As soon as former president Barack Obama described Donald Trump’s aesthetic assault on the White House as “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the current president did what he does best: seethe. Ever since Obama’s weekend joke at an Ohio rally, Trump has been complaining non-stop. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that Obama was “a grossly incompetent President” and accused him of “campaigning for a Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist.” The following day, he told reporters that Obama is “not a smart guy.”

At a campaign rally to shore up Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s fledgling re-election bid in Mississippi, Trump chewed on his grievance even more. After calling the Cheesecake Factory a “successful company,” he launched into a confusing defense of his garish White House redecoration. “A guy like Obama,” he said, “doesn’t understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful.”

There are a lot of words for what Trump has done to the White House, but “clean,” “pristine” and “beautiful” are not among them. The president has covered every corner of the Oval Office with cheap-looking gold-paint and elaborate carvings. The once-stately decor now has a cluttered and claustrophobic feel — an embarrassing departure from the dignified appearance that all modern presidents, regardless of party, adhered to, which had a simplicity meant to reflect the sober responsibilities of the citizen-leader. 

But to understand why Trump clings to words like “clean” to describe his chaotic and overwhelming design impulses, it helps to look at how authoritarian movements like MAGA relate to kitsch. As I wrote in 2019 about Hallmark films, schmaltz creates a safe space the right can escape to — a cavern where they can wallow in fake feelings and nostalgia, without having to face complex realities that might challenge them. What makes something “clean” or “pristine,” then, isn’t actual clean lines or even a lack of clutter. It’s a conformist fantasy where everyone is white and straight and knows their place in the social pecking order. For Trump in particular, “clean” and “pristine” are racially charged words, building on his long history of equating whiteness with purity and diversity with disorder. 

Trump and his fellow MAGA leaders are engaging in performative outrage over Obama’s comments. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth hovers around $600 million, ventured to a Cheesecake Factory in suburban Maryland, where he participated in a photoshoot. It was just the latest in a series of MAGA’s long list of kitsch-related tantrums, which have seen them feign enthusiasm for middlebrow corporate products as evidence of their identity as “real” Americans, unlike those snooty Democrats with their fancy mustards. 

This schtick has worked plenty of times to rally the MAGA base because, in this world, “elitism” has nothing to do with money or status. Instead, it’s a code word for the racialized paranoias that unite small-minded white people across the class divide. 

Just last year, MAGA propagandists got a huge boost when another restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, tried to change its logo from the overly busy image of a man leaning on a barrel to something more minimalist — or, one might say, “clean” and “pristine.” This update was spun as a subterranean assault on white culture, an effort to smuggle in those “elite” and urbane values into the restaurants cornpone comforts, a place Fox News Grandpa used to feel safe from having to hear hip-hop music in the parking lot. 

This time around, my sense is that the Cracker Barrel Panic of 2025 cannot be remade into a Cheesecake Factory October Surprise that will save the Republicans in this midterm cycle. I’m a Cheesecake Factory virgin, but my gracious Bluesky followers and old-fashioned internet research revealed that the restaurant’s marketing is a lot different from the white-bread Christian brunch vibe that Bessent and other MAGA leaders seem to assume it must have. Apparently, it’s a deliberate, self-aware camp rather than dime-store kitsch, appealing to a younger, more modern audience that doesn’t take itself seriously. The Cheesecake Factory is supposed to be silly, which is why its fans don’t think its look is appropriate for the White House. Its famously long and decadent menu is also part of the joke. But at the same time, it reflects the expanding tastes of a diversifying nation, borrowing flavors from all over the world.

It’s not just that the Cheesecake Factory’s wonton chips and chicken shawarma appeal to a different crowd than the chicken-and-gravy offerings at Cracker Barrel. The distinction is a sign of the way that middle America is moving on in general from the rigidly white, rural and suburban conformity so valorized by the Trump administration. The president and his acolytes, particularly during his second term, have been explicit about narrowing their view of what a “great” America should look like. The administration puts out a steady stream of propaganda envisioning a country composed solely of Aryan-looking nuclear families dressed in old-fashioned clothes. But it’s not clear if this has much appeal beyond some elderly white conservatives at Trump rallies, nostalgic for childhoods spent watching “Leave It To Beaver,” or the small number of bitter young men who let social media tell them it was easier to get a wife in the bygone days.

After his narrow win in 2024, Trump and his aides like Stephen Miller convinced themselves that the result was a resounding victory for his fascist fantasy. The president’s rapidly plummeting approval ratings, though, tell a different story: He mostly won because swing voters have short memories and thought he might make good on his promise to bring down prices. Instead, they got more inflation. Likewise, Trump and Miller thought they won on a “no more tamales” platform. But as it turns out, Americans just want those tamales to be a little more affordable. In fact, Trump’s policies are now even threatening to take away free chips and salsa. In the process, we’re learning that, for most Americans in 2026, this traditional Tex-Mex appetizer is considered as all-American as, well, cheesecake.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s love of kitsch mostly endeared him to his voters, who saw themselves in his corny preferences for the musical “Cats” or faux-baroque interior design. The president may be rich, but he connected with his fans in their shared resentment of smarter tastes, which require the very curiosity and intellectual engagement that the president fears. Instead, as Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine at the time, they craved the “evocative empty calories” of “[s]chlock and sentiment and melodrama.” Real art, on the other hand, makes you think and can even inspire empathy for people who are different. Trump promised an opportunity to sink deeply into a bath of nostalgia for an imaginary past. 

As the popularity of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl reminded us, the escapist fantasies of authoritarians don’t appeal to most Americans. It was just easier for some to look the other way when there wasn’t a war in Iran, rapidly rising gas prices and paramilitary troops grabbing grandmothers off the street. In good times, kitsch feels like harmless fluff, making its long history of being used for fascist propaganda easier to ignore. But when the president is more worried about redecorating the White House in his schmaltzy self-image than he is about the real struggles of Americans, the kitsch stops being so funny.

Love it or hate it, the Cheesecake Factory cannot save the MAGA movement — no matter how many Cabinet officials get photographed in front of it. 

The post The Cheesecake Factory aesthetic won’t save MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

Every president leaves a signature accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt rescued capitalism from itself. Donald Trump’s will be something no predecessor ever attempted: He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly. That dubious achievement belongs in the first line of his obituary.

On Oct. 18, “60 Minutes” reported that in the 21 months of his second term, Trump has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted — more than 150 times.” This is not the grievance of a defeated candidate. It is the drumbeat of a sitting president who won an historic election in 2024, controls the executive branch and still insists that the system that elected him is rotten.

The record is not hard to find. The day before his second inauguration, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Washington, D.C., that he would be president for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — which he would have missed had he won in 2020 — only “because they rigged the election.” In February and again in April 2026, he posted that “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” adding, “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.” In September, at the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, he told supporters, “I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” He doubled down on those claims earlier this month when he posted that vote counts “take weeks to rig, I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!” And on Oct. 16 in Georgia he declared that Sen. Jon Ossoff “lost that election [in 2020], but they gave it to him because it was a rigged election.”

But the centerpiece of Trump’s election lies came on July 16, when he used a primetime address to the nation from the White House to warn that our elections “were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and that the system “falls catastrophically short.” He promised proof. He delivered heavily redacted documents that, according to election officials and security experts, showed vulnerabilities long known and studied, but included no evidence that any American election had been stolen. He cited only some fraudulent registrations in Michigan, which authorities flagged, and no fraudulent voter registrations were processed.

What it all adds up to is this: Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he failed to document a single illegal vote. 

I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.

