In the Stretch Run …

With voting coming to a close four weeks from tomorrow, Morning Memo will be shifting its focus to the midterms, with dual track coverage of the horse race and the outsized expectations for Democrats as an opposition party, if they win.

Setting Expectations

Usually at this point in the election cycle, expectations management is focused on not being so confident that it dampens your voters’ sense of urgency to get to the polls, mutes the post-election news coverage of your victory, and takes the edge off the mandate you win.

But this cycle Democrats are saddled with enormously unrealistic expectations about what they can and should do after the election. Even if they win both chambers of Congress, Democrats even in normal times would face structural, institutional, and political limitations that are very real and will make achieving quick, tangible, meaningful reform virtually impossible.

But these are not normal times.

President Trump has done astonishing damage across all of civic life, in the public and private sectors. He will continue to enjoy the strategic and tactical advantage that comes when you don’t care about collateral damage and when wanton destruction is easier than building enduring institutions.

In addition, many of the ingredients that gave rise to the Trump era remain: a degraded information ecosystem, a fierce right-wing propaganda machine, a nihilistic Republican Party not committed to democracy or to a robust civic life, among many others.

That doesn’t mean the election is not important or that an opposition party can serve no function — but it’s obvious that Democrats will come in shouldering the weight of pressure to move fast and decisively in a system that favors neither. The opposition will also face the unhelpful dichotomy that while the American political system has slid over the edge toward neo-fascism, most of the political press still covers campaigns and elections with the same dated tropes and stale constructs — as if things haven’t fundamentally changed.

It can’t be the case that whether we get democracy or fascism, the rule of law or authoritarianism, reform or systemic corruption rides on the result of each election. Yet, here we are.

Midterm Elections Watch: Senate Edition

• NC and KS: The Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with the Senate GOP — has paused funding in the North Carolina Senate race and plans to invest $14 million to save Sen. Roger Marshall (R) in Kansas.
• Texas: Ken Paxton’s estranged wife can’t bring herself to say his name, but in a new ad urges Republicans to vote for the GOP ticket: “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team. It’s about getting the whole team across the finish line.”

#TXPol: "I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out, I have some … I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd."

Texas PAC is up with a new ad featuring Angela Paxton, Ken Paxton's estranged wife. pic.twitter.com/U7yYZ6ZBXp

— AdImpact Politics (@AdImpact_Pol) October 3, 2026

Midterm Elections Watch: House Edition

• Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee political director Brooke Butler predicts Democrats will carry the House with as many as 240 seats. Democrats have held a House majority that large only once in the last three decades: the high-water mark of 257 seats after the 2008 election.
• If Republicans lose the House, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is likely to run for House minority leader, Punchbowl reports: “Jordan won’t admit it publicly, but his inner circle of aides, advisers and friends is plotting for a leadership election, and he’s discussed it with people close to him.”

Midterm Election Shenanigans Watch

• The George Election Board’s request for the Trump DOJ to intervene in the state’s voting systems was a rogue act by the board’s executive director, the board chair told Votebeat. More here.
• Reuters: How Trump’s obsession with ‘rigged’ voting machines spread across US government
• Contrary to earlier reports, election denier Kurt Olsen is still employed at the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper had previously reported that Olsen resigned not just as head of the “grand conspiracy” investigation in south Florida, but from DOJ entirely:

A message Olsen sent Monday announcing his departure was originally misinterpreted by officials in Washington and Miami as a full resignation from the Justice Department, but Olsen later clarified to his bosses that he still intended to remain a department employee, even though he is no longer attached to the case, one of those people said Wednesday. His current assignment remains unclear.

Shock! Trump Behind Pro-Trump Govt Ads

President Trump was directly involved in ordering the use of $20 million in DHS funds to air TV ads in the stretch run of the midterm elections extolling his presidency, the NYT reports:

Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.

Quote of the Day

“My party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’”—Karl Rove

Good Read

TPM’s Christopher Mathias: Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing

Judge Blocks Border Wall In Big Bend

A federal judge in El Paso on Friday temporarily blocked construction of the border wall in the Big Bend region, including the eponymous national park.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Chicago: Marimar Martínez, the woman shot five times by a Border Patrol agent during Operation Midway Blitz, is expected to file a federal lawsuit today “that includes new ballistics analysis and video animation showing the agent was not in harm’s way when he opened fire,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
• Maine: DHS agents not only tracked and intimidated people observing ICE activity during Operation Catch of the Day, but allegedly stored information about them in a Palantir-built database, according to newly unsealed court filings reviewed by Wired.
• New York: A Hasidic Jew who protested against the Israeli flag may now be deported, the New York Times reports.

