driving Latinos to Democrats. Indeed, TargetSmart’s analysis also finds that many counties with the largest spikes in Latino turnout are also ones subjected to high-profile ICE activity. “Communities that have been directly impacted by ICE actions are generally seeing the largest increases in turnout,” Bonier said. Here is a big caveat: We’re at the outset of early voting, so we’ll know more when early-vote tallies arrive from states like Texas, California, and New York and Pennsylvania, which will shed light on the Texas Senate races and many House races concentrated in those states. Nick Ahamed, managing director of Equis Research, also cautions against reading too much into the early vote because we can’t be certain how it’ll break down. But Equis research finds that Latinos comprise more than 10 percent of eligible voters in 20 competitive House districts and more than 20 percent in a dozen of those districts. Given the NBC poll showing Democrats with a 24-point lead among them, Latinos could heavily influence the outcome. “If Democrats regain Latino support at levels we’re seeing in the polling, we expect Democrats to win in many of those 20 districts,” Ahamed told me. He noted that Equis research also shows Trump’s handling of costs and immigration are key drivers of Latino interest in voting. MAGA as a movement probably has plenty of staying power even if the midterms are a disaster for Trump. But nonetheless, all this could matter a great deal for 2028. Even with Democrats winning Congressional power, Trump will still have his ICE army at his command. While one hopes ICE will be partly constrained by Democrats in Congress, it’ll still have a huge pile of money and lots of heavy weaponry. And Trump will still control immigration policy. Yes, Latinos constitute a swingy constituency and Democrats can’t take them for granted in 2028 even if they win big this fall. But it’s hard to see JD Vance recapturing many of them as long as they continue getting brutalized by Trump’s economy and deportation paramilitary. This Latino move back to Democrats, if it becomes a full-scale shift, may deal a blow to MAGA long past the midterms. Trump and MAGA have pulled off some astounding political sleight-of-hand. They have openly advertised that their ideological goal is ethnic cleansing, recruiting ICE agents and saturating official government communications with explicit white-nationalist appeals. Yet they also succeeded for a time in selling this agenda to Latinos as purely about law enforcement and public safety. This straddle was critical to sustaining notions of MAGA as a multiracial movement. But Trump’s catastrophic economic failures and violent anti-immigrant horrors have rendered that balancing act impossible to sustain. We can’t be certain all this is driving the Latino early-voting surge, but it sure looks plausible. If this early trend holds—and if Latinos help deliver a resounding Democratic victory—that chart on raw vote totals will have captured what may be the beginning of the end.

Katie Miller, the wife of American deportation czar Stephen Miller, has reignited the convivial traditions of Washington’s elite by throwing grandiose bashes at the military base where her family abruptly moved. But there’s a searing reason why the MAGA couple sticks to hosting at home: They’re not welcome anywhere else in town. A tell-all published Thursday by Vanity Fair revealed the glitz and glam of Miller’s over-the-top parties, which have at times included donkeys, food trucks, hibachi chefs, a mechanical bull, and dozens of famed guests. It’s not uncommon to find nearly all of the presidential Cabinet in attendance, either. Frequent partygoers include the Rubios, the Hegseths, the Burgums, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel and his fiancée, Alexis Wilkins. The high-flying guest list has sparked jokes that the Trump administration might need a “designated survivor” to outlast Miller’s soirees, according to one regular attendee who spoke with _Vanity Fair_ _._ But whereas the Capitol wives of old would throw bipartisan get-togethers to bridge the divides of Washington politics, the Millers appear to be hiding from their detractors. Sequestered at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall—where they moved to escape the protests plaguing them in their old neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia—the Millers have found a way to revel and play away from public ire. “They need to do something to blow off steam because they’re not welcome in public,” another party guest told the magazine. “They can’t go to any venue without being assaulted. They have to do this stuff in Camelot.” But accepting an invitation from Katie Miller doesn’t necessarily imply a fondness for the couple. At least one longtime Trump ally told _Vanity Fair_ that Stephen Miller’s despotic reputation is a part of the calculation. “I’ll say I love her publicly, but the truth is I can’t fucking stand her,” the ally said. “But if she asks you to go on the podcast, or come over for dinner, you say yes, because Stephen Miller is the second-most powerful person in the world.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Thursday shooting of an unarmed man on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s words rather than the agent’s actions. “I wanna push back on a couple things. The Mayor yesterday did a press conference.…He said that ICE ‘has killed more of our neighbors than they claim to have saved.’ That’s a direct quote from the Mayor last night,” Mullin said with anger in his voice. “Just for a record here: Right now ICE has in detention 258 illegals that are wanted for murder charges just in New York alone.… [the mayor’s] words are dangerous, and incite hostility. It doesn’t help.” Mullin points to Mamdani’s view on ICE—which the vast majority of Americans share—as harmful rather than the violent actions of ICE itself. On Thursday, ICE shot and wounded 28-year-old Dominican man Oscar Belgal in the neck while he was driving with a 5-year-old child in the backseat in New York City’s Marble Hill, discharging seven rounds at Belgal. ICE claims he “weaponized” his car against them after they boxed him in. Mamdani unsuccessfully negotiated for Belgal’s release. According to Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Belgal was rushed by plainclothed ICE officers with their guns already drawn. “They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents,” Mamdani said. Mullin’s comments were not well received. “His words are dangerous and incite hostility—says the man in charge of the masked, armed, thugs violating Constitutional rights, and attacking and killing people in the streets,” Executive Director of the Campaign for New York Health Melanie D’Arrigo wrote on X. At least 40 people have been shot by ICE since the start of Trump’s second term, with 11 of those being fatal. Nothing Mullin or anyone from DHS leadership says should be taken seriously. Whatever statistics Mullin spouts are easily outweighed by the images Americans have seen of masked, disguised federal agents roaming their streets, terrorizing and killing their neighbors. ICE agents dressed in construction gear ambushing a man and firing at him seven times with a child in the car in the middle of the day is absurd, and Mullin has no real justification for it—leading him to deflect to Mamdani.

President Donald Trump is still going after Federal Reserve Commissioner Lisa Cook. In a presidential memo Wednesday, Trump announced that he’d set up a committee to oversee an investigation into whether Cook had made false statements in connection to one or more mortgage agreements. “As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” he wrote. Of course, Cook isn’t really Trump’s subordinate. In June, the Supreme Court blocked Cook’s removal, finding that the government had not afforded her due process. The ruling temporarily preserved the Federal Reserve’s independence. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to oust Cook. In August, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino informed her that the Trump administration was once again “considering” removing her from her position. It’s been more than a year since Trump first claimed that Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—had committed mortgage fraud by having two primary residences. Cook refused to step down and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.” Notably, Trump’s own mortgage agreements appear to match the same criteria his Department of Justice has used to go after Cook, as well as Trump’s other perceived enemies, former Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump said the new committee will meet next month to “consider the evidence and allegations against Governor Cook.” Cook has not been charged with any crime.

_You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox.**Sign up for free.**_ ## Inside Washington **Why Kansas might do the unthinkable and vote blue** A perfect storm could be brewing in Kansas to elect a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932. Methodist pastor **Adam Hamilton** ’s skills as a candidate, experts say, combined with uniquely bad conditions for the state’s farmers, could be the right ingredients for an upset. The problem is numbers: Registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the state almost two to one. “If there was ever a chance to elect a Democratic senator, this is it,” said **Dan Glickman** , who served as agriculture secretary under President **Bill Clinton** and represented Kansas’s 4th congressional district in the House for 18 years. A large part of that is because of Hamilton’s biography. As pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, he leads the largest Methodist congregation in the country, consisting of 24,000 members. Hamilton estimates that some 9,000 of those are Republicans, 9,000 are Democrats, and between 6,000 and 7,000 are independents. “Being a pastor of a massive church, you have to be a pretty darn good politician to keep your job,” Glickman said. “There’s probably more attention on the pastor than there is on the governor or the senator.” Recent polls have shown a shockingly close race. Some, like a YouGov poll conducted at the end of September, found Hamilton up three points against his competitor, incumbent Republican Senator **Roger Marshall**. An obstetrician-gynecologist, Marshall has held the seat since 2021. He recently came under fire when _The New York Times_ reported that he had sued more than 700 patients who carried unpaid bills, and 81 of those patients were arrested. When the _Times_ asked about the arrests, Marshall’s campaign said that judges issue warrants, not doctors. Marshall, who is endorsed by Trump, is also struggling under the weight of the president’s expensive tariff policies and the war in Iran. Trump is deeply unpopular even in red Kansas, where he is 15 points underwater. Democrats are betting some conservative farmers, as a result, could stay home, and some might even vote blue, giving Hamilton an opening to unseat Marshall. “A lot of times, farmers tend to keep their politics close to their chest,” said **Nick Levendofsky** , executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union. “But I am hearing a lot of rumblings all across not just the state of Kansas but across the country.” Levendofsky joined 250 farmers from all around the U.S. for the National Farmers Union legislative fly-in to Washington, D.C., in September. “You could feel the tension when we went to USDA, when we went into these meetings with members of Congress.” With the fall harvest season underway, the increased costs of diesel and fertilizer caused by the Iran war are now hitting extra hard. Harvesting equipment requires diesel. And in the next few weeks, Kansas farmers who grow winter wheat will begin planting, requiring more diesel and fertilizer. “It’s a double whammy,” Levendofsky said. Diesel price hikes are likely to add an extra $20,000 to $30,000 to a grain farmer’s expenses this year, estimated **Gregory Ibendahl** , a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University. Farmers, who are price takers, have no way to pass that expense on and will simply have to eat the extra cost. That doesn’t necessarily mean farmers will turn on Marshall, Ibendahl cautioned. “The administration is very good about having extra ad hoc payments beyond the typical Farm Bill payments,” he explained, which can help farmers make ends meet. Marshall may very well benefit by association with President **Donald Trump** in the eyes of farmers receiving those funds. But meanwhile, Kansas ranchers are deeply frustrated by Trump’s policies on beef imports. In 2025, Trump announced a plan to bring Argentine beef into the country to lower grocery prices. In late August, Trump announced a plan to ease tariffs on beef imports through the election, drawing the ire of Kansas cattle ranchers. “The answer to increasing prices in grocery stores isn’t selling out American farmers and ranchers to buy votes in November,” **Glenn Brunkow** , president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, told the Kansas Reflector at the time. Both Marshall and Hamilton criticized Trump’s decision. Now Hamilton is traveling across the state, including through its more red, agriculture-heavy counties, trying to connect with the kinds of voters who haven’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century. “We haven’t elected Democratic senators in a long time,” Glickman said, “but there’s no reason that can’t happen this time.” _—Emma Janssen_ ## Outside Washington The drip-drip-drip of leaks from Republican Senate nominee **Ken Paxton** ’s remarks at a private fundraiser continues. This time, The Texas Tribune reports that Paxton, when asked about the federal deficit, said legislators will need to make “some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending.” Mandatory spending, the Tribune’s **Kayla Guo** notes, is made up largely of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while in the most recent fiscal year, “much of the rest covered aid to lower-income families, such as food benefits and unemployment insurance, and a mix of retirement and disability benefits for federal workers and veterans.” Paxton didn’t elaborate on which programs he’d axe, at least in the clip that was shared with the Tribune. **James Talarico** ’s team quickly posted the news to X on Thursday, saying, “Ken Paxton plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. He’s telling seniors to ‘suck it up’ while he owns 15 homes and increases his net worth up to $27 million.” Paxton, meanwhile, has reacted to the news by affirming his support for Social Security and saying that “the fake news keeps spinning the same cherry-picked audio to mislead Texans and take my words out of context. I have never said I would take away entitlements from those who deserve or earned them.” (Note, however, the suggestive wording at the end of that sentence.) Elsewhere: * **Millions are under hurricane warning as Isaias approaches the Gulf Coast** on Friday. This has been an unusually mild hurricane season so far—which has been a very good thing, because both disaster preparedness and weather forecasting are in an unusually chaotic state following two years of budget cuts and unusual leadership decisions under the Trump administration. Republican Governors **Kay Ivey** of Alabama and **Ron DeSantis** of Florida have already declared a state of emergency in select counties, and Governor **Brian Kemp** has declared an emergency for the state of Georgia. _—Heather Souvaine Horn_ ## The Ideas Factory At **Policy Matters Ohio** , **George Boas** argues against the recently implemented 90-day gas tax suspension, saying it’s “misguided in at least three critical ways: It will have only a small, temporary impact on gas prices; it drains the budget at a time when schools, childcare, and healthcare are already badly underfunded or facing massive federal cuts; and it fails to address the root of the problem.” Better proposals, he adds, would include “targeted property-tax relief for Ohioans who need it most,” “strong consumer protections and data-center regulations to keep Ohioans from bearing an unfair share of rising electricity costs,” affordable childcare, pro-worker legislation, and more. **Data for Progress** released a new survey that found 67 percent of voters “say they support the U.S. having a refugee program”—a number that jumps to 90 percent for people who personally know a refugee. The survey also found widespread opposition to recent immigration enforcement actions. _—Heather Souvaine Horn_ ## In Closing **Good Week: Road salt** Maine’s Senate race has given the nation no end of agita, but it finally delivered a moment worthy of the outsize attention when **Susan Collins** , bragging that she’d convinced Trump to stand down on his plans to put a tariff on road salt, was hit by this rejoinder from her Democratic opponent, **Troy Jackson** : “We can’t eat road salt.” Jackson is no paragon of charisma, so we hesitate to call it a zinger. But the humble de-icing material conjured the kind of relatable, of-the-moment idea that usually eludes the grasp of an inanimate object. Could it be a game-changer? Elections have hinged on dumber things, that’s for sure. **Bad Week: Kimberly Guilfoyle** From the moment a pair of wayward Canary Island mastiffs thrust her into the public consciousness, no one could have imagined the story arc of U.S. Ambassador to Greece **Kimberly Guilfoyle** —the onetime paramour of **Gavin Newsom** turned “Mar-a-Lago face” cautionary tale. Now we’re left to wonder: Does her story end here? This week, a trove of private leaks revealed that she’d been attempting to do some Trump administration favor-trading in return for a $100,000 donation straight to her Amex card to pay a bill. It raises a host of questions: What could she have blown that kind of money on? How much of that was spent on the latest pan-Hellenic couture from Zeus+Dione? And most importantly, who hates her enough to leak this stuff? If you’re that person, contact us on Signal. _—Jason Linkins_ **Political Trivia Question of the Day** How many U.S. states allow death by firing squad? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) _—Michael Tomasky_

