In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.

Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.

Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.

In recent weeks, concerns about mail-in voting disruptions have focused almost entirely on President Donald Trump’s now-shelved plan to sharply restrict who can vote by mail. 

But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.

Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.

The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers. 

In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.

In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed. 

Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.

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Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting. 

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.

At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely. 

“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.’”

A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)

After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.

At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.

Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.

“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”

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Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted this way in 2022 and 2024. Trump himself frequently votes by mail, and in recent weeks has started to encourage his supporters to do so as well, though he has claimed without evidence that the process is rife with fraud.

The Postal Service has mostly ensured the timely delivery of hundreds of millions of ballots, even as mail volume overall has dropped 50% from its high in 2006. 

When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since. 

Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.

The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.

In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.

This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.

Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.

A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.

“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,’” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”

Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.

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Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.

In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.

In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.

In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.

“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”

In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.

Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.

Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.

Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.

Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.

The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.

ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.) 

Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect. 

“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher. 

Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.

A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.

In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.

Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen. 

In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.

“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.

The post Ballot rejections soared in rural counties after USPS reduced mail service appeared first on Salon.com.

“My name is Abdul; it means servant.” So begins the most compelling ad of this year’s election cycle. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks, simply and directly, to the camera. Seated in a brown leather armchair while holding a coffee mug, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee lays claim to his Muslim faith in straightforward, affecting terms. 

“I pray everyday,” he says. “I reflect on my role in this life, on this earth, how we leave it better than we found it, to serve God, to serve our neighbors.”

A cloud of suspicion, much of it tangled up in his ethnicity and religion, has hovered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. The othering has been both blatant and subtle. In August, I spoke with Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., as he made his way from the Capitol subway to his Senate office the day after El-Sayed’s primary win. Tuberville told me the Michigan Democrat was “a cheerleader for 9/11” and “basically” a terrorist. A pair of debates has seen El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, accusing him of being “bought” by and “pledg[ing] his support” to the Muslim Brotherhood, claims that are unfounded. Others, including wavering centrist Democrats such as party strategist James Carville, who recently gave El-Sayed a reluctant endorsement, have pointed to the nominee’s attacks on Israel over the Gaza war as evidence that he is hostile to Jews and Judaism. More broadly, anti-Muslim rhetoric and attacks are becoming a defining feature of the GOP.

El-Sayed’s ad, released last Sunday, is entitled “Prayer” and marks an obvious attempt to refute those accusations and change the conversation — to persuade hesitant voters in the final days of this tight race to pull the lever for him. As El-Sayed speaks, snapshots roll. He stands with a voter, who points across the river, a subtle message of an aspirational future. There is El-Sayed standing and holding hands in prayer with a group of Black churchgoers. A menorah and a humble church flash on the screen. And then there’s the candidate himself, standing alone in prayer, his head bowed. 

El-Sayed connects his belief to a national crisis of faith embodied in Washington: “We don’t have faith in our future; we don’t have faith that we can actually fix things.” Then he returns to his own candidacy. “I’m Abdul El-Sayed,” he says at the end. “A man of faith — and that’s a good thing.”

A good election spot offers an appeal to voters by telling a story, and “Prayer” certainly does that. But there are other ingredients that can boost a political ad to the realm of greatness. In a positive ad, voters are offered an intimate look into the candidate’s reason for running. “Prayer” also does that, and therein lies its true power. It shows a different side to El-Sayed, whose refusal to back down from a fight and ability to cut through the noise, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently wrote, “terrifies MAGA.” The ad offers a reason for his candidacy and life of public service, and ends what has been a tumultuous campaign on a grace note — and with an implicit promise. Everyone is welcome in my coalition, El-Sayed is saying, I’ll protect you. 

Even though “Prayer” is targeted to Michigan voters, it cannot be divorced from what’s happening nationally. It adds El-Sayed to an emerging list of Democrats who, as unabashed members of the religious left, are comfortable talking about their faith openly. Most, such as Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, Kansas U.S. Senate nominee Adam Hamilton, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, are Christian. Others, such as Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, are Jewish. By attaching his name to those ranks, El-Sayed is staking out important space for Muslims in public life.

But there’s more to it than just his religious and ethnic identity. The ad’s message serves as a proxy for the stark choice facing voters across the country, and just south of the Wolverine State’s border. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, funded and produced an ad attacking Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent, and featuring her own mother.

The spot, released only 24 hours after El-Sayed’s, carries a message that is the direct inverse of the Michigan candidate’s. Rooted in cruelty and scripted with a lashing of DARVO, a tactic easily recognizable to victims of abuse — Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim Offender order — the ad is uncomfortable to watch, and vile. 

Viewers see an elderly woman looking into the camera and identifying herself as Donna Arthur. “It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” she says, “but Amy has a serious problem: she is a liar.” Arthur goes on to attack her daughter’s credibility, but without producing any evidence beyond her own testimony, which is severely imperiled by a documented history of her own actions.

Arthur has been estranged from her daughter since 1978, when the 12-year-old Acton accused her stepfather of raping her. According to court records, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the crime, but fled the state before being tried. When his wife supported him, branding young Amy Acton a liar, both the girl and her younger brother were removed from Donna Arthur’s custody and raised by their biological father. In a statement released by her campaign, Acton’s brother stood by his sister’s account and branded Ramaswamy’s campaign “despicable” for turning the abuse Acton says she suffered “into a political talking point.”

In the ad, Arthur does not mince words. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she can’t help herself . . . Don’t vote for people who lie; don’t let her become your governor.”

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Setting aside Arthur’s agency and the willing role she played in the ad, Ramaswamy has chosen to retraumatize his opponent before the eyes of millions of voters. By platforming a woman who is, at the very least, an enabler and accomplice to the alleged sexual assault of a minor, if perhaps only in the aftermath, he is sending a chilling signal to victims of abuse in Ohio and throughout the U.S.: There are consequences to speaking up.

But if Ramaswamy’s behavior wasn’t bad enough, Donald Trump and JD Vance had to get in on the act. Vance, who as an Ohioan has particular skin in the game, positioned himself alongside Ramaswamy as a truth-teller, saying he “wasn’t even supposed to talk about” the ad but “couldn’t help himself.” The vice president went on to praise the candidate for having the “audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”

On Thursday, the president was even more crass, calling the ad an example of “hitting pay dirt.” Ramaswamy, he wrote on Truth Social, “should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals! I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave.”