Thread of the Day

Seth Cotlar on “remigration“

US Rushes Bombers Home From UK

NYT: “The United States rushed over the weekend to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from an air base in southern England after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation, two U.S. officials said on Sunday.”

Dennis Hastert, 1942-2026

The longest-serving Republican speaker of the House — who turned out to be, in the words of his sentencing judge, a “serial child molester” — died of natural causes at his Illinois home over the weekend at age 84.

Dennis Hastert served in Congress for 20 years, eight of them as speaker. But it wasn’t until 2015, eight years after he left office, that his abuse decades earlier of wrestlers while he was a wrestling coach emerged. Hastert pleaded guilty to illegally structuring payments to one of his victims and served 13 months in prison.

It remains one of the mysteries of American politics that the Denny Hastert saga — a tragic coda to the corruption of the Tom Delay era — never broke through into the wider political consciousness.

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Cuts Would Put IG Office Out of Business

In a move that smacks of retaliation, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte is moving to slash next year’s budget for the agency’s inspector general’s office by more than 60% — after it was involved in an earlier investigation of him.

The surprise draconian cuts to the IG’s office would eviscerate its ability to conduct investigations, IG staff told Congress in a letter this week: “We will be forced to reduce staffing by approximately 70-80% in FY 2027, which will result in the discontinuance of essentially all criminal investigations conducted by our Office of Investigations.”

(Senate Democrats sent a letter to Pulte yesterday demanding that he restore funding for the IG’s office and also demanded his resignation.)

The shock budget cuts are just a continuation of a retaliation campaign by Pulte against internal watchdogs that’s been going on for a year.

Pulte, who also serves as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has had an unusually high profile in Trump II for someone in his position, largely because he led the charge to use bogus claims of mortgage fraud to retaliate against Trump foes, like Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Fed Gov. Lisa Cook. With ready access to the president and poster boards often in hand, Pulte offered Trump what he already wanted: a tool of retribution.

Pulte’s mortgage fraud jihad resulted in an internal investigation of Pulte himself over whether he improperly obtained mortgage records of high-profile Democrats officials, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Wall Street Journal reported in November:

Fannie’s ethics and investigations group had received internal complaints alleging senior officials had improperly directed staff to access the mortgage documents of James and others, according to the people. The Fannie investigators were probing to find out who had made the orders, whether Pulte had the authority to seek the documents and whether or not they had followed proper procedure, the people said.

That group elevated the probe about the James documents to the more senior Office of Inspector General for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that Pulte heads, the people said. The acting inspector general then passed the report to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia, some of the people said. 

To summarize, Fannie Mae investigators found enough of concern to bring in higher-ups at the FHFA IG’s office, which took them seriously enough to forward the concerns to federal prosecutors pursuing James.

“The FHFA acting inspector general sent the office the report at least in part because it could be considered material information for James’s defense in the case, one of the people said,” according to the WSJ.

You already know what happened next: James was indicted for mortgage fraud last October in the Eastern District of Virginia by then-acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. The indictment was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge because Halligan was unlawfully appointed as U.S. attorney. Subsequent efforts by Halligan to indict James were rejected by two different grand juries.

The fallout from that episode was swift and severe.

Joe Allen, the FHFA acting inspector general who sent the internal investigation to prosecutors, was asked to step down, the WSJ reported. Around the same time, the administration fired about a dozen officials within Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit.

The pattern of retaliation is clear. But there’s a more recent wrinkle.

Last week, the WSJ — which you can see has been all over the Pulte story for many months — reported that Pulte hadn’t just targeted Democrats’ mortgages. He’d also examined the mortgages of Todd Blanche!

Blanche and Pulte have been nemeses, for reasons that seem pretty obvious even from the outside looking in. Pulte — a nonlawyer — was stoking Trump’s sense of vengeance with spurious promises of prosecutions that Blanche was stuck with having to try to make happen.