Republican Representative Mike Collins cannot seem to rise above his staffers’ Nazi reputations. The Georgia representative practically drowned under reports of his team’s ties to extremism during the state’s first debate against Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff Thursday, unable to bat away the various white supremacist connections within his orbit. “Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff said in his opening remarks. At least four of Collins’s former staffers and aides have been accused of extremist affiliations. They include Collins’s former chief of staff Kip Talley; former digital director William Paul (the son of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul); and a former intern, Preston Parra, who has frequently shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account, including an image of himself clad in the white supremacist groups’ hooded uniform. “You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office,” Ossoff remarked at one point. But the hate bled even closer to home: CNN revealed in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, was a white supremacist influencer who had shared vitriolic, extremist messaging across the internet. Collins, however, could not seem to confront the allegation head-on without blaming his Democratic opponent. “That’s my family. The craziness that Jon Ossoff has been spewing out there—I actually had a person put in jail this weekend because he not only wanted to kill my son-in-law but he wanted to kill me,” Collins said when asked directly about his son-in-law’s social media activity. “I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is, and I tell him that too. It’s wrong.” Collins then made a false equivalence between his son-in-law’s hateful messaging and Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, complaining that Ossoff had not condemned either. Ossoff’s response: “Imagine running for the U.S. Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to an audience of millions from your home. That’s Mike Collins.” The Democratic incumbent also railed against Collins’s own track record, recalling when Collins “cheered on” a group of young men that harassed a Black woman at the University of Mississippi with monkey sounds, and that Collins himself had “amplified neo-Nazi propaganda.” “If John Lewis were marching today,” Ossoff said, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent at the scene who opened fire into a vehicle with a five-year-old child Thursday has an alleged history of making violent arrests. In a violent incident Thursday afternoon, plainclothes federal immigration agents fired at least seven rounds into a car in Marble Hill, a residential neighborhood of New York City. Inside the vehicle sat Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old Bronx resident and a five-year-old boy, believed to be his son, Gothamist reported. Belgal was shot in the neck and hospitalized, and the child was reportedly unharmed. _Wired_ identified Brendan Cuni as one of the ICE officers present during the incident. Photographs from the scene showed Cuni in the aftermath of the shooting, wearing a high-visibility yellow construction vest, and carrying an AR-15–style rifle. He was disguised as a construction worker, and was in no way identifiable as a federal agent. Cuni has been named in multiple lawsuits alleging violent arrests in New York City and beyond, _Wired_ reported. Last October, a Bronx man claimed that Cuni tripped him hard enough to crack a tooth, and used a Taser on him six times while he was already handcuffed on the ground. In November, Cuni was involved in an arrest in Queens where ICE agents reportedly tackled and shocked a man with a Taser. In December, Cuni was deployed in Minneapolis as part of Operation Metro Surge. Activists allege that he was among officers who forced a pregnant woman to the ground, though this was not confirmed by _Wired_. During his stint in the Midwest, prosecutors charged a man with assaulting Cuni, but a judge found there was “weak” evidence, and no other agents could corroborate Cuni’s story. In at least three separate cases, judges have found issues with Cuni’s statements or arrest paperwork. Protesters gathered outside of the local hospital where Belgal was taken. “Don’t forget, don’t forgive, Brendan Cuni shot a kid!” they chanted, according to a video shared on X by The Intercept’s Noah Horowitz. At a press conference Thursday night, Democratic Representative Adriano Espaillat said that he’d attempted to visit Belgal in the hospital but had been blocked by federal agents. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that ICE had taken Belgal into custody, and that his discussions with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to have him released had been “unsuccessful.” In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Belgal had a previous criminal conviction, multiple prior arrests, and ties to a violent gang.

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great. At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as _The Atlantic_ reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag? Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball. The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that _it_ would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, _What is my opponent’s core moral flaw?_ and who went right at it with both barrels. He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him. As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point. It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, _New York Times_ –reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa. That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings. He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary. In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

Navi Pillay, the winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, took an immediate shot at President Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. The former South African judge and United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner gave an impromptu speech at Nuremberg Court in Germany, where she was attending an academic and legal conference after she received the news. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said. The room erupted in laughter. Trump has been practically begging for a Nobel Peace Prize for years, especially since it was awarded to then-President Barack Obama in 2009. Last year, he phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” to ask about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion. “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Trump said in another message to Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” Last October, Trump told the press “They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country” during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “My election was much more important.” This year, Trump has pretended to stop caring about the award altogether, although that may change when he gets wind of Pillay’s comments. “Just to be at this venue … Your applause means a great deal to me. You don’t want to receive an award, prize, or anything, unless the public agrees that you deserve this. So that’s how I appreciate your applause today,” Pillay said in her remarks. “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify [this announcement]. I think it’s very appropriate that I’m with friends and colleagues, all of whom support human rights. The last thing I did [was] the delivery of the report on Gaza naming what’s happening there as genocide.” > Amazing moment. Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLO We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize. We are all so thrilled! This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: https://t.co/Crbj6XdiyQ > > — Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026

_The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the_ Daily Blast _podcast. Listen to it_ here_._ **Greg Sargent:** This is _The Daily Blast_ from _The New Republic_ , produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Donald Trump has been furious at Fox News for many months now, and he just raged at the network again this week. But his fury is backfiring. We’re now learning that the White House and senior Republicans waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to get Fox to stop covering Abdul El-Sayed the way it had been, because it was making him into a stronger candidate. That’s humiliating enough, but it also captures a lot about Trump and MAGA right now: the belief that Fox should function as their twenty-four-seven propaganda operation, the shock that many voters aren’t perceiving El-Sayed in accordance with MAGA smears, and the ways in which all these manly MAGA men devolve into pathetic whiners when the going gets just a little hard. Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, has a good piece all about MAGA whininess today, so we’re talking to her about all of it. Jen, always good to have you on. **Jennifer Rubin:** It’s great to be here, Greg. **Sargent:** So Trump’s been in a fury with Fox News for months. He hates their polling, which shows Democrats on the cusp of winning Senate races in deep red states. This week Trump raged as follows: “Fox News spends more time covering the jihadist and Democrat candidates than they do the good old-fashioned Republicans. All they talk about is Democrat jihadists like El-Sayed.” Trump slammed Fox’s Martha MacCallum for a softball interview, and he also slammed Fox for not covering his rallies to his liking. Jen, your thoughts on all that? **Rubin:** Well, Trump is very upset that Fox is trying to save him from himself, and trying to save the Republicans from this grossly unpopular president. It is true. They are madly cutting away from his rallies, because they are so nuts. They are so discordant. He is blowing up New York and San Diego. He is railing on unregulated data centers, which is the kiss of death for candidates. He is going off on veganism. He is so nuts, so out of control, that Fox does not want to put him on. Their rationale is, we’ve got to elect Republicans. We can’t have them seeing our crazy commander in chief. **Sargent:** Yeah, what’s funny about that is that Trump is completely incapable of imagining that showing Trump’s rallies might hurt Republican candidates. That to me is really amusing. In Trump’s head, all attention is good. You’re winning when you’re the center of attention. But he is the kiss of death for many of these candidates now. **Rubin:** Exactly. His poll numbers have fallen off the cliff. And on all of these issues that he keeps repeating—if Republicans adopt them, they go down in the polls and they get killed. Data centers, not popular. Trump insisting affordability is not a real issue. If Republicans say that stuff, they get laughed at. And you know who thinks Trump is bad? JD Vance. JD Vance is no longer using the world’s-greatest-economy line. He is beginning to tiptoe away and say, well, we know things are hard, give us another shot. He can see the writing on the wall. He may be a radical racist, but he’s not stupid. He can read the polls. And with Trump’s demise and the demise of the Republican Party, he can see his own 2028 prospects evaporating. **Sargent:** Here’s where the stuff about Fox News gets really rich. Axios reports that Republicans have privately griped to Fox for months over their coverage of El-Sayed. They say this helps El-Sayed, complicating their efforts to portray him as out of the mainstream. And White House officials privately reached out to Fox this week to complain about that interview of him. Jen, let me translate this. What they really mean is, if Fox lets El-Sayed talk, it becomes a lot harder to smear him as a scary radical jihadist, because people see who he actually is, right? **Rubin:** That’s right. And this is the beauty of candidates like El-Sayed, like Pete Buttigieg, who can go on Fox, because they debunk the lies and the smears. So you’re right. It wasn’t that it was a particularly softball interview. It was just that he steamrolled right over her. And all the lies that they live with, the crazy conspiracies, the smears—when they hit reality, when you actually see the candidate, when you hear the candidate, anybody, even a Fox viewer, can tell that this is just a lie. **Sargent:** There’s another great detail from this reporting. Top GOP operatives repeatedly contacted Fox executives and producers, complaining that Jesse Watters of Fox had commented on El-Sayed in a way that could allow him to portray himself as moderate. Again, translation: by all means, Fox News, don’t tell the truth about this guy. We can’t win the election if you do that. I just love it. **Rubin:** It also shows, by the way, the degree to which not even Fox can keep up with the lies and the smears. Trump is so far out of reality, and the MAGA view of Democrats is so divorced from reality, that they can’t possibly construct any kind of, quote, news program that follows the plot. It’s impossible. The Democrats have, I think, been so down on themselves and on their brand that they failed to realize how utterly insane and incapable the Republicans are of constructing a narrative that makes any sense. **Sargent:** Absolutely. And I want to play an ad from Mike Rogers, who’s the Republican opponent of El-Sayed in Michigan. Listen to him talking here about Trump’s tariffs and his trade war with Canada. This is Mike Rogers, the Republican. **Mike Rogers (voiceover):** _Drinking a Labatt and watching the Red Wings, man, it just doesn’t get any more Michigan than that. And here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war._ **Sargent:** That’s really remarkable stuff, Jen. He says straight out that interdependence with Canada is a good thing, and Canada is not the enemy that Trump is depicting. Of course, you might note something here, which is that Mike Rogers doesn’t happen to mention who is starting this trade war with Canada, who’s conducting this trade war with Canada. He forgot to mention that part. It’s his party that’s doing it. It’s the leader of his party. But still, that is a real sign of Trump’s toxicity, if in a Midwestern state the Republican has to aggressively become Mr. Globalist all of a sudden. **Rubin:** Exactly. And this is happening all over the place. Look at the Republicans who are running against the war that they’ve repeatedly voted to give Trump a blank check to operate. So now they want the war to end. Now they don’t like the trade war. What’s next? Saying the big bad bill was a rotten thing? I mean, this is what happens. They are now caught in what you and I have been saying all along. These positions are politically untenable. They’re not just untenable in blue areas. They’re untenable in red states, in red districts. No one’s in favor of these policies, and they’ve backfired. So what’s next? I want to get out of the war because Trump has driven up gas prices? Well, that would be honest, but unfortunately they haven’t voted that way. **Sargent:** Well, yeah, I mean, a number of them are essentially trying to adopt that as their position. In your piece, you identified a pattern in which a lot of manly MAGA figures are getting quite whiny as this election approaches. One example you gave is JD Vance begging voters to give Republicans a second chance. Y ou also pointed out that Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, recently complained that he’s not in charge of his own campaign. As you pointed out, James Talarico is supposed to be the low-T guy, but Paxton’s claiming he’s helplessly controlled by others. **Rubin:** That’s just crazy. And Trump is the worst of them. Now his favorite complaint is, there are reports—and we’re going to throw these reporters in jail—for saying there are empty seats at my rallies. He says, no, people are moving down to fill in the seats. Wait a second. How do you fill in a seat if it’s not empty? That logic escapes him. But this is what happens when the, quote, strongmen meet reality. Suddenly they are humiliated. They are perceived as weak, as unpopular, and they are becoming unglued. And we are seeing this. So now they whine. They complain. They go running to Fox. I’m sorry, but maybe the reason that a lot of white men are no longer turning out is that they don’t like all this crybaby activity. His own ability to respond to the criticism is so degraded, because his mind is turning to shit, that he is unable to even mount any kind of comeback. No wonder Fox won’t put him on the air. **Sargent:** So you mentioned the strongman dimension to all this, and I want to pick up on that. Like, you see this same dynamic at play with all these depictions of Donald Trump as this manly, virile young figure—like all these memes that paste these young muscular bodies on Trump’s head. And meanwhile, he’s falling asleep at meetings. I mean, that is like the perfect example of the sort of weirdly brittle strongman politics. The image of it is always so brittle and shaky, and just cracks up at the slightest bit of probing, right? **Rubin:** And that’s why they have freaked out at the criticism over Natalie Harp. She is there to try to boost his ego, to keep him, I don’t know, on track, or to keep him from completely losing it. But now she looks like a nursemaid. She’s there to kind of soothe him and keep him going, pat him on the head, make sure he doesn’t lose control. This is the complete devolution of a party that, as I say in the piece, has marinated in toxic masculinity for years. They have gone after trans kids. They’ve slammed Democrats for feminizing the country and for feminizing the military. But who sounds like a bunch of whiny little girls? And I want to apologize to whiny little girls, because they don’t sound this bad. **Sargent:** Well, Pew had a new poll that we should talk about, because it sheds a lot of light on this. It finds Donald Trump’s approval rating now at 30 percent, which is the lowest of his second term. Jen, I think we’re getting into the twenties maybe pretty soon here. What do you think? **Rubin:** I think we’re getting into George Bush territory. Not only are his poll numbers low, but he is dragging down the entire party. This particular poll has the generic lead for Democrats at eight. We’ve seen other polls where it’s double digits. And even more frightful for Republicans is the enthusiasm gap. That poll had some very frightful numbers about how strongly people in the two parties feel about getting out to vote, how important it is for their party to control the House. And once those numbers drop off and Republicans don’t show up, a whole slew of seats then come into play. If they don’t show up, they can’t win. And that’s why the DCCC—that’s the group that elects Democratic House members—keeps expanding the map. That’s why independent analysts like Charlie Cook now have Kansas as a true toss-up in the Senate. The wheels come off the bus. We talked about this a few weeks ago, Greg. The self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity, of doom and gloom, of embarrassment, that Donald Trump is hitting your party. And I think this Pew poll shows that in spades. **Sargent:** So you brought up the enthusiasm numbers in the Pew poll. I’m just going to cite those. Pew finds that Democratic supporters are 14 points more likely than Republican supporters to say they’ve given the election a lot of thought. They’re seventeen points more likely to say they’re extremely motivated to vote this year. These dynamics are all connected to one another. The Trump rallies going off the rails—I think that that’s really starting to get a lot of Republican voters to sort of say, you know what, man, I can’t do this anymore. This guy is too nuts. Now, I think we should probably acknowledge that that door wouldn’t have been opened if he hadn’t fucked up the economy so badly with the tariffs and the war and everything else, and if he hadn’t screwed up everything so badly. But that door is open now. Now that he’s screwed that all up, Republicans are now willing to take a bit of a harder look at Trump. I think that’s what’s happening here. And I don’t want to overstate this. I don’t think the percentage of Republicans that are willing to look frankly at Trump is all that high. But there is a non-trivial number out there that are going to this place. In fact, a recent Fox News poll found in Texas that non-MAGA Republicans actually disapprove of Trump now, and they are also demobilized. They’re not that enthusiastic about voting. So these are real dynamics, Jen. **Rubin:** And you’re beginning to see coverage in the legacy media that Republicans don’t want to go out and knock on doors. Republicans don’t want to volunteer. We’re not talking about the mega-donors. We’re talking about ordinary people who make up the backbone of a party. If you don’t have people who, a month before, want to listen to the news, let alone volunteer, you’re going to have some real trouble. And there are going to be people who look like they’re in safe seats now, because the numbers don’t look so dire. But if 5 percent, 7 percent more Republicans don’t show up, that’s going to sweep in a whole bunch more Democrats. **Sargent:** It is. And just to wrap this up, your piece went very big picture on this by tying this to strongman politics as a general matter. As you pointed out, what we’re seeing here is kind of like a microcosm version of what you see with authoritarian movements—when the sort of facade of strength and power starts to crack, it really starts to fall apart rather quickly. Can you talk about those dynamics? **Rubin:** Absolutely. You know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has looked at strongmen in her book about fascism, really makes the point that there’s a moment in which the wheels come off the bus, the lies don’t work, the mistakes become too apparent, and as a result you see this kind of crack-up. Two things happen, and they’re both happening now. On one hand, the leader becomes unglued and starts saying a bunch of crazy shit. And the other thing is, they become much more aggressive, much more confrontational. Now we hear that there are more people he wants to arrest. Cassidy Hutchinson is now on the potential list of indictees. He is coming after people because they are frustrated. There are reports that FBI agents are very upset because they, quote, want indictments. Indictments for what? Around what crimes? So it is this frenzy of panic that has overtaken the Trump regime. On one hand, they become whiny, crybabies, desperate, saying all kinds of absolutely batshit, nutty stuff. But they also become much more aggressive, much more violent, much more prone to misuse law enforcement. So Democrats—and I know they are preparing—but they’d better be ready for election day, because we’re going to see, I am sure, all kinds of legal shenanigans. They’ve already begun. **Sargent:** Absolutely, Jen Rubin. And I’ve got to say, you know, with a little luck, Fox News will get bullied by Donald Trump into covering his rallies a whole lot more, right? **Rubin:** Please, please, twenty-four-seven. And you know what? He shouldn’t just go to Red America. This Democrat is pleading with him. Please go to some purple districts. Go to more states that are in play. Please let us all see him. The great leader needs to get out more where it matters. **Sargent:** Exactly. Jen Rubin, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. **Rubin:** It’s fun, Greg. Thanks so much.