But the accuracy of the count is not among them. Nearly every American jurisdiction leaves a paper trail for ballots. Bipartisan local officials tally them, audit them and, when margins are close, recount them. After the 2020 election, Trump’s own cybersecurity chief called it “the most secure in American history.” William Barr, his own attorney general, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. Georgia, under a Republican secretary of state, counted its presidential ballots three times. More than 60 lawsuits failed, some before judges Trump appointed. Studies of non-citizen voting find it vanishingly rare.

Compare Trump with the presidents who came before him. In 1800, John Adams handed power to his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, establishing the peaceful transfer between parties that defines our republic. In 1864, with the nation at war, Lincoln held an election he expected to lose and privately pledged to cooperate with his successor. Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 all lost as incumbents and accepted the verdict without a word against the count.

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Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Al Gore, a Democrat, swallowed razor-thin defeats in 1960 and 2000 rather than tear at the nation’s faith in its elections. Both graciously conceded despite having some basis for challenging results. Presidents have complained about the press, the courts and Congress. None of them made the American voter’s ballot the enemy — until Trump.

That is the damage he has caused. Democracy rests on a simple bargain: The loser accepts the result because both sides trust the count. Each time a president claims, contrary to the evidence, that the count cannot be trusted, he weakens that bargain. He also hands his supporters a ready excuse to reject any outcome they dislike, including the coming midterms. Americans should hold elections to the highest standard and fix what is genuinely broken, starting with how congressional districts are drawn. But they should not mistake a president’s endless repetition of baseless claims for proof of fraud. The evidence shows that America’s votes are counted honestly. The untrustworthy voice comes from the one who keeps telling them otherwise.

Trump has said he would accept the midterm results if they are “honest” — code for Republicans winning. He has already interfered with elections by suing Alaska to overturn results if having another Daniel Sullivan on the ballot allegedly defeats the Republican Senatorial incumbent with the same name. He has also sought to compel California to set aside the votes of 20,000 alleged non-citizens based on an error-ridden database and a dubious matching with registration rolls. 

As happened after Trump’s 2020 defeat, we can expect more lawsuits and pressure on Republican legislators and election officials to alter results.

The post The first line of Donald Trump’s obituary appeared first on Salon.com.

If the polls are correct, Republicans are set for a shellacking in the Nov. 3 midterms, losing the House and quite possibly the Senate, and likely some prominent governorships across the country. If that happens, there’s a good chance that online chatter about repealing the 19th Amendment will heat up once again.

For a decade now, MAGA social media users have been aggrieved at the way women vote for Democrats at higher rates then men, such as in 2024, when 53% of women voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, who received 55% of the male vote. Their solution to this imbalance began in 2016 as a trolling hashtag on what was then called Twitter: #RepealThe19th, a reference to the constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, that extended suffrage to all women in theory, but mostly white women in practice. The hashtag has faded since then, but not because of a lack of interest. The idea has morphed from a joke into a serious proposal that is making its way from fringe Christian right circles into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist who lead the church Pete Hegseth belongs to, has grown increasingly loud in his calls to replace individual voting with “household voting,” where only heads of households, who are presumably male, would be able to vote. The defense secretary has praised Wilson for a CNN interview he gave in which he outlined his vision of a Christian theocracy that disenfranchises women. Other prominent pastors with large online followings, such as Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, both in Texas, have explicitly denounced the 19th Amendment. 

Ending women’s suffrage is a hot topic among the right’s youngest leaders. Earlier this year, Kai Schwemmer, the political director of College Republicans of America and one of the many young leaders angling to be the new Charlie Kirk, called for the end of women’s suffrage. On his Daily Wire podcast, conservative commentator Michael Knowles hosted a panel of young women and spent an hour justifying the arguments for repealing the amendment. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has a large audience of young men, routinely calls for the end of women’s voting rights. 

Most alarmingly, Turning Point USA, which is among the most well-funded and popular conservative organizations in the country, is now routinely platforming opponents of women’s suffrage. Along with Schwemmer, the organization recently booked the Christian nationalist pastor and podcaster Joshua Haymes, who argues that women voting undermines the family, for their new “Pick Up The Mic” tour.  Commentator Andrew Wilson, who frequently goes viral by arguing that women should lose the vote, has also been representing TPUSA in podcast interviews. Alex Clarke, the host of TPUSA’s most popular women’s show, has platformed guests who oppose women’s suffrage, including one who argued it was a “net negative” for society. Savanna Stone, a popular MAGA influencer who opposes women’s suffrage, spoke at this year’s TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, a name whose irony gets worse by the year. Multiple attendees of the conference told the CBC that they would be happy to lose their right to vote. 

“Conversation over whether women should vote used to be limited to some of the most extreme and patriarchal churches,” said Sarah Stankorb, a journalist, expert in women and religion, and author of “Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion.” She told Salon that it’s “no coincidence” that ideas once on the fringes of the Christian right “keep popping up in public discourse.”

Stankorb noted that Christian nationalists are taking “partisan polarization” to a place where “denying the basic rights of half the population not only comes off as a debatable point, but one with theological backing.” 

“All at once, patriarchal men share think-pieces on walking back the 19th, while perched casually in leather chairs, normalizing the conversation as if it’s simply academic, reasonable even,” she said. Stankorb is worried that the constant social media repetition means the shock has “dulled over time,” putting the once unthinkable “in the realm of ‘normal.'”

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To be certain, it’s extremely unlikely that Christian nationalists will be able to repeal the 19th Amendment, which would require passing and ratifying a new amendment. There is precedent for this; after the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol, was ratified, it took another amendment, the 21st, to overturn Prohibition. The process would require a joint resolution approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate or a constitutional convention, followed by approval of three-fourths, or 38 out of 50, states

As extreme as the GOP has gotten, it’s hard to imagine that the party — which has 11 sitting female Senators — would go that far, or be able to win big enough majorities in Congress, if they even considered it. After all, it took a century of feminist organizing to get male leaders to even let women vote, and it would be a lot harder to take the right away since over half the electorate is female. 

In all likelihood, most of the MAGA pundits and pastors who are pushing to end women’s suffrage know full well it will never happen. But their musings shouldn’t be dismissed as nothing more than attention-seeking behavior. The larger goal here is to normalize the idea that women’s citizenship isn’t legitimate and to instill the idea that women should feel lucky to be “allowed” even the few rights they have. In fact, this notion is similar to the way that leaders like Vice President JD Vance insist people of color should be “grateful” for having rights at all, words which carry the implication that the way to prove their gratitude is by not demanding full equality. 

Wilson made the underlying threat explicit in April. “Women have to appeal to men for the rights,” he told Konstantin Kisin, a right-wing British political commentator. “Anytime men want to take rights away from women, they can, like that. And there’s not a damn thing women can do about it.” Wilson continued to argue that there will no end to male dominance, because if women push their luck too far, it will be the end of male “benevolence” in letting women have any rights at all. His diatribe shows the goal of the anti-suffrage argument: to scare women off seeking full equality, or even trying to claw back rights they do have.

While the 19th Amendment is unlikely to be repealed, it’s important to note that other rights that were long assumed to be safe have been stripped from women in the MAGA era. The right to abortion, which was for decades widely assumed to be untouchable, was overturned by a far-right Supreme Court in 2022. Because of women’s outrage — and suffrage — many red states restored abortion rights through ballot measures, which angered the right and amplified calls to take away women’s votes.

The assumption that the justice system will protect women and children from sexual violence has also been under assault in recent years with actions that range from the Trump administration blocking the release of the Epstein files to the attacks on the Cornell student whose only “crime” was reporting an alleged gang rape. Then there is the recent ad run by Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which features the estranged mother of Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent. In 1978, after Acton reported that she had been raped by her stepfather, her mother sided with her husband, and the pair fled the state following his arrest and before he could stand trial.

