This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s midterms response is a shrug.

What happened? By now, you certainly know: Democrats won overwhelmingly in Tuesday’s midterm elections, and they won everywhere. The party will head into 2027 with commanding majorities in the House and the Senate, breaking two years of unified Republican control in Washington, DC. 

The results are a sweeping repudiation of Trump, the Republican Party, and the first two years of his second administration. But you wouldn’t know it from the president’s only public appearance on Wednesday, which focused on his beloved East Wing ballroom.

How is Trump responding? To a surprising extent, he’s not. He blamed the loss on Republican candidates and his absence from the ballot in social media posts Tuesday night, but his public comments have been subdued, with none of the claims of election fraud that have become his hallmark. 

One Trump adviser, according to CNN, said that Trump likely would not attempt to challenge the results (Alaska notwithstanding, potentially) because the scale of the Democratic victories was “too big to rig.”

On Wednesday, Trump gave remarks from inside the partially completed ballroom — dwelling on its size, the kitchen setup, and his choice of marble for the flooring — and signed his name on a steel beam. His only comments on the midterms came in response to questions from the press, including about the Iran war, which Vice President JD Vance has blamed for the GOP loss.

“I think it’s largely true,” Trump said, “but at the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again.”

What’s the big picture? It’s pretty likely that we’ll see a few different versions of Trump’s response in the coming days, not to mention when Democrats actually take power in January — my colleague Astead Herndon described it on Wednesday as Trump’s “stages of grief.” 

Whatever the next two years look like, though, his tepid response to a historic defeat makes one thing clear: Donald Trump’s time at the center of American politics is slipping away.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Another result of Tuesday’s elections: More than a million low-income Texans could soon have access to healthcare, after Democratic victories in the state opened up the possibility of Medicaid expansion. You can read all about it from my colleague Dylan Scott here with a gift link.

Or, if you’re ready to be done with politics content for today, here’s a picture of a baby muskox. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Republicans began picking through their party’s post-midterms wreckage Wednesday to ask about — and argue over — how things went so, so wrong in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Tuesday’s blue tsunami not only washed out Republicans’ House and Senate majorities, it carried Democrats into office even in deep red strongholds like South Carolina, Kansas, and possibly Mississippi. It seemed to be a decisive thumbs down from the electorate on the second Trump administration.

These results also mark the effective start of the battle to determine what the Republican Party will become after Trump — both who the 2028 GOP presidential nominee will be, and what the party will stand for overall.

Within hours of the results, a sort of narrative warfare began to unfold, as different politicians, advocates, and factions tried to advance their preferred accounts of what exactly went wrong, who should get the blame, and what the party should change for the future. Here are three theories of what went wrong that are already starting arguments between big names on the right.

Was the war by far the most important thing – or just one problem among many?

The conversation about what went wrong is especially important for Vice President JD Vance, who remains the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, but is inextricably tied to an administration that increasingly looks like a failure. So it was noteworthy that he offered his own account of what happened.

Vance’s post-mortem glancingly mentioned a few issues, such as “cost of living/inflation,” and floated that he’d be open to changing immigration “enforcement” (though he reiterated he’d never support “amnesty”). He also cited voters’ belief that the United States should “change our relationship to Israel,” perhaps helping explain why Trump announced on Election Day that he’d decided to end aid to Israel after this year.

Yet there was one factor Vance wanted to be sure got most of the blame: the Iran war.

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. What’s more, he claimed that “everyone knows” that is the case, and that “any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

That position is no surprise coming from Vance, who has long been a critic of the hawkish GOP foreign policy establishment, and who had hoped to help steer Trump’s second term on a different course. 

Vance is associated with an “America First” faction that was deeply skeptical of US involvement in foreign conflicts, particularly in Ukraine and Iran.

But Trump ignored their advice, sided with the hawks, and launched his Iran war early this year. And though Vance stood by that decision publicly, he now wants it known that he was right all along. 

Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine and a critic of the hawks, told me Wednesday that Vance had a tremendous opportunity to help negotiate an end to the conflict: “He’s in a pole position to get us out of this mistake, and I think if he does do that, he will be associated with ending the war, not starting the war.”

The right’s internal conflict between the hawks and the America Firsters, has long been bitter and personal, and goes beyond Vance. Aspects of it played out publicly among commentators Wednesday, with hawks like talk radio host Mark Levin deriding the idea that the war sank Trump. 

“The mid-terms were not lost over a single issue.  And anybody with a functioning brain knows that,” Levin posted on X. He added that, to the extent the war harmed Trump politically, it was the fault of the America Firsters’ campaign to “undermine” it.

But right-wing commentator Ryan James Girdusky argued to me that the war hurt Trump’s coalition beyond just driving up energy prices. “In 2024, TikTok was all, ‘Trump is great, Trump is the man,’” he said. “What’s the vibe on TikTok today? It’s, ‘You’re at war for Israel.’ That is a completely different narrative, and that’s a mainstream narrative on TikTok.”

Is this outcome a rejection of Trumpism – that necessitates something very different?

Another narrative some began advancing was that the midterm elections were a repudiation of Trumpism in general — and, particularly, all the ways Trump deviated from the GOP’s pre-Trump conservative principles. 

The exact specifics varied, but the conservative commentator Erick Erickson summed up the gist of it by writing:

It was gas prices. It was the war. It was also the corruption. The incompetence. The tariffs. The playing nice with Russia. The impression of cruelty. The overly aggressive deportations. The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic. The arrogance. The ballroom. The reflecting poll. The golf courses. The arch. The Qatari 747. The aggressive redistricting push. The threats against enemies.

There was also Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), who criticized “a hastily executed war, headline after headline of scandals, a ballooning $40 trillion debt, and unpredictable tariffs” while saying it was “time for Republicans to return to the principled conservative values that once defined us—and that we’ve steadily abandoned over the last decade.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a past and perhaps future Republican presidential candidate, had some pointed criticisms for the Trump administration even before the results were in. This week, he said that in addition to failures on affordability and the Iran war being a “big, big drag,” the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration under former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem had created “unnecessary” conflicts. 

But DeSantis also emphasized another issue: corruption.“This swamp here is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “Look at the amount of money these people are making, who are in the administration,” he went on, specifically calling out Trump lawyer Alina Habba for reportedly getting a $10 million a year contract while advising the Justice Department.

Then on Wednesday, DeSantis gave a lengthy press conference in which he portrayed the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans.” Again, he cited the cost of living and corruption, and said that he himself does not trade any stocks while he’s in elected office.

What can Republicans do about the economy?

There was widespread agreement on the right that Trump had failed to address voters’ concerns about affordability and high prices.

There was much less agreement on why, exactly, Trump had failed on the economy — and what Republicans should do instead.

To the GOP’s free market faction, Trump had blundered with his tariffs, which, in addition to being handled chaotically, helped drive prices up. Curtis, the senator from Utah, mentioned tariffs and a failure to address the debt as major errors from the administration.

Those sympathetic to the populist right were more reluctant to blame the tariffs per se. Gidurksy told me that “the tariffs didn’t do what the anti-tariff audience said they were going to do” — that they did not cause economic catastrophe or raise prices as much as economists had predicted. 

Indeed, beyond the tariffs, many on the populist right believe that the Trump administration’s true failure was not delivering on their economic populist rhetoric. For instance, Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — was mostly orthodox conservative Republican policy, focused on cutting taxes (particularly for the wealthy) and paying for it by slashing Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

But outside a couple of working-class flourishes, like exempting tips from taxes, it did little to address the broader affordability problem. Gidursky told me that the administration’s most acute problem was that gas prices, interest rates, and health insurance premiums kept getting more expensive, and the administration simply didn’t manage to address that.

“Life is too expensive,” right-wing commentator Benny Johnson posted on X. “Especially for young people. This is a crisis. Communists will win on the ‘affordability’ question if we don’t end the war and fix prices.”

Still, coming up with an agenda that can actually address those voter concerns is more challenging, especially with the deficits and inflation concerns potentially constraining both parties from considering major new tax cuts and benefits. And making major long-term headway on spending cuts would likely require looking at programs like Medicare and Social Security that voters punished Republicans in the past for trying to remake, and that Trump moved the GOP away from considering touching. This tension between offering voters more direct help or retreating to austerity is likely to loom over the 2028 presidential campaign. But for now, Republicans are still struggling to figure out a clear agenda on the economy that resonates with voters. 

“Voters are signaling they are unhappy with the economy, the Iran War, and corruption,” the influential right-wing activist Christopher Rufo posted. “It’s about policy.”

Voters just ushered the United States into the post-Trump era.

The ballots are still being counted, and key races are still being called, but here’s the short version of the midterm election: It’s a blue tsunami.

Democrats looked set to take full control of Congress; they flipped crucial seats and won state-level offices where they’d barely been expected to compete. If anything, their performance was significantly stronger than expected — even after weeks of polls showing the party surging, and President Donald Trump’s approval cratering, and mounting outrage over gas prices, the war in Iran, healthcare, and corruption. It’s quite possible this is the biggest midterm wave since Watergate, and it appears likely to send large Democratic majorities to Congress.

What happens now? The historic shift that voters signaled Tuesday goes beyond just the raw numbers. Simply put, Americans are waking up in a different country today — one in which voters have decisively repudiated Trump’s party and opened up a new era of American politics.

Democrats won back groups they lost in 2024, like Latino voters, and made previously unheard-of incursions into MAGA territory, including rural and working-class white communities. Democrats even won the governorship of Texas — Texas!

One potential takeaway is that a new version of a Democratic coalition could be emerging. A more realistic way to see this, though, might be as the latest and loudest affirmation that the politics of the post-Trump era remain highly unsettled, with no voting group or state to be taken for granted by either party. 