In Maine, as everywhere else in the country, one of this year’s biggest electoral issues is the cost of energy. The price of electricity is rising at the third-highest rate in the nation, and heating oil—which Maine relies on more than any other state—now costs a record $6. So it’s no surprise that the state’s candidates for governor were asked about this issue in a debate last week. But Democrats should take note of how their nominee responded. Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, rightly attributed these rising costs in part to the global energy crisis caused by President Trump’s war against Iran. “We need to end the war,” she said. “That might bring relief.” She also called on the state and federal government to provide more funds, especially to help low-income families. The usual solutions. But then she went one step further. “I do believe deeply in weatherization and efficiency programs,” she said. Pingree formerly co-chaired the Maine Climate Council, an advisory group that created the state’s ambitious climate plan, and she noted that she helped create Maine’s quasi-state energy-efficiency agency, which Republican nominee Bobby Charles “wants to get rid of.” She added, “I believe investing in efficiency, continuing to install heat pumps, which help people get off foreign oil ... will long term save us money and make us more energy independent.” The magic words here, believe it or not, are “heat pumps,” which Mainers have adopted at a rapid clip thanks in part to Pingree’s championing. And notably, in her answer, she did not utter two other words that have bedeviled the Democrats: climate change. Since Trump’s return to the White House, a debate has roiled the Democratic Party about “climate hushing”—the accusation that politicians are deliberately not talking about climate change. This is a real phenomenon, and it’s driven by the belief, sowed in part by the consultant class, that the subject alienates voters. But as the Maine race shows, “climate change” is on midterm ballots all over the country—even if those exact words aren’t being spoken—because of its connection to voters’ wallets. Rising gas and electricity prices are top of mind for many voters—second only to the affordability of health care, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll published Tuesday. That’s a huge problem for the Republicans, not merely because they’ve been in power amid the price spike but because their president is directly responsible for it. In addition to Trump’s war with Iran, his war on climate policy has put extra pressure on the global oil supply by taking so many alternatives off the table. Energy Innovation, a California think tank, released data last week showing that policy changes since he took office—like cancelling wind, solar, and other clean energy projects—would raise household energy costs by thousands of dollars through 2040. Trump is also perhaps the country’s most prominent supporter of one the biggest villains in this year’s elections: data centers, which are rapidly proliferating across the country to support the AI boom—and consequently increasing communities’ electricity bills. These energy-hogging monstrosities, many of which are powered by natural gas, also befoul the local environment and, yes, contribute to climate change. Voters in Maine, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, and beyond might not be opposing them for that reason—or at least not only for that reason—but there’s no doubting the net benefit to the planet of that opposition. Welcome to the new political landscape, in which “climate” and “cost of living” are no longer politically incompatible priorities—rather, a productively messy coupling. As utility bills rise, the cost at the pump gets prohibitive, and rural America is invaded by data centers, it’s clear that environmental and economic issues are so intertwined that it no longer makes sense to talk about them as separate “issues.” The shift counters conventional wisdom: Political consultants and pundits have in recent years warned that climate was divisive and that Democrats should instead stick to “affordability.” David Schor, an influential pollster, said in 2021, “when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person.” Democrats weren’t talking that much about climate change anyway, but largely heeded this advice, even when making climate-forward policy. President Biden hardly bragged about his considerable investments in renewable energy, the whole package of which was branded as the “Inflation Reduction Act” to advertise (somewhat misleadingly) an economic impact. Trump’s 2024 victory only made matters worse, apparently convincing even more elected Democrats that talking about climate change is at best ineffective, and at worst damaging. The warnings from consultants and pundits intensified. The Searchlight Institute, run by Adam Jentleson, Senator John Fetterman’s former chief of staff, released a report a year ago titled “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change.” That rule is, “Don’t Say Climate Change,” because while “battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Socialist geographer Matt Huber, writing in _The New York Times_ in May, suggested that Democrats emulate candidates who avoid the subject to win back the working class: “The kinds of policies they support — for example, public investments in infrastructure like housing and electricity — will help address climate change, but there is little reason for politicians like them to focus on the issue anymore.” Many Democratic candidates, even some insurgents on the left, are finding their own path through this thicket. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has gone on Fox News and flatly stated, “I’m not going to defend the Green New Deal.” But he has called for a moratorium on data centers, not just to protect ratepayers, but the environment, too. “Keep the data centers away from our Great Lakes,” he said recently. He’s perhaps avoiding “climate change” as a political issue, but he’s showing how we can’t silo the wellbeing of “nature” from our own. It’s all connected. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the foremost example of a Democrat who’s threading this needle. He ran on an affordability platform last year before it became a buzzword among Democrats, and he doesn’t talk much about “climate” or the “environment”—but he has been working to expand bike lanes and make buses free, which will save New Yorkers money and reduce car emissions. The socialist mayor has a 60 percent approval rating, more popular by far than any other New York politician. It’s hard to argue with success. Still, drawing the connection between climate and affordability more explicitly—as some, but too few Democrats are doing—will help build an even bigger constituency for the policies that address both problems, and will sharpen the Democrats’ line of attack on the Republicans. And there are ample other opportunities to make these kinds of connections on the campaign trail. For instance, a new study by Food and Water Watch found that over the past decade household water costs have increased by 62 percent. Privatization, federal disinvestment in water systems, and climate change are all factors, the group said. The biggest increase—a staggering 177 percent—was in New Hampshire; take note, 2028 presidential primary hopefuls. Climate change is not a toxic subject for voters. It’s just not a top priority: A recent Environmental Voter Project poll of likely voters in eight Senate battleground states found that just 23 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of independents consider “climate change and pollution” to be a top-three issue. However, the same poll also found that voters are more likely to support candidates who want to transition away from fossil fuels, and that “they wanted politicians to spend more time talking about climate change and pollution (59%), rather than less (17%).” In other words, voters themselves are coming out against climate hushing.

Donald Trump rages regularly at Fox News. But Axios now reports that there’s more behind this than meets the eye: White House and GOP operatives have privately pressured Fox for months to change how it’s covering Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The problem? By giving El-Sayed airtime and covering him in a somewhat factual way, it’s made it harder for Trump and the GOP to smear him as a crazy radical jihadist. Translation: _Don’t let voters learn the truth about this guy; it’ll make it harder for us to beat him!_ That is so deeply humiliating. But it also gets at a bigger story about how the manly men of MAGA get so whiny when the electoral going gets tough. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian. We discuss her new piece on the flimsiness of MAGA machismo, probe the deeper reasons Trump can’t allow the truth about El-Sayed to be told, and dissect a new Pew poll showing Trump’s approval down to an abysmal 30 percent. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Either Donald Trump is playing dumb with the American people, or there actually is something wrong with him. The president turned to Truth Social Thursday to dispel fears surrounding his recent taunts to Iran, insisting via a social media post that he had not invited “the enemy to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.” But he did. Three times. Trump first told the world that Iran should bomb the two major Californian metropoles during a midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday. “I want to see a tremendous victory,” Trump said then. “You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.” “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego,” Trump continued as the packed-out arena cheered. “That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.… But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.” Trump repeated the threat on Wednesday in Texas, where he told another fawning MAGA crowd: “I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.” For whatever reason, while speaking with reporters that same night, Trump felt compelled to solicit a foreign adversary to attack America for a third time. “I say it all the time, let’s see what would happen if Iran ever did anything to Los Angeles or San Diego. I’m talking about through missiles. You want to see problems, let them hit Los Angeles or San Diego,” Trump said. But writing on his social media platform hours later, Trump claimed that reports of his own words were the result of “fake and artificial news” and that the comments were made in relation to the “temporary increase in the price of Gasoline,” which he suggested online was “a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon.” “And, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles? All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities,” Trump wrote, adding that “everybody knew that.” If Trump actually did mean to discuss the country’s current military efforts and its corresponding (and unfortunate) toll on oil and gas prices, then his attempts to do so were so bizarre and confounding that their sole communicative success was in denigrating the office of the president.