All these incursions on women’s rights are easier to sell to a public that has normalized the idea that women aren’t full citizens — that their ability to vote is a privilege that can be snatched away, and suffrage is only a right for men. The voting rights issue is used as a rhetorical cudgel against women, designed to delegitimize their opinions by suggesting they aren’t even real citizens. It’s about scaring women into thinking that if they “abuse” their vote by demanding full equality, they will be left with no rights at all. 

The post MAGA attacks on women voters are no joke appeared first on Salon.com.

Republicans wanted the 2026 midterms to be a victory lap for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Instead, the GOP’s signature legislation from the president’s second term — 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is shaping up to be a sleeper vulnerability for the party. 

When Republicans first passed Trump’s signature bill in party-line votes in both the House and Senate in 2025, its tax cuts took effect immediately, while the deepest cuts to Medicaid were scheduled for after the midterms, when the voters who would feel them could no longer hold anyone accountable. But even then, one of their own issued a warning that now hangs over the midterms. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement after indicating he would oppose the legislation, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the bill would result in losses of the kind Democrats suffered in 2010 after passing Obamacare. 

Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act anyway. Now, across social media, Americans are sharing stories of children cut off from cancer treatment and families struggling to afford prescriptions.

On Tuesday, Children’s Mercy Hospital announced that families in the Kansas City metropolitan area who buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplace will find the region’s only dedicated children’s hospital out of network on Jan. 1 — a devastating development for parents whose children depend on specialized care. It is also the kind of story that can demolish incumbent Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall’s carefully constructed distinction between cutting government spending and hurting actual people.

The story went viral fast. Influencer Jen Hamilton’s video walking viewers through what the Children’s Mercy Hospital news means for families drew 3.2 million views across three social media platforms and was shared on Facebook at 73 times her average rate. Kasey Jackson, a Kansas City mother whose son is being treated for cancer, posted a series of videos explaining that her family’s marketplace plan would stop treating his hospital as in-network when the new year arrived. Jackson explained that she previously sold her small business to pay for her son’s  leukemia treatments, but had few options left with no health plans to choose from. “As entrepreneurs, we don’t really have access to a group plan, so we have to go through the [Affordable Care Act] because there’s nobody that will provide private insurance for a kid with a pre-existing condition,” she explained. One clip passed half a million views.

The Children’s Mercy news arrives at an especially dangerous moment for Marshall, who has found himself in the middle of a re-election bid that was never supposed to be competitive. Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and Trump carried it by 16 points in 2024. Yet the Cook Political Report moved the race to a toss-up this month, and an Emerson College poll gives his challenger, Adam Hamilton, a Kansas City-area megachurch pastor running on the cost of living, a two-point lead.

Republicans have quadrupled their ad spending in the state since late September, a move that must be particularly galling for the party because as a physician, Marshall should have been inoculated against a healthcare attack. Instead, the OB-GYN specialist’s career choices have come under heavy scrutiny. 

In September, The New York Times reported that Marshall’s former practice had sued more than 700 of its own patients over unpaid bills, some as small as $101, and that 81 people were arrested as a result. Hamilton’s campaign built an ad around Meischa Zimmerman, who says she was arrested while eight months pregnant after missing a $50 payment, and found herself pleading not to be handcuffed in front of her two-year-old. “Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas,” she says. The ad has been viewed more than a million times on X. Marshall’s lawyers have called it defamatory, demanding it come down, saying the debt was larger and the arrest was for missing court dates. Marshall himself told cameras there were “no Medicaid cuts” in the law he voted for, dismissing the Times’ reporting as a “hit job.” A doctor-senator insisting the largest Medicaid cut in American history does not exist, while his own brutal record of collecting fees runs in heavy rotation, is the Big Beautiful Bill’s national problem in miniature.

But the social media outrage is not confined to one hospital or one state. The issue is also the number one subject in Senate advertising and the number two issue in House advertising, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Battleground Issue Tracker, which found that Democrats are airing tens of thousands more ads and spending tens of millions more on the issue than Republicans, who have all but declined to defend their own law. GOP candidates in competitive races have run a total of four television ads about the Big Beautiful Bill since its passage, according to AdImpact. 

Still, a POLITICO poll released last week found an overwhelming majority of voters know the law and oppose its contents, with their views slightly worse than when the bill was passed and signed into law. At the time, a KFF survey found opponents outnumbering supporters two to one. Since then, the White House’s attempt to rebrand the package as the “Working Families Tax Cuts” has moved almost no one, per the same POLITICO poll. 

The problem for the GOP is that voters do not have to agree with every Democratic argument about healthcare to dislike paying more for their own insurance. In a KFF health opinion poll conducted in June, 37% of Republican voters said healthcare costs were extremely important. More than half of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who identify with the MAGA movement said Congress had done the wrong thing by allowing enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, according to KFF polling released in March. Among marketplace enrollees, 62% blamed Republicans or Trump for the expiration.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance recently announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had canceled ACA enrollments covering 760,000 people, citing claims of widespread fraud. The Trump administration views its focus on fraud in federal health programs as a message that will resonate with voters. A KFF poll in mid-September found that 44% of voters and 54% of Republican voters call fraud in government programs extremely important for candidates to address, and a separate KFF and Associated Press survey found it was the top topic rural Republicans want to hear about. The administration withheld about $2 billion in Medicaid funding from California, and announced plans to defer more than $500 million in federal funds from Minnesota, claiming the state had failed to protect its Medicaid program from abuse.

Republicans are betting on energizing their base — and hoping to pull along persuadable voters. Polling, however, points the other way. A fraud crackdown may be the top concern for Republican-leaning voters, but only 44% of voters overall call it extremely important, according to KFF, which found healthcare to be the top issue for the electorate at large. 

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Some of the largest disruptions from the Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans scheduled for later are being moved forward by state budgets. Because the law shifts enormous new costs onto states in the coming years, some state lawmakers are cutting now to brace for the shortfall. Colorado, facing a $1.5 billion hole, has cut what it pays doctors who treat Medicaid patients. In Maine, a hospital has eliminated its labor and delivery unit. The $50 billion rural health fund that Republicans added to the bill at the last minute amounts to a fraction of what rural communities stand to lose from the same law.

Democrats who have made the bill’s Medicaid cuts a leading message are tied or leading in many battleground races, including in states Trump previously won. In Georgia, ACA enrollment dropped by more than half a million, hitting Trump strongholds like the district in northwestern Georgia formerly represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, where the number of uninsured is higher than the national average. Incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has been laser-focused on hitting GOP cuts on the campaign trail all year. In Maine, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is being attacked by Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, for casting a procedural vote to advance Trump’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to a Senate floor debate.,Although Collins voted against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, Jackson argues her vote helped pave the way for its enactment. In the House, California Rep. David Valadao’s Central Valley toss-up district, where roughly six in 10 constituents are enrolled in Medicaid, could help give Democrats control of Congress. Valadao, a Republican, voted for the Big Beautiful Bill. During a televised Oct. 6 debate, he said there are no actual cuts to Medicaid. His Democratic challenger has supported Medicare-for-All. 

The GOP’s scramble explains why, weeks before the election, the Trump administration began mailing one-time payments of $500, along with a letter from the president touting his health record, to more than 950,000 people in the 30 states that use HealthCare.gov. The money comes from accumulated marketplace user fees, but only enrollees who bought coverage without premium subsidies qualified, which means roughly one in 20 marketplace customers received a check while the rest got the higher bills. Trump has also promised every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, and Medicare beneficiaries have been told to expect $90.