The incoming class of leaders is a diverse portrait of America in the 21st century, and a picture of the kind of nation that Trump has explicitly been trying to roll back. Georgia elected the nation’s first Black woman governor; New Hampshire will send the first openly gay man to the Senate; and (as of this writing) the would-be first Muslim senator was leading in Michigan. In Kansas, a megachurch pastor won evangelical voters to the Democratic ticket, sending the state’s first non-Republican to the Senate in nearly a century. In an election where the closing Republican arguments often relied on tribal fears around religion, country of origin, masculinity, and gender identity, the results were a loud rebuke to those impulses. 

Taken together, the night was also, as election analyst Sean Trende put it, “a complete collapse of the Republican coalition.” Democrats will now have a chance to carry out the mandate they’ve been handed — on affordability, corruption, and foreign policy — and convince voters they can still be trusted with greater power in 2028 and beyond. How Trump responds, and the Republicans who must now balance their loyalty to a vengeful 80-year-old lame duck against a partywide emergency heading into the presidential cycle, will be one of the defining stories of the rest of his term. 

Here’s the story of the historic shift so far, and what it will mean for the country going forward.

The House: Democrats are poised to take control in a major way

Many of the Democrats’ newly won House seats could be hard for the party to defend in future elections, but for now the results could have major implications for how the chamber governs.

Both Democrats and Republicans have struggled with narrow majorities in recent years, in which a small handful of members can threaten to withhold their votes and tank legislation or procedural votes. The new Democratic majority is big enough to avoid that problem in the next session. But it also might diminish the influence of the energetic new progressive wing, since their votes would not necessarily be crucial to pass certain measures. 

From the very first votes counted in Indiana and Kentucky, in districts that Trump had won by double digits in 2024, it was clear that Republicans’ small House of Representatives majority would likely soon be washed out by a blue wave. But as the night went on, the size of the wave became more and more clear. Democrats were flipping Republican seats across the country, without any particular geographic or regional pattern to speak of. 

They flipped Republican-held seats in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina. They looked favored to win more in Arizona, Michigan, Iowa, and Virginia. 

Democratic House challengers with mainstream political experience, like Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-8), won. So did Democrats with military experience, like Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett (NJ-7). And so did Democrats with more against-the-grain backgrounds, like farmer Jamie Ager (NC-11).

The exact size of the Democratic majority wasn’t immediately clear as races remain uncalled, but forecasts on Tuesday night suggested it would likely be enormous — something like a 60-vote edge over the GOP in the chamber.

More votes means more leeway for leadership, which could perhaps give the party’s growing progressive faction, or a soon-to-be considerable moderate wing, less leverage to make demands and more freedom to vote “no” when their conscience or local politics calls for it. 

The Senate: Some very weak Republican candidates helped Democrats beat all expectations

Control of the Senate will be hugely important in shaping the final two years of Trump’s presidency — because a Democratic majority would make it much harder for him to confirm controversial nominees to administration positions. It would also likely make it impossible for him to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, should a vacancy arise.

Furthermore, if Democrats hope to achieve their ambitions next time they control the presidency (which they hope will be in 2029), they’d have to start building a Senate majority now — only a third of the chamber is up in each cycle.

The problem for Democrats was that political analysts had long believed the Senate map they faced this year would be forbiddingly difficult. They’d have to hold their own seats, including contests in swing states like Georgia and Michigan. 

To win a majority, though, Democrats then had to pick off at least four Republican seats, and some of those would have to be in deep red territory, which meant breaking into states Trump won big, such as Ohio and Texas.

In doing this, they didn’t just benefit from a blue wave. They also got help of a kind from a surprising source: Trump, whose choices and actions often seemed designed to put safe GOP-held seats at risk. 

Trump’s attacks on Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) spurred the veteran legislator to retire. Trump backed a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that resulted in a flawed and scandal-plagued candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, becoming the GOP nominee. And when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died suddenly in July, Trump decided to appoint his sister Darline, a political neophyte, to his seat.

On Tuesday, Republicans lost all three of those races. In North Carolina, the state’s popular Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, easily triumphed over former RNC chair Michael Whatley. In Texas, 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico became a nationally viral phenomenon with his faith-inflected message and defeated Paxton soundly. And in South Carolina, a pediatrician named Annie Andrews defeated Darline Graham in one of the night’s most shocking results. 

But the GOP’s Senate woes were broader. In Ohio, a state Trump won three times, former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) defeated Sen. Jon Husted (R), who Trump had appointed to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat once Vance became vice president. In Iowa, Republicans had viewed their candidate for the open Senate seat, Rep. Ashley Hinson, as one of the stars of the cycle, believing she did everything right. It wasn’t enough. She, too, went down to defeat, to state Rep. Josh Turek (D). In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins (R), who had long defied political gravity, finally lost to former state Sen. Troy Jackson (D).

And yet another shocker ensued in Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton (D) led Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), a one-term incumbent whose campaign was dogged by reports that, back when he was a doctor, he’d sued patients for unpaid bills.

All in all, depending on how uncalled races in Mississippi and Alaska turn out, Democrats could end up with somewhere around 55 Senate seats — an impressive majority, particularly in a year when they weren’t expected to come anywhere close to that.

Governors: Democrats get their chance to lead

Even with significant majorities, Democrats will be limited in how much they can check Trump and enact their agenda in Congress. 

But at the state level, Democrats won major gubernatorial victories around the country, giving them an immediate opportunity to pursue policies that could directly affect hundreds of millions of Americans — including in states that they haven’t led in decades. 

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms is set to become the first Black governor, and the first Black woman to govern any state in America, after defeating Republican businessman Rick Jackson. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa rode a backlash over data centers to beat Greg Abbott, long considered one of the most politically successful and influential conservative governors in the country.

In Iowa, Democratic state auditor Rob Sand, who campaigned as a pragmatist, won the governorship. And in Ohio, Democratic public health expert Amy Acton overcame a last-ditch ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy that featured her own mother — who lost custody of a then-12-year-old Acton after her husband was indicted for sexual abuse — to handily win her election. 

A bright spot for Republicans is Florida, where Rep. Byron Donalds overcame a surprisingly tough race against Democrat David Jolly and is set to become the state’s first Black governor. 

Latino voters gave Democrats a second chance

Underlying some of the night’s most surprising results were powerful demographic currents — for the GOP, not unlike a wave quickly pulling back from the beach. Trump had shocked Democrats over the last 10 years by making steady gains with Latino voters, first with conservative-leaning Cuban Americans in Florida, and then in 2024 with Mexican American and Puerto Rican voters around the country moving right over concerns about inflation and border security. 

But Trump’s economic mismanagement and aggressive deployment of ICE helped spur a backlash from early on in his second term that culminated in a massive swing back toward Democrats in key races. From South and Central Florida to rural Kansas to the Rio Grande Valley, Latino voters again favored Democrats, helping power candidates to big wins.

Nowhere was the impact greater than in Texas, where exit polls found Talarico won 64 percent of Latino voters in his race against Paxton, giving Democrats a statewide victory after decades of failure. Trump had won 55 percent of the Latino vote just two years earlier. 

The gerrymanders didn’t work. In fact, they sparked a backlash.

Republicans, egged on by Trump, had a last-ditch plan to save the House: Break from the usual once-a-decade redistricting process and gerrymander seats wherever state Republicans had the ability to do so. They got an added boost from the Supreme Court, which overturned decades of Voting Rights Act protections for minority-majority districts in its Louisiana v. Callais decision. 

It didn’t work. While the new maps gave Republicans an advantage on paper, the scale of the blue wave was so big that it quickly overpowered it. In Florida, Democrats herded into Trumpier districts appeared to all survive their contests. And in North Carolina, the situation was even worse for Republicans, with the former state house speaker who masterminded the new maps, Tim Moore, trailing in his own congressional run with nearly all votes counted in what was expected to be a solidly Republican seat. 

It may have backfired in ways that went beyond the House results. There was a massive surge in Black turnout across the South, where voting rights have long been a touchstone issue, that spilled into statewide races. Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates not only won by wide margins in Georgia and North Carolina, but put up shockingly competitive fights in Mississippi and Louisiana Senate races that only came on the national radar late in the cycle.  

The most important takeaway: Voters are really, really, really mad 

Americans chose to overlook some pretty glaring concerns with Trump when they sent him back to office in 2024, but they did so with a clear mandate: Get prices down, secure the border, and bring a positive resolution to conflicts abroad. 

It’s clear now he blew it, and they aren’t happy. 

The scale of voter outrage was the story of the night, just two years after Democrats faced its wrath and arguably far more intense this time. Sixty-two percent of voters in preliminary exit polls disapproved of his job as president, 53 percent of them strongly; 62 percent said he prioritized his own interests more than the country’s; 65 percent believed he had made the economy worse; and 44 percent said their own financial situation had worsened since his election.

It’s a complete loss of confidence, and a sharp contrast to his — in comparison now, modest — rebuke in the 2018 and even 2020 election, when voters still credited his economic stewardship even as they rebelled against his personal behavior and broader agenda. 

Both parties now know just how poisonous the current Trump brand is. The question is whether Democrats can offer a compelling alternative vision now and — above all, after years of anti-incumbent sentiment — prove they can deliver tangible results. Even on a historic night, a majority of voters told pollsters they held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. 

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the US would soon cut off military aid to Israel.

During an Election Day interview with Fox & Friends, Trump said of Israel, “We were giving them $4 billion but it’s cut off at the end of the year.”

When asked to explain this position, Trump said that Israel was a “very successful country” that didn’t need Americans’ money — and that the aid had become an “easy target” for “lunatics like [Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul] El-Sayed” in the midterm elections. Trump also suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed with this reasoning and supported a cessation of US aid to his country.

