On Thursday afternoon in Dallas, in what looked like a farewell tour, the president of the United States told his Texas followers to “Hold your nose” and vote for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a man he also described as a “pain in the ass.”

Donald Trump then sped off in the presidential limo known as the Beast — at nearly 100 mph, according to pool reports — and headed for an event in Oklahoma. Republicans gazed in mock wild wonder, palms outstretched, claiming they have no idea why they’re staring at potentially historic losses in the midterm elections next month. 

Afterwards a MAGA supporter told me that Trump’s performance was just “presidential humor.” And fair enough. Donald Trump has spent a lifetime being, in effect, the Wednesday night open-mic comic at a backroom bar in some college town in Missouri. 

Neither capable of growth nor understanding, he’s that guy with just one punchline. He’s a one-trick pony: “Sir, she said. Sir.” He’s the most talentless man ever caught in the bright glare of the light he demanded from the world.

But he is persistent. That’s his superpower. The grift? Oh, that part he learned from experience. But he’s naturally persistent, and out of that grew the corruption, fearmongering and boundless anger — all driven by his superpower. He learned to be transactional. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.  

The first Trump administration was an accident, largely brought about by the split I witnessed firsthand between Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ supporters at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia during the last week of July 2016. What a shock: The Democrats destroyed their chances through infighting. Who knew?

Trump never thought he’d win that election. Some Republicans, who later fled the party, never accepted him as a legitimate heir to the GOP’s legacy when he did. Now, critics and fans alike have pointed out that there’s no doubt he’s the rightful heir to the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; more corrupt than Nixon, a happy practitioner of Reagan’s economics and more of a mean-spirited-wimp than Hunter S. Thompson ever thought Bush could be. 

Trump’s refusal to bust up monopolies while cutting staff to the National Park Service and selling off public lands has removed any illusions that he might be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. His lack of military service takes him out of the realm of being a Dwight Eisenhower Republican. As for Abraham Lincoln, Trump has tried his best to divide a nation, not unite one. 

Since Trump never thought he’d win in 2016, he never really planned anything; he let the Republican establishment run things until he got comfortable sleeping in the big chair in the Oval Office and declaring each week “infrastructure week” while doing nothing about it. 

Then came COVID, and in 2021 Trump found himself out of power after, of course, refusing to concede the election and inciting a failed insurrection. That failure fueled his persistence and led to his 2024 re-election. The failure also fueled his anger. His subsequent 34 felony convictions in New York and the federal investigations into his actions became motives for Trump to seek and destroy all who tried to bring him to justice.

His persistent greed, anger and need for revenge empowered him during his first 100 days back in office in 2025, leading to sweeping, Nazi-esque changes sold to the public by discrediting or co-opting the media. 

Meanwhile, the former East Room of the White House looks like Dresden during postwar reconstruction; the Kennedy Center is starting to resemble a Greek ruin; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is empty and broken, and for some reason that can only be understood under the influence of hallucinogens and Red Bull, he now wants to build a triumphal arch and stuff it with weapons.

We have no idea why we’re at war with Iran and no idea how to negotiate a peace. Trump’s latest attempt at that answer came in the Oval Office on Wednesday when he said, for what must be the fifth or sixth time, that he could just blow Iran up. 

At least 58 people have died after being remanded to ICE facilities. Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin shrugs that off and says nothing ICE does is controversial and he’s not running “Holiday Inns — these people broke the law.” His superpower seems to be life-ending, militant ignorance.

Then there’s Russia, Ukraine, China and a host of other scandals. Those include but aren’t limited to spending taxpayer money on political ads, the price of diesel fuel, the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, antisemitism, misogyny and the L.A. mayor’s race. 

While covering Trump is always a challenge, covering his minions is another story. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who made his bones trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and challenging the results of the 2020 election, made a complete fool of himself this week in the Senate while attacking former special counsel Jack Smith. 

Schmitt’s superpower is apparently making an ass of himself in public. By misrepresenting nonsensical evidence, he accused Smith of perjury. When called out for his sophomoric display, he then went on right-wing media and lied some more.

Smith, who still reminds me of Coach Beard in “Ted Lasso,” explained that his prosecution wasn’t politically inspired. It was driven by facts. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties,” he said. “My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded,” Being driven by facts and principles is a pretty decent superpower and should describe most people, including reporters, lawyers, scientists, politicians and clerics. 

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” Smith said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

That conclusion shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone after all this time. Trump told me in the Brady Briefing Room, six weeks before the 2020 election, that “If you stop counting the votes” there wouldn’t need to be a peaceful transfer of power. He’d just stay on indefinitely.

Trump thus teaches us that persistence pays off even if the proposition is criminal and the facts aren’t in your favor. That’s why he currently commands the center ring of the circus.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, we have the aforementioned Sideshow Ken Paxton, one of the most loathsome individuals ever to climb out of the primordial ooze and declare himself a human being. This is a man so vile that even Trump hates him, and so do the Trump-happy Texas Republicans who have been known to embrace faith healers and hunt snakes in shorts and cowboy boots. They tried to rid themselves of Paxton, but he somehow slipped away.

Paxton’s superpower is his lack of spine and his greasy nature. That, combined with Trump’s (ahem) support, is the reason Paxton isn’t in prison. 

But time has its way with everyone. After more than a decade of deploying his superpower, Trump is noticeably faltering, even conceding from the Oval Office this week that his party may lose the midterms. The man who has traded on fear, corruption and grift for so long that he looks like a cartoon Tasmanian devil without the charm has now come to resemble Otis, the sleepy town drunk in “The Andy Griffith Show” (look it up, for heaven’s sake). 

Waiting in the wings is “Hillbilly Elegy” JD Vance, worming his way through the crowd. That’s his superpower: He’s a bearded human worm. If you don’t like him, you might place a bet on Marco “The Juggler” Rubio. His superpower is handling a variety of tasks without the loud explosive thud of total failure often seen from Trump, Vance and Pete Hegseth, who’s more like the the secretary of fashion than the “secretary of war.” That makes “Li’l Marco” a bright star in Trump’s dark firmament, even if it’s evident nobody likes him.  

Hegseth, on the other hand, is among the dimmest. His superpower seems to be the ability to cosplay a vain summer camp counselor in the Adirondacks from a bad Hallmark comedy.  

For the comic book fans out there, the Republicans are led by a Yellow Lantern with fading powers, delusional in his beliefs and actions, too fearful to change and faced with the overpowering realization that his time in power is quickly coming to an end. 

He even sent an email to supporters Thursday claiming “This could be my final four weeks as president.” Sure, it was another grift, as well as fatalistic and totally disingenuous. 

They may have to pry Trump out of the Oval Office with a crowbar and a handful of sedatives in 2029, if he lasts that long. But next month’s midterm elections, should they go as badly as Trump obviously fears, will mean the effective end of his presidency. What comes after that could be chaos. Don’t expect mature or professional behavior from a party that can’t tell the difference between an NBA game in Atlanta and a women’s college basketball game in Silver Spring. Just realize it’s the same party that wants to punish transgender Americans while rewarding the ultra-rich. 

The only question that matters is this; Does Trump have enough juice left in his Yellow Lantern ring for one last fearful victory? At his mini-convention in Dallas he told his followers to “cheat like hell.” At the same time Trump asked everyone to vote as if he were on the ballot; unfortunately for the Republicans, many will do just that. At this point, it’s almost as if Trump is campaigning for the Democrats. 

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Seems appropriate. Most of the Democrats are counting on winning by simply saying, “I’m not Trump.”

Folks, they’re not putting Vance out in the field for the Donald’s sake. He’s there for the same reason: Because he’s not Trump. Soon enough, JD could graduate from the sideshow to the center ring.