As it was described to WSJ: “Some officials believed Pulte had been trying to collect information on Blanche and others to undermine them and pressure them to more quickly pursue the investigations, the people said.” Pulte denies improperly pulling any internal files.

As if that wasn’t enough, DOJ began its own inquiry into whether Pulte and other officials had “inappropriately shared information about the Justice Department’s investigation into Schiff with those who weren’t authorized to be part of it,” the WSJ reported.

I was immediately intrigued by the anonymous sourcing of the WSJ story. Who would have been in a position to learn that Pulte had targeted Blanche? I came up with two likely candidates: the FHFA IG via Fannie Mae’s investigators and DOJ through its own investigation of the leaks against Schiff.

But that doesn’t mean that the FHFA IG dropped the dime on Pulte to the WSJ. Remember: The FHFA IG already gave the results of its Pulte investigation to DOJ a year ago in the James case. So DOJ was in a position to know in either instance.

Either way, it’s quite a coincidence that a week after that revelation Pulte is taking another retaliatory swing at the FHFA IG and basically trying to put it out of business.

Judge Drives a Stake Thru the Heart of Trump’s US Attorney Scheme

In a major decision that thwarts President Trump’s scheme to appoint loyalist federal prosecutors in blue states, a federal judge ruled that the president cannot fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian issued a preliminary injunction restoring the court-appointed Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney in Seattle. In his order, Bastian concluded:

Allowing the President to fire a court-appointed U.S. Attorney would upend the framework created by the Constitution and the statutory framework, which together balances the President’s right to appoint and the Senate’s right to confirm. Allowing the President to fire a court-appointed U.S. Attorney also eliminates the incentive to nominate a candidate that can be conferred by the Senate—in other words, bypassing the requirement that the Executive and Legislative branches work together to nominate and confirm the U.S. Attorney.

The Trump DOJ quickly moved to appeal the preliminary injunction order.

Judge Orders Inquiry Into DOJ in Broadview 6 Case

U.S. District Judge April Perry has commenced an inquiry in the conduct of the Trump DOJ in the Broadview 6 case. She named University of Chicago law professor William Baude, a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, as a friend of the court to take an adversarial position to the Justice Department, since the underlying criminal case has been dismissed and the former defendants cannot play that role.

Good Read

Michael Lewis in WSJ: the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE

Thread of the Day

The Florida Senate race is competitive enough for the vice president to be campaigning there in person, and spewing racist and xenophobic garbage against the Democratic nominee:

I don't wanna COUCH my words here: I know JD Vance, his eyeliner, and absent Ashley Moody are used to running away from people when things get tough because they care more about themselves and their billionaire buddies than the people they represent. But this is my home. /1

— Angie Nixon (@angieforfl.bsky.social) 2026-10-01T18:34:10.247Z

Trump’s Post-Election Plan for Bombing Iran Leaves GOPers Exposed

President Trump’s stated plan to delay the resumption of large-scale bombing of Iran until after the midterms is a not-very-well-concealed effort to protect Republicans up for reelection from the political consequences of the unpopular war.

The size and scale of the bombing campaign planned for late November has forced the Pentagon to begin taking active measures to deploy sufficient manpower and materiel to the Middle East, the WSJ reports:

• The USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier deployed from San Diego on Sunday and will be the third carrier strike group in the Middle East when it arrives in late November.
• The USS Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group also deployed from California this week, with Marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and will be the second such group in the Middle East when it arrives.

Another way of looking at this is that the threat to resume bombing is a negotiation tactic. The newly deployed forces will eventually relieve existing forces, but their arrival in theater means for a time they U.S will have a particularly robust force with which to either carry out renewed bombing or present a credible threat to do so.

Judge Demands OLC Memo on Boat Strikes

In a ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of Manhattan ordered the Trump administration to provide him with the Office of Legal Counsel memo that provides the legal justification for the lawless high seas campaign of strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats.

The order comes in a lawsuit brought by legal groups to enforce their FOIA request for the memo, which the administration is fighting against releasing publicly.

Noting the irony of the administration touting the memo to justify its conduct while refusing to release it, Judge Engelmayer wrote: “The agency defendants cannot claim surprise from this consequence of the Executive Branch’s repeated public statements embracing the OLC Memo—and it only—as setting out the legal parameters for the boat strikes.”

See You Back Here Monday

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