Of course, Trump says a lot of things. If all of his policy declarations could be taken at face value, then US soldiers would now be patrolling the streets of Gaza, while American hoteliers redeveloped its coastline.

Further, Trump’s remarks Tuesday morning seem to have been ad-libbed. The Israeli Treasury Department reportedly had no knowledge of a supposed joint agreement to end US aid. And existing US law provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual funding through 2028.

All this said, Trump didn’t pluck his Election Day rant out of thin air. Rather, his remarks actually reflect a prominent strain of thinking among Israeli leaders and security experts. In their view, America’s cash may no longer be worth the political blowback that it invites.

Given this Israeli sentiment — and the souring of American public opinion toward Israel — the United States might very well draw down aid in the near future (although, probably not as soon as “the end of the year”).

The Israeli case against US aid to Israel

During a May interview with 60 Minutes, Netanyahu said he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.”

Amit Halevi, a lawmaker in Israel’s parliament and member of Netanyahu’s party, spelled out the logic of his position last year. In a pamphlet outlining his vision for the US-Israel relationship, Halevi said US military aid “creates a false narrative of dependency, weakens Israel’s global standing and subjects it to political pressure.” Halevi met with the leadership of the Heritage Foundation — arguably, the GOP’s most influential think tank — in 2025, shortly after Heritage had released its own controversial call for the (very gradual) phasing out of US aid to Israel.

Many on the Israeli right believe that such aid compromises Israeli sovereignty. As the retired Israel Defense Forces general Amir Avivi told Breitbart in 2024, aid “puts on Israel lots of restrictions,” which prevent it from pursuing its security interests with a free hand. Similar concerns have been voiced by former Israeli Prime Minster Naftali Bennet and ex-Israeli ambassador to Israel Michael Oren.

Their argument boils down to two observations:

• There are many forms of US support that Israel would struggle to do without — but financial aid is not one of them.
• Direct financial aid provokes political blowback in a way that other, more essential forms of US assistance do not.

There is evidence for both these points. In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the IDF. To sustain its 2025 level of military funding — without American cash — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This might irritate Israel’s taxpayers. But it would scarcely threaten Israel’s ability to pursue whatever foreign policy it sees fit.

By contrast, Israel does need access to American military hardware. It has the money to fund its own military. But to adequately provision it, Israel must be allowed to purchase American-made fighter jets, among myriad other forms of martial technology. And the Israelis would also have a tough time doing without its broad military, diplomatic, and intelligence alliance with the United States.

That alliance has attracted some criticism on the American left and right this year — particularly, after the US partnered with Israel to launch a war against Iran.

But Israel’s American critics seem to have found the aid issue uniquely politically potent. Which makes sense: A voter doesn’t need to have any strong opinion about the Israel-Palestine conflict to oppose sending billions of dollars to a wealthy foreign country. Unlike proposals for an arms embargo or sanctions, cutting off aid speaks directly to Americans’ material interests; that money could be going to US citizens but is flowing to the Israeli military instead.

In his Senate race, Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.

Meanwhile, in a controversial ad, an outside group supporting El-Sayed’s candidacy made this argument in blunter terms, portraying a couple forced to pare back their grocery list, in order to save enough money for “killing Palestinians.”

New @RebellionPac ad dropping in Michigan. We have to suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars. That’s why they buy politicians like Mike Rogers. He promised to serve Israel “unconditionally,” but never made that promise to you. pic.twitter.com/mtgVOyNczg

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) October 24, 2026

US aid to Israel is not actually responsible for Americans’ rising grocery bills (although, the war in Iran plausibly is). But the broader isolationist argument has wide resonance. In a recent survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a majority of Americans favored either reducing or ending aid to Israel. And whether or not Trump’s aid comments referred to a solid plan, his political aides swiftly used them to reclaim the “America First” banner from Democrats like El-Sayed.

America First. pic.twitter.com/RyLif7XuB6

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 3, 2026

Faced with these dynamics, it isn’t hard to see how an Israeli leader might think it best to beat a strategic retreat on financial aid. 

A phase-out of US aid may be coming, whether Israel likes it or not

To be clear, Israel’s leadership is by no means united in favor of Trump’s impromptu proposal. Indeed, even those who support winding down US aid have insisted that this withdrawal of financial backing must be gradual. And Gadi Eisenkot, the man most likely to become Israel’s next prime minister, is a staunch advocate for indefinite US aid. On Tuesday, Eisenkot assailed Netanyahu for his purported agreement with Trump about winding down such assistance. Both Israeli leaders are currently trying to cobble together a parliamentary majority through alliances with small political parties, after each failed to win such a majority outright in Israel’s recent elections.

Still, it is quite plausible that Netanyahu genuinely told Trump that he was open to phasing out US aid, given the Israeli prime minister’s public remarks on that subject.

In any case, authority over US spending ultimately lies with the American people’s elected representatives, not Israeli officials. On the US left, right, and center, political winds are blowing against aid to Israel. With some of that country’s own leaders and admirers bowing to such gusts, the draw down of American aid to Israel might now be a matter of when, not if.

The outcome of the midterm elections is perhaps the single most important factor in determining how the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency will play out — and what impact it will have on people’s lives in the United States and around the world.

If Republicans defy the polls and hold both chambers, Trump would have the chance to pass more sweeping legislation on party-line votes, confirm more loyalist nominees to important positions, and continue remaking the judiciary, all while keeping oversight to a minimum. Democrats would have limited tools to object, Republicans would keep a free hand to run Washington, and Trump would be able to cite the results to maintain party loyalty. Practically and politically, the next two years would look a lot like the last two.

Conversely, the better Democrats do, the more power they will have to block Trump’s agenda, check his power, investigate his administration, and advance priorities of their own on issues like the economy, healthcare, the war in Iran, immigration enforcement, corruption, and more. But they’d also face significant limits on their power, from the Senate filibuster and Trump’s veto pen to White House tactics that could delay or derail oversight. 

So what are the real midterm stakes? Which moves from a Democratic Congress would be symbolic and which could have an immediate impact on real-world outcomes? And what might prevent them from achieving their goals?  

To get a better sense of what Democrats could actually do if they won power in Congress, I spoke to current and former congressional aides as well as plugged-in outside experts. They generally painted a picture of a grim slog akin to trench warfare. Some believed the expectations of the Democratic base would far outpace what could realistically be achieved, and that frustration and disappointment were inevitable.

But some also expressed surprising optimism that, if Democrats played their cards right, they could score real and meaningful accomplishments — in driving policy change, in bringing wrongdoing to light, and in laying the groundwork for far more ambitious goals in the near future.

Whether they can do this will depend in part on politics and messaging, but also on how they use the formal tools that would be newly available to them with a congressional takeover: legislation, investigations, and — in the case of a Senate win — the confirmation process.

Legislation: How new Democratic majorities could legislate in a way that actually matters

House Democratic leaders are proudly talking about the bills they plan to quickly pass if they win the majority on topics such as healthcare, tariffs, and the war in Iran.

But the reality is that, so long as the Senate’s 60-vote requirement for ordinary legislation to advance remains in place, such bills aren’t going to make it to Trump’s desk without winning significant Republican support. (And even if they do make it to Trump’s desk — say, via the special budget reconciliation process — he could veto them.)

Instead, for Democratic majorities to do meaningful things with legislation under Trump, they’d likely have to pursue one of the following three approaches.

1. Confrontations on the must-pass bills

Lots of bills go nowhere in Congress, but some are viewed as “must-pass.” Some have practical consequences for failure after a certain deadline: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the country will default on its debt with potentially catastrophic consequences; if government funding bills aren’t passed, the government will shut down, as it did for 43 days last year.

Often, if one or both chambers flip in the midterms, a bold new majority tries to use one of these bills to make policy demands on the president, believing the bill’s “must-pass” status gives them leverage. Then, a showdown unfolds, as both sides play chicken before a looming deadline.

So if Democrats win the majority, they will have to decide: Which much-pass bills do they want to make demands over, what do they want to demand, and just how hard do they want to demand it?

Experts I spoke to were skeptical Democrats would push too hard on the debt ceiling. “The Democratic position in the past has been, ‘We don’t threaten the full faith and credit of the US government,’” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-aligned think tank, told me. The consequences of default seem, to them, too devastating to risk, and they’re historically reluctant to legitimize Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a weapon under Democratic presidents.

Some sort of fight seems likelier on government funding — after all, even while in the Senate minority, Democrats used the filibuster to shut down the government late last year, demanding that Republicans extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. They could run that playbook again, saying they won’t fund the government unless Trump agrees to their demands on healthcare (such as rolling back Trump’s Medicaid cuts), ICE (where they’ve demanded new accountability measures and restrictions), or other issues. 

Many are skeptical that Democrats will successfully strong-arm Trump into making concessions in this way. When last year’s shutdown stretched for over a month and its consequences — for unpaid government workers and recipients of government benefits — grew more acute, enough Democrats eventually gave in even as they seemed to have the upper hand in polling. But it’s likely that the party’s base will urge them to try again — and if they do, their theory that they have more leverage over Trump this time will be tested.

2. Bipartisanship

The alternative to trying to shake the president down is to actually try and get Republican votes — passing measures with bipartisan support. 

And don’t scoff — though partisan battles will get all the headlines, there’s still a surprising amount of bipartisan action on substantive issues in Congress. During the final two years of Trump’s first term, bipartisan bills on Covid relief, energy, and trade passed. Under President Joe Biden, bills on infrastructure, semiconductors, same-sex marriage, and presidential election reform won bipartisan support. And this year, a bipartisan housing bill became law, and Congress hopes to pass an electricity permitting reform deal before the end of the year, too.