Should Trump and the Republicans suffer the historic midterm blowout everyone sees coming — barring armed confiscation of ballot boxes — the president will play the victim, a martyred hero who will claim the elections were rigged and blame Joe Biden, China, Canada, our NATO allies and Iran. If he somehow finds a miraculous recharge for his ring, he will use his superpower to foment further revenge and retribution. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.

I’ve been told that everyone has a superpower. If so, I’ll defer to what my father told me was mine: asking annoying questions. I still have a few for you, Mr. President.

The post Trump’s superpower is fading. Can he recharge before the midterms? appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, which just passed its seven month mark, is deeply unpopular among Americans, new polling continues to suggest. A survey from the Associated Press/NORC Research Center published Thursday reports that 71% of adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war, started alongside Israel in late February, while 69% say the war has not been worth fighting.

“More than half of adults say the country as a whole, the national economy, and their local economy are worse off since Trump was reelected in 2025,” the survey reports. “Most Americans (73%) say the country is heading in the wrong direction, including 92% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans.”

The president seems to realize this growing frustration could cost Republicans dearly in the midterm elections next month, possibly losing GOP control of the House, Senate or both. “It’s possible,” Trump mused to reporters outside the White House Thursday. But he continues to insist that the Iran war is worth it — ostensibly to prevent the nation from obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite the nuclear stockpiles of both the U.S. and Israel — while doubling down on threats and deploying even more troops to the region. 

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On Thursday, officials told the Wall Street Journal the Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, expected to arrive at the end of November. It would add around 10,000 more troops to the region, putting further strain on the Navy, which has been under pressure from near-record deployments and supply shortages.

But it does seem like Trump is waiting until after the voting to renew bombing Iran, as the Journal reported in late September. In a sprawling interview with Time published Thursday, the president said as much. “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world,” he said. “With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.”

The post Trump leans into Iran war, admits it could cost Republicans the midterms appeared first on Salon.com.

Andy Beshear has a favorite song: “Universal Sound” by Tyler Childers, the Grammy-winning country artist with a special place in the Kentucky governor’s heart. That title is something of a metaphor, about connecting to a deep, abiding spirituality accessible to us all. It’s meant to be an ecumenical message — just like the one Beshear hopes to deliver.

“Universal Sound” carried him through a “nasty” reelection campaign in 2023, which ended with a comfortable victory over his GOP opponent, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who had been hand-picked for the race by Sen. Mitch McConnell. Amid mounting speculation that Beshear could become a leading contender in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, “Universal Sound” may well become familiar to more voters.

Beshear’s newly published book, which is de rigueur for potential candidates seeking to raise their political profile and lay out a vision, is also stoking talk of 2028. With its title taken from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country” explores how President Donald Trump and his administration have, in Beshear’s words, “hijacked” Christianity, and how the governor’s brand of inclusive faith underpins his political life, offering readers a blueprint for governing with compassion. 

I interviewed Beshear last week on the sidelines of Bourbon & Beyond, the music festival held annually in Louisville, Kentucky. He spoke about a reinvigorated religious left, addressed the tricky question of whether Trump should be considered a Christian, discussed his willingness to take unpopular stands in a red state, hinted at his plans for 2028 and explained why, as a politician often compared to Mr. Rogers, his kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. (Full disclosure: My husband, the novelist Silas House, served as Kentucky poet laureate under Beshear, and I once briefly assisted the governor on a writing project.) 

This conversation, which took place in a backstage trailer vibrating from the country and hip-hop tunes emanating from nearby stages, has been edited for length and clarity.

Governor, thank you for taking the time to talk. “Go and Do Likewise” is centered around the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. What do you think that story has to tell us and teach us today? 

Well, it’s a perfect story for a moment of division. So the parable of the Good Samaritan is about a man lying bloodied and naked on the side of the road, and everybody that looks like him and thinks like him and votes like him and prays like him and loves like him goes to the other side of the road, ignores him and walks on. But Jesus chooses someone who’s raised to hate that man on the side of the road — the man on the side of the road was raised to hate the Samaritan — and that’s the person he has come over, not kick the man while he’s down, but lift him up, carry him to safety and, if you read it carefully, pay for his healthcare moving forward.

But the parable of the Good Samaritan is more than just a story to emulate; it’s an instruction, because Jesus then looks at the crowd and says, “Now go and do likewise” . . . This is one of the fundamental — not teachings but instructions of the Bible. It’s for us to be good, especially when it’s hard. For us not to judge people, and at people’s worst moments, to just be good to each other.

Faith is obviously so important to you, and I’ve heard you many times refer to it as your “authentic why.” What do you mean by that?

Well, first, I would never impose my faith on anyone. I’m not somebody who thinks that my faith needs to be written directly into law. That’s Christian nationalism, and I’m against that. But I do think in an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.

It tells me I’m supposed to leave this world a little better than I found it, and that’s one of the reasons I’m still [here]. You know, I thought that two terms as governor would be enough, and they still may be. But I see a world now that’s moving backward and not forward. And doesn’t faith call you to stand up and to speak out at that moment?

What do you think being in that position — I imagine you sitting there in Frankfort at night, weighing this [calculus] — has taught you?

First, I believe in any job that I’ve taken on. I am fully dedicated to the people of Kentucky, and when I fight with the president, it’s not because I’m a Democratic governor and he’s a Republican president. It’s because he’s doing something that hurts the people of Kentucky, and whether it’s popular or not, that was the job I took on to do my very best to move us not right, not left, but forward.

But you know, [the COVID pandemic] taught me a lot of lessons. I did what I thought was the right thing, that might not be the popular thing, the thing that would save the most lives. And you know what I found? As long as you’re willing to respect people enough to explain your why and not just your what, doing the right thing is oftentimes the politically popular thing, even if it wasn’t beforehand. People respect conviction, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it. And when you’re willing to explain why you did something, people can disagree with you but still believe you’re coming from a good place.

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I read your book is that the religious left used to be such a strong force in American politics. You know, Bobby Kennedy, all of his work —

All of the War on Poverty, even if not couched in those terms —

Yes. Bobby Kennedy’s work for social justice was rooted in his Catholicism. Jimmy Carter, famously a Sunday school teacher, spoke about his faith a lot. Even Hillary Clinton, in her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign and administration, talked about her faith and took a lot of flak from establishment media. What happened to the religious left? Why do you think it declined, or kind of went underground?

Well, what I think we’re seeing now, when you see the James Talaricos of the world, our Kansas Senate candidate [Democrat Adam Hamilton] who’s a Methodist minister and others . . .  you know, the media will always try to take something as a tactic. They’re like, “Why are Democrats talking more about faith right now?” instead of “Why are people of faith running as Democrats right now?” And I think it’s because there is such a manipulation and a hijacking of faith going on, in such a transparent manner, that people of faith are saying, “I’ve had enough.”

When you see Donald Trump hold a Bible in a way that you’re pretty sure he’s never held it, much less never read it; when he says he doesn’t think there’s any way he’s going to heaven, he doesn’t seem to be worried about it; when he walks out after Erika Kirk gives voice to the Golden Rule in such a beautiful way, and says, No, no, I believe in the exact opposite; when you see JD Vance using faith to kick people while they’re down instead of lift them up, and to judge as many people as possible — then I think people of real faith want to stand up and take that back. Or at least to provide the counterexample. I think people are tired of seeing faith used for bad in public life instead of for good, and that’s the core of why I wrote the book.

You don’t shy away from going after President Trump. You write that he “makes people feel good about themselves by telling them it’s okay to be the worst version of themselves.” At another point you say, “Trump may occasionally talk about Jesus (or ‘Two Corinthians’), but he has missed the point. Jesus lifted up the very people this Republican administration pushes down . . . Trump throws Gatsby parties with his billionaire friends, while Jesus hung out with the exact opposite. Trump clears the very people out of city parks that Jesus would minister to.” 