_You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox.**Sign up for free.**_ ## Inside Washington Virginia’s 5th congressional district is rural, evangelical, and red. But, in a testament to how difficult 2026 is for Republicans, Democrat **Tom Perriello** just might have a fighting chance. “It is somewhat surprising that, at least based on the polls, the Democratic candidate is polling so well,” said **Alex Keena** , a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. “And then on the other hand, it’s probably not surprising at all, given what’s going on in this cycle.” Farming is a cornerstone of the local economy, and the district is also home to Liberty University. Since the district’s new lines were drawn in the 2020 redistricting process, Democrats haven’t considered it a particularly viable target. President **Donald Trump** won the district by 12 points in 2024, and Republican incumbent **John McGuire** defeated his Democratic opponent by 15 points. Even in 2025, which was considered a good year for Virginia Democrats, Governor **Abigail Spanberger** received just over 46 percent of the vote in the district. But, as Keena suggested, things are different in 2026. McGuire was leading Perriello 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a recent _Washington Post–_ Schar School poll, with a 4.6 percent margin of error. Though that still puts the Republican in the lead, experts say it’s a slimmer margin than expected, and Perriello has a chance. Like voters in the rest of the country, residents of Virginia’s 5th district are feeling the knock-on effects of Trump’s war in Iran. The district is a mix of blue college towns and red farmland, and those farmers have been hit hard by the increasing costs of fertilizer, gas, and other goods. Trump helped boost McGuire’s campaign in 2024 as a form of revenge against Representative **Bob Good** , the district’s then-representative. Good, a staunch conservative and former chair of the Freedom Caucus, supported Florida Governor **Ron DeSantis** in the 2024 Republican primary, drawing Trump’s ire. The decision to replace Good in 2024 is part of why Perriello has a chance now, Keena said. “Members of Congress are most vulnerable in that first reelection cycle,” he explained. Good could have stayed in office, building a reputation for himself among constituents. Instead, McGuire is a newcomer and comparatively unfamiliar to voters in the district. “This is kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for a president who likes to make erratic decisions and likes to use his endorsements to air grievances and punish people,” he said. Perriello, on the other hand, has a reputation within the district. He represented the 5th district from 2009 to 2011. The district was a bit different then, before the most recent round of redistricting, but experts say he’s still a known entity in the area. He’s been campaigning hard: On Monday, he campaigned for more than 24 hours straight in what he dubs, “24 Hours of Tom.” “The original idea was, I knew that people were working a double shift to support their own families. I wanted them to believe I’d work a double shift for them in Congress, and that became this idea of the 24 hours of campaigning,” Perriello told _The New Republic_ on Wednesday. In the 26 hours that he campaigned, he hit every county in the district. “We want to make it clear that I am running to represent every part of this district, not just the blue areas.” During the early morning hours, Perriello said, he rode along with Charlottesville police, met with emergency responders, and joined farmers who were getting to work at 4 a.m. He also met with truckers refueling at gas stations; one explained that it cost $3,000 to fill up his tank. The cost of living crisis, Perriello said, makes voters “particularly angry because these were man-made problems, and those men are Donald Trump and John McGuire.” Data centers have, unsurprisingly, become a key issue in the race. Virginia has the country’s highest concentration of data centers, and it is also the proposed home of the Valley Link Transmission Line, a high-voltage electric line that would traverse 115 miles across the state. Perriello has made data centers, AI concerns, and utility costs a centerpiece of his campaign and hopes it will pay off with voters who see data centers as a physical manifestation of their fears around AI and affordability. “The voters are way ahead of the political parties on AI,” he said. “You have issues like the Valley Link Transmission Line and data centers that are uniting people across very different kinds of politics.” Perriello said that communities should be the ones to decide whether companies can build them in their backyards. “Where communities don’t want data centers, we should help them fight the data centers. And where communities want them, we should fight to get them the best possible deal,” he said. “But it is really hard to find communities that want them.” McGuire, meanwhile, has said that communities should decide whether a data center is built, but that the U.S. must beat China in the fight for AI dominance. Experts who spoke to _The New Republic_ emphasized that, despite the favorable political circumstances, the odds are still in Republicans’ favor in Virginia’s 5th district. But there’s a larger story at play. “Democrats can win the House without Virginia five,” said **Stephen Farnsworth** , a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. But “the fact that Virginia five is increasingly seen as competitive speaks to what a challenging environment Republicans are facing this fall.” _—Emma Janssen_ ## Outside Washington _The_ _Minnesota Star Tribune_ ’s **Allison Kite** and **Briana Bierschbach** pen a fascinating report on the shifting politics of northeastern Minnesota, which used to offer strong support to the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party but “has become harder for Democrats to hold” and could be key to Republicans gaining the upper hand in the state’s tightly balanced legislature. Republican candidates are playing up issues like immigration and fraud, while Democrats such as state senator **Grant Hauschild** —looking to defend himself from a second-time challenge from Republican **Andrea Zupancich** —are “betting that health care and childcare will matter to voters, too.” Democrat **Aaron Schweiger** , currently running against sitting state Representative **Natalie Zeleznikar** , similarly “said Trump has effectively pulled rural voters away from Democrats based largely on ‘cultural issues,’” and material ones could push them back into the blue. Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to claim the high ground on data centers. New York’s 1st congressional district candidate **Chris Gallant** gives T _he New York Times_ an interview for the ages: “‘I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky’ as hell, he said, using a saltier word. ‘I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.’” _Times_ reporter **Jacob Bernstein** was accompanying the Democrat to the shooting range and had asked him about the photos that the _New York Post_ publicized last month, from when Gallant posed for a “San Francisco fetish brand” in 2010. Gallant initially called it a “coordinated political hit” but has opted to own the vibe. _—Heather Souvaine Horn_ ## The Ideas Factory On Thursday at 1 p.m., the **Center for American Progress** will hold an online discussion with **Eric Zwick** and **Owen Zidar** , authors of the recent book _The Everywhere Millionaire_ , about how business ownership became the “main path to wealth in America, and what that means for the future of tax policy and the American Dream.” New York University professor **Lily Batchelder** and **Amy Hanauer** of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy will also join the discussion, which will be moderated by **Corey Husak** , with introductory remarks from **Emily Gee**. A new poll from **Data for Progress** finds 56 percent of likely voters think “the government should invest more” in public housing, with strong majorities backing extreme weather resilience, energy efficiency, and clean water and air as factors to be considered in constructing such housing. The organization concludes that voters generally support the components of the so-called “Green New Deal” for public housing—just not necessarily by that name. _—Heather Souvaine Horn_ ## In Closing **Here’s Why That’s B.S.** Destroying Los Angeles is a “small price to pay”? Watch TNR’s **Edith Olmsted** unpack the speech in which Trump seemed to suggest it would be okay for Iran to nuke southern California. **Political Trivia Question of the Day** Who was the United States of America’s first ambassador to France? He’s a pretty famous guy. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) _—Michael Tomasky_

Yet another person with close ties to Donald Trump’s White House has been linked to a pro-Russia Balkan regime. Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, works for a political lobbying firm that has a $35,000-per-month contract to represent a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. She traveled there as recently as August. A photograph circulated by Evi Kokalari, a conservative Albanian American activist, showed the younger Wiles wielding a rifle and standing next to a man that CBS News identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. The image appeared to have been initially posted to Wiles’s Instagram story with the caption “mostly work + some serious fun!” Continental Strategy, Wiles’s employer, confirmed to CBS that she traveled to Republika Srpska in August, but said she has not lobbied the U.S. government on its behalf. Yeah, she probably wouldn’t have to do much—her mom would do it for her. As of Thursday afternoon, Wiles’s page on her company’s website was inaccessible. This news comes as MAGA world has turned its ire on two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, who took time out of their presumably busy pre-midterm elections schedules to travel to the Balkans to assist in that territory’s elections. The two men were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to provide counsel on voting issues to the government, which is led by far-right nationalists. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies. Both LaCivita and Blair are connected to Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect them from the White House’s ire. Trump tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants,” but his chief of staff’s child may be harder to disown.

On Thursday afternoon, President Trump awarded national medals for advancements to technology and science to six CEOs and founders: Google’s Sergey Brin, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Advanced Micro Devices’ Lisa Su, Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk. These six awardees collectively donated at least $6 billion to either Trump’s campaign, his inauguration fund, his White House ballroom, pro-Trump super PACs, or other Republican initiatives aligned with Trump’s agenda, a _New Republic_ analysis found. Congratulations to all six individuals for realizing that the president can be very easily bought. **Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, current Gemini AI head** Google’s parent company, Alphabet (which Brin co-founded), donated $22 billion to the Trust for the National Mall, a fund that will help construct Trump’s White House ballroom plan. The donation was made as part of a settlement in Trump’s January 6-related lawsuit against Youtube. Google separately donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Brin himself donated half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee last year, and spent more than $100 million in an effort to kill California’s proposed wealth tax. These donations don’t include other clear links between Google and Trump, like the tech company’s decision to hire Trump ally Carlos Trujillo’s lobbying firm, Continental Strategy, to lobby the White House. **Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO** Huang donated an unspecified amount to the construction of President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom last year, and attended a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. His company, NVIDIA, also announced they’d be pledging $1 billion to Trump’s Genesis Mission AI project on Thursday morning, shortly before Huang received his award. **Lisa Su, President and CEO, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)** Su’s AMD company donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, and pledged to give 15 percent of its processor sales revenue from China to the Trump administration. **Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, xAI CEO, X Corp. CTO** Musk, who also served as a quasi-member of the Trump Cabinet as head of DOGE, has extensive financial connections to the Trump administration. In 2024, he wasn’t just Trump’s largest donor, he was the biggest political spender in the entire country, shelling out $277 million directly to Trump and other Republican campaigns. Musk helped form Trump’s America PAC, and ran a $1 million election “lottery” scheme to pay Republican voters. **Michael Dell, Dell Technologies** Dell and his wife gifted the Trump administration $6.25 billion to the president’s “Trump accounts” program for children. **Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO** Nadella’s company, Microsoft, contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and an undisclosed amount to his White House ballroom. Trump has disclosed millions in stock trades in the companies run by all six individuals.

North Carolinians were blissfully unaware that they survived one of the “great water hurricanes” of all time—until Donald Trump said so at the White House summit for scientific achievement Thursday. All hurricanes lash rain as a fundamental part of the storm system, but the president suggested Thursday that there was a difference between a cyclone and what he described as a “water hurricane.” “I will tell you personally, because I was involved, we had a hurricane—one of the great water hurricanes of all time—delivered more water than at any time that we can remember on record,” Trump said in the midst of a speech intended to celebrate Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink technologies. Yet somehow it’s not the first time that Trump has leaned on the bizarre phrase. The president previously pitched the idea during a presidential campaign stop in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in October 2024. He lamented the role that water had played during Hurricane Helene—a Category 4 storm that ravaged the state and simultaneously sparked Trump’s interest in dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “I must’ve been the first [to visit the area], I followed that storm right in,” Trump said two years ago. “But I saw the devastation, I came back the following week because I didn’t want to get in, it was a travesty, it was a vicious, it was water, the water was the worst we’d ever seen, it was a water hurricane, that’s what it was.” Pretty much everything Trump said about hurricanes at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age summit Thursday was blatantly dishonest and, ironically, logically unsound. Despite the damage it wreaked, Hurricane Helene was not the most severe rainfall event in U.S. history. That distinction would go to Hurricane Harvey, which battered portions of Texas and Louisiana across eight days of rainfall in 2017. He was also not involved. Trump visited the Tar Heel State once to formally acknowledge the wreckage, making three stops across North Carolina on October 21, 2024—nearly a month after the storm had passed. “The power of nature. Nothing you can do about it, but you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House. It’s been not good. Not good,” Trump said at the time. The storm inspired an unfounded MAGA conspiracy that the Biden administration was utilizing FEMA funds to assist undocumented immigrants. But even after North Carolinians voted Trump back into office, the Trump administration made it remarkably difficult for the state to access the emergency relief. Instead, the Trump campaign initiated a GoFundMe where Americans could privately donate cash (on top of their taxes) to help rebuild the damaged regions of North Carolina. They managed to raise $7.7 million, but that money effectively disappeared within a year. Trump’s team distributed the money to a handful of Christian charities with close ties to the president, including Mtn2Sea Ministries, Water Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, the Clinch Foundation, and Sweetwater Mission. As religious entities, none were legally required to publicly disclose their expenditures, making it next to impossible for the press, the communities in need, or those who donated to actually track down the dollars. Hurricane Helene killed at least 250 people across seven states, making it the second-deadliest storm to hit the mainland in U.S. history. More than 100 of those fatalities happened in North Carolina. The state is still dealing with the fallout of the storm: state officials are still working to provide internet and housing assistance for thousands of people that lost their homes to the hurricane, according to a factsheet released by Governor Josh Stein’s office in September.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad to be open to the public. Speaking to Jack Posobiec for Real America’s Voice on the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, Hegseth was asked about the decision to execute Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian in 2009 on the base before being shot, wounded, and arrested. President Trump approved Hasan’s death by firing squad to take place December 3, the first such execution in over 60 years. “Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said. “We know what it is, it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” What Hegseth means by “public” is unclear. Will it be broadcast live? Will spectators from outside of the military be allowed onto the Texas base to see it? We’ll probably learn more in the coming days, but current Army regulations allow for at least two media outlets to be present for the execution. No legal execution has ever been broadcast live in the U.S., and the country’s last public execution was in 1936. Since he was convicted of a military crime, Hasan’s execution required approval from Hegseth and then Trump, which was granted. Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t want this to be the last firing squad execution. In April, the DOJ announced it was bringing back federal firing squads for death penalty sentences. President Biden had paused all executions and commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole as he was leaving the White House.