But it is not just drastic healthcare cuts driving voters’ alienation from the GOP. An analysis published Thursday showed that millions of Americans have lost critical food assistance since Trump signed last year’s massive Republican tax giveaway for the superrich, with soaring grocery prices and cuts to school meals exacerbating the crisis. According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 5.5 million people, including roughly two million children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program assistance since July 2025. SNAP participation and spending have been falling, and the decline is much deeper than the Congressional Budget Office initially projected. These are by far the deepest SNAP cuts in history, and each month, new data reveals the damage is worse than previously anticipated. Republicans have responded that a slight reduction from an explosive increase is hardly a cut, and they have cheered SNAP participation returning to pre-pandemic levels, ignoring the mounting human toll. 

As Election Day approaches, the reality of these policy choices has turned the GOP’s signature legislative victory into a major political liability. The strategic miscalculation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is getting harder for conservatives to contain. By forcing millions of Americans to choose between basic medical care and daily necessities, Republicans transformed tax cuts for the rich into a personal crisis unfolding on screens and in living rooms nationwide.

The post Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is back to haunt the GOP’s midterms appeared first on Salon.com.

On Wednesday night, for the second time in a week, Donald Trump voiced his admiration for a supporter who punched out a heckler at one of his rallies. Last week it was a woman. This time around it was a man. “The guy stood up and he got whacked,” Trump exclaimed with delight.

Last week he mocked a woman for her appearance and called her scum after she showed up at a rally wearing a T-shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files.” Two men in the audience shoved her, and one punched her. Both pulled her hair as the crowd shouted, “USA! USA!” The man who had punched her exchanged high-fives with friends. Police removed the woman and did not charge those who attacked her. 

A journalism mentor of mine once said, “It isn’t who’s telling the tale that matters, unless that’s the tale you’re telling.” Well, that’s always the case for Trump: He’s always telling his own tale, and he never wants you to forget it. It’s all about him, along with the sideshow of cultists who will hurt others and debase themselves to please him. 

His latest tale is one heard many times. It’s a story about a kingdom profiting from another kingdom’s mistake and using the profits to fuel the mistake the first country made. It’s a story of subjugation.

This is the continuing story not of Bungalow Bill but of Don the Con, who really is “the all American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son.” While Trump enjoys watching Americans punch each other out and his fans cheer the results, Russia is profiting from the war Trump started while supplying military intelligence to the enemy he created. It’s an effective way for the Russians to keep funding their war in Ukraine. You can almost hear Vladimir Putin talking to Trump in a manner something like a conversation in “Lord of the Flies” between Jack Merridew and Roger, on the topic of how great it will be to kill the “piggies.” Just look it up.

Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent to noble Ralph and his conch shell anywhere on the planet, though many Democrats act like pretenders to that role. Well, somebody better step up fast.  For a country that so often pretends to be the underdog defending democracy, right now the U.S. seems more like an autocracy defending its hegemony over the rest of the world. You know, the bully who started the fight and then stands there applauding the effort.

Fortunately, it finally appears that enough people may be ready to stand up to the bully in the upcoming midterm elections. If there is a Ralph available in the United States, maybe we’ll see that person emerge in the aftermath. 

That thought has Trump and his minions up all night pointing fingers at one another, cursing and screaming accusations. or breaking down like toddlers who’ve lost their pacifiers. Such is Republican politics in 2026.

Over the past week, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, has run a campaign ad that tries to score political points off the sexual abuse that his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, allegedly suffered at the hands of her stepfather as a child. 

Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized Ramaswamy, including outgoing GOP Gov. Mike DeWine. The editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch promptly endorsed Acton, calling Ramaswamy’s attack ads reckless and disqualifying. Republican Sen. Jon Husted, in the middle of his own difficult campaign against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, called the ad disgusting.

Vice President JD Vance, on the other hand, announced that he was “disgusted” by Republicans who pushed back on the ad. Politics is a tough business. Trump also urged Ramaswamy to keep running the ad, claiming that it hit “pay dirt.” For the second time in a week, Trump talked about how much he enjoys looking at Husted’s rear end. “I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs,” the president told us. “I said, ‘His ass, s**t, it’s like — it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel.”

OK. There’s no appropriate “Lord of the Flies” analogy for that unexpected behavior, although Caligula might suffice. 

Midterm ads for Democrats have struck a decidedly different tone. In Texas, James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, is pushing a cinematic TV spot that embraces hope. It’s a powerful closer, well-edited, well-written and carefully produced. It stands in stark contrast to the fear-mongering of Ramaswamy and the Republicans.

In Mississippi, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is making his way across the state in a taco truck, giving away free food and talking with voters. In his challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Colom has gained enough attention that Democrats are daring to imagine they might stand a chance with an African-American candidate in the Deep South. 

Colom’s recent ad is a 30-second comedic tour-de-force in which voters call out Hyde-Smith for advising her constituents to “get another protein” if they think beef prices are too high. “Get another protein? I’d rather get another senator,” a variety of voters exclaim, with a mixture of humor and profanity.

If Colom succeeds, it may well be because of that ad. It reminds me of the “Where’s the Senator?” ads that Mitch McConnell used in Kentucky back in 1984 to dethrone Democratic Sen. Walter “Dee” Huddleston.

Whether or not Colom wins is beside the point. The point is that Democrats have finally found something approaching a message: They’re against corruption. Along with the message of hope projected by Talarico, they may have stumbled onto something more palatable than “We’re not him.”  

That’s precisely what scares Trump the most. He’s being removed from the conversation now that the Democrats have discovered that they must connect with local voters on issues that matter to them. Apparently, they’re finally learning to listen.

Trump and the Republicans can only pray that the Democrats are enjoying a moment of premature euphoria, and that their hubris will be destroyed on Nov. 4 after the election results come pouring in. “If you stop counting the votes,” as Trump told us in 2020, there won’t be a change of power. But members of both parties now show signs of believing that the Trump magic is gone and that nothing can stop the “blue tsunami” — not even vote-count shenanigans or declaring martial law and snatching the ballot boxes. Of course the Democrats could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They’re very good at that.

What recent activity on the campaign trail tells us is that the poison of Trump and his choirboys is spreading even as Trump himself is losing influence. One shudders to think that there are worse possibilities than him out there, but given the way he’s liberated the darkest tendencies among his followers, as exhibited by Ramaswamy, there can be little doubt that’s the case. 

The humbling coda to this narrative is that no British sailor will arrive in the nick of time to save us from our “Lord of the Flies” existence. We have to do it ourselves.

While it’s tempting to crack a smile watching the Trump regime dissolve into bitter tears of greed and anger, it should be noted that this process is only beginning. It definitely won’t be over when the polls close. It might not be over until after the new Congress is seated in January, if then.

Trump has tried his best to destroy innate goodness, spirituality, quiet insight, intellect, rationality and science through his most devoted soldiers. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are just a few of his choirboys, closely akin to the mob who kill Simon and Piggy in William Golding’s novel.  

The imaginary beast of “Lord of the Flies,” according to Trump and his followers, comes with various names: communism, socialism, transgenderism, immigration, vaccines and the free press. He vented some of his anger by directly threatening a reporter this week, telling Andrew Feinberg of the Independent, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful.” Not one reporter stood up to defend Feinberg. All of them should have. 

The New York Times reported this week that Trump is now considering throwing the entire press corps out of the White House, turning the Brady Briefing Room back into a swimming pool (as it was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time) and banishing us all to the other side of the island, or at least to the Executive Office Building across the street. He made similar threats during his first administration. 

The reason is clear enough — despite all of our shortcomings in the press, there are still too many reporters who have actually read “Lord of the Flies” and recognize Trump for what he is. Every time he’s on television, when he’s not sleeping through a meeting, he reveals once again how unhinged, incompetent and corrupt he truly is.