That’s a powerful indictment. You’re saying that the president doesn’t love his neighbor as himself.

No, he calls his neighbor “the enemy from within.” It is the most stark contrast. I think about “love your neighbor as yourself” versus the president [characterizing] your neighbor as the enemy from within. I also think about Erika Kirk saying, I forgive my enemies, and Donald Trump saying, no, I hate my enemies . . . It’s just the exact opposite of what the Bible is supposed to teach us.

At one point, you question if he even knows the story of the Good Samaritan. 

I’m not sure he does.

Christ said, “You will know them by their fruits,” right? Do you think President Trump is a Christian?

I try not to question people’s faith, because I admit that that is judging. But he is not living and he is not governing like a Christian. Now, when you think about the miracle of the fishes and the loaves in each of the four first books of the New Testament, it’s that important. Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids and seniors’ table [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian, and I doubt they ever run out of food at the White House. 

I think about the “Big Ugly Bill,” and it’s causing kids to lose having enough food, but it’s also taking doctors away from the sick. And while I think he was talking about spirituality, the actual words of the Bible — which many people believe is the direct word of God — is that Jesus said a doctor is for the sick. Yet there’s a lot of sick [people] that aren’t going to have a doctor. So Donald Trump certainly isn’t living out faith. And for those that preach that he is a person of faith, my granddad, a lay Baptist minister, always said, you know, faith without action —

Yeah, is “dead.” In the book you call for a “Great American Reset.” What do you mean by that? How would you define that?

I did not live through McCarthyism, but we have read about McCarthyism — about attacking and othering people, throwing them in jail — and Donald Trump’s doing it right now. He’s so desperate, he’s calling people communists. I mean, just blatantly ripping off Joseph McCarthy. But the president himself is doing it. But we reached a point where people said enough, and they took a breath, and we came back together and did not repeat it — at least until now. 

I don’t want to leave a broken country to my kids or to anyone else’s. I don’t want to leave this divided of a country to anyone else. I don’t want to leave a country where we are told it’s OK to hate each other and that your neighbor is the enemy. And so while I judge MAGA politicians, I don’t judge MAGA voters — and I don’t even use that phrase. Why? Because I want them to take a breath and to say, “OK, you know, let’s do something better. You know, this went too far. Let’s repair the wounds that we have,” so that we don’t move from retribution from one side to retribution to another side, and back and forth and back and forth, but that we get something more like what we had growing up. 

When you were talking, I thought of another scripture — “the repairer of the breach” from the Book of Isaiah, which Bill Clinton used quite a bit. That’s kind of what you’re talking about, bringing people back together, healing divides.

I feel like we’ve done that better in Kentucky than most places. I still don’t always agree with the way people vote, but if you look at where we were with [my predecessor as governor] Matt Bevin, [who was] going after everybody who is different, othering anyone and everyone, judging everyone . . . Look at where we are now. That last [presidential] election, you didn’t see nearly the signs or the flags or anything else. You saw people who, in the very least, wanted to genuinely respect their neighbors.

You talk about that happening here in Kentucky. How do you think that can begin nationally, though, when a lot of MAGA Republicans out there think, as you write in the book, that “Democrats are Satan in the flesh”?

Well, Republicans right now are costing them about $4,500 extra a year in tariffs, about $800 extra a year in gas. If they need diesel, it’s even worse. So they might think that Democrats are Satan in the flesh, but Republicans are bankrupting them. If you want to eat, to be able to afford groceries for yourself or your kid, if you want to be able to see a pediatrician for your child in your own community, you’re going to think about things a little bit different. Democrats have the chance to grab that lane. And we should be. That’s where we should want to be. That’s certainly where I’ve always governed. 

Think about a soybean farmer, and you and I both know we got a lot in Kentucky, and I’m not sure if any of them voted for Kamala Harris. But look at what’s happened to them. First, the USAID program’s eliminated. That’s one of their major clients, because if you feed starving nations, people like the United States better. Then [Education Secretary] Linda McMahon comes in, using her wrestling knowledge, to end the farm-to-cafeteria program. Then Donald Trump — and he alone decides on tariffs — throws them on China, and they stop buying our soybeans. They’re the largest purchaser in the world. They move to Brazil and Argentina.

Then he decides to get in a war with Iran that he doesn’t even explain to the American people a couple days before in his State of the Union. And now the price of diesel, which runs all farm equipment, is at an all-time high. If that’s not enough, a third of the world’s fertilizer runs through the Strait of Hormuz. So, a soybean farmer that voted for Donald Trump, who believed that was their guy, is totally betrayed, trying to decide if they’re going to plant crops at all, or if Donald Trump has bankrupted their family farm.

You’re the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to the polls, and this book is introducing you and your beliefs to a whole other set of people, of potential voters. What are your plans for 2028?

Well, I haven’t made any final decisions, but I will say when I walked off the stage in 2023 . . . I looked at [my wife] Britainy, and I said, “Hoo, I’ll never have to run for anything ever again.” As I’m here today, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. And I’ll make that decision later. 

But I think about two core tenets of my faith. Number one, that I am made by a loving God that calls me to love other people, and that ought to be the baseline. And number two, I ought to leave things better than I found them.  

Listen: When you’re governor of a place you love, it’s enough. It’s special. What we’ve done in Kentucky together, all of us, people of all different parties over the last seven years, [has] been transformational, and I couldn’t be more proud — and I was willing to go out on top . . .  But I can’t watch a country slide back. I can’t see progress that folks in Selma marched for 60 years ago, undone by a rogue Supreme Court. So I don’t know exactly what my role will be in the future, but I just will not leave a broken country to my kids or anyone else’s. I will not.

I want to ask you sort of a different question. Let’s say that a popular Democratic governor, who has been elected twice to that job in what many see as one of the reddest states in the country, decides to run for president. What would they offer the American people?

Well, a vision of both reviving the American dream, of proving to people [who] believe the economy is broken that it can work again. That if you work hard and play by the rules that you can get ahead — that you can take your kids on the same vacation that you went on, that you can leave your family better off. That we can fix the darn government that people look at as corrupt right now, and we can heal this divide that is such a threat to our future as Americans. And none of us enjoy — none of us wants to be mad at the person that lives across from us. I think we can get back to being, yes, an imperfect nation, but one that’s stable, [where] at least we are moving toward progress each and every day.

Right now, polls are showing that Democratic voters want fighters, leaders who are unafraid of punching back against corrupt and MAGA politicians. Some Democratic politicians are resorting to using strong language, dropping F-bombs to get their point across. You, by contrast, have built your political identity on leading with kindness. “Kentucky’s Mister Rogers” is how many people see you. One of your book’s chapters is titled “Be the Adult in the Room.” So I wonder if you think there’s room for that kind of politics in the party and America today, coming in the wake of Donald Trump.

Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s “Mister Rogers” — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the “Mister Rogers” is the one still standing. A lot of people can claim they’re fighting in different ways from the bluest of states. How many people have sued [Trump] 30-plus times from the reddest of states? How many people speak out against him when it could negatively impact their approval rating instead of positively impact their approval rating? 

You know, every day that I stand up for Kentuckians and Americans, every day that I fight back against this administration, I have more to lose than anybody else. But what’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? So there are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person to fight and win. But shouldn’t we want one that will actually win in the end? And so I think that when people look at who’s fighting in the hardest of places, they see this governor. 

The midterms are about six weeks away. What do you think the Democratic Party is getting right, and where do you think it’s falling short?

I think that they are getting right how hard the world is on American families right now. I hate to use the “affordability” word, because I believe it’s becoming like a political science term. What it really [means] is that your medical bills cost too much. That’s why we forgave $250 million in medical debt here in Kentucky [via executive order]. It’s that your utility bill is going up. It’s that groceries are too much, and my goodness, gas is through the roof. We need to make sure that we’re communicating in terms that the American people communicate in. 