A handful of other Republicans, including outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine and former Ohio Rep. John Kasich, decried the commercial and said it should be taken down.

There is no other word for the behavior of Ramaswamy and MAGA leaders: It is personally and publicly cruel, and the message it sends acts as a reveals far too much about Republican policies and the political leaders who advance and implement them. In their world, victims are treated with disdain and abusers defended while the American people are subjected to severe economic and psychological mistreatment. 

The cost-of-living crisis is ignored, all because a vainglorious president decides to wage an unnecessary war in Iran. The healthcare of millions is stripped away to line the pockets of the wealthiest. The rights of women, people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ+ Americans are under assault because of leaders and voters who want to hoard their privilege. 

Against this backdrop, El-Sayed’s ad stands as a balm for voters who long not just for a fighter, as he has well demonstrated he is, but also for a leader who is unafraid to lead with compassion and humility. It’s too early to know if his appeal will result in success at the polls. But the ad, in contrast to Ramaswamy’s, nonetheless underscores what’s at stake in the midterms: a choice between faithful service and abject cruelty.

The post A tale of two election ads offering different visions for America appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, and Welcome Back To The Franchise

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

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

The Ramaswamy campaign’s new ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother, in which she repeatedly denounces her daughter as a liar, is making Republicans squirm even in this era of Trump-inflected gutter politics. Acton and her mother have been estranged for decades since her mother’s husband — her stepfather — was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child. 

Brendan Carr Threatens News Broadcasters Over ‘Fake Polls’

Brendan Carr, Trump’s attack dog at the FCC, is warning the polls are “fake,” and that he’s ready to do something about it.

“During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm,” he claimed on X.

“Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations,” he added, adopting Trumpian terminology and capitalization.

There’s something to this; as we’ve noted on TPM, there’s been a weird spate of truly fake polls, many seemingly created by AI. Fake polling outfits have been discovered twice in recent months; when exposed, the people behind them claimed they were simply conducting a “social experiment.” It looks, more realistically, like a bid to rig the betting markets.

But there’s also a long tradition of both sides — and especially Republicans — crying foul when they don’t like what polls are saying. Trump’s movement has taken this to a new level in recent years, denouncing information it doesn’t like as fake and a bid to, as Carr described it this week, “interfere” in the “regular functioning of the electoral process.” Trump’s ridiculous and now-dismissed lawsuit against Ann Selzer — the storied pollster whose very-wrong survey in 2024 showed Harris winning Iowa — is one recent, dramatic example of this.

Carr’s invocation of the term “news distortion” describes a real violation of rules on which the FCC is empowered to take action, but this is not that. “Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should ​answer for it, but broadcasters ​who report publicly available polling ⁠data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the Democratic commissioner on the FCC’s board, said. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do ​not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

Given this, it makes sense to see Carr’s message as primarily aimed at Trump and his allies, a form of cope, as Republicans fret that the grim numbers for their side ahead of the midterms will send the message to voters that it’s not worth turning out. The latest scandal around a fake pollster — “Wedgewood Polls” — arrives at a convenient time for this push, allowing Republicans to dramatically overstate “Wedgewood’s” influence.

“I’ve been sounding the alarm that the polls are WRONG,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote in an X post flagged by Josh Marshall last night. “IGNORE THE POLLS, and GO VOTE,” he wrote. “We have 13 days to SAVE AMERICA!”

Senate Intelligence Democrats Issue Warning About Election

The top Democrats on congressional intelligence committees said yesterday that they fully expect the Trump administration to claim “foreign interference” next month as it seeks to undermine confidence in the election.

• Democrats said they planned to counter this messaging if they have reason to think it is false. “If, at noon on Election Day, the president announced that the Iranians have undertaken operation, I’m on TV saying ‘I’m Gang of Eight and I have received no such briefing, no such information, and I have no reason to believe that this is accurate,'” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking member on the House intelligence committee.
• “Now, does that end the crisis? No, but that’s the first step,” he added.
• The idea of foreign interference has loomed large for election denialists, who claim, for various baseless reasons, that other countries can control our voting machines, and that this is cause for Trump to declare a national emergency or for his administration to take other, drastic actions.
• Jared Holt, a longtime researcher of the far-right, writes that Trump-aligned figures are increasingly talking about elections as a “national security” issue, but that broader calls for a national emergency declaration around the 2026 midterms have not really caught on within the online spaces where Trump’s most hard-core supporters gather.
• A recent poll by ABC News and the Washington Post found that “7 in 10 lack confidence that President Donald Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.”

Tabs

• Republicans have relentlessly spread the myth that James Talarico is himself trans, or has pro-trans positions that they assume will turn off Texas voters. A fascinating investigation by the 19th and Uncloseted Media finds that these claims and conspiracy theories were very much not in the discourse ahead of Talarico’s run. In the day and a half after he won the primary, these messages exploded across social media, pushed by prominent Republican and reactionary accounts. It’s the most cut-and-dried look I’ve seen at the coordinated efforts by online influencers to shape the conversation — often in ridiculous or false ways — during this year’s midterm.
• Crypto-aligned donors have spent a whopping $55 million opposing Sherrod Brown’s run for Senate in Ohio, Politico reports.

Man of the Hour

This one is a weird one. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Marty O’Donnell, running as a Republican for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, runs an online forum where neo-Nazi rhetoric abounds. One user mused that the Nazis “did some good things” and another asked, “Was Hitler really an evil guy?” Another odd detail of this story: The forum is devoted to the “Halo” video game franchise, for which O’Donnell, the candidate, wrote the music. When he decided to run for Congress, he suggested to the die-hard gamers on the site that they become “The Marty Army,” which, apparently, they did. O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent, Susie Lee, is favored to win.

Are We at War?

“The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.

Fox News’ closing argument for the final midterm elections of Donald Trump’s political reign is increasingly frantic. The network promised its viewers prosperity. With early voting underway in most states, its best pitch now is footage of burning streets in France.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Fox repeatedly sold Trump’s return to office as the cure for high prices. As economic indicators began to disappoint toward the end of 2025, the network pivoted to promises that 2026 would bring an economic boom. Once again, that prosperity has failed to materialize. Now, with the year nearing its end and Fox’s leading personalities struggling to explain why voters should reward Republicans for their stewardship of the country, the network has changed its pitch: Forget what Republicans promised to do for you. Be terrified of what Democrats will supposedly do to you.