For what is perhaps the world’s stuffiest, most self-important, and—sure—rarefied cultural award, the Nobel Prize in Literature is also often quite funny. That a lot of people take it far too seriously has been the premise of the tens of thousands of words we have written about it, stretching back more than a decade. Still, the best joke about the Nobel in those eleven years was one we didn’t write. In 2016, the Swedish Academy awarded world literature’s most prestigious honor to Bob Dylan, who promptly did everything he could not to accept it. This was funny in part because we had predicted that Dylan would not win the prize—not that year, and not ever. But this couldn’t lay a glove on the bigger joke that Dylan had won at all. It was a lesson in humility that we’ve carried with us ever since: The Nobel Prize in Literature is always funnier than anything we could write about it. It was a lesson we should have already learned. In 2007, cameras ambushed Doris Lessing outside her London home as she was coming back from grocery shopping. She had just won global literature’s biggest prize, the assembled journalists excitedly told her. “Oh Christ,” she responded. She had already won “every bloody one” of Europe’s prizes. The Nobel, she sighed, completed the “royal flush.” Lessing was as expertly deadpan and awkward as the best of British comedy. It wasn’t entirely clear if she was irritated because she won the Nobel Prize, because she was impatient to put away her groceries, or because her house was surrounded by the worst and most obnoxious people on earth (British journalists). What was clear, even then, was that this kind of thing likely would not happen again—anyone currently Laureate-worthy (even William Vollmann) would almost certainly carry a cellphone while shopping (even while doing the kind of shopping Vollman does). In any case, it was a great video—and one I thought would never be equaled, let alone surpassed, in the annals of Nobel announcements. This video of Japanese fans reacting to the news that Haruki Murakami had—once more—gone un-Laureated on Thursday morning is just as perfect and every bit as funny. It may be even better: > Video: A Haruki Marukami mega fan reacts with sadness to the announcement that his favorite novelist did not win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. In their haste to create an announcement sign, someone misspelled the name of the winner, Anne Carson. https://t.co/uip4EoL0uX > > — Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@mrjeffu) October 8, 2026 An anguished man holds up his arms in genuine pain while desperately clinging to a sign attesting to his love for Murakami (and wearing his favorite author’s signature item of clothing—a T-shirt that is a little too loud). Then the camera pans to an older man wearing a ridiculous pink beret, sitting next to a younger one wearing a _Forrest Gump_ T-shirt. Then the camera cuts again, to a woman holding a white board containing the name of the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature: “Ann Carson,” the Canadian poet. Her name is actually “Anne,” though that misspelling only pushes an already perfect video into the pantheon. The torment, the stupid T-shirts, the sense of absolute, absurd devotion: It is exactly like a crowd scene you would see in the middle of a college football bowl game. It’s genuinely funny. This is what it’s all about. (It is also—down to the _Forrest Gump_ shirt—exactly what Philip Roth went through every year in early October as he sat in his agent Andrew Wylie’s office at the crack of dawn waiting for a call that would never come.) Despite our history of bad calls, we remain as certain as ever that Murakami will never win the Nobel Prize, and this video only makes us more convinced. The problem isn’t that Murakami writes exclusively to jazz on pristine 180-gram vinyl or that he does so surrounded by perfect, bespoke beechwood furniture. Nor is it that the Swedish Academy is biased against cat people (they prefer labradors) and jazz (they have penciled in Yung Lean for 2050’s Nobel), or that they do not appreciate the challenge of achieving truly al dente pasta (they only eat meatballs). The nonexistence of rich and rewarding friendships with women in Murakami’s work or its suffocating sterility may even be points in his favor. The beautiful video of Murakami’s fans ripping up their (frankly ridiculous) T-shirts gets at the real problem: Murakami will never win because he’s in another tier of influence than practically every other “literary” novelist. The iteration of the Nobel Prize in Literature that has been in place since the scandal-plagued annus horribilis of 2018 is serious and refined and uninterested in fandom and mania. It is inarguable and unimpeachable. It does not approve of people rending their garments on behalf of their favorite novelist (who has, incidentally, published an entire book about his garments). Carson, for what it’s worth, is inarguable and unimpeachable, a consummate Laureate for a Nobel Prize now exclusively bestowed on the consummate. The honorific attached to the work of the two scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a day earlier also applies to her writing: It is devoted to “solving the mystery of life’s asymmetry.” Abstract, intertextual, genre- and form-bending, Carson is technically a poet, though that term only goes so far. When Carson was informed by the Swedish Academy that she had won the Nobel Prize, she was at her home in Iceland, where she is a citizen. She told them she was there “listening to the wind.” Writing about music may be like dancing about architecture, but listening to the wind is actually what Anne Carson has done over and over again in more than 20 works written across four decades that have been described as “poems,” “novels,” “plays,” and “librettos,” among other descriptors. But “Anne Carson listens to the wind” is closer to the truth, which is probably ineffable—or at least only capable of being described by Carson herself. Take _Nox_ , among her most famous works, which is a suite of interconnected poems published in an accordion-like fold-out box. The box is not a gimmick: It’s essential to the work itself, which is devoted to the death of her brother. (It is also really hard to describe without visual aids—specifically a box—so you’ll have to trust us.) Carson has always been committed to form—box-shaped and otherwise—but naturally she has other preoccupations: grief, longing, and, as Carson writes in _The Gender of Sound,_ the way that patriarchal culture puts “a door on the female mouth.” That door, Carson writes, has been present “from antiquity to the present day,” which gets at another feature of her work, a deep and explicit interest in classical literature, and the way that it continues to reveal great continuities despite thousands of years of social upheaval. Carson, if it’s not already clear, is an unusually tactile writer. This is true both literally (see the aforementioned box) and in a more expansive sense: In nearly all her work, Carson has shown an interest in getting beyond form and even language. When she says she is out there in Iceland listening to the wind, she’s being as honest as the wind herself—and not just because Iceland is among the windiest places in the world, windwise. (According to unconfirmed reports, Carson is currently in discussion with New Directions about the feasibility of packaging a new prose poem in a wooden box that will contain authentic wind from Hvannadalshnúkur. If the supply chain holds, look out for _Hvannadalshnúrtúre_ this winter, retailing at $89.99, though that price may fluctuate based on the openness of the Strait of Hormuz.) Carson’s whole deal—ruminative, form-bending, wind-obsessed—makes her an especially fitting winner in 2026, the year artificial intelligence entrenched itself in intellectual life and began (or continued, if you assume that James Patterson has had a prototype LLM churning out dozens of fast-paced thrillers since the 1990s—though, don’t worry, his collabs with Bill Clinton and Mr. Beast were all produced the old-fashioned way) to strangle book publishing. To present a thorough list of 2026 AI literary controversies I’d probably need to ask Claude for help, which would sort of undermine my point. In any case, it’s already obvious that publishing has proven to be highly vulnerable to AI scams, deceptive writers, and corporate hacks trying to optimize and scrape the life out of literature. It will get worse before it gets better, which makes writing like Carson’s work particularly appealing. There’s no way Anne Carson, author of _The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos_ , is going to be captured by the machines or turned into a Hulu microriginal. Carson is not just averse to literary celebrity but reluctant to do any publicity at all, something that is practically heroic in the current environment—her reticence makes Doris Lessing look like Joyce Carol Oates. (Which isn’t to say that she’s averse to modernity. There are surpising flickers of contemporaneity in a lot of Carson’s work, and until her win this morning she was most infamous in 2026 for a _London Review of Books_ ode to Rosalia.) Like Lessing, Carson has her (wrong) detractors, and their ranks will certainly grow in the coming weeks. In a stinging 2024 piece in _The Nation_ , the classicist and _Odyssey_ translator (and _The Odyssey_ hater) Emily Wilson compared Carson to two writers: the Instagram poet Rupi Kaur and the Hulu novelist Margaret Atwood. That is, to be fair, the kind of thing that I used to do when we wrote articles handicapping the Nobel betting odds every year, especially in that column’s later, more Don Rickles–infused era. As far as hating goes, one can only respect it. (“Zaniness”? OK, sure. we would have said her prose made Sigur Ros’s lyrics seem intelligible. And that her next book would be an improvement because it would contain no words at all—though it would be “contained” in a perfectly carved ebony box. And also probably something about the whole Rosalía thing.) Maybe we’ve gotten soft, but we don’t really believe any of that. Zany or not, Carson is notable because she’s sui generis. They broke the mold when they made her. (_Shattered Fagments of the Mold_ is currently on backorder. Each fragment comes packaged with a sliver of the other kind of mold, harvested from the fjords of Iceland. Cannot be moved across state lines.) Both the lovers and the haters can agree that Anne Carson is an original, a macro one, even as the Nobel Prize in Literature itself has become increasingly predictable. As the Swedish journalist, novelist, and ace Nobel watcher Jens Liljestrand noted to me Thursday morning, over the past ten years the prize has consistently rotated between men and women and Europeans. Bettors have noticed this, which is why Carson, Canadian-born and female, rocketed up the betting odds in the hours before the announcement. (Odds are next year’s winner will be a European man: Congratulations, Mircea Cărtărescu! And more importantly congratulations to his fans—when he wins you have my word that I’ll buy both of you shots.) As the post-scandal years roll past, it’s becoming clearer that the Nobel Prize in Literature is now solely the province of a fairly narrow set of practitioners of high literature who possess a sterling reputation and attract modest sales. Not too long ago, you could count on some weird thrills and variations—a highbrow but still popular writer followed by a French litterateur whose novels depict a man who finds himself returning again and again to a woman he met once, during the war, when things were harder, but also simpler, when one could feel the tectonic shifts of history and the tobacco-stained breath of politics on the wind. There’s not so much of that going around these days. More than it’s ever been, the Nobel Prize is targeted to graduate students and booksellers, which is to say the unemployed and the underemployed, but also the broodily bespectacled. That is not to say it has been without conflict. The decision to award Carson was controversial within the Swedish Academy, according to the Swedish literature podcast Gästabudet. While you should generally discount anything you hear from podcasts, unless the speaker is Bill Simmons and the subject is a Miramax film about poker from the late 1990s, I have heard similar rumors from Scandinavia, though they’ve all come secondhand and have to be qualified as “gossip.” That fractiousness, real or otherwise, isn’t especially surprising given the realities of the Prize, which can only be awarded when the majority of the 18-person Swedish Academy agrees on a candidate. It seems likely next year’s Nobel will follow the pattern and be awarded to a man, most likely a European man. Still, the (rumored) infighting could mean that the winner will be a compromise candidate aimed at smoothing over internal divisions, which could point to a swerve, like when the then-unknown Abulrazak Gurnah won in 2021, or someone “safe,” though what that means in practice is anyone’s guess. What next? Every fall, like clockwork, articles that should have been tweets pop-up bemoaning the fact that numerous great writers never won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges all died un-Laureated, as did Philip Roth, if you’re into that kind of thing. These tired exhortations are often presented with a whiff of forbidden truth: Big Nobel is trying to conceal something important from you. The Nobel Prize in Literature is actually not a comprehensive prize for Best Book People, these articles insist. Well, yes. There are many reasons why these writers didn’t win (in order: horny, goofy, horny, Jewish, horny, woman, Argentinian, Philip Roth), but above all they didn’t win because the Nobel has historically eschewed the concept of the “laundry list.” Way back in 1901 when the first Prize was awarded, everybody knew that Tolstoy was canonical, which is one reason why it was given to Sully Prudhomme, a melancholic French poet who lived in obscurity and died less than eight years after his selection as Literature’s Next Top Guy. If the Nobel has not always favored the esoteric, eccentric, and non-canonical over the canonical, it has at least attempted to balance the obvious and the surprising. To put it somewhat differently, it has often proceeded from the presumption that the literary canon is always in flux and that no one can be really sure which writers will be deemed important in 100 years time. Today the Nobel seems trapped between its newfound consistency and its old-school tendency toward novelty, rewarding writers who fit the bill (even if they provoke controversy within the Academy) but still tend toward various kinds of marginality. For now that means no to Murakami and yes to Cărtărescu. Perennial betting favorite Can Xue will probably win in a couple of years and perennial betting favorite Salman Rushdie probably will not. Fair enough. In 2023, after Jon Fosse won the Nobel, we noted that the Prize was “so back.” Two years later, after László Krasznahorkai won it, we opined that it was “boring now,” more or less for the same reasons that excited us when Fosse won. Like the Nobel, this column contains multitudes.

The Trump administration wants to prosecute Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was one of the star witnesses for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Punchbowl News reports that the Department of Justice wants to criminally indict Hutchinson, accusing her of lying to the January 6 committee about what she saw that day in 2021. The DOJ’s civil rights division presented evidence to a federal grand jury on Tuesday, and is expected to present additional evidence and witnesses in the coming weeks, unnamed sources told Punchbowl. NBC News confirmed the report. Hutchinson, who worked for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has not yet received a subpoena from the grand jury. Republicans have been calling for Hutchinson’s prosecution for years, with Representative Barry Loudermilk referring her to the DOJ in March and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signing off on it. In 2022, Hutchinson testified that President Trump wanted to join his supporters and march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but his aides and Secret Service detail said it wasn’t safe. Hutchinson said that Trump then tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, and when a Secret Service agent grabbed his arm, he grabbed the agent’s neck. Hutchinson also testified that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and said Meadows overheard the president say Vice President Mike Pence “deserves it” in response to the MAGA faithful chanting “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol. The DOJ’s civil rights division usually handles discrimination cases, and it’s not normal for the office to oversee a case of lying to Congress. The division has resorted to hiring questionable candidates to fill vacancies, including lawyers convicted of crimes themselves. These substandard lawyers will hopefully have a tough time convincing a federal grand jury to pursue revenge against one of Trump’s perceived enemies, who simply testified what she witnessed on January 6.

Vice President JD Vance was asked to define socialism on Thursday. Instead of even trying to sincerely engage with the concept, the Harvard-educated lawyer and author offered a brain-dead, tailored-for Fox News answer. Vance was fielded the question at a press conference in which he announced that Microsoft and other tech firms would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards. “Oh man.... It’s a hard term to define these days because very often socialism … classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So I don’t know what the term means anymore,” he said. “I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you wanna replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.” There are quite a few different definitions and perspectives on socialism. There are the so-called “sewer socialists,” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who believe that Americans should have “whatever they need to live a dignified life” and that it is “the government’s job to deliver on that.” The more specific, classical definitions go beyond filling potholes and housing affordability, advocating for a future in which wealth is redistributed from a small minority of elites to the working class. It can have both market and non-market models and takes various economic and social formats. Regardless of what you think socialism means, it is certainly not “replacing American workers with foreign workers” and wanting boys to play girls’ sports. This was a confusing, unintelligent answer from a man who’s supposed to be quite smart. What does Vance have to lose by just answering the question in good faith, especially as someone uniquely positioned to answer it? I bet Secretary of State Marco Rubio would have had a more interesting response.

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wants ICE detention facilities to be inhumane. The Department of Homeland Security shot down a plan to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane, a government contractor told NPR News Thursday. At a meeting with the DHS deputy director, the contractor pitched constructing a FEMA-style camp, believing that would be more humane than building megaprisons inside of warehouses. But his company’s plan was rejected. “No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people,” the contractor told NPR. The contractor believed that the directive to construct facilities with the worst possible conditions came from the White House itself—specifically Stephen Miller, who was not present at the meeting. “Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted,” the contractor said. “Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I’ve never been in that position before.” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told NPR that the contractor’s comments were “false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller,” and that the comments were “defamatory.” Under Miller’s leadership, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, insufficient food and water. Immigrants have been denied adequate medical care, and legal counsel, and were even locked in cages. As of earlier this week, 28 people have died in ICE custody in 2026. In 2025, ICE reported 33 detainee deaths, the highest in two decades.

MAGAworld has turned its fire and fury toward two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, after it was revealed that the pair were more interested in assisting a pro-Russia Balkan regime than helping Republicans win the midterms. “This has opened the floodgates,” a person close to the White House told Politico Thursday. “The knives are now fully out for these two.” Donald Trump tapped both men to oversee his midterm advertising campaign. But LaCivita and Blair were not stateside last week amidst the Republican blitz, instead visiting a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska ahead of its regional elections, according to several sources that spoke with The New York Times Tuesday. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, according to the _Times_ , has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies. Blair and LaCivita were paid well for their time and, presumably, their connection to the president, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington-based law firm affiliated with Republika Srpska’s government. Trump, for his part, was apparently unaware of the duo’s travel plans. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump immediately tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants” and “do not work for me.” Yet the sudden disownment is a convenient revision of Blair and LaCivita’s broad influence on the MAGA movement. Both have held significant positions within Trump’s orbit: prior to running the president’s midterm spending campaign, Blair served as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. LaCivita worked as the chief strategist of Trump’s primary super PAC, MAGA Inc., and later became chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee. Both are also connected to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect Blair and LaCivita from the White House’s ire. “[Trump] has been livid for awhile over how things have been heading, and he hates nothing more than when people make money off him, especially when those people abandon him like this,” another person close to the president told Politico, noting that Trump could “could cut them off forever” if the situation continues to go south. But outside of the White House, political strategists have viewed LaCivita and Blair’s disembarkment as a sign of Trump’s troubled waters. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained to Politico that “if your top political advisers are not paying attention to the midterms and instead are paying attention to taking money off the table in a foreign country, that seems to indicate to me that they’ve moved on from Donald Trump as their top priority, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that.” Others were simply stunned by Blair and LaCivita’s foreign affairs. James Carville, who worked on former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, told Politico that the entire scandal was “jaw dropping.” “Everything I did, I cleared with the White House,” Carville said. “When I saw this I did one of those sitcom spit takes.”

Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is targeting multiple universities that he claims “bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents.” Vance singled out Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the University of Pittsburgh at a press conference, saying that the government would be investigating them. Vance said the Trump administration believes that these institutions exploit the J-1 visa program, which allows foreign students to work and conduct research in the United States. The investigation will also include a team examining visa fraud. “Something weird is going on at these universities,” Vance said. “They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.” In the same press conference, Vance defended tech CEO Elon Musk’s contributions to the country as a positive example of a foreign student. Musk came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa as a student but never enrolled in the Stanford University graduate courses his visa was tied to, instead working illegally on a tech startup. “It’s one thing if you were to bring in a person like Elon Musk. I think 99 percent of American citizens look at somebody like Elon Musk or Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, and say, obviously, ‘If that person wants to come in and build something great in the U.S., we support that,’” Vance said, before attacking companies and institutions who hire foreigners as accountants and pay them far less than American citizens. A reporter pressed Vance about Musk, noting that he didn’t build his companies overnight, and asked how the government would determine if a prospective immigrant was the next Musk. “Does the person coming in fill a position that simply cannot be filled by an American worker? That’s question number one,” Vance said. “Question number two, very importantly, is this person a truly elite human being, are they truly bringing in a special set of skills, and abilities, and work ethic, and competence?” Vance seems to be trying to thread a needle by saying some foreign students are OK but others are not. Musk committed the very fraud the Trump administration claims to be trying to combat. But the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is the world’s richest man, supports Trump, and has racist ideas about immigration, so he gets a pass.

Vice President JD Vance was forced to eat his words in real time, accusing Microsoft of hiring too many foreign workers on the same day President Trump plans to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Vance criticized Microsoft while announcing the tech company would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards. “We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America. Particularly the American technology sector, we’re the bigger boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ … American workers,” Vance said at his Thursday morning news conference. “So our message to Microsoft is, ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.’” This is a common argument against the H-1B work visa program, which allows foreign professionals to work in the United States. Vance was questioned about the ironic timing of his comment just minutes later, and tried to have it both ways. “You had some harsh words for Microsoft at the top of your speech just then,” a reporter raised. “In that case, why is President Trump awarding the nation’s top technological medal to the CEO of Microsoft this afternoon?” “Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things. They also laid off 6,000 American workers while replacing them with 6,300 H-1Bs,” Vance replied. “And our message to Microsoft is not that we wanna harm your company, it’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” The last time Vance waded into the H-1B debate he ended up dragging his wife, Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, into the fray. “You can believe on the one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system, while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country. And look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India, and, you know, I love my in-laws.… They’ve been great contributors to the United States of America,” he said at a Turning Point USA event last spring. “But I also think when you become an American citizen … one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country, and not the country you came from before.” Vance seems to have applied that thinking to Microsoft today—perhaps without running it by Trump first.

The president is making an enemy out of Fox News. The conservative media behemoth publicly defended its reporting this week, rebuking a wave of Republican backlash that began after host Martha MacCallum interviewed Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in August. “Someone didn’t necessarily like that,” Fox News Media president Jay Wallace told Axios Thursday, seemingly referring to Donald Trump. “But that’s what we do.” For years, Fox News blurred the line between legitimate news coverage and conservative entertainment. The network veered toward sycophancy once Trump entered office the first time, offering buddy-buddy interviews to the presidential Cabinet while dampening the reach of critical stories such as the Epstein files. (Fox News mentioned the prolific child sex trafficker hundreds fewer times than its major broadcast competitors.) But apparently, Republicans got too comfortable with Fox’s bent knee. Once network executives decided to air interviews with Democratic competitors—such as El-Sayed—the floodgates opened. First, the outcry was private. White House aides put in calls to the network, complaining that Fox’s angle on El-Sayed would only help him in the tight Michigan race. But the fury bubbled to the public sphere this week, when Trump decided to take the issue to Truth Social. “FoxNews spends more time covering the Jihadist and Dumocrat candidates than they do the good old fashioned Republicans, the people that have saved America, and are making it great again,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday. Trump further claimed that MacCallum had offered El-Sayed a “softball interview.” “She never interviews me like that. They don’t show my record breaking Rallies the morning after, but others do, and that’s what MAGA is watching. Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way!” he added. Republican strategists also chimed in. Jason Roe, a Michigan-based GOP operative, told Axios that the network was doing El-Sayed a “favor.” “It’s only helping him reach center-right voters,” Roe said. “But they are in business to make money, and he attracts eyeballs.” In another post Wednesday evening, Trump went full Islamophobe, referring to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” (the candidate’s full first name is Abdulrahman) and deriding him as a “Terrorist Sympathizer.” El-Sayed responded to the attack Thursday morning, arguing that Trump is “not just attacking me.” “He’s attacking all of us. He thinks so low of us. He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office. He thinks we don’t know any better,” El-Sayed wrote on X. “It’s time for change.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly launched a 45-day immigration crackdown in California ahead of the midterm elections, instructing its officers to “go after anybody.” The so-called “Operation Safe California” has not been formally announced yet, but two sources told the Washington Examiner Wednesday that operations have been underway for several days. One source told the outlet that officers were “told to go after anybody, they can pick up anybody.” The _Examiner_ suggested that means that federal agents will target any undocumented immigrants, not just people with criminal records. There is no evidence to suggest that ICE has ever been so discerning. News of this secret operation comes as early voting began this week in California, which has been a consistent target for punishment by the Trump administration. Voting rights groups cited an ICE detention that took place in Santa Maria, California, on Monday in the same area that voters had to pass through to reach a ballot drop box. This latest surge of ICE activity comes more than a year after federal agents descended on Los Angeles in June 2025, which led to widespread protests and violent encounters with law enforcement. Of the hundreds of people detained as part of those raids, seven in 10 people had no criminal convictions. A second source told the _Examiner_ that “management want numbers.” Last year, White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller instructed ICE to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day, a demand that has overwhelmed the agency and resulted in inhumane and degrading detention practices. Now it seems, the Trump administration plans to turn up the temperature.

American diplomats are supposed to represent the interests of the U.S. above everything else. David Milstein, an aide to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, was running cover for the Israeli government, suppressing reports critical of Israeli actions, _The New York Times_ reports. Milstein, according to several unnamed sources, quashed reports from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem documenting Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank—including against Americans. Milstein sent a cable from the embassy to Washington praising Israel for cracking down on Israeli settler violence, when in reality, embassy staff had drafted a report saying that the Israeli government wasn’t taking action. After Congress raised concerns about how Israeli authorities and settlers have killed nine American citizens, Milstein suppressed another embassy report, hindering lawmakers from investigating further. Milstein also demanded any communications from the embassy’s section on Palestinian affairs go through him. This led to the embassy’s cables dropping from several per week to only a few per month, sources told the _Times_. They said that this kind of intervention is unprecedented for the embassy, and is preventing the U.S. government from getting accurate information about Israel from diplomatic channels. Trump has rarely criticized Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his second term as president, and he chose to appoint Huckabee, a Christian Zionist and staunch supporter of Israel, as ambassador. It’s not clear if Milstein’s actions have Huckabee’s blessing, but human rights groups and U.S. allies have raised concerns about all of these issues. Last month, Canada, France, and the U.K. announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That’s unlikely to happen in the U.S. anytime soon—and in fact the U.S. has threatened tariffs in response to the sanctions—but one would still expect U.S. diplomats to accurately document what is happening where they are stationed. In the case of Israel, however, the truth is actively being hidden.

President Donald Trump did nothing as one of his rallygoers attacked a peaceful protester. Trump struggled to get through his address at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, Wednesday night as his remarks were repeatedly interrupted by at least seven separate protesters. As one demonstrator made his way out of the arena through the jeering crowd, a rallygoer in a red hat seized the protester’s shirt and yanked his hair, pulling him to the floor. Other rallygoers appeared to intervene—but not the president of the United States. Instead, he basked in the roar of an angry crowd, wandering aimlessly around the stage. “Let me ask you a question, is there anything like a Trump rally? Is there anything like it?” Trump asked, smiling broadly. In a separate incident, a rallygoer wearing a white cowboy hat stalked after two protesters as they were directed out of the arena. The rallygoer smacked one of the protesters’ baseball hats off and followed them threateningly, pumping his fists. He even appeared to lunge or kick one of the protesters, before being held back by a security officer. Trump’s unwillingness to condemn his supporters’ violence (and in many cases, his decision to encourage it) is obviously nothing new. But the failure to address violence that unfolds before his own eyes is still shameful behavior from any leader—let alone the president of the United States. Speaking at the rally, the president told demonstrators to “get the hell out of here,” and claimed they were “paid by enemies of our nation.” After the sixth interruption, Trump tried to laugh it off. “You know, I never talk about looks of a person, but those are really bad looking people,” Trump said.

More audio of Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton has leaked, this time featuring the embattled lawmaker telling people depending on federal benefits programs to “suck it up” and prepare for cuts. “The growing out of this is part of the solution, and making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending—you’re gonna have to do it,” Paxton said at the same donor meeting that three other leaks have sprouted from, as first reported by The Texas Tribune. “There is no solution. That’s just the reality. We have to suck it up,” he continued. “From Republican presidents to Democrats, we’ve been spending like crazy. And no one seems to care. And it’s gonna bankrupt us.” Just about everything Paxton has said behind closed doors suggests that he is both out of step with President Trump and out of touch with the average Texas voter. “At this point I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the next leak from this fundraiser is: ‘Honestly, you should probably just vote for Talarico,’” joked liberal podcaster Jon Favreau. In previous leaks from the meeting last month, Paxton called Trump a drag on his campaign and said Trump’s war on Iran was raising prices and making it harder for him to campaign. Aside from the embarrassing amount of leaks, Paxton sounds like more of a “Never Trump” Republican rather than a willing Trump loyalist, as he portrayed himself during the primary election. This all comes as his long-awaited showdown with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico draws nearer, with Talarico leading most polls by a small margin. > NEW @TexasTribune: Ken Paxton privately suggested he'd support cutting federal benefit programs, per new leaked audio. Asked about reducing the deficit, he said: “Making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending - you're gonna have to do it." "We have to suck it up." https://t.co/mxmb45Me2o > > — Kayla Guo (@kaylaguo_) October 8, 2026

When Donald Trump gives, he expects something in return. The revelation came amid an attack Wednesday night against Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, who Trump apparently believed should have become a Republican after he received a presidential pardon last year. Speaking at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, Trump insisted that he never expects quid pro quos when it comes to presidential pardons. But he then proved that untrue minutes later. “I made no deal,” Trump declared, recalling his exchange with Cuellar. “I didn’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll give you the pardons if you turn Republican.’ I didn’t say that. No, I could have done that very easily but—where a crooked politician would have done that.” “But I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar might say, ‘Wow, he did something really wonderful, you know, somebody has a heart.’” The president then suggested Cuellar had been villainized by the Democratic Party and that he would have been welcomed into the Republican Party with open arms “if we asked.” Just moments afterward, Trump mused about how Cuellar’s daughters had “begged” Trump to pardon their father, and wished that they had used the “same level of charm to convince their mother and father to do the right thing.” “I guess I expected maybe he wouldn’t run, or maybe he’d run maybe as a Republican, I don’t know,” Trump said. Trump had shared similar thoughts on Truth Social hours prior when endorsing Cuellar’s opponent. The president accused Cuellar of a “tremendous act of disloyalty” and said Cuellar was an “extremely ungrateful person.” “Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a long-term jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary,” Trump added. The FBI raided Cuellar’s home and office in 2022 as part of a federal probe into the Texas Democrat’s ties to Azerbaijan. Cuellar and his wife faced a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy—including allegations that they improperly accepted $600,000 in bribes from the central Asian country—before Trump intervened. At the time, Trump chalked up the charges to an improper intervention by the Biden administration, suggesting that his predecessor had weaponized the legal system to punish Cuellar for criticizing America’s immigration processes.

President Donald Trump clearly gets a kick out of imagining Iran destroying American cities. Speaking at a rally in San Antonio Wednesday night, Trump doubled down on the outlandish fallacy that anyone complaining about high gas prices should consider the alternative: that Iran could strike Los Angeles or San Diego. “But you wanna see trauma? You wanna see problems? And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit—you wanna see a horror show, you wanna see problems? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles. And you wanna see some bad things happen. You wanna see a country that would be in freefall,” Trump said. “We’re not gonna let that happen. We protect our cities, we protect our country.” Trump made a similar remark at a rally in Nebraska earlier this week, where he said, “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.” Some viewers believed that Trump had issued an invitation to Iran to destroy two American cities. The rally crowd even burst into cheers when the president evoked the imminent destruction of California, a consistent target of his administration. But Trump’s team insisted that his comment was simply taken out of context: His “let them” comment was a warning of what could happen if the United States did not intervene, and that the “small price to pay” referred to high prices of goods and services. “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X. Trump’s decision to revisit his controversial comment clarifies everything: clearly he likes to evoke the destruction of these blue cities in order to illustrate his nonsensical point about high gas prices to crowds in red states. His dramatics are just another way to sidestep blame for high prices. It’s worth noting that Trump’s fallacy is a false one. Multiple former Trump administration officials have contradicted the president’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program presented any imminent threat to national security. Trump himself claimed earlier this week that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated in June 2025, a full eight months before he ordered attacks in March 2026.

Kimberly Guilfoyle begged a donor to send her $100,000 without leaving a trace as part of her pay-to-play grift—in the midst of her confirmation process last year to become U.S. ambassador to Greece. The Wall Street Journal reports that Guilfoyle urged Trump donor and former congressional candidate Eric Deters to send her hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in exchange she’d make sure the administration took special care of Deters and his personal tax issues. Guilfoyle is also the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom and ex-fiance of Donald Trump Jr. “You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, that’s all that will show,” Guilfoyle wrote to Deters on July 3, 2025. “Please. And I have you down as one of my special guests for my hearing in DC on Wednesday.... I can get you in for a meeting on the matter we discussed please get back to me ASAP.” “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she said, referring to the payment. Guilfoyle was confirmed as ambassador just months later in September. Deters claimed that while he and Guilfoyle exchanged texts and promises for months (“I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” she told him at one point), he never sent her any money. Deters is the same former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate who hosts the new defunct Freedom Fest in Kentucky. Guilfoyle was one of the event’s earliest headliners, as Deters paid her $300,000 to speak there starting in 2020. In 2024, Deters sought out Guilfoyle’s help with an extradition request for Abubakar Atiq Durrani, an Ohio doctor who fled to Pakistan after he was charged with defrauding insurers with unnecessary spinal surgeries on kids. Deters, who was representing the families of the children, ran into a problem with Durrani’s malpractice insurer MedPro, which held it wasn’t liable for his actions. MedProinstead sued Deters for “a calculated scheme to extract payments” from the company, “at first through abusive litigation, and by ultimately outright extortion through threats of violence and murder and by blackmail against the company’s CEO.” The accusations—which Deters denies—led him to reach out to Guilfoyle, even telling her he’d pay her $1 million to get him a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show to draw attention to his situation. Guilfoyle and Deters began to speak more frequently after her nomination as ambassador. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” Guilfoyle wrote in one message to Deters. It’s really dangerous … and you could simply just call me on signal.” She even chastised him for speaking to a producer on her podcast about their deal, saying, “it’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.... Do not say we have any arrangement. What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.” Deters claims he didn’t end up making any payments to Guilfoyle and had “not received one favor.” Guilfoyle’s attorneys deny that the messages between her and Deters are legitimate, and claim that if anything he owed her speaking fees from his defunct Freedom Fest. Deters denies that. This is a massive ethics question that the administration will likely try its hardest to ignore, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio did before leaving for Greece. “I’m not going to comment,” he told reporters.