You said something at a recent book event that caught my ear, that the Democrats have gone too far on a few things. I’m wondering what those might be.

We went too far on overregulation. We’ve got to protect our environment, we’ve got to protect our workers. But if we make things so onerous, then it takes a long time to accomplish anything. If you believe we need more housing, and it takes that much longer to build housing, then people lose out. If it takes too long to build a factory, you don’t have those jobs that pay the good wages. So we’ve got to have a sense of urgency . . . Democrats have to design our policies in a way to get results, and if we believe truly in something, even if we’re only 80% right on what the policy looks like, understanding if we get it done faster, it benefits more people.

You come from what many observers would call the party’s more traditional wing. Right now, there’s a lot of energy behind progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, and democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Do you think there’s room in the party for this wide range of political identities?

I think — and you’re not doing it — but I think that the media tries to put everybody in a box to have a narrative. How many people in a Trump plus-30 state that have vetoed every anti-LGBTQ+ bill that [has reached] their desk would suddenly be lumped in as a moderate? And that’s not to suggest I view myself as a progressive. I just — I don’t view myself as either. I view myself as pragmatic.

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My job is to stand up for my people and all their rights, live out my faith and to see everyone as a child of God, but [also] to solve problems. And that’s where Democratic governors are. You know, I think that this debate can play out in the House and in the U.S. Senate, where they might have different caucuses. But governors aren’t one of 50 or one of 24 in a party. You’re one of one, and your job, if you’re doing it right, is to get things done, to actually improve people’s lives. So, I can’t be as ideological as someone who votes on the amendment to the rule, right? My job has to be to figure out how to get the best results for our people on each and every day. 

Are you worried that Republican attempts to deploy terms like “communist” across the board will hurt the Democratic brand overall?

Oh, I think what the president’s doing is so hyperbolic and so transparent that people see right through it. There is only one elected official in the entire country actively engaged in socialism, and his name is Donald J. Trump. 

The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and he is the only person negotiating a U.S. government interest in a private company. But, you know, what you do is you call people the name that you’re worrying that you are, and so he’s calling people “communist.” So now that he’s engaged in socialism, which he is, what is the difference between that and communism? It is the people in charge enriching themselves, which he and his family are doing. It’s turning the police and the justice system into your own personal force, which is what he’s doing. You see in each and every one of these that the things that Trump is calling people is what he’s actively engaged in.

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Donald Trump has never been one for subtlety, so it follows that his taxpayer-funded “public service announcement” instructing Americans to love him would literally feature a gospel choir singing the words “Love Me.” Along with many of his closest allies, the president is a fan of pseudo-science, so perhaps he believes the repetition will have a hypnotic effect on viewers, reversing through pop psychology trickery the free-fall that has beset his approval ratings.

This is just one of three separate ads, totaling $1.5 million so far, that feel less like a sincere effort to persuade voters and more like an expensive effort by the White House to soothe the temperamental 80-year-old. Either way, what’s indisputable is that Trump is becoming increasingly frustrated that the chicanery he has used throughout his life no longer seems to be working.

The president has perhaps the most staggering track record of defrauding Americans of any hustler in the country’s 250-year history. His glib assertions of being the greatest genius who knows more than any other person about any subject under the sun have served him well for decades, and his 34 felony fraud convictions and civil fraud cases paint a picture of a man who always seems to find marks who will believe his transparent, self-aggrandizing lies.

Before he won the White House in 2016, “The Apprentice” managed to convince millions of viewers that a man who managed to lose nearly a billion dollars was some great businessman. Even when Trump argued that he, unlike medical experts, understood the salutary effects of household cleaners to treat Covid-19 patients, his followers stayed by his side, some of them putting their trust in MAGA quackery over science-based healthcare like vaccines. The cult of personality built around his persona of presidential greatness remains a puzzling swindle. 

But on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump did what he usually does these days when presented with a microphone: He whined at length at how he isn’t getting the love he believes he deserves. 

“Nobody talks about all the incredible things,” the president complained, saying America has “the best economy we’ve ever had.” He added, laughably, that people are “twice as wealthy” as they were as two years ago under the Biden administration. Then he repeated his false promise that, if Republicans win the November midterms, the government would issue a “dividend” check of $5,000 to every adult American. 

It may be easy to laugh at this stuff, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember that Trump has always been this way. Polls, however, suggest that Americans are finally waking up. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found his approval rating at a dismal 32% — hitting, in other words, the very bedrock of his MAGA base. Worse for him, only 13% of Americans, according to an analysis by G. Elliott Morris, are willing to tell a pollster they buy the president’s $5,000 check lie, showing that even people who claim to approve of him can’t be bothered to trust him any longer. 

People could be learning from experience. As Catherine Rampell of the Bulwark detailed, the $5,000 check promise is only the latest in a long list of false second-term promises that Americans would be receiving fat checks from the government. Her “partial list” includes these examples:

• $5,000 stimulus checks via a “DOGE dividend” (February 2025)
• $2,000 stimulus checks via a “rebate” or tariff “dividend” (July 2025, August 2025, November 2025, December 2025, February 2026)
• Checks of indeterminate value that would redirect money that would have been spent on Affordable Care Act subsidies (November 2025)
• $500 Obamacare “rebate” checks (September 2026)
• $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans win the midterms (yesterday) 

Thankfully, there now appears to be a limit to the number of times a fraudster can promise the check is in mail before even some MAGA voters start to wonder if they’re being had. Most clung to two big reasons to justify their vote in 2024: the president’s promises to lower prices and end foreign wars. Trump broke both in a dramatic fashion, starting a war with Iran and a trade war with, well, much of the world, both of which have escalated inflation, particularly of fuel prices. Even his most ardent followers are reminded of his lies every time they buy groceries or gas. Running ads that repeat his failed promises only serve to remind people of the broken trust. 

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Beyond bigger propaganda, Trump has no other ideas for how to change the situation. On top of the ads, last week the White House launched “Trump TV,” which was billed as an alternative to cable news but mostly runs pro-Trump content so poorly produced that it makes AI slop seem compelling. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye chronicled, the viewership started at a paltry 8,000 people and, by the next day, had faded to fewer than 1,000. It would have likely been even lower if it weren’t for journalists watching it to report on the emptiness of the enterprise. 

Perhaps the surest sign that these efforts are more about placating Trump than persuading voters is the his travel schedule. The president is avoiding visiting states with close congressional races, where he risks being shunned by Republican candidates trying to distance themselves from his unpopularity. Instead, he is mostly sticking to deep red states like Alabama and Oklahoma, where they can still scare up enough MAGA diehards to fill stadiums and, crucially, give Trump hours of reassurance that he’s still got fans. On Tuesday, he spoke at an event heralding our era as a “golden age” due to AI. As a political maneuver, his words were baffling, as most Americans deplore the economy and loathe AI. But being surrounded by billionaires while applauding himself with gold-related talk is Trump’s happy zone, and keeping the president there appears to be all that matters to his West Wing staff. 

For the worrywarts of the left, there remains plenty to be concerned about. Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are facing intense gerrymandering and voter suppression, which could blunt the wins currently projected by the polls. Even if the party were to take both the Senate and the House, Trump will still occupy the Oval Office for two more years. Armed with the criminal immunity granted him by the Supreme Court, he has no reason to stop blatantly flouting the law in a myriad of ways, ranging from his attacks on the Kennedy Center and prosecuting the Iran war without congressional approval to his own mysterious swelling wealth. 

Still, even though it’s almost certainly illegal, there is an upside to Trump using taxpayer money for ego-gratifying TV ads and propaganda. The more time he spends on his futile efforts to restore the glory days when only half of Americans opposed him, the less energy he has for the work of actually governing. Everything he’s done in that arena has been an unmitigated disaster. Keeping Trump distracted from making serious decisions is a good thing for us all.