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Further examination of reality makes clear, however, that the “Lord of the Flies” metaphor ultimately fails. It’s not just our country that resembles a group of children stranded on a deserted island with no rules or adults to guide us. The whole world is that way. If we were ever the beacon on the hill or the big brother or the Ralph from “Lord of the Flies” who stood up for liberty and justice, we’ve abandoned that role. The choirboys have taken over. Some of them, like Trump, even wear face paint, like in the book. 

Russia, China, most of the Middle East and Africa, France and other parts of Europe all look like crazed pre-pubescents hunting pigs with spears. If we want to broaden the analogy, Trump isn’t even the leader of the pack.

His actions this week make clear that he’s just a Roger. He represents malice, cruelty and a descent into brutality, but the true leader of the choirboys is Putin. He is obviously pulling Trump’s chain. He trolls him, leads him by the nose and manipulates him, playing him with such finesse that Trump can get himself twisted into a Gordian knot as easily as most of us draw breath. 

What happens next? That isn’t written in any book, at least not yet. But come Nov. 4, should we all survive that long, it will be.

The post Midterm panic turns Trump’s GOP into “Lord of the Flies” appeared first on Salon.com.

As soon as Vivek Ramaswamy released an ad celebrating a woman accused of backing a fugitive rapist, the widespread assumption among the pundit class was that it would backfire on him. Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate is falling behind in the polls against his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, in a race that threatens to turn long-red Ohio blue.

In a move reeking of desperation, Ramaswamy’s campaign ran a spot featuring Acton’s elderly mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a “liar” and suggesting she suffers from severe mental illness. But it took almost no time at all before the record was widely corrected, with extensive media reports showing the facts in black-and-white: In 1978, Arthur sided with her husband, Cledith, when he was charged with raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter Amy. 

Acton has not seen her mother since the Arthurs fled Ohio in an effort to evade justice nearly five decades ago. Her brother confirmed what both Acton and court records show, calling the Ramaswamy campaign “despicable.” The news that the GOP nominee was championing an abusive mother over her daughter quickly became the media narrative, leading to multiple predictions that the ad would backfire on Ramaswamy.

And yet MAGA leaders, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, are doubling down on the ad. At a Wednesday campaign event in Cincinnati, Vance praised Ramaswamy for his “audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is,” despite there being no evidence that Acton lied about her rape and ample evidence — such as fleeing the state — that the Arthurs did. On Wednesday, Trump defended the ad, saying, “It’s very unusual for a mother to hate her daughter, but I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”

The president escalated his rhetoric on Thursday, posting on Truth Social, “let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate.” In Iowa on Thursday, Trump went further, calling Ramaswamy “lucky” to have this situation to exploit, and that he should thank “God” for the favor. 

MAGA media figures like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Trump’s traveling companion Laura Loomer and Newsmax’s Greg Kelly have also defended the ad. Podcaster Megyn Kelly praised Arthur for trying to expose her daughter’s “sketchy history,” citing an interview Arthur did with a woman convicted of attempting to bomb an abortion clinic. In that conversation, Arthur complained that the last time she saw her daughter, in 1978, the 12-year-old was wearing clothes she deemed immodest.

Ramaswamy’s campaign has pledged to spend $4 million airing the ad. The reason is grim political strategy. With Trump’s approval ratings hitting record new lows by the day, Republicans feel their only hope to eke out victories in close midterm races is to juice MAGA turnout. Demonizing an adolescent rape victim is a likely two-fold play; it could energize the same people who are currently attacking Jane Doe, the Cornell gang rape accuser.

But the framing of Ramaswamy’s ad also suggests there is another audience his campaign has in mind: aging MAGA voters who are obsessively angry about the phenomenon of parental estrangement.  

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As I documented in an extensive 2024 report, right-wing media frequently runs scare stories about adult children who cut off their parents, a phenomenon that gets blamed on therapists, progressive ideology and social decay supposedly producing selfish children — but never the parents themselves. Just this year alone, Fox News has run multiple stories blaming “cutoff culture,” “social contagion,” “social media” and “ungrateful” children for parental estrangement. Earlier this month, the conservative National Review castigated children who go no-contact for being too poisoned by left-wing ideology to return their parents’ allegedly unconditional love. In September, the Wall Street Journal called it an “epidemic” and quoted supposed experts who claim children suffer from “self-delusion,” “diminished skill for tough conversations” and “a focus on identity over family,” which is often a euphemism for LGBTQ+ adults who refuse to stay in the closet to placate their family. 

“No one is reckoning with the question of what is happening in a lot of families that makes kids feel like they would be better off going low- or no-contact,” explained Joshua Stein, a political researcher who has spent years tracking parental estrangement forums. Instead, there’s an “online ecosystem of estrangement experts,” who often work through right-wing media, “selling services and stories appeal to that audience by first assuring them that it’s not their fault.”

“This is the same underlying politics of grievance at the heart of the American right,” he told me, noting that the Acton situation, while an extreme example, is not unusual. 

“Donna Arthur is a symptom of the moral psychology of right-wing reactionary politics,” Stein said, noting that for the “reactionary right,” the concept of respect “is one-directional.” In this view, “authority figures are entitled to respect, regardless of conduct,” and that “respect includes deferring to the authority,” which all too often results in making excuses for child abuse. 

While none of the estranged adult children who spoke to Salon in 2024 had endured sexual violence, many described how right-wing politics were deeply intertwined with parents being controlling, cruel and abusive. Some spoke of being severely beaten. Others had parents who wanted to dictate their romantic lives. One woman was pushed into a bad marriage at an early age. Another man described how his parents ran off girlfriends for being the “wrong” race or religion. A woman reported being denied medical care for religious reasons. Another woman, who is biracial, said her white mother made racist comments to her. 

In online forums for estranged parents, which tend to lean conservative, Stein found that children’s stories of mistreatment were regularly dismissed. “The driving narrative of children exaggerating trauma is central to reactionary politics of estrangement,” he explained, noting that Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Acton’s mother is “a manifestation” of this “reasoning under its worst conditions.” 

Ramaswamy, Trump, Vance and their advisers are all notorious for being constantly online, and they are almost certainly aware that the topic of parental estrangement is a driving concern with many MAGA voters, some of whom have experienced estrangement or distancing from their own children, family members or friends, and are outraged at the thought of facing social consequences for their reactionary views. Much of the online response in right-wing spaces suggests this read on the GOP base is accurate enough. On social media, plenty of GOP voters have defended Arthur and denounced Acton. Many of them appear to be elderly.

“Because of the estrangement factor,” one Daily Wire commenter wrote, “I believe the mom.” Many concurred.

“So telling the truth is a horrible thing. Mothers know their kids better than anybody,” one person posted on Facebook in response to a local news post about the ad. “NOT all daughters are good daughters EITHER,” agreed one. “Our mothers know us best!!” added another. 

To be clear, these attitudes are not the norm among Americans generally, and pollsters haven’t had a chance to gauge if Ramaswamy’s ad has boomeranged. But if the goal is to energize Republican voters who may feel demoralized this cycle, the strategy makes more sense. There’s a widespread sense of grievance on the right over feeling rejected for their political views, which manifests in everything from Republicans complaining that liberals won’t date them to a woman at a rally for Byron Donalds, Florida’s GOP nominee for governor, demanding that the law force her “petty” daughter to stay in contact.

The Donna Arthur ad was designed to stoke that very sense of entitlement and persuade conservatives to use their vote to punish liberal family members and neighbors for shunning them. It may not be enough to overcome the disgust that Ramaswamy stirred up in voters who have a healthier attitude about family and boundaries. Still, from the party that gave us “Haitians eat pets” and “LGBTQ kids poop in litter boxes,” there really is no move too morally depraved, if they think they can get votes with it. 

The post Ramaswamy’s ad exposes MAGA’s obsession with parental estrangement appeared first on Salon.com.