Some of these bills were standalone; others became law because they were attached to must-pass bills, such as government funding, or the National Defense Authorization Act. That’s a potential way to get something Trump doesn’t like into law — get enough Republicans on board, and hope that either Trump will conclude it’s too much of a headache to veto it, or that support in Congress is so strong his veto will fail (two-thirds of both the House and Senate can vote to override a veto). There’s precedent from this year’s bipartisan housing bill, which Trump allowed to become law without his signature.

Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that Democrats could try to add riders on appropriations bills that block certain controversial Trump administration regulatory actions. “That feels potentially achievable to me,” he said. But, to get those bills to Trump’s desk, they’d have to get the consent of Republican negotiators in Congress. 

Bipartisanship can be achieved through working with the other party and compromising with them. But another route is through political pressure — say, if a proposal is so popular and politically potent that the other party feels they have no choice but to go along. “Bipartisanship is not always the signal of a kumbaya environment,” Charlie Ellsworth, a former aide to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer who currently advises the advocacy group Public Citizen, told me. 

That’s what happened with Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) bill to release the Epstein files last year; GOP leaders tried to hold it back, but the dam broke and it eventually passed with overwhelming majorities in both chambers. If Democrats win the majority, they could similarly put pressure on the GOP by forcing votes on issues where the party might be divided — like tariffs, or the Iran war.

3. Groundwork for the future 

The other route for legislating to really matter in the next session is more forward-looking — Democrats could be crafting bills that they truly intend to pass in 2029, if a new Democratic president is sworn in and the party holds Congress.

The idea here is that the next president may have a limited window to pass major legislation, so he or she will be looking for ideas to take off the shelf. And the more serious legislative work that gets done in this Congress, and the more Democratic consensus is built ahead of time, the better-prepared certain bills could be for that opportunity.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, for instance, included several provisions that House Republicans had crafted during the Biden administration. Similarly, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included prescription drug provisions that House Democrats had crafted during Trump’s first term.

“There’s a lot of consequential prep work that can happen during these time periods, even when there’s not a real prospect of the legislation becoming law in this term,” Fiedler said. 

The flipside is that if Democrats flock to unworkable ideas in this Congress in order to appease an interest group or win a messaging fight, they may feel pressure to follow through in the next Congress — and problems may result. Take the first year of Trump’s first term, when he and the GOP felt compelled to deliver on their longtime vow to repeal Obamacare — but since they hadn’t come up with a specific proposal to do it that was politically viable and hadn’t seriously grappled with the many potential downsides for patients, the effort ended in failure.

“Democrats need to be cognizant that if you’re going to do a test run and draw a contrast between what Democrats are for and what the president opposes, you should expect the American people will ask you to deliver when you have the power,” Ellsworth said.

Investigations: How Democrats could think creatively to get around Trump’s stonewalling

Democrats say it’s urgently necessary to investigate a plethora of Trump administration scandals, from the Trump family’s crypto investments to Trump’s granting of pardons to his fundraising for the White House ballroom construction to aggressive actions by ICE, and much more.  

Winning control of either the House or Senate is crucial to these efforts because it would give them a hugely important investigative tool: congressional subpoena power. Democratic majorities would be newly able to issue legally binding requests for documents and testimony. (Currently, stuck in the minority in both chambers, all they can do is ask nicely.)

Why do investigations matter? One goal can simply be to unearth new facts about what’s been going on inside the executive branch, which can help determine their next steps. A second can be to spur criminal investigations, though this seems unlikely while Trump is in power, given his co-option of the Justice Department. 

A third can be to pave the way to impeachment if significant wrongdoing is exposed. That said, in contrast to Trump’s first term, Democrats sound far less eager to impeach him this time around, though some have floated potentially impeaching Cabinet officials. 

Finally, a fourth goal can be to use hearings and other activity to focus the press and public’s attention on certain topics and potentially build momentum for action in response. Many Democrats feel that their 2021-2022 House January 6 committee, which featured dramatic public testimony and audiovisual presentations, was an innovator here.

The catch is that the Trump administration could — and likely will — just refuse to comply with subpoenas aimed at officials or agencies. In Trump’s first term, he vowed to fight “all the subpoenas” from House Democrats, and for the most part the administration followed through, declining to cooperate or asserting executive privilege. 

If faced with this stonewalling, the usual next step is for Democrats to sue, and hope courts will compel compliance from the administration. The perennial problem, though, is that such lawsuits often take a long time to resolve — and could well stretch on into the next president’s term.

“It is unfortunately possible for the recipients of congressional subpoenas to resist and drag out these proceedings,” Tim Heaphy, the former chief investigative counsel for the House January 6 committee, told me. “And lawyers knew that, so they could run out the clock.”

Anticipating this resistance, Democrats have floated that they may focus their subpoenas on people or companies outside the government who they think might have information about executive branch malfeasance. 

These potential subpoena targets include donors to the White House ballroom construction effort, investors doing business with the Trump family, private companies that have gotten federal contracts, lobbyists that have helped secure presidential pardons for their clients, and law firms that made deals with the Trump administration.

The administration may still at least attempt to cite executive privilege to try to quash these subpoenas. “I’ve heard that there’s already some discussion about whether the executive branch would have standing to object to a subpoena handed to a government contractor,” Heaphy said. Democrats also hope to get cooperation from whistleblowers and government officials who actually want to share what they know.

But some have called on congressional Democrats to do more to try and ensure there will be consequences for defying subpoenas. For instance, Congress could theoretically assert a power known as “inherent contempt,” ordering noncompliant officials to be detained (or, potentially, fined); this power has not been invoked since 1934. If they tried to use this power against administration officials, a major constitutional battle would ensue. Others have suggested the less dramatic approach of making government funding contingent on agencies’ or officials’ cooperation with investigations.

Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor and an expert on congressional power, told me that, to succeed with investigations, Democrats would have to think creatively. Simply litigating the Trump administration’s defiance, he said, was “a fool’s errand.” He added: “If they follow that playbook, they’re going to get the same results — which is, nothing will happen in those investigations over the next two years.”

Confirmations: A Senate takeover would have big stakes for how the Trump administration functions

If Democrats manage to win the Senate, there will be another major consequence — Trump will need their approval to confirm judges and many administration officials. 

Trump has nominated several extreme or controversial figures to his administration; and, because the GOP Senate majority was inclined to defer to their party’s president, the vast majority of them were confirmed. (Sorry, Matt Gaetz.) These nominations can have very real consequences: if Trump had selected someone other than Pete Hegseth, who was only one vote away from not being confirmed, as defense secretary, perhaps he would have heard more warnings about the risks of war with Iran.

A Democratic Senate would be far more skeptical of confirming particularly controversial nominees for administration positions. But more broadly than that, all Trump nominees would face tougher scrutiny. “The administration’s going to find it very hard to get pretty much anyone confirmed,” Chafetz said.

The official line from Democratic leadership is that they will be happy to confirm qualified Trump nominees — but that Trump is simply nominating unqualified people. “If the nominees are as crappy as his present ones, very few of them are going to get through,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — the likely majority leader, if Democrats win the Senate — told Semafor last month.

A confirmation blockade wouldn’t lead to an urgent crisis, since Trump’s administration is full of confirmed appointees already. But as various officials leave the government — voluntarily or involuntarily — Trump will want replacements. Democrats will have to weigh just how far they want to go in slow-walking or delaying Trump nominees. Some Democrats will also want to use nominees as bargaining chips in their dealings with the administration, while others may think obstructing noncontroversial nominees is antithetical to how government should function.

Trump would likely respond by trying to rely more on “acting” appointees for key roles, as he did in his first term —  but there are legal limits on who can be appointed to an acting role, and how long they can serve there. 

Judicial nominees, meanwhile, serve for life if they’re confirmed. So a Democratic Senate majority would be most skeptical about confirming Trump’s judge picks, particularly at the circuit court level and certainly at the Supreme Court should any vacancy arise. 

For the Supreme Court, this is most consequential; conservatives currently have a 6-3 majority. But there are four Supreme Court justices in their 70s, with the oldest being 78-year-old Clarence Thomas and 76-year-old Samuel Alito. 

If Republicans hold the Senate, either could retire confident a right-wing successor would be confirmed. But if Democrats take over the chamber, they’d likely follow the precedent set by the GOP when they refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee for the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in 2016 — holding it open for the next president to fill.

That said, there may be a brief window for Republicans to try to confirm a justice in the final session before the new Senate majority is sworn in, if one or more do decide to step down.

The political stakes: In Trump’s last two years in power, will he be hemmed in — or emboldened?

Finally, looming above and affecting all these issues, is the political reality that the midterms will deliver what’s taken as a verdict on Trump’s second term so far. 

If Democrats’ win is huge, Republicans will engage in a frenzy of finger-pointing and blame-casting as the party grapples with what comes next for them after the Trump era, especially with a presidential contest starting up in which he won’t be on the ballot. Practically, Trump will be more hemmed in, and though he will surely stoke further controversies and crises, he will be a weakened figure facing constant challenges from Congress.

Conversely, if Trump’s GOP defies the polls and holds both chambers, he’ll likely treat it as a complete vindication of his second-term approach — and feel emboldened to plunge ahead on his most controversial agenda items, from ICE crackdowns to the Iran war, confident Congress will do little to stop him and the next Republican nominee (whether Vice President JD Vance or someone else) will take his side.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is closing out the midterms by talking about anything but. 

What’s happening? If polls bear out, Republicans are a day away from a catastrophically bad midterms result, potentially losing control of both chambers of Congress. 