Jesse Watters said the quiet part out loud on “The Five” on Oct. 15. Polling, he explained, shows the MAGA base is engaged and locked in, while “the non-MAGA faction and independents” are where Republicans are exposed. He cited an interview with Caroline Sunshine, a former Disney star turned MAGA operative, who told him the GOP could not simply sell the great stuff Trump had done because accomplishments “don’t motivate.”

“You got to go out and have fear porn,” Watters concluded. “You have to say, ‘These people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes,’ and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous.”

His fellow host, Greg Gutfeld, apparently delighted, replied, “Good for you, fear porn!”

Notice whom Watters said he was worried about. MAGA is engaged. It is the “non-MAGA faction and independents” who trouble Republicans — precisely the voters least likely to be persuaded by the insular world of “The Five.” Fox’s fear-mongering is a performance for the converted, intended to escape the studio through Trump’s Truth Social feed and whatever the mainstream press can be induced to cover.

The result is a campaign by the network that has the instability of an advertising operation testing different nightmares. The targets change, but the pitch remains the same. One day it is rioting in France. The next it is a Democratic senator’s comments about prosecuting officials who break the law. Now Fox is turning its cameras toward the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, scrutinizing her family’s movements and encouraging speculation about her whereabouts. The instruction never changes: Your dissatisfaction with the people in power must not become a vote against them.

Sean Hannity has called this “the single most important, consequential midterm election in our lifetime,” warning that Democrats would “shred your Constitution” on behalf of a “radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement.” Republicans, Hannity conceded, may be “imperfect” and even “pathetically weak,” but “Democrats are completely insane.” He has also claimed Democrats want to abolish the family and seize control of Americans’ assets, food and healthcare. Laura Ingraham warned Wednesday that Democrats want the public to “submit or be crushed.”

Coincentedally, Fox’s October surprise arrived on cue. What began as student protests over conditions at a high school north of Paris has expanded into a broader protest movement, with large demonstrations across France. Although the overwhelming majority of demonstrators have marched peacefully, scattered violence over the weekend gave Fox the footage it needed. Media Matters tallied at least five hours and 18 minutes of network airtime devoted to the unrest between Saturday and Wednesday morning. Monday alone accounted for two hours and 22 minutes, with the subject raised in every hour of programming from 5 a.m. until midnight.

Ingraham called the footage a “reality check” for anyone who doubts the stakes of the midterms, claiming a Democratic victory would bring the same chaos to the United States. Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox and Friends,” warned viewers that “this type of stuff is coming here.” Hugh Hewitt was even blunter: “It’s coming here.” Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump press secretary now collecting a Fox paycheck, called the scenes “very instructive” as Americans decide who should lead the country.

The argument presented by Fox hosts was as crude as it was consequential: French unrest became evidence of what American Democrats supposedly intend to unleash at home. The network offered little reason to believe that the political circumstances in France were transferable to the United States. It did not need to establish that connection. It needed viewers to feel it.

Then came the feedback loop that has defined the Trump era. The president, who often posts in real time while watching Fox, declared Sunday morning that “France is burning” and demanded that the U.S. close its borders. By Monday evening, footage of the protests had made its way into his stump speech for embattled Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, where video clips had already been screened for rallygoers. Trump described France as a nation being conquered by migrants, jihadists and communists hostile to Christianity and Western civilization. Democrats, he claimed, wanted to bring the same destruction to America.

House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the pile-on, posting that France was “descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS.” POLITICO reported that Republican operatives saw the story as a potential jolt for their campaigns, with party sources saying that linking the perceived anarchy to Democratic policies would be a focus of the GOP’s closing message. Fox News Digital further amplified the narrative by publishing an investigation identifying what it called “a transnational network of communist and socialist organizations” linked to the French movement.

The process is familiar: Fox finds a frightening story, strips it of context and recasts it as a warning about Democrats. Trump amplifies the coverage, giving the story the authority of the presidency. Republican operatives then convert the resulting panic into a campaign message, which Fox can cover as a political development in its own right.

This is a campaign-season ritual. In 2014, the fearmongering centered on Ebola. In 2018, it was migrant caravans. In 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop became an obsession. In 2022, Fox returned to the old-fashioned panic over “America’s crime crisis.” In 2024, it was Kamala Harris being for “they/them.” Each story was presented as an urgent national threat with implications for the election. 

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This year’s French panic, however, appears to have sputtered. While Trump continued invoking the unrest on the campaign trail, by Wednesday morning Fox’s coverage had fallen sharply. The network was already moving on to its next outrage: days-old comments from Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former CIA analyst.

At a University of Chicago event on Oct. 13, Slotkin discussed how Democrats might hold Trump administration officials accountable if they regained power. She said she wanted to pursue significant cases against officials who enabled unlawful conduct and to make prospective employees think carefully about the legal risks of working for the administration.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity,’” Slotkin said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about how Democrats would exercise investigative and prosecutorial powers if they regain control of Congress, and politicians should be careful not to imply that public servants are presumptively guilty because of whom they work for. But Slotkin’s stated target was officials who enable unlawful conduct, not young conservatives as a class. Her remarks concerned the prospect of legal accountability, not a blanket prohibition on conservative participation in government.

Fox seized on the comments as evidence that Democrats intend to intimidate young conservatives out of public service. Slotkin pushed back, arguing that the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity did not extend to people who commit illegal acts at a president’s direction.

So then the network turned its attention to Omar, exposing just how selective its concern about intimidation can be.

Earlier this month, federal agents searched Omar’s home near Washington under a judicially authorized warrant. Citing unnamed sources, Fox reported that the investigation concerned immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child. The allegations remain allegations; the existence of an investigation does not establish wrongdoing by the congresswoman.

Fox did not merely cover the search. Its reporters were at her door on the morning it happened. On Oct. 20, Fox News Digital published an article centered on Omar’s daughters arriving at the residence. The report described her eldest daughter, Isra Hirsi, pulling into the driveway after dark and carrying a bag into the house.