The post Trump can’t trick Americans into loving him appeared first on Salon.com.

Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote.

The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.

Congress funds her organization’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.

Now a White House proposal threatens that work. 

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants to change spending rules to prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or what it vaguely calls “related activities.” The office is headed by Russell Vought, who has long criticized the use of taxpayer money for voter registration efforts and who more recently used his position to cancel, freeze or redirect vast amounts of federal funding in defiance of Congress’ orders.

Miller, who has worked at her nonprofit for six years, said she’s never faced regulators wanting to impede her work.

“Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said. 

The proposal is part of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal efforts to expand access to voting, especially among groups that have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement. 

President Donald Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote, and that may require everyone to deliver that proof in person, which would effectively end voter registration drives. 

Last year, the Trump administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, though the agency temporarily lifted the ban amid litigation over the policy change. The Department of Education also sent a letter to colleges and universities stating that they could not use federal work-study dollars to support voting-related work. (The directive has been contested.) Previously, those funds were used to pay students who had part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities.

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And on the first day of Trump’s second term, the president rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand opportunities for registration. Biden’s order acknowledged that some Americans, including Black citizens and people with disabilities, face historic and ongoing barriers to voting access. 

Neither Vought nor his office responded to ProPublica’s questions about the proposed change. But in a letter sent to state officials in 2022, he condemned Biden’s executive order as a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.” 

Vought’s proposed change, which wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms, could have ramifications for the next presidential election well beyond voting accessibility. 

Nonprofits that receive government funds to help people sign up for Medicaid benefits, food stamps or other programs subject to the National Voter Registration Act are required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. Like Disability Rights Nebraska, these groups would be caught between contradictory federal directives if the proposed ban is finalized.

Thousands more nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but provide voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts said the confusion over which groups the ban affects and the burden of proving an organization is in compliance could lead many to pause or curb registration efforts ahead of the 2028 election. Colleges and universities that help students navigate registering to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.

But it is nonprofits like Disability Rights Nebraska and the people they serve that will be among the most directly hit.

“I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” said Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who’s an expert on disability and citizenship. 

In 2002, Congress helped tackle the challenges people with disabilities face in voting when it passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation was designed to upgrade states’ voting systems and improve security in the wake of the controversial 2000 election, when close results in Florida triggered a recount, followed by lawsuits that ultimately ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to George W. Bush being declared the winner. 

The Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush, created grants to assist people with disabilities in registering to vote, casting their ballots and accessing polling places. That funding continues to this day. In recent years, Congress has budgeted $10 million a year, which is spread among 57 nonprofit groups that together cover every state as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and U.S. territories. 

That funding has narrowed the gap in casting ballots between those with disabilities and those without, according to an April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research that was written for the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps implement the reforms put in place by the Help America Vote Act. 

But challenges persist when it comes to voter registration. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with registering, compared to 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to survey data from Rutgers. That gap may sound small, but it is statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey. 

The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May. It is part of an extensive attempt to remake the rules governing federal grants. Once OMB’s final rule is released, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation. Legal experts said some lawsuits will likely focus on how the rule contradicts existing laws and policies, like the grants that were enshrined in the 2002 law and repeatedly approved by Congress.

Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the OMB for part of Biden’s administration, said the proposal disregards how the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives dozens of federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies create detailed policies to select grant applicants and get the money out the door.

Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House, said Bagenstos, who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in disability and appropriations law. 

“This is not even a surgical power grab,” he said. “It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”

Disability Rights Nebraska was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year. When the organization heard about the proposed rule, it submitted a public comment in opposition. Such a change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the group wrote. 

The organization’s work is strictly nonpartisan as mandated by law, the letter said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, the group wrote, 30% of the new voters its staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party.

To ensure their drives are nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each person representing a different party, as required by law. 

Many of the residents she speaks with are essentially cloistered, Miller said. 

She recalled one visit to a rural assisted living facility in early 2024. The community is so small it doesn’t have a library or a gas station. The nearest election commissioner’s office is a 30-minute drive away. 

Disability Rights Nebraska had put up a poster inside the building, listing key facts about voting access for people with disabilities. At one point, Miller said, a young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at the poster. “Is this true?” He asked her. 

Yes, she told him.

“So I could register?”

“You can,” Miller said. “Do you want to register?”

He did. Miller said he knew what party he wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. She said he told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process.

Miller said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments.

“If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said. “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”

The post “A massive power grab”: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote appeared first on Salon.com.

Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.

The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development. 

Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

 

When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading. 

For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right. 

But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration. 

By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts. 

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Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry. 

An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.

This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly. 

On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”

Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.

The post Fox News tries to cool conservative anger over AI appeared first on Salon.com.

Susan Collins is very concerned — and she should be. As a politician who has only run for one office in her life and held the same seat for nearly 30 years, the Maine senator is facing a possible loss in what looks more and more like a big blue wave coming in November’s midterm elections. As the rare GOP senator representing a blue state, she should be the first one caught in that undertow. But Collins is a rare creature: a virtual Houdini who has always managed to fend off defeat during tough elections. Whether she will somehow work her magic again is one of the biggest questions of 2026.

At the start of this election cycle, Democrats had two competing strategies about how to beat her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was convinced that because more women than men vote in the state and Collins wins most of them, the answer was to find a Democratic woman that closely matched Collins’ profile. So he persuaded the popular Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, 79, to run for the seat. A progressive faction took the opposite approach, believing that a younger, male populist outsider would provide the contrast Mainers were looking for. So they recruited a oyster farmer, Graham Platner. It soon became clear that Schumer’s bet was the wrong one, and that Platner’s persona and message were more appealing. Mills’ heart wasn’t really in the race, and she dropped out fairly quickly. But then, after Platner was forced to withdraw from the race due to credible allegations of sexual assault, he was replaced with another salt-of-the-earth working man type. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who once served as president of the Main Senate, was well-known in the state and became something of a compromise candidate. Collins is currently trailing Jackson in most polls, although the revered New York Times/Portland Press/Siena poll, released Thursday, showed her with a small lead. 

While no one is counting their chickens, the environment appears to favor Democrats. This is the first election for Collins since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and decades of access to abortion. Since the senator had effectively cast the deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, vouching for his mainstream credentials and assuring Americans he considered Roe “settled law,” the case also severely damaged her reputation as a moderate among many Maine voters, most of whom — remember — are women. Collins has since claimed she was “misled” by Kavanaugh, but she has refused to repudiate her vote. 

What had once been one of the senator’s selling points — her position on choice — is now a liability. But it doesn’t stop there. According to analysis by Planned Parenthood, Collins has subsequently supported 95% of Trump’s judicial nominees — to be fair, that percentage is roughly on par with her votes in previous administrations — including for anti-choice judges. She has also voted against the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights laws, legislation she had previously co-sponsored. For some voters who backed her before, this is a deal breaker. 

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Collins’ other selling point to Mainers of all political stripes has been her dedication to bringing home pork for the state as the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. While that power has been somewhat curtailed by both parties in recent years after revelations of such schemes as former GOP Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ infamous “bridge to nowhere,” Collins has managed to keep the tradition going, albeit with a more subtle application.

Throughout the campaign, Jackson has portrayed Collins as a tool of the corrupt GOP swamp, tying her to Trump and the party’s overwhelming corruption. While it’s hard to know how much traction Jackson has been getting on that issue, last week he was handed a gift in the form of a Pro Publica story alleging that Collins engaged in suspicious pay-to-play arrangements via a high-powered Washington lobbyist who is close to her and her husband. (Reporting by the New York Times supported the claim.)