Trump, however, has other things on his mind. On Monday, he made his final midterms pitch in a nearly hour-long press conference with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, where he focused heavily on the state of the newly reopened Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and his other DC construction projects (both planned and underway).

“This is a massive piece of pool,” he said. “And it was treated with a lot of love and then it was treated with a lot of hate, and we’re going to stop the hate.” 

What else has Trump been saying? Monday marked the culmination of the president’s strange campaign season, which has been heavy on disjointed rambling and musings about the posterior aspect of incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted (among others).

Trump has also spent the past few months urging Americans to vote in the midterms as if he were on the ballot — but polling suggests he may be more of a drag than a boon to Republican candidates locked in close races. 

What’s the big picture? We won’t know for sure how the midterms will turn out until polls close Tuesday night (and maybe not for a while after that, depending on how some key races turn out). 

Trump, though, briefly acknowledged on Monday that things are looking bleak for his party: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” he said, “but we gave this a very strong shot.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This is a few days late in coming, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my colleague Ian Millhiser’s tribute to the late Patrick Stewart and his iconic role on Star Trek as  Captain Jean-Luc Picard. You can read the full story here with a gift link.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow for the big day!

Here’s a hot take: The outcome of the 2026 midterms is unlikely to turn on close races in California. California has no statewide races that are expected to be close, and it is a solid blue state that recently redrew its US House maps to maximize Democratic gains.

So it’s a bit baffling that the Trump administration’s final bid to get the Supreme Court to interfere in the midterms, at least before Election Day, focuses on California. On Monday, the eve of the election, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department asked the justices to order California to “segregate” as many as 20,000 ballots and place them in a special pile where they may never be counted.

The case emerges out of a list of over 20,000 names that the Trump administration first sent to California on October 13, asking election officials to separate their ballots and verify the voters’ eligibility. The administration claims that these individuals are “likely” noncitizens, but that they are nonetheless registered to vote in California.

But it is unlikely that many — or even, potentially, any — of the names on this list are actually noncitizens who are registered to vote in California. Shortly after receiving Trump’s list, Los Angeles County officials took a sample of 200 names from the list to see if they are actually noncitizens who appear on the state’s voter rolls. In their preliminary review, they determined that nearly 40 percent of the names on the list belong to people who were born in the United States (and thus are almost certainly US citizens), and that 56 percent of the individuals on the list either canceled their registration or their registration is no longer active. Over 70 percent have never voted in California.

Again, this is only a preliminary review. It is likely that further investigation will determine that even more of these individuals are either citizens or not actually registered to vote in California.

This high error rate, moreover, closely mirrors a similar drama that played out earlier this year in Nevada. The Trump administration initially claimed that as many as 16,000 noncitizens appear on that state’s voter rolls, but when they later flagged a list of supposed noncitizen voters for Nevada officials, only 185 names appeared on the list. Nevada later determined that all 185 of these individuals are, in fact, citizens.

So Trump wants the Supreme Court to interfere in the 2026 midterms based on a list of 20,000 names that is completely unreliable, and that may not identify a single actual person who is both registered to vote in California and a noncitizen. And even if all 20,000 of these individuals did cast a vote in the upcoming midterms, moreover, it is unlikely that they would change the result of any election. Just shy of 11 million people voted in California’s 2022 midterm elections, so the 20,000 people identified by Trump’s administration are a tiny fraction of the California electorate.

And, on top of that, Trump’s lawyers are not even asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise these 20,000 people — at least not yet. At this early stage of the litigation, Trump’s lawyers merely seek a court order requiring California to set these individuals’ ballots aside to determine if they are citizens or not.

None of what Trump’s lawyers are asking for is legal. But the most striking thing about this case, which is known as United States v. California, is its weakness. Even if the justices agree with the Trump administration’s extra-legal claim that it can require a state to set aside ballots based on a highly dubious allegation that some of those ballots might belong to a noncitizen, that decision is unlikely to change the result of any 2026 election — although it could potentially allow this administration to sow chaos in 2028.

Trump’s legal arguments are garbage

Just in case there’s any doubt, there is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever for the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Trump’s administration.

For starters, Trump’s lawyers rely on a statute which makes it a federal misdemeanor for some noncitizens to vote in a federal election. Notably, nothing in this statute regulates the state of California, or any other state. It does not prohibit state officials from counting any ballot, or require them to segregate any ballots into a special pile. This statute merely empowers the federal government to bring criminal charges against an individual noncitizen who votes illegally.

If the Trump administration actually believes that any of the 20,000 names on its list are noncitizen voters, in other words, then its recourse is to gather enough evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that one of those individuals violated federal law. Then it can charge that individual with a crime and potentially obtain a conviction. The statute simply does not permit federal courts to order segregation of ballots.

Meanwhile, a separate federal law requires states to “complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” So it’s actually illegal for California to comply with a request to remove the supposed noncitizens from its voter rolls, because this request came within 90 days of a federal election.

Additionally, as the Supreme Court said less than two weeks ago in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (2026), federal courts “should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” Trump’s lawyers filed their brief to the justices in the California case on the literal eve of an election.

Finally, as Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, explained in an opinion arguing that Trump must lose this case, it is unlikely that California could comply with an order requiring it to segregate the contested ballots even if it wanted to. The state says that segregating these ballots “would be a logistical and administrative nightmare” because the list “does not contain the information necessary to identify voters; the Registrar has no established system for segregating ballots; and trying to create one now risks shutting down the system the Registrar needs to run the entire election.” 

Additionally, Bennett writes, California “also lack[s] the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State.”

Given these flaws in Trump’s case, it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will order California to set aside the contested ballots. And, if Trump somehow does prevail, it is also unlikely that such a decision would change the result of any 2026 race.

That said, in the unlikely event it does happen, a decision favoring Trump in California could allow him to interfere with the 2028 election — because it would enable the Trump administration to harass state election officials by sending them fabricated lists of “noncitizens” that the state would have to scramble to process while it was also trying to run an election. 

But it is still unclear what Trump is trying to accomplish by bringing the California case to the justices on the day before an election, when even this Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in Trump’s favor.

If this is the extent of Trump’s efforts to overturn an election that is expected to end badly for his Republican Party, then those efforts are unlikely to amount to anything at all.

Conventional wisdom holds that young voters are idealistic and socially progressive dreamers, while older voters are hard-headed, pragmatic, and much more attuned to pocketbook issues. 

Conventional wisdom, meet Gen Z. Between 2020 and 2024, voters in this cohort swung right by more than 20 percentage points — but now they’re boomeranging back away from President Donald Trump, mainly over the cost of living and a deep sense of economic anxiety, according to a number of recent surveys of young voters.

“Inflation/prices” is the top concern for voters under 30 in YouGov’s “most important issue” tracker, far above civil rights and civil liberties. The cost of living, corruption, and US involvement in foreign conflict were the top three issues for young Americans 18–29 (who say they have at least a 50-50 chance of voting in the midterm elections) in this fall’s Harvard IOP youth poll, with 65 percent of this cohort saying the cost of living is “extremely important” in determining their midterm vote.

Similarly, 49 percent of the same young Americans in the poll said their personal finances have gotten worse since Trump took office for a second term and 91 percent said the cost of living will be “important in determining their vote.” The final New York Times/Siena national poll of the midterms reported 0 percent of likely voters under 30 “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance on cost-of-living issues.

“It’s the economy, stupid” is not a new observation in politics, but the fact that Gen Z voters are prioritizing the economy above social issues marks a genuine shift from their earlier habits. As recently as 2020, healthcare, the environment and climate change, and racism topped young voters’ priorities, according to Gallup. Back then, 79 percent of youth told pollsters that the pandemic helped them realize how much politicians’ decisions affected their lives, which added a unique society-wide issue that often didn’t fit into traditional economic categories. And in the 2022 midterm cycle, Gen Z voters were the only age group to name abortion as the top concern in deciding their vote, ranking the issue 23 points higher than inflation in a Tufts University CIRCLE analysis of national exit-poll data. 

Not anymore.

What Gen Z wants from elections

Call it the post-culture war. Just two years ago, Trump returned to the White House in part thanks to anti-woke “manosphere” influencers popular with young men, even as young women became more liberal, especially on issues like the environment and abortion. 

Now, as the top issues are changing, there’s more consensus: Amid an AI revolution, rising inflation, and war in the Middle East, identity politics can feel like a luxury. Young women were actually more likely than young men to say that rising prices and inflation constitute “an urgent crisis requiring immediate action,” in the spring Harvard IOP youth poll.

The implications are potentially far-reaching — and not just for the midterms. Both parties will need to reckon with a rising generation consumed by cost-of-living concerns in ways that could challenge the status quo and force new compromises with older generations. Already housing has become a familiar flashpoint: Young voters feel locked out of buying a home, but what might help reduce prices for them could be seen as a plan to reduce property values for older voters sitting on a home they bought long ago. And on healthcare, both parties could face more pressure to help younger voters grappling with surging costs in employer and individual insurance plans, which could compete for federal dollars and attention with programs for seniors like Medicare. 

Lately, I’m hearing young people describe frustration with candidates for a focus on policies that feel tailored to boomers or Gen X, such as raising taxes to fund Social Security or slashing property taxes for existing homeowners, without much attention on remedies for young Americans in the short term, such as bringing down the cost of rent, making higher education more affordable, or increasing healthcare options for younger Americans unable to get a job.

In my focus groups with young voters, the economic anxiety is palpable.

“I feel like over the last year things definitely have changed,” a 21-year-old man from Miami said. “You see it generally even with gas prices…a lot of it has to do with the fact that our country has involved itself in a lot of different conflicts around the world at this point.”