The headline read, “Omar’s daughters show up at scene of DC raid as rumors swirl about embattled rep’s location.” A promotional post on X asked, “Where is Ilhan Omar?” and explained that the congresswoman had not been spotted publicly since the search and that Fox was “tracking new activity at the residence.” It described her daughters’ arrivals and noted that her husband had continued to appear outside the home.

The framing was unmistakable. Fox was not simply reporting on the status of an investigation. It was inviting viewers to treat the movements of Omar’s family as clues in a mystery, while encouraging speculation about the congresswoman’s whereabouts. One of the daughters, when approached by Fox News Digital, responded with a pointed question: “What’s your problem?”

It is a fair question. The public has a legitimate interest in allegations involving an elected official. That interest does not automatically extend to tracking her children’s movements or turning their arrival at a family home into a political spectacle. Fox’s reporting made the family part of the story without establishing why their ordinary activities were relevant to the investigation.

The episode also exposes the hypocrisy of Fox’s Slotkin coverage. The network wants viewers to believe that Democrats’ talk of accountability will intimidate young conservatives into avoiding public service. Yet its own reporters are making the movements of a Democratic official’s children into content, inviting public harassment and targeting.

Fox’s fixation on Omar has long gone beyond policy criticism. Its personalities have repeatedly invoked her Somali background and Muslim identity to cast her as an alien presence in American politics. Kilmeade recently seized on an account of the congresswoman being disappointed by the homelessness she encountered in New York after arriving in the United States to accuse her of being ungrateful. The implication was that Omar’s criticism of the country was itself evidence of a defective character.

That framing makes the doorstep surveillance more disturbing. Omar is not simply a politician whose positions can be challenged. She is a perpetual outsider whose loyalty is always in question and whose private life is treated as fair game. When Fox’s cameras turn toward her family, the distinction between political journalism and political harassment becomes harder to defend.

The network’s rapid succession of panics reflects the problem at the heart of the Republican campaign. Trump promised to make Americans more prosperous. Fox helped sell that promise. But with voters still confronting the cost of living and increasingly skeptical of the administration’s performance, the network has little incentive to dwell on whether Republicans have delivered. It is far easier to insist that the alternative would be worse.

Fear can be a powerful political tool. But it has limits. It works best when voters have little direct evidence with which to test the claims being made to them. Fox’s message is competing with a reality its audience can see for itself: The economy is not delivering the uncomplicated prosperity Trump promised, and dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is creating opportunities for Democrats.

The network can show its viewers burning streets in France. It can portray a senator’s comments about legal accountability as a threat to an entire generation of conservatives. It can turn a congresswoman’s family into the subject of a lurid guessing game. None of that answers the basic question now facing voters: Have Republicans earned another two years in power?

The post Fox News’ midterm fear mongering grows increasingly desperate appeared first on Salon.com.

For the better part of its final decade, Rawhide was my bar. The old leather place on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea was dark in the way that mattered, a judgment-free room where the only thing anyone asked of you was that you be yourself. There was the Eagle down the street, a bigger playground, but Rawhide was rawer, closer to the bone, and it happened to sit practically next to my apartment, which made it the place I dropped into on my way home or to kick off a night. 

Most nights I was a simple man at the end of the bar, taking in the spectacle, listening, watching. On slow nights, when the crowd thinned, the bartender would let me put on a few of my own songs and we would all jam to them, and it felt less like a scandalous den than like Cheers with a twist, everybody knowing your name, nobody needing you to explain yourself. Then it closed, and the space became, of all things, a lingerie shop, which tells you most of what you need to know about what New York City decided those rooms were worth.

I bring it up because I recognized something the instant I saw the photographs of Chris Gallant.

Gallant is the 37-year-old openly gay Democrat running for Congress in New York’s first congressional district, out on eastern Long Island, against the Republican incumbent Nick LaLota. A few weeks ago, the New York Post surfaced a set of images from a 2010 photo shoot: Gallant, younger and gorgeous, in bondage gear, pictures taken with a then-partner for the fetish retailer Mr. S Leather. The photos lived openly on the company’s website for most of a decade, and then disappeared. Perhaps inevitably, someone dug them up, handed them to a tabloid and waited for the man to crumble.

Gallant didn’t. In an interview with the New York Times, the military pilot, union leader and firefighter called it his “Kim Kardashian moment,” said his friends have always known he is kinky and refused, flatly, to perform the shame he was supposed to perform. I have rarely been prouder of a stranger.

But I want to be precise about what is actually scandalous here, because everyone keeps aiming at the wrong target. I spend my working life as a trauma-informed violence-prevention educator, which means I spend it on a single distinction: the difference between what is done with your consent and what is done to you without it. By that measure, the photographs are the most innocent thing in this entire story. They were made by consenting adults, with a partner, for a purpose Gallant chose, and they lived in the open for years. There is no victim in them.

The violation came later, and it belongs entirely to whoever pulled those images out of their context to use them as a political weapon. That is the nonconsensual act in this story. That is the thing we should be clutching our pearls about. Someone took a man’s consensual expression of his own desire and weaponized it to try to drive him out of public life, and the media coverage of it largely treated the man in the leather as the problem. 

 

We have the true obscenity backward. The scandal isn’t the leather. It’s the leak.

Gallant’s refusal to grovel is the correct answer — the only answer. For most of my life, the price of a seat at any table was a quiet agreement to be a less vivid version of yourself, to sand down whatever might frighten the neighbors, to apologize in advance for existing. The men I stood shoulder to shoulder with at Rawhide mostly paid that tax their whole lives. So when a candidate looks at the oldest trick in the book — here is evidence that you are a deviant — and simply declines to be ashamed, he is doing something the boy I was could not have imagined. Be queer. Be masculine. Be unafraid, authentic, bold, believable. That is the whole platform, and it is a good one.

Here is where I step off the easy celebration everyone else is writing, though not in the direction you might expect. Gallant is making his stand in a district Donald Trump carried in 2024 and that the Cook Political Report currently rates as Solid Republican. He may well lose. But losing would not make his candidacy a mistake. Every barrier broken is a notch in a glass ceiling, and the ceiling does not care much whether the person who cracked it got to walk all the way through. An out, unapologetic gay man refusing to be shamed off the ballot in Trump Country is exactly the kind of barrier that, once broken, cannot be unbroken.