In a nutshell, the former CEO of a defense contractor told the FBI that he created a shell company to hide a $150,000 donation to a super PAC supporting Collins in exchange for her help in obtaining millions in contracts, which he received. There is evidence that she not only knew about it, but worked with others to make it happen. After a preliminary FBI investigation in 2023 didn’t lead to any charges, new evidence was apparently leading the bureau to a larger investigation when the Trump Justice Department quashed it as part of their purge of the agents and lawyers who were working political corruption cases.

Collins maintains she was cleared of any wrongdoing, but there is a big cloud over her head at the exact moment voters are increasingly concerned about government corruption writ large. It doesn’t help that she has enabled Trump and his administration all along the way. She might vote with him less than other Republican senators, but that’s not saying much, since many of them are barely sentient rubber stamps. And Collins certainly hasn’t been a crusader against his unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse, which is only going to get worse now that the president is entering his lame duck period. Among her confirmation votes was one in favor of budget director Russell Vought, the main author of Project 2025, who continues to make the case that Trump has the power and right to cancel congressional appropriations he doesn’t like. 

Collins’ big pitch to the people of Maine is her perennial favorite — that she has seniority and power, and that she will use it for their benefit. But she has shown little appetite for using any of it to stop the worst consequences for Maine and the country-at-large. In the end, it may come down to whether Mainers care more about Collins’ record of bringing home the bacon or about saving the country from a malignant administration.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to reflect Graham Platner’s job as an oyster farmer.

The post Susan Collins’ time is up as Maine’s Houdini appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned. 

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute. 

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service. 

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. 

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said. 

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives,

including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

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The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” 

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless. 

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” 

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The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. 

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed. 

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery. 

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. 

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order. 

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone. 

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks? 

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

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The big story coming out of the 2024 election was how Donald Trump orchestrated a realignment of American politics, bringing demographic groups that had long eschewed the Republican Party into the tent. Latinos, Black voters and young people, mostly males, had voted for him and the GOP in larger numbers than anyone could remember, and it was seen in some quarters as a sign that the party was embarking on a thousand-year reign. Conventional wisdom held that Trump was something of a magical figure who had defied the odds, defeated the majority of the legal and political efforts to hold him accountable, and triumphantly returned to power. 

Many attributed the president’s success to a new political power on the block — the so-called manosphere, consisting of male podcasters with millions of followers who had enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Many pundits said that Kamala Harris lost the race because she didn’t try hard enough to appeal to these influencers, even though many are heavily misogynistic and wouldn’t have been open to her candidacy in any case. Their juvenile humor and oppositional defiance also happened, incidentally, to be perfectly matched to Trump’s sophomoric style. 

However, like transgressive boys everywhere, they have a short attention span; Trump has not turned out to be as fun as they thought he would be. Although anecdotal evidence suggests they have been less fervent followers of the president for several months now, The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts to see if it was true. What they found was revealing: “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” Many are publicly unhappy with the economy and the war, both of which are seen as broken promises and could account for the decline in mentions, but the hosts are mostly spending their time trashing Democrats like James Talarico, the Texas state representative who is running for the Senate and may just win. (Significantly, the king of the manosphere, podcaster Joe Rogan, is actually a fan of Talarico.) 

There are some other big names in the podcasting world, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are now openly antagonistic toward Trump, mostly for opportunistic reasons. The pair are among the early crowd jostling for power within the post-Trump right-wing ecosystem. Kelly has railed against the Trump family’s alleged corruption, while Carlson appears to be positioning himself as a presidential candidate, with his iconoclastic takes on a number of issues and increasing talk of a third-party bid. He recently told NPR that Trump should be removed from office. 

But mainstream conservative media is still largely on board the Trump train, although Fox News’ firing of Maria Bartiromo for coordinating with the White House — hilarious as the network’s outrage is, considering the cozy relationships between the president and Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — and its decision to stand against Trump in support of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO has revealed a schism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has also been pulling no punches throughout the second term. 

But what of the Republican establishment? Since Trump’s exultant victory in 2024, they have behaved as if he were ordained by God to be America’s reigning monarch, omnipotent and infallible. Republican governors have largely abdicated their own roles as one of the Constitution’s checks and balances, agreeing to give up their own sovereignty to serve his agenda, while the GOP majorities in Congress have proven to be nothing more than trained seals happily signing on to the president’s usurpation of their own power. 

But you can’t really blame them. Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite. He actually inherited a recovering economy — dubbed “the envy of the world” in 2024 by The Economist — and newfound global respect. If Trump had done nothing and simply continued the policies that were already in place — and then taken credit for them, as he is wont to do — he would be in a different position today. But he surrounded himself with radicals and sycophants, and he believed his own hype. The results have been a disaster.

As Republicans prepare to face the voters in the November midterms, they are finding out that the “magical” Trump mystique was actually luck and hot air. Reality still exists, and it bites. Hard. 

As we head into the final month before the election, the polls appear very bad for Republicans. The House majority is almost certainly gone, and the Senate is increasingly in play, something that wasn’t seriously contemplated six months ago. The president’s approval ratings are in the low to mid-30s, and his ratings on the most important issues of the economy and the Iran war are even worse. Gasoline and diesel prices have turned the two big promises Trump made — to lower prices and keep the nation out of wars — into epic failures, and voters are livid. 

Suddenly, GOP candidates are running for the hills. Candidates in tight races in battleground and red states — including Mike Rogers, who is running for the Senate in Michigan against Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who faces Josh Turek, a Democrat, in Iowa — are saying the Iran war must end. (As the New York Times pointed out, Hinson was among seven House Republicans who recently supported a resolution calling on the president to stop or seek congressional approval for military action in Iran.) Others are scrubbing or downplaying endorsements by or mentions of the presidents on their campaign websites. According to The Washington Post, Mike Beltran, the Republican nominee running against Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., touted on his website earlier this year how he had “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That language has now vanished, along with photos of Trump and references to “America First.” At least seven other GOP congressional candidates, reported the Post, are doing the same. One Florida Republican. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, has even publicly condemned the president for elements of his radical deportation policy.

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Historically, this is common. Midterms are notoriously hard on the party in power, and presidents usually take the blame. Often, the approved strategy is for candidates to go ahead and distance themselves from the president, and try to win their races by portraying themselves as independent thinkers who will not rubber-stamp the unpopular majority’s agenda. Whether it’s Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2014, close midterm races almost always feature some version of that same sales pitch. The only exception in recent years I can think of is 1998, when the GOP’s threats to impeach President Bill Clinton over the findings of the Starr Report with regard to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky blew back on them, costing them seats and resulting in the resignation of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich in disgrace. 

But this time it is especially jarring considering the fealty Republicans have been required to show their leader — and have willingly given him — until now. That loyalty ended up not helping Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary just a few months ago when Trump endorsed his opponent in retribution after Cornyn waited too long to endorse him in 2024. As the midterm campaign has unfolded, it’s belatedly become clear to many Republicans that standing with Trump may be riskier, even among the party’s base, than standing against him.

But they have a problem. The president won’t shut up. To the chagrin of most of his own party, he is insisting on making the midterms all about him. A narcissist to the core, Trump believes that the only way Republicans win in November is if he is out there bragging and blaming and lying as he always does, because that has been the secret sauce that brings out MAGA voters. He has even released a taxpayer-funded propaganda ad — which is illegal — touting his alleged accomplishments. 

No one should mistake the Republican retreat from Trump as a full-scale rebellion. Instead, it’s a tepid, last-minute attempt on the part of some desperate candidates to show independence, knowing they may lose anyway — and that the president will say it’s because they didn’t support him enough anyway. The Republican Senate had a chance to take a stand on one of the biggest issues in the campaign, and the one that’s causing the most pain for average voters: Iran. On Thursday they voted down a resolution to end the war. The tally was 50-49. When it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, it’s clear they will default to Trump as always. Voters, though, are finally seeing through them.