Meanwhile, asked about the top political or social issue impacting her right now, a 23-year-old woman from Tucson, Arizona, said the price of everything felt too high: “The rising cost of living. Everything just feels more expensive like groceries, rent, gas…even as a college student last year. And healthcare is a big concern.”

And a 21-year-old student in Pennsylvania said he uses student loan refunds to finance daily necessities. 

“During the school year, I am relying on my refunds from school to pay my rent, to pay my car payment and car insurance, phone bill, internet, stuff like that,” he told me, adding, “right now, my focus is on economic issues because I feel that I need to continue working simply just to live, that I don’t have much room to focus on cultural issues, since what is on my mind is how I will be getting my next meal. Which then ties in cultural issues, but the main forefront is the economic issues.”

What changed for young voters? 

One interpretation for why younger Gen Z voters are putting economics ahead of cultural issues is simple: The economic outlook for young people is frightening, with constant talk of new technology transforming — or eliminating — the careers they hoped to pursue. 

One study found that employment among workers ages 22–25 in AI-exposed occupations was 19 percent lower than it would have been had it kept pace with their less-exposed peers — a gap that has widened since researchers first reported it in August 2025. Another found that only 30 percent of 2025 college graduates got a full-time job related to their degree (an 11-point drop from 2024). So it’s no shock that today, the majority of adults under 30 are more concerned than excited about AI, according to the Pew Research Center.

Meanwhile, just 63 percent of adults 18–29 said they are “doing okay” or “living comfortably,” which is notably lower than the 83 percent of adults 60 and over who say the same. Anecdotally, I often hear young people say that they feel like they’re worse off economically than their parents were at the same age. These are difficult claims to check, both individually and in aggregate. But a lot of it comes down to homeownership and the sense of financial stability that comes along with it, which feels like an impossible dream for many in Gen Z.

“Obviously cultural and those other issues are important, but at the end of the day the most important thing is putting food on the table, gas in the car, and the roof over your head,” a 26-year-old teacher from Illinois told me. “And it feels right now like that’s kinda impossible to do all three. You can put gas in the car and food in your stomach but it’s hard to find a house or apartment to rent or buy. It’s kinda like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where if your core issues aren’t satisfied you can’t look higher up the pyramid.”

Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession might find this all familiar. And in fact, in 2008, the Harvard IOP youth poll found that the economy was the top issue for young Americans ages 18–24.

Of course, worrying about the economy and voting on the economy are two separate things, and young voters — who turned out in 2008 at much higher rates than prior presidential years — will need to be convinced by politicians that it’s worth putting their trust in elections to help, let alone either party. 

The post-2024 CIRCLE poll of young people offers one interesting wrinkle in this regard. Those who didn’t vote were more likely than those who did to name inflation and the cost of living, as well as jobs and unemployment, among their top three priorities. (The 2024 election also saw lower youth turnout compared to 2020 — about 47 percent versus 50 percent, respectively.) We’ll see if that dynamic changes this midterm cycle.

When voters transition from voting on social and cultural issues to voting based on economic ones, it’s often said condescendingly that they’re voting with their “heads” rather than their “hearts” or that they’re “growing up” and learning that running a household takes more money and responsibility than they expected. I don’t think these young adults are growing up; I think they’re freaking out.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again. 

He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.

Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)

The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”

Go a little deeper

When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans. 

That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations. 

But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.

Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office. 

Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.” 

Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.) 

Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.) 

These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations. 

Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.

One link for later

➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
• Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s revenge campaign is getting increasingly desperate. 

What’s happening? On Monday, we learned that Trump’s Justice Department is criminally charging former FBI Director James Comey for a third time, in the latest installment of Trump’s ongoing efforts to prosecute his enemies.

Unlike two previous instances, the charges are not in the form of an indictment. Instead, the DOJ filed a two-count criminal information, which allows prosecutors to lodge charges without getting a grand jury involved (but, crucially, does not allow the government to try Comey on those charges unless he waives his right to a grand jury). 

What is Comey charged with? The charges allege that in October 2016, Comey unlawfully transmitted national security information about US email surveillance to a journalist. They were filed earlier this month on October 5, exactly 10 years after the alleged disclosure, after which point the statute of limitations would have expired. 

Comey denies the charges, and said in a video posted Monday that the case “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice.” 

What’s the context? Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, has long been at the top of Trump’s second-term enemies list. He was indicted on scanty allegations of lying to Congress in September 2025, and again this spring for an alleged threat against Trump, in the form of a photo of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” (“86” is broadly understood to be service industry slang for rejecting or removing something or someone). 

The first set of charges quickly fell flat after a judge found that the US attorney who brought them — former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan — was illegally appointed. Comey is still seeking to have the second set dismissed. 

What’s the big picture? It’s unclear if this third set of charges will stick, though the Trump administration says it still plans to seek a grand jury indictment. But their existence underscores how dramatically Trump has succeeded in politicizing the Justice Department.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

How does creativity work? My colleagues at Vox’s Unexplainable podcast went looking for answers in a fascinating recent episode. You can hear all about what they found here.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s midterm barnstorming is getting uglier and more desperate. 

What’s happening? At a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday, Trump launched a new round of anti-Muslim attacks against Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, describing him as a “jihadist” who “should never be allowed inside the halls of our great beautiful Capitol.” 

“If Abdul and the Democrats win,” Trump told supporters, “they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

What’s the context? Trump’s speech marks the crescendo — so far — of what has become an increasingly Islamophobic midterm campaign by the Republican Party, centered on El-Sayed. 

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan’s Republican Senate nominee, has repeatedly tried to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Republicans have also attempted to wield Islamophobia against the Democratic Party as a whole.

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News that his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, “supports Sharia law,” while at the Republican midterm convention in September, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said that “communism” and “Islamism” were allying against Republicans.

What’s the big picture? In addition to his overt Islamophobia, Trump’s presence on the campaign trail in the final few weeks of the midterm elections has been decidedly strange and surprisingly heavy on physical descriptions of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH). 

Now, with just eight days to go, Trump’s itinerary features rallies in Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, and Florida — all Republican states where the party has found itself, to one degree or another, with a tougher-than-expected Senate race on its hands. 

It’s hardly the travel schedule of a president who feels good about his party’s chances— such as in Michigan, where El-Sayed is leading in most recent polls.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

US elections may not be until next week, but two other countries held theirs over the weekend: Serbia and Brazil. As my colleague Caitlin Dewey reports in Vox’s Today, Explained newsletter, both resulted in surprise victories over right-wing nationalist parties, with Serbia ousting its incumbent strongman, Aleksandar Vučić. 

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Flávio Bolsonaro is also especially good news for the climate: As the New York Times reported earlier this month, the fate of the Amazon rainforest may well have hinged on the outcome of the election.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

If there is a Democratic wave in next week’s midterm elections, one of the biggest reasons for that will be young voters.

While voters of all ages have soured on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party since his 2024 victory, polls show that the decline has been particularly pronounced among the young people who’d backed him in surprising numbers just two years ago. That election result prompted endless conversation about a “vibe shift” among Gen Z, and whether younger voters had turned against “woke” progressives, become radicalized by “manosphere” podcasts and TikTok algorithms, or lashed out against Biden-era gerontocracy.

But the story looks very different heading into November. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found that, of people aged 19–34 who voted for Trump over Kamala Harris, only 49 percent approve of his job performance as president. (In contrast, among Trump 2024 voters aged 50 and above, about 75 percent still approve of him.)

Pew also found earlier this year that partisan identification among young adults has shifted — or, rather, reverted. 

In 2022 and 2023, Democrats had a 17-point advantage among adults aged 18–29 — 55 percent of them said they were Democrats or leaned toward Democrats, while just 38 percent said they were Republican or leaned toward the GOP.

In 2024, that gap closed, and Republicans actually took a slight edge, 47 percent to Democrats’ 46 percent. But now, in 2026, Democrats are back to a 16-point advantage, getting 54 percent of young voters compared to the GOP’s 38 percent.

And it isn’t just that fewer young people are saying they’re Republican. Those who remain Republican are also saying they’re less likely to vote this year.

According to the Harvard Youth Poll released last week, 50 percent of Democrats aged 18–29 say they’ll definitely vote, but only 34 percent of Republicans in that age range say the same. That’s a 16-point partisan gap; the biggest this poll found in recent midterm cycles.

The core reasons for all this in a sense aren’t too surprising. Like older voters, young voters say they’re most concerned about issues like the cost of living, corruption in government, overseas wars, and the cost of health care.

But the swings — and the feelings of betrayal and disappointment among prior Trump supporters — have been particularly dramatic among the young, which raises the question of what about their experience and outlook is influencing their politics in particular. 

To answer that, I spoke to advocates and political consultants focused on young voters. Here’s what they see as the origins — and limits — of the coming youthquake.

How to think about the Gen Z “Trump regretters”

Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Gen Z-focused strategy firm The Up and Up, told me that we should think about young people who voted for Trump in 2024 as really three separate cohorts.

First, she said, are the “hardcore MAGA young people who still stand by the president, just like the older MAGA folks.” They supported him in 2024, and they still do.

Second, she said, are the young people who “are very much on the America First train” but who “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment, whether it comes to building a White House ballroom, or the Epstein files, or starting new wars” — and have moved away from him as a result.

These young people are much less likely to move toward Democrats, but many of them could be disillusioned and not bother to vote this year.

Third, she said, is “a large cohort of young people, predominantly young men, who were never hardcore MAGA, but who voted for Trump in 2024 because they were frustrated by the political conversation at large.” 

“They were frustrated by their economic situation; they were tired of political correctness and the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of ‘wokeness,’” Janfaza continued. These people, she said, now feel “politically homeless.”