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There is an asymmetry worth naming. A straight candidate with an old racy photo shoot — such as former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican who posed nude for a Cosmopolitan photo spread in the 1980s — gets a wink and a news cycle. A gay man with the same gets a referendum on his fitness to serve. But you do not retire a double standard by hiding from it. You retire it by having enough people walk straight into it, unbowed, that it stops working. Gallant just made it work a little less well.

What I actually worry about is not whether Gallant wins. It is whether the next one runs. Look at how the field is being remade right now, by democratic-socialist insurgents, by former military officers and ex-intelligence officials trading their clearances for yard signs — whole new kinds of candidates deciding the work is too important to sit out. So where are the out, unapologetic queer candidates? 

My fear is that a young gay man with a few consensual images somewhere on the internet, and there are a great many of us, watches what is being done to Gallant and quietly decides it is not worth it. My hope is the opposite: that he watches a man refuse to be ashamed and thinks, if he can take that and keep his head up, so can I.

Because that is the thing this moment cannot be allowed to become: a warning. Instead, it has to be an invitation. A seat at the table is too important to cede to whoever is willing to leak a photograph.

Gallant did nothing wrong. He took some beautiful photographs with a partner a long time ago, and he has declined to be sorry about it. The shame in this story was never his, and it was never ours. It belongs, every ounce of it, to the people who went looking for a way to make a good man disappear.

My hope, for the next queer person weighing whether to step into the arena carrying a past and a future both, is that they look at Chris Gallant standing in his own light and decide to run anyway. We need them there.

The post The Democrat congressional candidate who won’t be kink-shamed appeared first on Salon.com.

Don’s ‘Dividends’

Republican incumbents and candidates facing data center outrage back home have been trying to get President Trump to land where he just landed on data centers for months, as the party works to develop some sort of concrete campaign position for candidates on an issue that has sparked ubiquitous backlash across the nation.

Republican leadership and Trump’s allies, for their part, attempted to carve out a compromise lane for candidates to operate within on the campaign trail, as Trump made his position on the matter clear: he’s in bed with Big Tech and, thus, entertaining no nuance. Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance tried to obscure Trump’s obstinance on data centers by suggesting in August and September that the tech companies expanding and building them need to cover their electric costs, either by “putting power back into the grid,” as Vance suggested, or by finding ways to make the data centers “self-sufficient.”

“They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station in September.

Another Senate Republican, Jon Husted, is locked in a heated campaign in Ohio that is also foundering under the weight of the data-center backlash. I’ve written before about the data center skeletons in Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-OH) closet, left over from his time as lieutenant governor. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has skillfully spun this baggage into a pretty compelling attack operation. Husted then mounted an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to try to get Senate Dems to help him pass legislation that would help him on the campaign trail, which I wrote about here.

But the crux of the matter is this: Husted was pushing to pass a bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would direct state utility regulators to consider implementing new standards that ask Big Tech companies to cover the cost of electric bills and the grid updates needed to run their data centers.

Officials in the Trump administration in August were even working to convince tech and utility companies to sign a pledge to prevent AI model-driven electricity cost hikes.

This is all to say, Republicans have been trying to stand in this lame space between support for Big Tech and its wild enthusiasm for data centers and AI, and Americans’ bipartisan outrage about the risks to their communities and their finances that come along with the facilities. And Trump has not let them, determining a few months back that anyone who is against data centers — and the strain they place on local resources — is “backwards and poor.”

Now, just shy of two weeks from Election Day, he’s come around to other Republicans’ position. In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump “mandated” (whatever that means) that tech companies “make their own electricity” and pay communities that host the facilities “dividends” (he also put this term in quotes, so unclear if he or anyone knows what that means):

As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion. New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease. Other elements likewise! If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a “dividend.” I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck. MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A. President DJT

Republicans have done this to themselves by advocating against AI regulation (state level anti-regulation measures were ultimately stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill before passage, however) and getting in bed with the tech oligarchs gunning to buy off politicians for years. And Democrats struggled with how to message on the matter until the American public invited them to seize on their indignation.

There are a few key races that will reveal whether Trump’s last ditch data center pivot was effective this cycle.

Speaking Of Big Tech Backlash

I have little faith in polls, and I hate prediction markets, but I can't help peeking at PressAudit's 2026 midterm tracker.

The founder, Paul Renshaw, created this midterms page that shows prediction market odds from Polymarket and Kalshi on who is likely to control Congress. — Read the rest

The post I hate prediction markets, but I keep peeking at this midterm tracker appeared first on Boing Boing.

Laura Loomer and Todd Blanche Are Fighting

Josh Marshall has been chronicling the many ways that Trump world is descending into petty feuding ahead of the midterms — and how, in the midst of that, Trump is starting to cut loose those hangers-on who look too much like dead weight. Josh has dubbed stories in this vein “‘Layla’-coda updates” which, TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo eventually explained to me, is a reference to the scene in Goodfellas when Robert De Niro’s character has his crew members killed off, one by one, to avoid sharing the cash from a successful heist. The coda of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” plays in the background as the bodies are discovered.

Anyway.

This dynamic of escalating intra-MAGA feuds and score settling has now come to involve Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has usually managed to hover above it all, studiously going about the work of prosecuting Trump’s enemies. Dragging Blanche into the muck is Laura Loomer.

The dispute between the two improbably involves the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, a 2022 law that allows members of the military, their family members, and others who were exposed to contaminated water on the North Carolina military base to seek compensation from the federal government. Wells on the base are believed to have been contaminated with toxic chemicals, a problem that went on for more than three decades; residents developed a wide range of conditions including cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Loomer has, for some reason, turned up advocating for these military families, and on X accused associate attorney general Stanley Woodward of “sending these veterans insulting lowball offers designed to insult and belittle their suffering.” She described Woodward as “a lifelong Democrat at the DOJ” and suggested he was plotting to hand North Carolina to the Democrats in the midterms. “He has got to be one of the WORST hires of the second Trump administration,” she said. “But, I tried to warn people.” The message seemed intended to capture Trump’s attention.

Blanche shot back last night. “Laura, you should be transparent with your followers, and you are dead wrong about Stanley,” he wrote on X. “He is a patriot who is fighting for POTUS and the American people every day.”

Blanche went on to take personal responsibility for the Camp Lejeune cases, saying that the DOJ has been “consulting with and keeping the White House counsel’s office and DOW updated along the way.”