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Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

For years, Khalwinder Singh Bhengura lived an unassuming life in Arlington, Texas, where the 69-year-old Indian immigrant works a graveyard shift preparing passenger meals for an airline catering company.

Bhengura moved to the U.S. and spent 18 years working toward becoming a legal resident, securing his green card in 2022. It was a cause for celebration in the Bhengura family. Then things took an unexpected turn.

In 2024, according to a federal indictment, Bhengura registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November presidential election, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen.

Bhengura’s case is part of a Trump administration campaign to prioritize prosecuting noncitizen voters.

On Sept. 10, federal authorities arrested Bhengura and charged him with voting as an alien in a federal election and making a false statement about being a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote. That makes him one of 70 people the Trump administration has charged in voting fraud cases this year, according to Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.

The list includes noncitizens from all corners of the globe, residing in all corners of the U.S. It features everyone from a 20-year-old college student from the Philippines accused of voting in Hawaii to a 39-year-old New Jersey restaurant owner from France. And an examination of the defendants and the filings in their cases found no sign of any organized efforts to cheat the American electoral system.

Votebeat reviewed Justice Department press releases and news accounts since June 1st and identified 41 recent cases involving noncitizens accused of voting. At least 23 defendants are legal residents holding green cards. Those charged range in age from 19 to 73 and come from at least 18 different countries, including Russia, Mexico, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria. Eight of the cases involved undocumented immigrants. About half of the cases come from Texas and New Jersey, with others popping up in a dozen other states, from Alaska to Louisiana.

Lawyers for most of the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. The list contains an eclectic assortment of alleged voter fraud cases. For example, one suspect in Massachusetts is accused of falsely impersonating his landlord to vote as part of a long-running feud between the two Chinese nationals.

The Justice Department has also charged American citizens in connection with the crackdown on fraudulent voting. One Pennsylvania man is accused of voting in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in the November 2024 presidential election. A city manager in Oklahoma is accused of signing voter registration forms for 11 residents.

But most of the cases involve immigrants like Bhengura who were on the pathway to U.S. citizenship when they voted in elections over the past decade. Bhengura’s lawyer says he acknowledged voting, but many of the cases involve nonresidents who secured their green cards, voted in elections, and then denied doing so when they were filling out paperwork or doing interviews to get their American citizenship, according to the legal filings.

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Joshua Ferrer, an assistant professor of government at American University, said many legal residents charged with improperly voting don’t realize they weren’t supposed to do so.

“It’s likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials,” Ferrer said.

The fact that there are no indications that these voters were connected as part of any larger scheme “is another sign that the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud aren’t true,” he added.

Bhengura’s case raises a number of unanswered questions. Federal prosecutors said Bhengura registered to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he could have been registered to vote if he had provided the documentation.

Knox, Bhengura’s attorney, defended him as “an honest, hard-working taxpayer and proud U.S. resident. He is terrified to face the government of the same nation that promised liberty and freedom. He prays that justice will prevail.”

Carol Lam, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California under President George W. Bush, questioned the Justice Department’s choice to prosecute these people. In her opinion, the government shouldn’t try to deport green card holders who didn’t know they couldn’t vote until they became American citizens.

“Our justice system was not created to terrorize people,” she said. “I think voting in national elections when you are not a citizen is a bad thing, but how you deal with these things is the question. If there is good evidence that the person didn’t intend to vote, that would be a slap-on-the-wrist kind of situation, and it’s instead being used to leverage people to be deported.”

Lam acknowledged that every administration has the leeway to decide what crimes to prioritize. But she questioned the Trump administration’s decision to devote so much time and energy to cases like Bhengura’s.

“Taking a 69-year-old grandfather with a green card with no apparent intent to violate the law who may have voted based on bad information and using it as a jumping-off point to deport a person would be at the bottom of my pile,” she said. “We had suspects who actually committed acts of violence, so there were so many more cases where life and limb were actually at stake.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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A new political ad airing this week features clips of President Donald Trump pledging to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism in America,” and promising “America will never be a communist country.” It cuts to flashing text reading the “largest tax cuts in history” and “reigniting American manufacturing” while a choir repeatedly sings “love me” in the background. The sample is from JMSN’s song “Love Me,” who said on X that he did not authorize license of the song. The UFC’s Dana White chimes in, saying Trump “is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”

The 30-second spot seems like any other campaign ad, designed to use emotion to sway voters, but it turns out that taxpayers actually paid for the whole thing, which may not be legal. That’s sparked considerable controversy on Capitol Hill, with both Republicans and Democrats criticizing the ads. The cost of the ad is $430,000 and is running across multiple network TV channels across the country, though the Associated Press reports “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”

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Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is not running for reelection, called the ad “inappropriate” and compared it to messaging from former right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on X. “It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns.”

As a result, Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office and Office of Special Counsel, alleging “The TV ad boosting the image and character of Donald Trump as well as reiterating Trump’s campaign rhetoric, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and produced and distributed by Trump’s White House staff, appears to be a clear violation of the laws prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda purpose as well as a violation of the Hatch Act.” Public Citizen also noted that they have filed a dozen Hatch Act complaints with OSC over the past year, all of which have been ignored by the agency.

The White House defended the ad and said it is “educational and unapologetically patriotic,” according to AP.

The White House is currently airing this video as an ad during commercial breaks on Fox News.

It looks and sounds like a political spot and includes a disclaimer stating that it is paid for by the U.S. government.

The soundtrack: as images of Trump flash across the screen,… pic.twitter.com/TloS7I9O55

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 24, 2026

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There may only be one person in the world who thinks that a Democratic majority in Congress could actually roll back all of Trumpism in a matter of months. 

That’s Donald Trump.

“We gotta win this election,” he told the audience at a rally in North Carolina on Sept. 16. “If we don’t, all of those things that we got you . . . they’re all gonna go away. All of the things that we’ve done, the strongest border in the history of our country, it’s all gonna go away. If we lose, you’re going to lose your border, you’re going to lose your tax cuts, you’re going to lose your wealth, and our country is going to go through hell, and we’re going to be a laughingstock all over the world, just as we were two years ago.”

It’s almost like he doesn’t know he has a veto.

Back here in the real world, Democrats will likely flip the House in November, and maybe the Senate too. But if they want to have something to show for it two years from now, they’re going to have to find a way to get around Trump’s veto power. 

That will require the kind of aggression — the kind of fight — the current crop of Democratic party leaders has never shown.

Imagine, instead, a Democratic leadership with a to-do list in one hand — starting with a compelling affordability agenda — and a how-to list in the other hand, something like this:

• No more cowering from veto threats. Democrats should dare Trump to veto popular legislation and make him own the consequences if he does.
• Demand major concessions from Trump in return for passing a new debt limit and a defense spending bill, and shut down the government if necessary.
• Drive a wedge between Republican legislators and their increasingly unpopular and irrational leader.
• No more protecting “centrist” Democrats from tough votes.
• Tell the lobbyists to take a hike.
• Impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for malfeasance.
• Impeach Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought for violating congressional spending directives.
• Order the Capitol Police to arrest and jail administration officials if they refuse to honor congressional subpoenas.

Democrats in leadership and on the campaign trail talk a lot about their lofty legislative goals. But some of those goals are unattainable as long as Trump has the veto — and even more so if Republicans keep the Senate. Democrats need to be thinking and talking about what they can practically achieve — and how. And they need to have a battle plan so they can hit the ground running in January.

I raised questions about how they could do that in a Sept. 2 op-ed for MS NOW. As part of my hunt for answers, I turned to some wise left-leaning Washington veterans for their thoughts.

“This is going to be really tricky business,” Norman Ornstein, the longtime congressional analyst, told me.