Hello, and Welcome Back To The Franchise

Dobbs fallout may have dropped out of the headlines, but existential state-level battles that will decide the fate of women nationwide continue to rage. 

This cycle, there’s one anti-abortion amendment and three pro. Two of them could upend the abortion landscape in their states. 

Jesse Watters can’t seem to stop admiring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. The Fox News host loves to talk about how Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate is “in great shape” and how “Abdul . . . beat the machine” — meaning the party establishment’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — in a hard-fought primary. During an interview in August, Watters clearly enjoyed El-Sayed’s jokes and blunt speech, which included calling his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, a “beta,” and asking the host if he was circumcised when Watters tried to corner him on gender-affirming surgery for minors. The next day, Watters made no bones about El-Sayed’s appeal. “I like him,” he said. “I don’t want to like him. I like him for some stupid reason.”

But the reason was obvious. The doctor-turned-politician has an aggressive bro style that appeals to someone like Watters. Quick-witted with bulldog energy, El-Sayed never backs down from a fight. But despite Watters’ admiration, Fox News has become obsessed with taking El-Sayed down. It’s not because he’s Muslim, though Republicans are ratcheting up the racism in their efforts to derail his campaign. It’s because he is a model for how Democrats can escape their reputations for being weak and feckless. 

El-Sayed has a lot going for him. He spent years running public health services in the Detroit area and speaks eloquently and with authority about people’s struggles to afford healthcare, even writing a book about Medicare for All. Most importantly, he’s an excellent communicator who can boil down complex policy ideas into easily digestible concepts without dumbing them down. A video of him explaining to Trump voters why universal healthcare is cheaper than the insurance system went viral for good reason. One can see that, for these voters, it’s likely the first time someone plainly explained how removing executive salaries and profit incentives from healthcare makes it cheaper. 

Other politicians, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are good at explaining progressive policy. But what really seems to scare Republicans about El-Sayed is his political persona as a brawler — and for good reason. Vice President JD Vance learned this last week when he lobbed a strange insult at El-Sayed during a rally in Michigan for Rogers. The Democrat, Vance said, is “a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude.”

This is a common and deeply racist attack from Vance, who portrays non-white progressives as undeserving recipients of white people’s largesse — a caricature that has no relation to reality. El-Sayed left a position as an assistant professor at Columbia University to work in public health, where he won awards for his success in protecting children’s health from environmental pollution. During this same period, Vance worked as a venture capitalist who was close with tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

El-Sayed resisted the temptation to “well, actually” Vance, and instead hit back by calling the vice president and those around him “carnival barkers” who “are small and want to make us small like them.” His response was smooth. “JD Vance called me a little weasel today,” El-Sayed said. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a Wolverine,'” a reference to the mascot for the University of Michigan, where the Democrat got his undergraduate degree. 

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently wrote, El-Sayed has been courting Fox News viewers by appearing on the channel and running endless ads on it, all without softening his left-leaning message. He clearly hopes his bravado will woo some of the network’s audience, just as it won over Watters. 

For his part, President Donald Trump is worried that El-Sayed is right. He’s been openly complaining at rallies and on Truth Social about how charming the candidate is in his Fox appearances. In early October, Axios reported that the White House contacted the network to complain about El-Sayed’s coverage. Trump was especially miffed at the Democrat’s interview with Martha McCallum, during which the host’s efforts to bait him into saying something that could be spun as “radical” failed. Instead, MacCallum embarrassed herself by defending billionaires hoarding wealth, to which El-Sayed said that he’d rather pay for schools than be so “focused on allowing a billionaire to make another billion.”

Since then, it seems that Fox producers got the White House’s message that they have to do something to dirty up El-Sayed. But they’ve learned the hard way that it won’t work to come at him directly, because he ends up dominating interviews and beguiling those who, like Watters, love his commanding and clever style. MacCallum later tried to redeem herself by interviewing progressive activist Corbin Trent and pretending he was a stand-in for El-Sayed.

At first glance, Trent performed as Fox producers no doubt hoped he might. He took MacCallum’s bait by defending the Muslim Brotherhood, something that the host could not get El-Sayed to do. The problem, though, is that Trent has no discernible relationship to the candidate. While he has worked for other progressives, including Sanders, I found no evidence that he has even met El-Sayed, much less is qualified to speak for him.

This attempt to hobble El-Sayed was revealing; it’s clearly all Fox News has. If the network tries to bring El-Sayed on again to ask him the same questions, they know from experience that he’ll probably just win over even more of their viewers. This isn’t idle speculation. MS NOW recently conducted a focus group with regretful Trump voters in Michigan and found that five out of the six are voting for El-Sayed. Republicans should be worried about the young male demographic in particular. Trump won male voters under 30 by a narrow margin in 2024, but they are jumping ship and now strongly favor Democrats.

El-Sayed is a compelling model for a new kind of Democrat. Polling by Strength In Numbers/Verasight shows that even Democratic voters take a negative view of the party, but not because they think their leaders are too progressive. “[T]he single most common complaint about their own party is that it is too weak, too cautious, or not fighting hard enough,” writes G. Elliott Morris in an analysis of the poll.

The Democratic base wants the party to take a more aggressive stance toward their GOP opponents, which will be key to building a more lasting coalition — especially one that includes younger and more male voters. El-Sayed is doing just that, and it has the right scared.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s fighting style terrifies MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Republicans running for governor across the country are backing away from abortion bans they once endorsed.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, calls his state’s 20-week abortion limit “settled law.” Just three years ago, he co-sponsored a bill that would have banned abortion six weeks into pregnancy.

Stacy Garrity, the GOP’s candidate in Pennsylvania, has said during her campaign that she would “respect” the state’s current law, which allows abortion until 24 weeks of pregnancy. Four years ago, she called on abortion opponents “to engage and make a difference” in state laws after the fall of Roe v. Wade. 

In Kansas, where abortion is legal until 22 weeks, Republican Ty Masterson has demurred when asked if, as governor, he would support a statewide referendum to eliminate the Kansas constitution’s abortion protections. Masterson had previously spoken at protests in opposition to reproductive rights and won the backing of state and national anti-abortion groups.

The candidates’ retreat suggests that, even as reproductive rights fade from the national spotlight and polls show voters are far more likely to prioritize cost-of-living concerns, the political ramifications of pushing for new abortion restrictions remain substantial. The rhetorical distancing also moves political conversations away from an issue that overwhelmingly energizes Democrats. 

“That might be their strategy there, to try to demotivate Democratic turnout in the state to take abortion off the table as a voting issue,” said Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research, polling and journalism organization. That’s especially true in tighter races such as those in Wisconsin and Kansas, she said.

Tiffany’s, Garrity’s and Masterson’s campaigns did not reply to requests for comment. The 19th contacted multiple Republican-aligned pollsters who also did not immediately respond.

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About 60 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, including about two-thirds of independents, according to a poll from The 19th and YouGov. 

That said, pushing for abortion restrictions has never been broadly popular. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Republicans seeking general election typically would not campaign overtly on abortion bans, said Molly Murphy, a pollster and president of Impact Research, a Democratically-aligned polling firm. 

“It would get discussed in donor meeting hot mics, endorsement questionnaires, etc, but candidates wouldn’t run on the fact that they’d ban abortion,” she wrote in an email.

    

Voters largely don’t consider abortion to be “settled law,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, noting that the share of voters opposing abortion bans has increased since the fall of Roe. “They feel like, ‘Wait a minute, it can be taken away again.’” 

In some races, Democrats and their allies are trying to push abortion rights back under the microscope — a strategy geared toward energizing liberal voters, Kirzinger said. 

Wisconsin’s Democratic nominee for governor, David Crowley, has said that, if elected, he would work with the state legislature to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — though it’s not clear how expansive that protection would be or whether it might supplant the state’s 20-week cutoff.