Tina Tang of the Democratic-aligned firm Navigator Research has conducted many focus groups interviewing young people who now regret voting for Trump. She told me that many of those “Trump regretters” said they’d initially hoped he would bring change to the political system generally, and that he’d deliver on his promises about the economy and jobs. 

“Young voters are especially worried about jobs right now,” Tang said. “That was actually one of the biggest frustrations we heard from young voters this time around: frustration with the job market. We hear a lot about how he promised a lot of things; he promised the economy was going to get better, that costs were going to come down, that there would be more jobs.”

Young people are pragmatists. They’re losing faith in the system because they think it isn’t delivering.

Several of those I interviewed also urged caution about the common trope that young people tend to be strongly progressive or liberal, a longtime assumption that led many observers to be caught off guard by their swing toward Republicans in 2024.

Indeed, the Harvard Youth poll released this week found that 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought of themselves as liberal, 23 percent as conservative, and about 46 percent as something in between.

Santiago Mayer, founder of the progressive youth-focused group Voters of Tomorrow, told me that while Gen Z voters often have liberal values and policy views, they often didn’t define politics in ideological terms: “I think for a lot of things many of us would consider progressive, for them, they are common sense, and they’re not necessarily analyzing these issues through a political lens.”

Indeed, Mayer said that while the politicians who are most appealing to young voters can vary in ideology, “the one thing they have in common is that they are very pragmatic and very practical. They are talking about how they’re going to improve things today and how they’re actually going to create material, tangible change in young people’s lives.”

Tang of Navigator Research concurred, telling me that young people are “absolutely still very skeptical of both parties.” She added: “What we hear from young people a lot is: they want to see results.”

And the results they crave are, above all, about the economy and cost of living. Janfaza told me that there’s been a longtime misconception among pundits that young voters are obsessed with identity and the culture war — but, she argues, that was never quite true, and it’s even less true now.

“Now, climate and abortion do not even make it into the top issues that young people are saying they care about,” Janfaza said. “And it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about those issues, but the economic concern just ranks much higher.”

Indeed, she believes that the “flirtation with socialism” among some young voters is really more about policies such as affordable housing, affordable health care, and affordable education — as well as a promise to break with the status quo. “That’s really what young people are hungry for.” 

Key to young people’s worldview is that they’re feeling increasingly pessimistic about that status quo. One striking finding in the Harvard Youth Poll was that, when asked whether they expected to be financially better or worse off than their parents when they reach their age, more said worse — a first-time finding for the poll.

“I think you see that in the numbers that there’s a level of nihilism amongst young voters,” Mayer said. “They’re basically giving Democrats another chance. But I worry that this is kind of our last chance to get them to believe in democracy.” 

And, he worried, if Democrats don’t deliver actual improvements to their lives, “they’ll be gone for good.”

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s victory in the 2026 US Senate election. If you’re confused by this development, you should be. Because the election won’t happen for more than a week.

The case arises out of an odd candidacy that might undercut incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s reelection bid against Peltola. A man named Dan J. Sullivan also secured a spot on the ballot, and Republicans fear that the not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot might trick voters who wish to vote for the incumbent into voting for the not-senator instead.

In the abstract, it’s a fair concern. But there are two reasons to doubt that not-Senator Sullivan will attract many voters who actually wanted to vote for the Republican. According to a sample ballot published by Alaska’s Division of Elections, Sen. Sullivan will be identified as a “Registered Republican” and as the “Incumbent,” so voters will be told which Dan Sullivan to vote for if they wish to reelect the one who is actually a senator. 

Additionally, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, a system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, and votes cast for losing candidates are redistributed to voters’ next choice. So an Alaska voter who wants to reelect the Dan Sullivan who is actually a senator, but who is confused as to which Dan Sullivan is the incumbent, can simply rank both Dans Sullivan as their top two choices, and the ranked choice system should ensure that their vote is counted as a vote for Senator Sullivan (and against Peltola).

The question of whether not-Senator Sullivan may appear on the ballot, moreover, has already been litigated. Initially, the Alaska Division of Elections, which is led by a Republican, attempted to disqualify the not-senator because it concluded that he did not seek election to the Senate in “good faith.” Not-Senator Sullivan sued, and an Alaska court ordered him reinstated as a candidate because “the Division’s decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot was based on a ‘good-faith’ requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska Statutes, or the implementing regulations adopted by the Division” — that is, there is not actually a law that prevents the not-senator from running, even if he is intentionally running as a spoiler candidate.

This lower court order was affirmed by the Alaska Supreme Court last June. If Republicans thought that this decision violates federal law, they could have asked the Division of Elections — which, again, is run by a Republican — to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Instead, they appear to have let the issue lie until less than two weeks before Election Day, when Trump’s Justice Department filed a new, federal lawsuit claiming that not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot is somehow illegal, and asking a federal court to preemptively block a Peltola victory in the upcoming election. Trump says that he personally told the Justice Department to file this suit.

It is difficult to find an actual legal argument, much less a persuasive one, anywhere in the Trump DOJ’s complaint initiating the lawsuit. Trump’s lawsuit also runs afoul of something called the “Purcell principle” — a concept that, ironically, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the same day that the Trump administration filed its suit — which says that federal courts should be reluctant to intervene in election-related disputes when the election itself is about to happen.

It is likely, in other words, that the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a Democratic victory that hasn’t even happened yet will fail. But the mere existence of this new lawsuit, which is known as United States v. Alaska, is an ominous sign that the Trump administration will use every tool in its shed to overturn Democratic victories in the upcoming election.

So what are the actual legal arguments in the Alaska case?

It is a bit of a stretch to even describe the Justice Department’s complaint in this case as a “legal” document, as the complaint does not so much as point to any law that either not-Senator Sullivan or the state of Alaska may have violated, and instead vaguely alludes to legal sources that use terms like “integrity.”

Specifically, the Justice Department points to a federal law which says that it has four purposes, one of which is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” It also points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bullock v. Carter (1972), which said that “a State has an interest, if not a duty, to protect the integrity of its political processes from frivolous or fraudulent candidacies.”

But the statute that Trump’s lawyers quote, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, does not concern which candidates’ names should appear on the ballot. As its name suggests, it is a law about voter registration, and it imposes requirements on states, such as requiring them to register voters when those voters obtain a driver’s license.

Similarly, while Bullock does include a single line indicating that states may enact laws targeting “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” nothing in the opinion suggests that sharing another candidate’s name makes someone’s candidacy frivolous or fraudulent. The decision itself concerned unusually high fees charged to a candidate for public office in Texas, and the Court concluded that Texas’s fees were unconstitutional. 

The line about “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” meanwhile, was included to clarify that states still have some power to regulate ballot access. While Bullock concluded that Texas’s fees were excessive, the opinion also suggests that states may impose more reasonable filing fees on candidates to discourage unserious candidates from seeking office. Alaska, for example, charges a modest filing fee of $100 to US Senate candidates.

The Trump DOJ’s entire argument, in other words, appears to turn on the fact that it identified two legal sources that use the word “integrity” in contexts that bear little resemblance to the Alaska case. 

Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers claim that the court must prevent Alaska from certifying a Peltola victory “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

This lawsuit also cannot be squared with one of the Republican Party’s favorite legal doctrines

Even if Trump’s Justice Department had a persuasive argument that leaving not-Senator Sullivan on the ballot is illegal, they should still lose Alaska because they waited too long to file the case.

In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Supreme Court warned that “court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” and it added that this “risk will increase” as Election Day draws closer. More recent decisions, many of them joined only by the Court’s Republicans, have read this “Purcell principle” quite expansively to forbid federal courts from issuing election-related decisions in the months leading up to an election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even claimed that Purcell prevents federal courts from issuing election-related decisions as soon as nine months before the general election date.

Supreme Court decisions invoking Purcell to shut down lower court orders altering a state’s election rules are now very common in the weeks leading up to an election. On Thursday, for example, the Court relied on the Purcell principle to block a lower court order that would have made it easier for college students to vote in New Hampshire. The Court began its decision with this line: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” 

Trump’s DOJ, meanwhile, did not even file its lawsuit seeking to preemptively invalidate a Peltola victory until less than two weeks before Election Day. If Purcell means anything, it must mean that a federal court cannot force Alaska to kick a candidate off the ballot mere days before a federal election.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is getting a head start on litigating the midterms. 

What’s happening? The administration is asking a federal district court in Alaska to potentially block the certification of Alaska’s US Senate race, should incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, lose to his Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola. 

It’s the first major lawsuit of the 2026 midterms aimed at directly challenging the results, and very likely a sign of things to come after polls close on November 3.

What is the administration arguing? Sullivan is currently in a close race against Peltola, a former US representative who polls suggest may hold a slight lead. But the race is complicated by the presence of a second Dan Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan, on the ballot (no relation).

According to the lawsuit, which names Alaska’s state elections director and several state elections entities as defendants, the election could be “tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan.” 

The suit asks that “Defendants not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion,” which it defines as a loss by the incumbent Sullivan in the event that the other Sullivan attracts enough votes to alter the outcome of the election. 

What’s the context? The second Dan Sullivan’s appearance on the ballot has already been litigated. After he was initially disqualified from the ballot, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that he should be included, and he finished third in the state’s August primary (the top four vote-getters appear on Alaska’s general election ballot).

How worried about this should I be? For now, not very. Trump filing lawsuits disputing election results was all but inevitable, even if it’s surprising to see him start this early. 

None of that means he’ll succeed: Trump and his allies filed dozens of election lawsuits in 2020 and were largely laughed out of court. (Plus, this particular lawsuit has been assigned to a judge appointed by President Barack Obama.)