“It would require a wholesale change in the DNA of House and Senate Democrats,” said Jim Manley, a political strategist who spent more than 20 years working in the Senate, including six years as spokesman for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Triumphant congressional Democrats “are going to be feeling feisty, they’re going to feel vindicated, and they’re going to feel like fighting like hell,” said Robert Kuttner, who co-founded the Economic Policy Institute and the American Prospect.

“If they aren’t assertive,” Ornstein warned, “they may not hold their majority for very long.” 

Each of these experts, with decades of experience between them, all agreed that whether Democrats control one of both chambers, they need to pass lots of popular bills and make it painful for Trump and Republicans to oppose them. If the legislation becomes law, it’s a huge victory. If it’s blocked, the public will know who to blame. 

“The old playbook says you’ve got to be concerned about the threat of a veto,” Manley said. “Why go through that exercise if it can’t get through the Senate and/or is going to be subject to the president’s veto? You’ve got to husband your resources.” 

But now, he said, “If the president wants to veto it, that’s fine. We’ve got to adopt a strategy that you never know until you try. You never know until you apply pressure. You never know until you force a vote. Trump is incredibly weakened already. He’s going to be even weaker next year. He’s losing juice on Capitol Hill. He’s losing altitude with the American people.”

Democrats are in general agreement about one starting point: an affordability agenda recently outlined by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. It calls for bringing down the cost of healthcare, groceries, gas and housing. Of those four areas, healthcare is approaching a major crisis, which sets the Democrats up for their first major battle: Restoring the devastating Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Republicans in 2025 intentionally postponed until after the 2026 midterms.

“Very few people appreciate the fact — except for the authors of the bill that did it — how much healthcare spending is going to be cut, and how many people are going to be hurt in the next year,” said Manley.

As Ornstein explained, “Medicaid money doesn’t go to the 10 million people who are going to lose their health insurance because they impose these new onerous work and reporting requirements. It goes to the providers.”

Hospitals and nursing homes will lose money and some will close, putting even more pressure on those that remain.

“So first,” Ornstein said, “you’re going to hold hearings pointing out why this is happening, and that it was the Big Beautiful Bill that did it. Two, you are going to pass bills that restore funding. And if Trump vetoes them then you’re going to hold a bunch of hearings on why he is undermining health care in America.”

Legislation to restore Medicaid cuts— and to restore the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that Trump cut last year, throwing three million people off their insurance plans — “those are the kinds of things that are just very, very popular that are going to be hard for Republicans to oppose,” Kuttner said.

“There will be negotiations,” he said. “And the more Republicans [that] Democrats have siding with them, then the more pressure there is on Trump.”

Fissures are sure to keep growing between Trump and Republicans in Congress, Kuttner said. “If the Republicans have a wipeout in both houses — and it’s increasingly looking like that could well happen — and Trump is in his last two years and is a crazier and crazier lame duck, a lot of the loyalty starts dissipating.”

“It’s not like they’ll suddenly recover backbone or principle,” he said. “This is just a simple calculation of self-interest.”

“Will there be ways to try and exploit that and try and get stuff done?” Manley asked. “It’s possible, yes.”

When it comes to demanding that Trump do — or stop doing — something in particular, Democrats don’t have a lot of leverage. But they’ve got some.

“Trump’s got two things that he needs to do next year,” Manley said. “He needs to figure out a way to fund defense spending, and he needs to be a part of an effort to pass a debt limit increase. Beyond that, he doesn’t really need anything legislatively.”

That gives Democrats two big chances to refuse to go along with the president until their demands are met. “They should go to the mat,” Ornstein said, “and that might include government shutdowns, maybe even having extended government shutdowns.” 

While Manley cautioned that any leverage Democrats earn after the midterms “only goes so far,” he pointed out that “doesn’t mean they can’t try to use it.” Democratic leadership is also going to have to start getting tougher with the caucus, he said. 

Manley pointed out that two conservative Democrats cast the decisive votes on Sept. 1 advancing a Republican legislative package. “I just find that highly objectionable. The leadership’s going to have to figure out a strategy to not have people defect on key votes.”

Manley invoked his own history as a Senate staffer as evidence. “The old Jim — the guy who worked for Harry Reid — always looked out for the caucus as a whole, trying to protect the centrists. I get this. But there’s going to have to be some changes.”

Democrats will need to do a better job of resisting lobbyists. “You know, former members — and let’s be honest, there’s going to be former members, former staffers — they’re going to go up to the Hill and they’re going to try and plead with Democrats to cut their clients some slack,” Manley said. “And the leadership and the committee chairs are just simply going to have to say no.”

Oversight will be another important way to put Trump and Republicans on the defensive. Once Democrats have the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas that comes with being in the majority, there will be “so many incredible opportunities for investigation,” Kuttner said.

There will also be one major obstacle: Ever since 2019, shortly after the midterm elections during his first term that gave Democrats a majority in the House, Trump has simply refused to honor congressional subpoenas.

During Trump’s first administration, Democratic House members voted to issue criminal contempt citations to two Cabinet officials — Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — who denied them documents. But it didn’t work: Criminal contempt enforcement is up to the Department of Justice, and with Barr in charge, the department balked.

There is, however, a way Democrats can escalate: They can brush off their “inherent contempt” power, and enforce it themselves.

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“How far are you willing to go?” asked Ornstein. “Are you actually going to use your power, set up a little jail in the Capitol, and have the Capitol Police arrest them?” 

Ornstein’s answer: Yes. “I’d like to see that. If people are going to defy Congress, hold them accountable, knowing that this Justice Department won’t do so.”

If they win a majority in the Senate, of course, Democrats will also have the ability to confirm or reject Trump appointees, including judges. “You would hope that they would basically say: ‘no more radical lunatic judges, no more rattle radical lunatic Cabinet members or sub-Cabinet members,’” Ornstein said.

Trump could counter by putting those appointees — or even worse choices — in acting roles. But, as Ornstein put it, “You’re not going to have an opportunity to put in lifetime appointments — and you certainly will not have the opportunity with the Supreme Court.”

Finally, there’s impeachment. On the one hand, launching impeachment proceedings in the House is unlikely to result in removal, which requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate. But they’re great for focusing the public’s attention. 

Ornstein supports the impeachment of some Trump Cabinet members — starting with Hegseth. Republicans are already so terrified of having to take a stand on Hegseth that after renegade Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie introduced articles of impeachment against him on Sept. 16 and demanded a vote, Speaker Mike Johnson chose to call an early recess instead.

“For the vast majority of Americans who have no clue what horrors have been inflicted upon the country by these monstrous people, you’re going to actually be able to shine a light on them,” Ornstein said. “You can shine a light on what Pete Hagseth has done to get us into this disastrous war, to hollow out the military, to undermine American national security.” 

And, Ornstein said, “I would also, at minimum, make clear that there’s no statute of limitations for this” and that “we can promise you that [he] will be charged in 2029.”

Next on his list would be Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Collins, which would create yet more heartache for Republicans. “Are you going to side with people undermining food safety, people taking away Alzheimer’s research, and causing measles outbreaks and deaths? Or are you going to do the right thing?” Ornstein said.

If the administration keeps ignoring congressional budget appropriations, Manley said, “then Russell Vought goes to the top of the impeachment list.”

Impeachment hearings also force the media to pay attention. “You’re going to embarrass them and you’re going to highlight the fact that the terrible things happening to people are being caused by the Trump administration,” Ornstein said. “Which, mind you, the press should have been telling them very clearly over the last several years, but they haven’t, and with the hook of the Democrats conducting these hearings, they will.”

Ornstein said the future for a Democratic congressional majority is uncertain. “They’ve made these promises. But they don’t have the power to implement them. They’re on the firing line and people may blame them. And Trump and billionaires will put a lot of money into blaming them for everything bad that happens. And then the question becomes: Are they able to use tough leadership over the power of the purse to bring about some changes? And I don’t know the answer to that.”

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