Pine Tree State Prosperity, a political action committee associated with the national Democratic Governors Association, is running advertising in Maine that highlights anti-abortion remarks made by Bobby Charles, the state’s Republican pick for governor. The Democratic nominee, Hannah Pingree, has led by double digits in recent polls. Charles’ campaign did not reply to a request for comment. 

Planned Parenthood’s super PAC, called Planned Parenthood Votes, has focused its resources in states such as Michigan, where the Republican candidate, U.S. Rep. John James, has said that abortion is “decided.” Four years ago, James said he opposed abortion in all cases, and he has compared the practice to genocide. His campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

James’ running mate, Jay DeBoyer, recently suggested leveraging a state constitutional convention to enact a 12-week abortion ban in Michigan, according to recordings of the remarks reported by The Detroit News and Michigan Advance. DeBoyer has since said publicly that abortion is a “settled” issue in Michigan, where voters in 2022 amended the state constitution to protect abortion before fetal viability.

Some gubernatorial candidates are still pushing for abortion restrictions, albeit far less ambitious ones. 

In New Mexico, where Democrats are expected to keep control of the governor’s mansion and already control both legislative chambers, Republican candidate Gregg Hull said he was “fully committed” to working with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to reduce the number of Texans coming to the neighboring state for abortions. 

Hull has repeatedly called himself “pro-life” but also said that he would not change the state’s abortion law, which imposes no time limits on the procedure, without legislative support. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Abortion opponents are trying to revive the issue in a handful of states. SBA Pro-Life America, one of the nation’s leading anti-abortion groups, is pushing ads that characterize Democratic candidates for governor as well as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as extreme on the issue, including in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan.

But generally, voters are less likely to trust conservatives on abortion, Lake said. And talking about abortion, she added, is more likely to generate enthusiasm among key Democratic voting blocs, particularly young women and college-educated women, who typically support reproductive rights.

“We have in our research people who say, ‘I used to be pro-life, I didn’t support abortion, I would never get one, but I think this is a decision that needs to be made by a woman and her doctor,’” Lake said. “People now feel this is just way too dangerous. This has gone way too far.”

The post The GOP candidates walking back some of their abortion stances appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.

Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts. 

In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942. 

More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country. 

Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate. 

Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.

Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump lies. Telling untruths is not merely second nature to him; it is of the first order, automatic. He lies as naturally as he breathes.

From his claim to being a great businessman and dealmaker to calling himself not the worst president in U.S. history — which he is, by far — but the best, Trump has spewed a firehose of falsehoods to the public. But he has never reserved his lying only for his political opponents.

He has lied to his MAGA followers about, well, everything — bringing grocery prices down, ending this or that war “on day one,” the value of his cryptocurrency offerings, creating any number of “unbelievable” plans to fix our infrastructure, our healthcare, our economy. All those “beautiful” plans that were never plans but so-called concepts of plans. You know, back-of-the-envelope musings on critical national issues while heading off for another taxpayer-funded golf outing.

Suffice it to say: If you can name it, Trump has lied about it.

Journalists often write of Trump’s Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, but that is only one of the big lies Republicans tell, and it is not the one that most adversely affects working Americans.

The biggest lie is the one Republicans have told for more than half a century — about how they are better than Democrats at managing the economy. A majority of Americans have believed this for my whole lifetime. But with Trump’s wild mismanagement of the economy, public sentiment is finally changing. More people now trust Democrats on the economy, and for good reason.

The idea of telling a lie so massive that not many people would think that it could be made out of whole cloth comes from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” The failed artist and future German führer thought that most people would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This theory was later put to use by Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to scapegoat and dehumanize Jewish people, and it led directly to the Holocaust — a horrible truth many Nazi-curious conservatives love to deny.

Trump, a fanboy of ruthless dictators, was determined to stay in office after losing the 2020 election decisively in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden, and he naturally turned to Hitler’s technique. (I say “naturally” because, according to his first wife Ivana, he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. Also, after Trump’s first term, his former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly warned Americans that Trump very much admired Hitler.)

The Republican’s lie on the economy is such a whopper — so “colossal,” as Hitler put it — that it has defined American politics for decades. That’s the ruse of the colossal lie, which is not merely the propagandist’s use of repetition (Trump’s main go-to move) but a sort of verbal legerdemain. People are cunningly led to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own pocketbooks.

As we head into the November midterms, and as candidates begin to emerge in the 2028 presidential race, it’s a good time to refresh our memories of how costly the GOP’s colossal lie about trickle-down economics, which began with President Ronald Reagan, has been for Americans.

Running for the presidency, the former Republican California governor and B-list actor said that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations would “trickle down” benefits to the working people of America. This sounded good in theory, but it was “voodoo economics” in practice, as George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent in the 1980 Republican primaries, noted — until he was chosen as the Californian’s running mate).

In his two terms, Reagan’s tax cuts increased the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion. But that’s nothing compared to Trump. While occupying the White House, the president has increased the national debt by a staggering $11.6 trillion so far, an increase of more than 25%.

As I’ve written before, Democratic presidents have almost always done better — I should say much better — than Republican presidents in managing the U.S. economy. According to a 2016 academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, this was true from the Truman administration through the first Obama term across all major macroeconomic measures: job creation, unemployment, national debt, GDP growth, growth in real wages and controlling inflation.

As Blinder and Watson concluded:

[T]here is a systematic and large gap between the U.S. economy’s performance when a Democrat is president of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criterion.

We can tack on Biden’s term as well, which, amid the global inflation spikes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down supply chains, recovered far better than any other advanced country. As The Economist put it at the time, the quickly recovering economy under Biden was “the envy of the world.” People may not have felt “the vibe,” but things were on the right track by all standard economic measures.

In addition, in 2021, the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed with bipartisan support to rebuild or upgrade the nation’s aging transportation, water and broadband systems. The following year, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act was enacted and called for microchip manufacturing to be started up in rural areas, mostly Republican-voting districts. Unlike Trump, Biden understood that the president is charged with working on behalf of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

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Since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, about 70% of all jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, and in recent decades, the percentage is more than 90%. Of the 11 recessions the country suffered between 1953 and 2020 — when the pandemic began — 10 began while a Republican was in the White House.

What Blinder and Watson studied was independently updated in 2024 with similar findings of a “striking” positive difference on the U.S. economy when a Democrat is in the White House. One doesn’t need academics or economics experts to tell that Republicans never look out for the interests of the working class, or even the middle class. But for those who still like evidence, a series of charts by Steven Rattner and graphic artist Taylor Maggiacomo tell the story of Trump’s promises on the economy and his results so far.

What these charts cannot show is the long-term economic disaster of lost markets for farmers and U.S. manufacturers caused by Trump’s tariffs and his disparagement of our trading partners, or what it will mean to our economy as countries move to de-Americanize their tech — which they must do to protect themselves from Trump.

Although he had once headed the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan kicked off the GOP’s modern union-busting zeal, treating union members as badly as he did university kids, our infrastructure of the future, as governor of California. This points to another factor that macroeconomic statistics do not tell us: Democrats are not only better stewards of the economy, but they also want the wealth created by American workers to be shared more equitably and for the social safety net to be made more robust, so Americans can better weather any financial vicissitudes.

Democrats also understand that the economy depends on healthy, educated, informed workers, and that the performance of parents in the workforce increases when they have access to affordable quality childcare.

Do I need to point out that Republicans have little to no desire to help workers and those in need, outside of, say, charitable contributions or church work? Indeed, rather than looking out for the poor or loving the stranger — and growing increasingly annoyed by those darned Biblical verses about a camel passing through the eye of a needle — the wealthy and powerful long ago undertook to remake American Christianity.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, the right’s perversion of the message of Jesus knows no bounds; to justify their greed and avarice, they are taught that it is inconceivable to be Christian and vote other than Republican, which is yet another colossal lie by the GOP.