President Trump’s meeting with convicted election denier Tina Peters on Monday concerned some disturbing plans for the upcoming midterm elections. Peter Ticktin, Peters’s attorney, said that she proposed that Trump seize ballots from across the country and conduct a hand recount, reports Kyle Clark of Colorado’s 9 News. “It’s a good plan, and I do think that something like that is probably going to happen,” Ticktin said to right-wing podcaster Joe Oltmann in Colorado. “In the event that we have this kind of disaster, and everything goes wrong, and the vote is crazy, and the senatorial races put it up there to remove the president and the vice president, in that nightmare, should it come true, Donald Trump is not going to relinquish control again.” Oltmann has called for the state’s top Democrats to be executed in the past, and said on the podcast that violence is going to be necessary. Ticktin said on the podcast that Trump should be in control of America’s weapons if the country descends into civil war. “So, he’s got nothing to lose, the nation has nothing to lose, it’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it would be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin said. Normally, this kind of speculation would be written off as a conspiracy theory from the fringe. But Peters was invited to the White House for a meeting, and had her prison sentence for election tampering commuted after Trump put pressure on Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis. Trump is desperate to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress after the midterms, and seems willing to entertain all kinds of crazy ideas.

_The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the_ Daily Blast _podcast. Listen to it_ here_._ **Greg Sargent:** This is _The Daily Blast_ from _The New Republic_ , produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Today we’re checking in on the state of play in the battle for the House of Representatives. New reporting indicates that Republicans have entered into a triage stage, meaning they’re giving up on some seats as all but lost, while urgently sending reinforcements to other ones that should be safe. These leaks are growing more humiliating for Trump, as they’re depicting a political environment that’s sharply deteriorating even as Trump keeps insisting his own numbers are better than ever. On top of that, the polling averages and the forecasts continue to trend toward Democrats. To make sense of it all, we’re talking to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the forecasting site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Kyle, great to have you on. **Kyle Kondik:** Hey, Greg. **Sargent:** So the Fifty Plus One polling averages have Democrats up a clean eight points in the generic House ballot matchup. They have Trump’s approval down below 35 percent, a key threshold. Nate Silver’s website just declared this: “Democrats are in an excellent position to retake the House, and are also favored to retake the Senate.” Kyle, taking the Senate out of this, do you agree with Nate on the House there? **Kondik:** Yeah, I do. You know, we’ll see where the ultimate seat gain lands, but things look very good for Democrats in the House. I mean, really, I think Democrats have been favored in the House the whole cycle. Redistricting added a curveball into all of that, although I think even at their worst point, the Democrats were still favored in the House. And a lot of us were kind of waiting to see what happened after Labor Day in terms of the polling. And the numbers, if anything, have gotten better for Democrats since then. And you know, maybe you see some rebound for Republicans a little bit, but the picture looks pretty bleak for them in the House, and increasingly maybe in the Senate too. Although I guess I personally don’t see a clear favorite in the Senate. I know that some of the sort of poll-based forecasts do. I’m not quite ready to go there yet, but it’s undeniable the numbers have been getting better. **Sargent:** Well, let’s talk about Sabato’s Crystal Ball, your site, and how it right now ranks things. You guys have 16 Republican-held House seats as toss-ups, versus only four Democratic-held ones being toss-ups. You guys have another eight GOP-held seats as leans Democratic. So that’s at least 24 GOP-held seats that are quite gettable for Dems right now. Can you talk about that pool of seats and explain what that big picture means? **Kondik:** Yeah. Look, I think, you know, again, particularly after Labor Day, we’ve been kind of steadily moving races toward the Democrats, sort of as we pick up on, you know, micro-level factors, but also in acknowledgment of what the macro, the big-picture factors are. And I feel like our moves have generally been vindicated by some of the reporting. You know, Tom Kean in New Jersey Seven appears to be an underdog. He’s an underdog in our ratings. That’s just one of them. Another one is Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which is Don Bacon’s seat. That’s one of few Harris-district Republican seats that the Republicans held in 2024. Don Bacon is retiring. That looks increasingly like a relatively safe Democratic pickup. So again, there’s just been a lot of movement, to the point where I think for much of the cycle we were thinking maybe the Democrats are in the 220s. It is easier to imagine them getting into 230s now, I think. I don’t think that’s exactly where we’re going to land. I’d probably be right around 230 at this point, best guess. But that’s only kind of trended upward for me over the course of the cycle. **Sargent:** Well, I will say 230 is actually pretty striking, given that during the whole battle over redistricting, the mid-cycle redistricting efforts, the gerrymandering that Republicans did, it was really starting to look as if the Democratic gain would be much more trimmed. Democrats really sort of had to trim their sails. That was sort of the prevailing take. But 230, you’re getting up into wave territory, right? **Kondik:** You’ve got to remember that the most recent House elections have produced very small majorities. So just 222 to 213 for Democrats in 2020. Then it flipped, 222 to 213 for Republicans in 2022. That was followed by just 220 seats for the majority for Republicans in 2024. So we’ve been in a period of very closely contested House majorities. And the House map did get better for Republicans through the net effects of all the gerrymandering and redistricting that happened. And if this was a closely contested national election, you could see a world in which the Republican advantage on the House map that they have now, that that would have saved the House majority for them when otherwise maybe Democrats would win it. But when Democrats are leading by eight or nine points on the House generic ballot, and you just see what’s going on in these individual House races—I think Republicans were hoping they could build a wall big enough to overcome a Democratic wave. That I don’t think has happened. **Sargent:** Well, Republicans agree with you. Politico reports that Republicans are leaking that they’ve now entered into triage mode. Before we get to the details, I just want to read some quotes. One Republican operative tells Politico there are, “fires everywhere.” Another GOP operative says this: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.” Kyle, in 2006, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, including around thirty seats. If Republicans think that the situation could keep deteriorating to the point of something like that, it’s pretty striking, no? **Kondik:** Yeah. And it’s also worth remembering that Democrats did really well in 2006. They won the Senate and the House, unlike 2018. But part of the dynamic in 2006 is that there actually were a number of swing-district Republican survivors. So like Jim Gerlach and Chris Shays—some old names from the past. Republicans had kind of blue-leaning or purple seats. But Democrats made it up because they won in some pretty red-leaning territory. And that’s what we’re watching for in the Senate. And we also could be watching for that in the U.S. House, as Democrats are both defending some of their own incumbents in redistricted double-digit Trump seats, and also trying to flip some double-digit Trump seats. And they appear to have some opportunities to do that. **Sargent:** And it seems like some of these dynamics are in place right now. You’ve got certain types of Republican survivor types still out there, like Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, right? Maybe someone like him hangs on. But at the same time, the national environment is so bad for Republicans that even as some of those types survive in some places, in other places, you know, Republicans go down in districts that are like Trump plus 10. Is that sort of what we could expect? **Kondik:** Yeah. I’m going to be publishing something a little bit after this podcast comes out about, you know, the possibility that there may be no Harris-district Republicans left. There were only three in 2024. Brian Fitzpatrick is one of them. We mentioned the open seat, Nebraska Two—that’s another one. And then Mike Lawler in New York Seventeen, who’s in a narrow Harris seat. And he’s in, I think, basically a toss-up race. I think Fitzpatrick is still favored. And then, because of redistricting, you also have a handful of other seats that became Harris-district Republican seats but are going to flip, like a bunch of seats out in California, for instance. But even in the bad years for the president’s party, like 2018, there still were three Clinton-district Republicans, including Fitzpatrick back then too, who survived. So it would be historically odd for there to be no Harris-district Republicans. And again, I don’t think we’re quite going to get there, but it may be that there’s only one or two left. **Sargent:** I just want to underscore the importance of that. You’re basically saying that if it’s a very good night for Democrats, it’s at least within the realm of possibility that Republicans have no House seats in districts that Kamala Harris won. Zero. **Kondik:** That’s right. That’s right. Again, Fitzpatrick is the toughest one there. And again, I still think he’s favored. **Sargent:** So Kyle, to get a bit more specific about what this triage mode means for Republicans. They’re now pulling money out of a number of seats that are the easiest tier for Democrats to contest, and putting more money into outer-tier races that are much, much harder for Democrats to win—meaning those are now in danger, and they’re giving up on these low-tier seats. A couple of examples. National Republicans just cut their spending to Nebraska’s Second District. They’ve pulled out of New Jersey’s Ninth District. What do you make of those shifts? **Kondik:** New Jersey Nine is a Democratic seat, but it is a Trump-won seat. That’s Nellie Pou’s district. That was a seat that swung—it’s heavily Latino, it’s like North Jersey—it swung pretty heavily to Republicans in 2024. Seems poised to swing back in 2026. And so I think Republicans are hoping to compete there, but it just never really developed. And then Nebraska Two, we talked about, as a seat that’s, you know, historically it’s pretty hard for—you know, if the president’s party has an open seat in a hostile midterm that the other party won for president, that’s a seat that they generally will end up losing. **Sargent:** Well, I’ll tell you what really struck me as well, Kyle. Republicans just added more money to Kentucky’s Sixth District, which Trump won by 15 points. **Kondik:** It is interesting that that race is now kind of more on the battlefield. We have it as leans Republican. So we still favor the Republicans there, but we had it as likely as of, I think, a few weeks ago. And the outside spending is kind of telling that it’s a pretty hot race. **Sargent:** They need to send—meaning Republicans need to send—big-time reinforcements in to defend a Republican-held district that Trump won by 15 points. **Kondik:** Yeah. And look, think about this too. The president’s approval rating is maybe twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two points underwater, maybe more, maybe less, depending on the poll you look at. A district that Trump won by fifteen—in 2018, his approval rating probably would have been positive in a district like that. Maybe just narrowly, but because his net approval was about minus ten around the time of the 2018 election. Minus twenty, his approval is probably underwater in a Kentucky Six. And again, there are going to be some people who disapprove of the president but who vote Republican in their, you know, local House and Senate race. But you do see a big battlefield, and I think part of it is just the president’s approval rating being so low. **Sargent:** And we’re seeing him underwater in states where he won by double digits as well. **Kondik:** Yeah, and that’s something that’s also been striking about the Senate races this year compared to 2018. Because if you go back and look at the exit polls of the big Senate races—you know, the Republicans did pretty well. I mean, they ended up coming out of that cycle with one extra seat. They had lost the Alabama special election in late 2017, but they came in with, I think it was, 52 in 2016, and they came out of the cycle with 53. And if you look at the exit polling in those big Senate races, Trump’s approval was usually positive in the key races. I mean, particularly in like a North Dakota or an Indiana or Missouri, that Republicans flipped. But even in some of the more competitive kind of battleground races—this time it looks like the president’s approval rating is underwater in Alaska, and Ohio, Texas, and Iowa, which are all, you know, double-digit Trump states, where Trump would have had positive approval, I think, in the 2018 context. **Sargent:** Well, can you step back and sum up the big picture right now? How deep into red territory are Democrats plausibly and credibly reaching right now? What tier of seats do you think they’re going to flip a number of? Is there some way to get a handle on this in a kind of postcard way? **Kondik:** I think that coming out of this election, they’re probably going to hold several double-digit Trump districts. I don’t have a great handle as to how many, but particularly—there are those, like, three South Texas House seats that Democrats already hold two of, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Bobby Pulido is also trying to beat Monica De La Cruz in a Trump-plus-eighteen seat. And it seems like those kind of Latino-heavy districts are the ones that are going to swing, like, really strongly to the Democrats, more so than some other places. But that hypothetically could be three right there. And you look around the map—like, what if they actually do win a Kentucky Six? Like, could they—you know, they did win a handful of those kinds of seats in 2018. I kind of wonder if they could actually get into double digits. That’s probably what it would take for them to get to 235 or more House seats. But again, the environment is just pretty lousy for Republicans. Again, it doesn’t have to be that way. And you know, maybe there is something systematic about the polling that could be underestimating Republicans. But you take the numbers at face value, they’re just pretty poor for Republicans. **Sargent:** Just to sum this up in another way, you expect Democrats to pick up a number of Republican districts right now that are Trump plus seven, Trump plus eight, Trump plus nine, and then maybe a handful more that are Trump plus double digits, right? Is that the size of it? **Kondik:** Yeah. And again, it wouldn’t surprise me if ultimately the Democrats kind of stall out a few points short in, like, a Kentucky Six or something. Or, you know, maybe some of the other—Montana One is another one that they sometimes talk about. It’s another open seat. But the possibility exists to win a few of those seats anyway. **Sargent:** Well, here’s where it gets even worse for Trump. Congressman Tom Emmer, a senior Republican, just admitted to Axios that Republicans are not going to win all the seats they’ve redistricted for themselves in this cycle. Your outfit, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, is about to make some more ratings changes this week. I understand you guys will move Florida’s 25th District from toss-up to lean Democratic, and Florida’s 22nd District from lean Republican to toss-up. Those are two Dem-held seats in Florida that Republicans had hoped to flip. Those are your coming changes, right? Can you explain why you’re making these changes, and what their bigger significance is? **Kondik:** Yeah, look. Republicans wanted to gain four net seats out of this new Florida gerrymander. We don’t really think they’re going to do that. And I think the one who’s probably best positioned to hang on is Jared Moskowitz, running in Florida 25. Moskowitz, unlike many Democrats, is fairly pro-Israel. Florida 25 is roughly 25 percent Jewish. He’s probably a pretty good fit for that district. It was Trump plus nine, but it also voted for Biden by five. And so there is some old Democratic DNA there that Moskowitz could maybe kind of re-put-together in a much better year for Democrats. And so we’re going to have that one as leans Democratic. It’s some rating changes that we’re making soon. And then Florida 22 is an open seat. You’ve got two relatively unknown candidates. The partisan top line is kind of similar to Florida 25, in that Trump won it by about 10 points, but Biden did narrowly carry it in 2020. So that’s another South Florida seat to watch. And then Kathy Castor in Florida Fourteen. That’s still a toss-up. That’s a Trump-plus-ten-ish district in Tampa. Castor’s been around for a long time. Her mom is also a big fixture in Tampa-area politics. The mayor of Tampa’s last name is Castor, even though they’re not related. So there’s a lot of Castors down there in Tampa. But that also looks like a race that Democrats might be able to salvage in this environment. **Sargent:** Well, just to sum this up, your best guess is Democrats finish the night with 230 House seats, and they have a shot at getting as high as 235 if it’s a very good night. Is that about right? **Kondik:** Yeah, I think that’s right. That would be about where I would land right now, in sort of the 230-ish, maybe a little below, maybe a little above. And again, in my own assessments, that’s been kind of steadily growing just a little bit over time. **Sargent:** Well, Kyle Kondik, it’s certainly interesting. Thanks so much for that big picture. It’s really great stuff. **Kondik:** Thanks, Greg.