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Friday! Here’s some good news to add to a recent string of encouraging headlines about cancer treatment: A new vaccine may reduce the risk of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, by more than 40 percent, according to the Washington Post. You can read all about it here with a gift link.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is cozying up to Russia again. 

What’s happening? On Wednesday, Russia released an American prisoner, 74-year-old retired teacher Stephen Hubbard, back to the US. The US, Trump said in a social media post, “out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return.” 

Hubbard’s release is unquestionably good news. But Trump is wrong: In just the last month, his administration has delivered for Russia in more ways than one, often inexplicably and despite bipartisan condemnation. 

What is Trump doing for Russia? Late last week, he waived upcoming economic sanctions on Russia that he had only recently signed into law after they passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. He also: 

• Struck a diesel deal with Russia, temporarily lifting fuel sanctions on the country in exchange for Russia releasing a trivial amount of diesel into the global market; 
• Announced — seemingly without talking to either party — a Russia-Ukraine “energy ceasefire” favorable to Russia (which has since fallen apart); 
• Temporarily interrupted US intel sharing with Ukraine and played a role in interfering with Ukraine’s access to Starlink, which helps power the country’s drone warfare against Russia; and 
• Called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be replaced.

Last month, Trump also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the annual G20 summit later this year, which would mark Putin’s first appearance since 2019.

What does Trump get out of all of this? There’s Hubbard’s release, but taking that on Trump’s own terms (muddled though they are), the US didn’t give anything to secure it — which means that all of those favors have amounted to not much at all, other than papering over Russia’s role as an international bad actor and breaking with US allies in Europe. 

Why does this matter? Trump’s Russia embrace comes at an awful time for Ukraine, which, as the New York Times reported earlier this month, is facing a Russian campaign to “freeze Ukrainians into submission” as winter approaches. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I was delighted to learn about the US’s new national park yesterday, its 64th. Chiricahua National Park — until Tuesday, only a national monument — is the first new park in six years. Located in southeastern Arizona, it’s also called the “Wonderland of Rocks,” according to the Washington Post; you can read more about it here with a gift link. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

With two weeks until the midterm elections, Democrats are comfortably favored to take the House. Their path to Senate control, though, is harder — and it could run through Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race against former state Senate president Troy Jackson, a Democrat.

When Collins first ran for Senate in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate. But 30 years later, she’s still in office despite the odds, as Maine has grown more blue around her. 

One secret to her political durability is her success in “bringing in the bacon” for Mainers: Her official Senate website features a map of projects that she says she helped fund as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, including hospitals, bridges, affordable housing, public transportation, and water systems.

This year, though, all of that money might not be enough for Mainers to look past their frustration with another Republican: President Donald Trump.

To learn more about what Maine voters are thinking as they prepare to head to the polls, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post reporter Dan Merica, who’s on the ground reporting from Maine, about why some Mainers who backed Collins before are now reconsidering their support.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

Maine this cycle was going to be interesting no matter what. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who is running for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 this cycle.

But since the outset, it has really defined, I think, these midterm elections. The rise of Graham Platner, the oysterman turned politician, really hinted at the populist anti-establishment fervor that was in the Democratic base. That fervor was so strong that it prevented the sitting incumbent Democratic governor from winning the primary here in Maine to challenge Susan Collins. I think that said a lot about the Democratic Party. 

Obviously Graham Platner’s campaign then flamed out and he ended his campaign because of the allegations of sexual assault against him. 

But then you have the Collins angle of it, and she is really the poster candidate for a Republican who, in this election where Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low, is having to basically suspend political gravity in a state that really does not approve of the job that he’s done as president.

I want to ground this conversation in how voters in Maine feel about him right now because I know you’ve been talking to voters. What is the vibe out there? Are people mad? 

There’s a lot of anger for the president here. Maine is in a unique position where it’s been on the receiving end of a lot of what those people who are mad at Trump would say is harm that he has caused. 

It’s a border state. It borders Canada. There’s a ton of cross-border relationships. And so his attacks on Canada, his suggestion that it’s going to be the 51st state, has really hurt the state of Maine because it’s hurt tourism in the state. Many Canadians come down south to vacation in Maine. And there’s been a drop in tourism because of that fight with Canada.

The tariffs have hurt Maine because so much of the wood and the lumber that is grown and cut here in Maine is actually shipped up north to Canada to be processed, and then what it is processed as is shipped back across the United States. The tariffs have been incredibly harmful for the state. 

And then you have ICE. I’m in Biddeford. There was a shooting of an individual here in Biddeford. That has been an issue in this race as well. 

So there’s a lot of anger at the president, and it’s very easy to feel that when you’re talking to voters. I actually just spoke with a voter who voted for Troy Jackson, dropped his ballot in an early voting box. And I just asked him, “What did you vote for? Who’d you vote for? Why did you vote?” And he got visibly emotional when he started talking about the Trump administration and how scared he was for the future of democracy and that was why he was voting for Troy Jackson.

I’ve also talked to voters who supported Susan Collins just six years ago at the end of the first Trump administration. They voted for her back then and they feel like the last six years have made it impossible for them to vote for her again. And then on the other side, you have people who are hardcore die-hard Trump supporters and they actually think that Susan Collins has been too hard on the president. 

She’s in a really tough spot politically where on her left, there are a lot of voters, including some who have voted for her recently, who are furious with her, who don’t think she stands up to the president enough. And then on her right, there are voters who think that she stands up to the president too much.

It’s funny to think about these two figures representing the same political party because while they might agree on a few issues here and there, they couldn’t represent more different brands of Republicanism. What’s the truth of how much Susan Collins sides with Donald Trump?

She has sided with the president at times. She has voted against the president at times. I was struck that, in the debate on Thursday, she said, “I have been a senator under five different presidents.” I don’t exactly remember what her number was, but she noted that she had only endorsed one Republican president and that was George W. Bush.

I was just in Kennebunk, which is right next to Kennebunkport, which is a historical location for the Bush family. They have a large home at Walker Point. There is some relationship between the Bush family and Maine, [and it] makes sense that Susan Collins really does kind of line up more with the Bush-style Republican Party than she does the Trump-style Republican Party.

What’s her actual relationship with the president like? And surely he’s well aware that she was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach him over the January 6 insurrection. Does that get in the way of their relationship?

I think he’s very well aware when somebody breaks with him. I would have to imagine he’s aware of that. 

“It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.”

I was actually told by a Republican early in the campaign that President Trump demands loyalty from people that he supports, but this person actually said that there are rules for Republicans and that there are rules for Susan Collins and that Republicans were willing to kind of give her some leeway, which is actually an acknowledgement that they know the bind that she is in. 

They know that she’s running for reelection in a blue state, in a state that the president lost, in a state that is very hostile right now to the president. It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.

Affordability is a huge issue in Maine, right? And Donald Trump hasn’t exactly helped…

That has really heightened the competitiveness of this race. The same race is always going to be competitive, but the fact that gas prices are where it’s at, the fact that we’re going into winter, it’s starting to get cold up here. Home heating oil prices are above $6 a gallon. 

I think about 80 percent of homes that are heated by home heating oil are in the Northeast, a large portion of them probably in Maine and New Hampshire, two states with Senate races in November. It’s been a huge issue up here. 

The Trump administration has actually tried to get rid of a low-income program to help with home heating oil that helps a lot of folks in Maine. You’ve seen Republicans, from the gubernatorial candidate to congressional candidates, break with the president on that because they know it’s a huge issue. 

So when you talk about affordability, yes, we’re talking about the price of beef, the price of groceries, the price of gas, but there’s also these localized issues in a state like Maine, in particular. And I think home heating oil actually could be a really fascinating, underappreciated issue in this race. If you grew up or live in Arizona or Nevada or California, you’re not thinking about the oil that you need to heat your home. That could be a real issue here in a state like Maine.

Collins is a political survivor. For all of it to come crashing down because of, essentially, who the president was — is that a bit of a sad ending to this political story for her? Do you think she’d maybe have regrets about how she approached Donald Trump?

It’s certainly possible. And you’ve seen other senators who have bucked the president and have then retired and not run for reelection. I’m thinking of Thom Tillis, for example, in North Carolina. There is this fascinating case study in how the Republican Party has changed when you look at Susan Collins and you look at Donald Trump. 

Someone like Susan Collins in an earlier iteration of the Republican Party would’ve had a lot of success and would’ve probably stayed onside the Republican Party in a way that she just hasn’t done under Trump. She represents a different kind of era of the Republican Party. 

I think there was a time when bringing home the bacon to a small state really worked politically. I’m thinking about Harry Reid, for example — he represented Nevada. In 2010, he faced a really difficult reelection campaign and his entire campaign was bringing home the bacon to Nevada, a similarly small state, and he won reelection in 2010.

I think if Susan Collins wins reelection in 2026, it’ll prove that there’s still a lot of goodwill for politicians who can deliver funding projects for states like Maine, states like Nevada, smaller states that maybe don’t get the kind of national attention that others do. 

If she does lose, a lot of it will be put at the feet of President Trump. I’ll be fascinated to talk to her if she does lose, because I do think she will have a lot to say that she probably hasn’t said yet, but I think that’s an if, and I think we have two more weeks to find that out.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to take over a public park. 

What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course. 

According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees. 

Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.

But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.

A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme. 

Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts. 

What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.

Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards. 

The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.

Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader (belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”

The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.

In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.

Poor people pay for your travel points

To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit. 

Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.

Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method. 

For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense. 

This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.

As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.

What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits. 

As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.

American swipe fees are too damn high

To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud. 

Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries. 

To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.

By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card. 

In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used. 

Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices. 

This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.

The Credit Card Competition Act might not work

All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition. 

Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.

Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees. 

The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make. 

After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.

Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points. 

It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.