Public sentiment about which party does best in managing the economy has finally shifted to Democrats in the face of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the recovering Biden economy. Trump’s tax cuts, tariffs, attacks on education and journalists, his disparagement of historical allies and his war of choice with Iran have undermined nearly every aspect of what has made the United States prosperous.

But it is up to journalists to regularly tell this truth to the public in the face of the colossal Republican lie about the economy that began with Reagan, a man who had the sheer audacity to claim that the budget deficit was affected by restaurant servers not declaring their tips.

Today’s Republicans are even more Dickensian, focused as they are on deporting hard-working immigrants who long to be American citizens and taking healthcare and even food stamps away from struggling American families.

Why are Republicans terrible with the economy? Because they do not believe in government — unless it helps them.

The post The biggest GOP lie isn’t about elections — it’s the economy appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

"I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls' sports." — JD Vance's personal definition of socialism.

Sycophant and Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, was asked for his personal definition of socialism and answered with talking points intended to inflame tempers and anger bigots. — Read the rest

The post JD Vance defines socialism with bigotry, not economics or socialism appeared first on Boing Boing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Supreme Court convened on Monday for another exciting round of “how far will they go?” and, as luck would have it, the putative leader of the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito, is out on a book tour talking about the philosophy that will guide their decisions. 

“So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country” is a collection of essays adapted from speeches he has given since 2007, many with straightforward titles, including “Let Judges Be Judges.” While an associate justice, Alito’s power on the Court shouldn’t be undersold. While all the other conservatives justices — aside from Clarence Thomas — don’t openly identify as originalists, they have shown themselves happy to follow Alito’s lead when it suits their ends. In fact, the so-called Roberts Court, named by tradition after the chief justice, is a misnomer. It’s really the Alito Court, which should send a chill down your spine if you have any concerns about where America is heading.

Alito gave a long interview to CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford, addressing a wide range of issues. One wouldn’t call him a charming personality, but he is compelling in his absolute confidence in himself and his ideas. At 76, he seems to be just getting started. He admitted to Crawford that he thinks about retiring, as anyone his age would, but he doesn’t have any intention of doing so at the moment, a fact that must come as a disappointment to both President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans who are struggling to hold on to their majority. 

Considering the sad example of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both Alito and Thomas would have done conservatives and Trump a big favor if they had retired during these first two years of Trump domination. Had they done so, they would have been seen as heroes to their fellow right-wing activists. 

Trump may think his legacy is in the hideous monuments he’s building to himself, but the Court’s conservative majority will be the lasting mark of his reign. He has already appointed three — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — of the six conservative justices, and if he were able to appoint two more in the vein of Alito and Thomas, but 30 years younger, he would likely seal the nation’s future and benefit his wealthy cronies for generations to come. 

Even if the pair had merely hinted they might resign, it would have given the Republicans something to run on in the midterms. Should the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, as they are now increasingly expected to, come January any hopes of appointing a far-right conservative in Alito’s image are dead for at least the next two years. If a vacancy were to happen, presumably the Democrats would invoke the McConnell precedent and keep the seat open until a new president is elected. 

But right now Alito and Thomas are at the height of their power and influence — and they aren’t going anywhere. “I think I can still make a contribution,” Alito told Crawford. “And it’s hard to give up the opportunity to do something that I think will be good for the Constitution and good for the country as long as I’m able to do it.” As Kevin McMahon, a political science professor at Connecticut’s Trinity College, told Reuters, “They have been waiting for a long time to be in the position. So why leave?”

Why leave indeed? Crawford’s analysis of Alito’s power on the Court is that he is now the fulcrum on which its decisions are made. “Alito is especially skilled in bringing together five justices for a majority on some of the Court’s most difficult and contentious issues,” she observes. “The justice often publicly portrayed as unyielding and inflexible is, behind the scenes, the conservative who is uniquely adept at finding common ground on the most divisive issues.” 

Alito is certainly having some success with his signature issue, the unitary executive, having been a champion of the right-wing theory since the 1980s, when he worked for Ronald Reagan’s hyper-partisan Attorney General Ed Meese in the Justice Department. As Alito defined it back in 2000, before he was elevated to the high court, the “president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.” He believes the president has the sole authority over federal agencies and sees presidential power as dominant — well, unless the Supreme Court disagrees and says otherwise. 

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All this may seem to be in conflict with Alito’s guiding philosophy of originalism, but he explains that away by calling himself a “practical originalist” who believes that the Constitution is a sort of sacred text that must be taken literally as it was understood at the time of its adoption — unless it just doesn’t seem right. Last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Even Originalists Make Mistakes,” in which he listed legal scholars and practitioners who, in his estimation, aren’t following the one true creed. But Alito admitted that he, too, must sometimes deviate from the path and make a “reasonable judgment call” that may require him to overturn precedents and that “conditions” may “militate against scholarly purity.” 

The justice goes to great lengths to deny that he has any partisan interest, but it’s clear throughout the interview and from his other comments over the last few years that he’s highly partisan and influenced by the right-wing hysteria over the “woke” left. Alito expressed grave concern about presidents criticizing the Court for its decisions, saying that Joe Biden was particularly harsh. But when pushed a bit, he admitted that Trump has been harsh too. That false equivalence is so fatuous it’s embarrassing that a Supreme Court justice would have the gall to utter it.

Biden condemned the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by calling it a “tragic error” and “an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.” The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision did, after all, overturn a constitutional right that had been in effect for 50 years, one that numerous conservative justices had told the Senate and country they considered to be settled law. Trump, on the other hand, has said that members of the Court, especially those he appointed, are “very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution,” when they vote against his wishes. But he hasn’t stopped there. They are also, he said, “an embarrassment to their families, if you want to know the truth” and a “disgrace to our nation.” But then Trump loves Alito and says he “wants to make America great again,” so perhaps the justice agrees with him about his brethren. And why not? They are aligned on virtually every issue. 

As the Court’s new term begins, Alito is clearly feeling his oats. He wants to have the influence and power to decide the radical cases that are coming before the court as a result of Trump’s unprecedented power grab under the unitary executive theory. The project is his life’s work. So he’s staying.

But that doesn’t mean that Democrats didn’t dodge a bullet when he refused to retire so Trump could name a young replacement. These days it may be hard to imagine anyone worse than Samuel Alito, but just think about who could have been next. How does Justice Todd Blanche or Justice Aileen Cannon sound?

The post Samuel Alito’s unfinished business could be a gift to Democrats appeared first on Salon.com.

Having abandoned Donald Trump for a longer-lasting future that doesn't involve being left to die with the press corps, Karoline Leavitt surprises us only by jumping to Fox News so quickly.

Leavitt was one of Trump's most vile press secretaries. Not the pitiful joke of Scaramucci, or the weakness embodied by Spicey, Karoline "The Mouth of Moron" Leavitt was a hopped-up, supercharged version of Huckabee-Sanders with nothing but spite for the American people. — Read the rest

The post Having spent enough time with her family, Karoline Leavitt joins Fox News appeared first on Boing Boing.

The President of the United States stood in a high school gym in Vandalia, Ohio, and described his vision of a Republican victory this November, insisting they'd "shove it up their ass." The audience cheered.

Trump was stumping for Ohio Republicans Jon Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy when he resorted to the kind of argument MAGA can really get behind:

Apparently the face-eating leopards have evolved. — Read the rest

The post Trump tells Ohio Republicans: "We're gonna shove it up their ass" appeared first on Boing Boing.

It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).

What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.