In short order, America’s data centers have come to stand in for a broad range of apocalyptic threats, from the climate crisis to the surveillance state to Trump’s kleptocracy. Data centers are an excellent symbol for the Halloween season—sinister in every way. They combine the ugliness of strip mining, the creepiness of a CIA op, and the affront and destruction of a military invasion. They’re hard on the land. They’re loud. They’re built with exquisite tenderness for GPUs, and near total disrespect for human beings. Finally, the _output_ of data centers—artificial intelligence—has spectacularly failed to win American hearts and minds. AI now seems to exist chiefly so oligarchs can spy on us, confiscate our wealth, lay us off, and finally wipe us out altogether. No chatbot oozing charisma, let alone a charmless CEO, seems to be able to persuade Americans that AI has our best interests at heart. With the midterms less than a month away, suspicion of data centers has reached a fever pitch. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a September poll by NBC News oppose AI data centers in their areas, and 45 percent “strongly oppose” the buildouts. So candidates in both parties are running hard against them. Political attacks on data centers reliably conjure a nightmarish extraction economy, in which the powerful are sucking the very life out of the people. “Big corporations gobble up energy to feed their data centers,” Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown says on the campaign trail. “They devour your land. They suck up your water. They leave you with the bill.” In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico echoed Brown on CNN: “These data centers are popping up in our communities, soaking up all our water, driving up our utility prices.” Talarico described Ken Paxton, his Republican rival, who used AI deepfakes in an attack ad last month, as “bought by the data center industry.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump has tied his fortunes entirely to AI and leads the frat of its crown princes. Trump has smeared data center protesters as “stupid people” who “want to be poor.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, the ranking Smithers to Trump’s Mr. Burns, insists that the resistance to data centers is a Chinese psyop. But voters in key midterm races continue to protest. Paul Renshaw, founder and lead developer of PressAudit, which evaluates and aggregates the news, has created a map of the data center buildout, showing where hyper scalers are breaking ground and where communities are protesting. Renshaw’s study is revealing. Not only are more data centers in the works, but the proposed new ones are some 12 times larger per site than the centers running today. They’re bigger, louder, and more destructive. If they get up and running, according to Renshaw’s research, the data centers in the pipeline could dominate up to 20 percent of the entire U.S. electrical grid. This means that, in spite of promises by the AI companies, local electricity bills will almost certainly rise. After all, they’ve already shot up in U.S. states that have data centers, and the price hike is dramatic. Over five years, energy prices rose 41.6 percent in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which are studded with data centers. The public’s pushback has been fierce, especially in contested districts. Twenty of the 43 most competitive House districts are contending with data center proposals, and protesters have managed to pause about a quarter of them. As popular resistance to data centers has solidified, the political geography of the buildout has shifted. Most data centers built up through 2024 were erected in Democratic counties, while the new proposals, for the bigger centers, are mostly in Republican ones. This may explain why Republicans have turned so sharply on the buildout. According to Renshaw, support for data centers in their own communities was at +36 among Republicans in July 2025; by August 2026, it sank to −30. This whiplash has caught at least 16 AI-boosting politicians off guard. These include House candidates in tight races across Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Virginia, along with Republican Senator Susan Collins and Republican Representative Ashley Hinson, candidates for Senate in Maine and Iowa. All have supported data centers in the past, and while some are trying to downplay their records, others are leaning into them. Republican Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, whom _Newsweek_ recently ranked as the top data center booster in a competitive race, has told voters in his district that the U.S. “simply can’t afford to slow down the buildout.” With six in 10 Pennsylvania voters opposed to the centers, it’s Perry’s room-reading skills that might need building out. There’s something especially satisfying about the oligarchs and their Republican friends crashing into, of all things, American democracy. Because while opposition to data centers could help decide the midterms, the midterms could also shape future data center policy, leading to pauses and moratoria. This would destabilize AI investment and undermine market gains. For the very rich, that’s the real apocalypse.

In today’s episode, nonpartisan political forecaster Kyle Kondik makes some critical points about Donald Trump’s approval rating. First, it may be so low that he’s even underwater in House districts that he carried by double digits. Second, unlike in 2018, his approval is underwater in red states with big Senate races. Indeed, the latest polling averages have him sinking below 35 percent, a key threshold. And _Times_ polling finds him upside down in five Senate-race states he carried by double digits. Taken together, it’s clear his public standing is unraveling. Meanwhile, leaks from Trump’s GOP allies are growing deafening. One GOP operative said: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.” _Worse than the GOP’s epic 2006 losses under George W. Bush!_ For the straight story on the state of the House map, we talked to Kondik, managing director at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He explains how Trump’s low approval is expanding the map for Democrats in surprising ways, interprets the latest GOP spending in deep red areas, and why he thinks Democrats might end up with 230 House seats. Listen to this episode here.

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration Wednesday, alleging that recent TV advertisements espousing the president’s political agenda were funded by taxpayers and thus violated U.S. propaganda law. The 31-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accuses Donald Trump of personally directing the advertisements. The DNC has asked the court to intervene in the scheme to stop the ads and the flow of public funds that has buoyed their creation and proliferation. More than $12 million in government funds have been spent on the pro-Trump ads since September, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact. The Department of Homeland Security had previously set aside $20 million for the dubious expenditure, the Associated Press reported late last month. The administration ultimately created four adverts to glorify Trump, framing the MAGA leader as a centerpiece of American resistance. One 30-second commercial, set to JMSN’s track “Love Me,” framed Trump as the bastion of American strength and resistance against foreign foes. The refrain, “love me,” was played repeatedly while images of Trump flashed across the screen, and text appeared reiterating Trump’s claim that “America will never be a communist country.” “He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met and nothing is going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country that he’s lost,” UFC President Dana White can be heard saying towards the end of the clip. All four ads were accompanied by an unusual disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” One appeared to use footage from a 2024 spot for Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump practically confessed to the arrangement on Monday, relenting to public backlash via a Truth Social post in which he said he would no longer use taxpayer money on the adverts. “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money,” Trump wrote. “This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.” He did not, however, mention if he would use his coffers to reimburse the American people. Speaking with reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “the ads were really good” and a “promotion for the country” rather than a promotion of himself. Vice President JD Vance also defended the commercials, claiming on Monday that the messaging was “not partisan.” “We’re trying to tell a story about how great the United States of America is,” Vance said. The DNC, however, disagreed. In their complaint, the political committee argued that the “political propaganda ads” were an attempt to resuscitate Trump’s “historically low approval ratings and avoid widespread Republican defeats in the 2026 midterm election.” The ads, according to the group, followed a broader pattern of behavior in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to center himself in the midterm cycle, effectively turning Election Day 2026 into another referendum on his popularity. In recent months, Trump has attempted to bribe Americans with a $5,000 handout (if Republicans win), made himself the center of an unprecedented two-day Republican midterm convention, and repeatedly instructed voters to act as if he’s on the ballot. Yet all of those things have only proved to hurt Republican odds, as resentment grows against Trump due to the dragging Iran war and the rising cost of living. _This story has been updated._

Election officials in Florida have extended the state’s new voter registration protections to Donald Trump—even though he doesn’t qualify for them. The Palm Beach County Office of the Supervisor of Elections confirmed to the Tampa Bay Times Wednesday that it had wiped Trump’s personal info from public facing voter registration records. In doing so, it made private data relating to Trump’s home and mailing addresses, his birth date, his party affiliation, and email address—data available on voting Americans in nearly every state. The change will make it more difficult to ascertain when Trump votes by mail versus in person. Trump had asked the agency to remove his information earlier this year, but the office told the _Tampa Bay Times_ that it did not review whether the request was actually legitimate. As it turns out, it was not. A public records law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in June 2025, allows certain public officials to remove their personal information from the public facing state system. That includes members of Congress as well as a smattering of specific elected positions, such as the governor, lieutenant governor, chief financial officer, attorney general, agriculture commissioner, state representative, state senator, property appraiser, supervisor of elections, school superintendent, school board member, mayor, city commissioner, and county commissioner, according to the text of the law. Notably, the list does not include the president. Local lawmakers couldn’t help Trump make his request legitimate even if they wanted to: State representatives won’t meet again until March, waylaying the chance to introduce an amendment that could retroactively and specifically include him. Trump’s request came by way of a notarized document, in which he claimed he was eligible as a state public officer. The form was notarized by Chamberlain Harris, a 26-year-old White House aide whom Trump promoted last year to deputy director of Oval Office operations and subsequently appointed to a four-year term on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, overseeing Kennedy Center construction (or demolition) projects. Harris was also one of three women in the Trump administration to receive a $45,000 bonus from the president as a “cash gift for the holidays” last year.

President Trump claimed that he can do whatever he wants to his political enemies. “I could’ve done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could’ve done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could’ve done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said in the Oval Office Wednesday after being asked whether he believes Democrats will try to impeach him if they win back the House and Senate. “I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me. Twice. And … I can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things.” “He’s telling you exactly how he sees his power. Now apply that to an election he’s desperate to control,” Democracy Docket wrote on X. This is just the latest in a long list of vindictive threats the president has made towards his political enemies, from former FBI Director James Comey to Senator Adam Schiff. He accused Obama of treason this past May. But this recent admission is his most brazen to date, particularly given that it comes right before an extremely consequential midterm election that will also usher in his lame duck period.

President Trump had trouble fighting to stay awake Wednesday while surrounded by members of his administration and the press in the Oval Office. While his “Trump Accounts” for American children were receiving praise from venture capitalist Brad Gerstner, the president struggled to keep his head from drooping, waking up when he was told “thank you.” Trump later perked up when a reporter asked him if had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding a plague outbreak in Siberia, and the president happily pointed out that Wednesday is Putin’s birthday. “I have a call set up. Today is his birthday. Today is Vladimir Putin’s birthday, I’m sure you’re gonna celebrate it. Are you gonna celebrate his birthday? No, I have a call set up,” Trump smirked, his voice sounding hoarse. The octogenarian Trump has fallen asleep in public dozens of times during his second term as president. Only last week, he fell asleep after announcing a new steel plant in Iowa, and his moments of senility keep adding up. Despite all of that, he remembered Putin’s birthday and thought it was important to mention. Is Trump’s planned phone call really about the plague, or will he congratulate the Russian dictator on many happy returns? Judging by Trump’s mental and physical condition, as well as his past deference to Russia, it could very well be either.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a hypernationalistic speech at the Acropolis in Athens Wednesday in which he lauded the supposed superiority of Western civilization while stoking more fears about immigration. “The heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so,” Rubio waxed. “We take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here—and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did. “Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world,” Rubio continued. “Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process we opened our borders, and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay. And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty.” Rubio went on to warn against immigration, amplifying the xenophobia that is a central tenant of both the MAGA movement and the larger international far-right. “We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration,” he said. Those on the far-right, including Elon Musk, praised the speech—while others pointed to it as a possible sign of Rubio’s long-suspected intentions to run for president in 2028. Either way, the incendiary address reaffirmed the aesthetic importance of ancient Greece to right-wingers. “This is the classical understanding of politics—and of statecraft—that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim. Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization,” Rubio continued. “We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.”

A Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona says she was sexually assaulted while trying to repair one of her campaign signs. The _Phoenix New Times_ reports that Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th congressional district challenging incumbent Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, reported being hit over the head this summer in a dark parking lot in Sun City, Arizona, just after 2 a.m. on a Friday as she walked to the damaged sign. She awoke to her rapist pulling his penis out of her, she told the publication. He said, “—ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” Greene-Placentia said to the _New Times_ , which she filled in her head as “Democratic bitch.” She’s not clear on what exactly he said. One leg was out of her jeans, and she remembers swinging her leg after another man approached. She heard him say, “Not even worth it,” before he left the scene. She was left face-down in the parking lot, her SUV still running with the trunk open. Greene-Placentia doesn’t remember putting her jeans back on, closing the SUV’s trunk, or leaving the scene to return home. “It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” she said to the newspaper. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.” Greene-Placentia said she had stopped to fix her campaign signs late at night numerous times previously, sometimes with her husband, Alex Placentia, or a campaign staffer. She hasn’t done so since she was raped. She thinks she suffered a concussion, and reported being covered in bruises after the attack. Initially, Greene-Placentia tried to forget about being attacked, but said she decided to report her assault because she campaigns on fighting for the people of Arizona, “and I didn’t feel like I could keep saying that if I weren’t also fighting for women that are victims of sexual assault.” She told her campaign staff about it the following Sunday, and her husband on Monday. Two weeks later, she reported the rape to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, according to a police report. For two days after the assault, Greene-Placentia was “missing in action,” her campaign manager Isaiah Lopez and her husband told the _New Times_. She vaginally bled for three days after the rape, according to the police report. She said she was a “very angry person” for days and weeks afterward. “I want a fucking rematch. I want to call them out. I want to like, go on TV and say ‘Let’s go again and don’t come at me from behind,’” she told Lopez and her husband. Her campaign held a staff meeting at a gun range because she felt so angry. Hamadeh has yet to comment on the alleged rape, but in July, he defended right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are accused of strangling women unconscious and raping them and face charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and child pornography in Europe. Greene-Placentia is vowing to press ahead with her campaign. “I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it,” Greene-Placentia told the _New Times_. “We’re asking people to stand up and donate or volunteer. We’re asking those folks to be uncomfortable, as [Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes] says; then I have to be willing to be uncomfortable too.”