“Find a different obsession other than going after one of DOJ’s best fighters,” he concluded.

This dispute does appear to be on Trump’s radar. At a rally in North Carolina last night, Trump cast any DOJ offers that victims found unsatisfactory as part of an effort to keep the money from going to “trial lawyers.” “We want it to go to the families, not to the lawyers,” he said, per a local NPR station.

Trump then grotesquely told the crowd they better vote Republican if they wanted to see the veterans get their money.

“If we don’t win, there’s no money,” he said. “If we do win, you’re getting it.”

It’s not yet clear whether it’s time to cue the “Layla” coda in this story, but it does appear to be yet another example of the brutal midterm environment — Democrats are favored to win up and down the ballot in North Carolina — causing accusations to fly among the president’s allies.

The ‘Manosphere’ Falls on Hard Times?

No one ever found the “Joe Rogan of the Left,” and maybe it doesn’t matter.

• As I noted in July, the New York Times recently conducted a fascinating analysis that found traffic to and engagement with various right-wing media personalities — such as Benny Johnson and Steven Crowder — to be falling.
• Puck this week reports on research from the Democratic-backed Speaking With American Men project that finds male voters holding increasingly negative opinions about a range of male, Republican-aligned influencers, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson to the recently arrested Tate brothers.
• Axios flags research from Cygnal’s 2026 Young American Men survey also finding Trump and Vice President JD Vance to be unpopular with this demographic.
• It is, of course, unclear that the podcasts were ever truly the problem — or even a significant part of the problem. I still have not heard a convincing explanation that fully captures how to think about voters post-COVID, anti-incumbent angst, and the role various media play in either inspiring it or piggybacking on it. That angst can be seen prompting instability worldwide, not just in the U.S. — sometimes empowering reactionary parties, but sometimes working against them.
• Regardless, manosphere-aligned influencers are still sowing toxicity into our politics. Christopher Mathias writes for TPM on the campaign by these figures to cast Democratic candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s story of being raped earlier this year as a hoax intended to attract votes.

Tabs

• Don Jr. disagrees with his dad about the Iran war, two unnamed people tell The Atlantic for an article that sure reads like the younger Trump trying to distance himself from one of the administration’s least popular decisions.
• Elena Kagan denounced a series of recent Supreme Court decisions during an appearance at Catholic University, in particular casting Rucho v. Common Cause, which effectively greenlit partisan gerrymandering, as “deleterious” to our democracy, with its impact on display this year. She also criticized decisions like Citizens United that have opened the doors for a deluge of money in politics. “The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”

Woman of the Hour

It’s Alina Habba, already locked in a damaging feud with fellow Trump world operator Ric Grenell, and now the subject of a New York Times investigation that finds a Venezuelan billionaire set her up with a gig through which she’ll make $50 million. In exchange, the billionaire, Julio Herrera Velutini, finally got the pardon from Trump he had long been seeking.

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

This column first appeared in The Amendment, a newsletter by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large. Subscribe today to get early access to her analysis.

Most people had no idea who Angie Nixon was until a few months ago.

Maybe the three-term Florida state legislator came onto their radar in April, after her one-woman protest in a pink jumpsuit and matching bullhorn on the House floor against the special session to gerrymander the state just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act went viral. 

Perhaps it was Nixon’s stunning and decisive primary win in August that made a progressive Black woman the face of the Democratic Party’s political fortunes in Florida. Or maybe it was another viral moment, courtesy of Vice President JD Vance, who suggested at a rally earlier this month that she should “get the hell out of here” and that she doesn’t belong in America if she calls herself a socialist.

But Nixon, who now seems to be everywhere, did not come out of nowhere. Her improbable rise to become Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate is the result of a decade of preparation meeting political opportunity, challenging notions of electability in a state that’s increasingly moved toward Republicans. In the final weeks of the race, Nixon’s virality and scrappy approach are getting attention and may be paying off, as donors have given the campaign a much-needed boost.

“People are pissed. They’re struggling,” Nixon said in an interview. “They want to feel like they can talk to elected officials and they are listened to. But Donald Trump and Ashley Moody, they’re turning their back on folks. I believe the government should work for people, but right now it’s actively working against them. And so I am running because we need to send someone to Washington, D.C., that’s going to stand up to Donald Trump and make him listen and do right by everyday Floridians and Americans in this country.

If elected, Nixon would become Florida’s first Black senator and could be one of a record four Black women senators serving simultaneously. Her candidacy has expanded the political imagination of her state and country about who can win statewide — and who gets to claim Florida’s future.

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There are a lot of variables that create an Angie Nixon moment, said Glynda Carr, president of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee that works to put more Black women in office and has endorsed Nixon. 

“What makes her a compelling candidate is when she tells her personal why, and why that has driven her to be an advocate, an organizer and a legislator — that speaks to people,” Carr said. “She may be being outspent — Democrats are being outspent in most places, and Black women are always outspent. What she has said is people can’t outwork her.”

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Nixon faces an uphill battle headed into November. Republicans have 1.5 million more registered voters in Florida, and President Donald Trump won the state in 2024 by 13 points. While Nixon remains competitive in the final weeks of the general election, most polls show her still trailing her opponent, Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody, by several points. Only one Black woman, former Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, has ever won office statewide in Florida.

The odds are not lost on Nixon, who campaigned last week in Monticello, on the Georgia-Florida border, about 45 minutes outside of Tallahassee. When she took the stage, Nixon was met with a wave of enthusiasm whose energy she matched. She made her case to the Jefferson County audience of mostly older, White voters in a city with a 43 percent Black population and a county that Trump won by 19 points in 2024. 

“We’re working so hard and then they tell us, ‘You’re not working hard enough.’ Meanwhile, they’re working less and less and less and getting richer,” Nixon told the crowd as they nodded in agreement.” 

“We have the opportunity to do something different in these next 250 years,” she continued as the audience clapped and cheered. “We have the opportunity to build a new vision for our country, y’all. One where everyone can be healthy, prosperous and safe, and experience rest and joy.” 

Afterward, as volunteers broke down the room at the Monticello Opera House around her, Nixon stopped to chat and take pictures with the voters — old and young, moms and children, of different backgrounds and races. 

“My coalition needs to be diverse,” Nixon said in an interview. “I can’t just go have conversations with Democrats. I have to have conversations with independents, with Republicans, with members of any other third party. And we have to work hard on talking to them, cutting through the noise, and letting them know we hear them, we care about them, and we’re going to help provide some relief.”

On the stump, she has been focused on affordability, centered on issues that are popular among many voters. Her platform includes paid family and sick leave, a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions, a universal jobs program and Medicare for All — some of the same policy priorities of the Democratic Socialists of America. Nixon is a member of the progressive group but has said she is not completely aligned with all of the group’s policies.

While Nixon is a progressive candidate, she knows it will take a broad coalition of Floridians — including some who may not have been open to voting for a Democrat, a Black woman or both — to win in November. Her message aims to appeal to voters’ interests and not just their ideology, a rejection of the idea that she’s someone who doesn’t belong in this country.

“Her biggest asset is her ability to be in front of voters,” Carr said. “She’s building a grassroots, final drive that is a blueprint. We’re going to see more candidates that look, talk, and believe in the values that Angie Nixon believes in. She’s not an anomaly.” 

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Voters may be getting to know Nixon, but she has spent years getting to know them. 

For two decades, she has been an organizer in Florida, and she was first elected to the state legislature in 2020. On her campaign website, she touts her record as the former executive director of Florida for All, a statewide coalition of progressive groups that has helped register tens of thousands of voters. 

As a sitting state legislator who knows how to run local elections as an organizer and candidate, Nixon has a résumé that has prepared her for Washington, said Carr.

“That is certainly a skill set that should be welcomed in Washington. She’s going to hit the ground running and understand the process. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, here’s this woman who is inspiring, who people are interested in what she has to say, she wears pink, she has a bullhorn.’ She has all of that — and she also has the experience.”

What can look like a surprise candidacy to some is the culmination of years spent building relationships and registering voters. In the decade that Nixon has contemplated her run, the political landscape has also changed.

In 2016, Kamala Harris became only the second Black woman elected to serve in the U.S. Senate. Her election came 20 years after that of the first Black woman senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. A decade after Harris’ election, there are two Black women senators — Democrats Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware  — making history as the first Black people elected as senators from their respective states and the first Black women to serve simultaneously in the Senate. In November, Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton is poised to join them, meaning at least three Black women would be serving in the Senate together. Nixon’s path is more challenging, but she could become the fourth.

“In a decade, that’s a lot of movement in the highest chamber,” Carr said. “And that Black women are starting to chip away at this thought that Black women can’t run statewide. She didn’t have permission. For all intents and purposes, she shouldn’t have even filed. It’s Florida; it’s a Black woman.”

For much of the race, Nixon’s campaign was strapped for cash and didn’t have much support from PACs or wealthy donors. She raised $975,000 during the primary, largely from small donors and social media, against an opponent who raised more than $16 million. But the latest campaign finance reports show that Nixon outraised Moody in the third quarter, with the candidates reporting fundraising totals of $7.6 million and $5.8 million, respectively. Moody holds the overall advantage, with a total haul of more than $14 million, and has so far outspent Nixon by 32 to 1. 

Nixon is among the increasing number of Black women who are running for statewide office up and down the ballot. They are expanding their ambition beyond what has already been proven — the mayor’s office, seats in Congress — and running difficult races in difficult states, courting voters and challenging the institutional status quo. Slowly, they are normalizing whose candidacies should be considered by claiming their right to contest their place and power in our democracy.

“I love my state, and so I’m going to fight for it, because it’s mine,” Nixon said. “It’s everyone’s here in the state. It’s our Florida.”

The post Angie Nixon has been working years for this moment appeared first on Salon.com.

Subtle Trump Distancing May Not Be Enough

Republican Rep. Thomas Kean Jr (R-NJ) may be best known on the national scene as the son of the former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean and the Republican member of Congress who piqued curiosities when he missed months of votes earlier this year, later to reveal he had been hospitalized for depression. He’s also the Republican incumbent in a key battleground House race coming up next month where he faces an increasingly popular Democratic candidate in a race that the Cook Political Report now rates as “lean Democratic.”

Projections about the race started to shift in mid-September. While Kean was able to flip New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District back in 2022 (mind you, after the seat went to a Democrat for the first time in decades in 2018) and he won reelection by five percentage points in 2024, President Trump won the district by just about 1 point the same year. So, it was hardly an exercise in bravery when he decided to aggressively break with Trump on a few key issues during debates with his Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett last month.

But Kean was one of the first Republican candidates this cycle to break with Trump on an issue that TPM has been following closely throughout Trump’s second term, as he innovates on the idea of political retribution against his perceived political foes and those who did not vote for him for president. I wrote about Kean breaking with Trump in detail here, but, in essence, Kean, on the debate stage, stood up for the infrastructure projects that Trump’s White House decided to shut down as part of some Russ Vought-led anti-DEI retribution campaign against blue state and city officials in the New York City/New Jersey area.

“I will challenge anybody who gets in my way, including this president,” Kean said last month, when asked about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding for the Gateway rail tunnel project — a $16 billion infrastructure renovation plan for the tunnels that connect Manhattan to New Jersey.

But the distancing from Trump may not be enough. It appears that Republican congressional leadership has all but written off his reelection campaign as a lost cause. While both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have traveled to District 7 to stump for Kean and Bennett, respectively, the New York Times reported last week that there is a pretty glaring sign that the Republican Party has abandoned Kean’s bid. Per the Times:

Top Republican super PACs aligned with President Trump and congressional Republican leadership are cutting off financial support for two Republican House members seeking re-election, according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans.

The decision represents the first instance this cycle of national Republican groups abandoning incumbents as the party scrambles to prevent more widespread losses in the midterm elections.

Officials with the two super PACs decided to cancel all remaining advertising booked for Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa over the weekend after internal G.O.P. polling had showed their re-election chances dimming.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, the political action committee aligned with Johnson, is reportedly “redirecting $10 million from the seats it is effectively ceding in Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio and spreading it across 16 new districts, two of the people said,” in the Times’ words.

Campaign finance filings from last week show that Bennett out-raised Kean by more than $2 million last quarter, though Kean still holds a cash advantage overall. Despite signs of a potential flip, Kean’s campaign is projecting confidence he’ll hold the seat.

“This is still a very well-funded effort that will be at parity with our opponents,” Harrison Neely, a spokesperson for his campaign said. “And historically, that hasn’t been the case in this district, we’ve always been outspent.”

Democrats Get Ready to Probe DOGE

Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson joked on a livestream that Musk was “fucked” if Democrats won the White House. Musk had trollishly asked on Twitter why, despite two Trump assassination attempts, no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That, he and Carlson mused, was enough for the Democrats to throw him in prison. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” Musk said. “Will I see my children, I don’t know.”

Remember when billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were supposedly enemies? At the start of Trump’s second term, the world’s richest man, was busy ripping through nearly every level of the U.S. government with the Trump-approved Department of Government Efficiency. But by June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported the pair had “torched” their relationship, which amounted to a lot of social media slapfights and accusations about who was in the Epstein files. But the truth is, the two men have a storied on-off relationship that seems to fluctuate based on who’s grabbing the check.

Lately, Musk and Trump are back to acting like close pals. It was hard not to cringe watching the president award Musk the National Medal of Science on Oct. 8, the highest honor the U.S. can bestow on a scientist or engineer. I was probably reading too much into it, but I sensed some awareness on Musk’s part that it was an empty gesture, unless inflating stock prices is a scientific achievement. But maybe the pageantry is meant to distract from how many government grants Musk has been awarded. According to multiple reports, Tesla and SpaceX basically would not exist without the government giving Musk’s companies wads of cash.

At any rate, Musk is now stepping in to try to save Trump’s allies in the midterms, dumping hundreds of millions into races, with Axios reporting he is “single-handedly keeping the Republican Party afloat in some of its most vital races.” So far, he’s spent some $366 million in pro-GOP midterm TV spots and other campaign efforts, with $276 million donated since July alone. No other known donor comes close to dishing out more funding. But for Musk that’s a relatively trivial amount, even though his fluctuating trillionaire status is currently hovering below the threshold for designation. 

Some of Musk’s money went to his own super PAC, but a good chunk also to the Senate Leadership Fund and the Lone Star Liberty PAC, both of which are backing Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton’s endangered campaign for the U.S. Senate against state Rep. James Talarico. Right now polling indicates that statewide election results in the Lone Star State are going to be extremely tight, with new data from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project released Wednesday indicating Democrats are statistically tied in key races. It’s not just Talarico, who leads Paxton 50% to 47%, but Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa holds a one-point lead over Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which is effectively a tie. Trump is reportedly already searching for someone to blame if Democrats pick up their first Senate seat in Texas since 1988.

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Across the country, other races indicate a high likelihood that Democrats will retake the House, while the Senate still looking like a tossup. With these numbers, Musk is likely to dump even more cash into the election before Nov. 3, but it increasingly smells like desperation. As Alex Gibney, director of the new documentary “Musk,” recently told Salon’s Melanie McFarland, Musk is “literally paying for political advantage.”

“He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts,” Gibney said. “But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.”

It remains to be seen if this midterm meddling will pay off for Musk. He got what he wanted out of the 2024 presidential election by propping up Trump’s campaign, but his attempts to financially sway results in other races haven’t worked. In 2025, Musk dumped more than $18 million into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to suborn the state’s redistricting efforts and regulations of car manufacturers and dealers. His influence made it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, but that still didn’t get him the outcome he wanted.

Last Thursday, Musk settled a class action lawsuit alleging that his PAC had engaged in fraud in the 2024 presidential election by falsely telling voters they had a chance to randomly win $1 million when the winners were actually predetermined. He also dodged bribery charges in August for trying the same stunt in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

In the end, the results will all come down to voter appetites, and there are increasing indicators that the majority of Americans are fed up with the ultra-rich meddling in government. A recent Fox News poll indicates that corruption is the top concern among both Democratic and Republican voters, with 60% extremely concerned, a figure that outpaces inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%) and healthcare (48%). Data from a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found roughly two in three Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, with most of the increase over the past year coming from people who lean Republican.

These numbers may indicate that people are starting to see through Musk’s ruse. He could probably pour even more money into politics, and probably will anyway, but there’s a glimmer of hope that it won’t accomplish much.

The post Musk’s midterm meddling reeks of desperation appeared first on Salon.com.

The post Why the GOP’s voter fraud messaging may backfire appeared first on Salon.com.

‘We Are Not Impressed by Their Case’

The Trump administration’s Justice Department has escalated its pre-midterm crusade against California, using the myth of widespread noncitizen voting as its justification for novel and bizarre adventures to try to undercut trust in elections ahead of the midterms.

Just last week, the DOJ sent a letter to election officials in Los Angeles demanding election administrators take a series of actions after claiming it found thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in the state. DOJ officials laid out a list of steps they wanted local election administrators to take to ensure that these people, who it alleged were “likely noncitizen voters,” didn’t receive mail-in ballots or have their votes counted.

Since then, the Justice Department has also sued the state of California and threatened investigations and the potential prosecution of any election worker in the state who might knowingly process ballots from noncitizen voters. The DOJ has previously issued similar warnings to election officials across the nation.

Noncitizens voting in federal election is vanishingly rare and there is no evidence to show that it has impacted the outcome of any federal election. But President Trump and his allies roll out the conspiracy theory that it is widespread anytime he loses, or thinks he’s about to lose, an election, as TPM has reported for years.

On Monday, federal law enforcement arrested 11 people and charged 28 people residing in California, accusing them of making false statements and submitting fraudulent voter registrations. Each of the people charged have legal status in the U.S. but are not U.S. citizens, the DOJ said. The Justice Department is calling the sweep of arrests “Operation Protect the Vote.” The DOJ in an online statement accused California election officials of not properly maintaining the state’s voter rolls and ignoring its wild claims that there are some 20,000 noncitizens registered in the state.

My colleague David Kurtz got into the DOJ’s potentially unfounded accusations in Morning Memo a bit more last week, which you can catch up on here. There are plenty of reason to be suspicious of the DOJ’s claim that it has found tens of thousands of noncitizens on California’s voter rolls. The DOJ has been trying to force states to hand over their voter lists and/or to run their voter rolls through a faulty federal database that has a poor track record with finding eligible voters to be ineligible. Courts across the nation have blocked the DOJ’s campaign to seize voting records from states.

California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters on Monday that there is not a widespread issue with voter fraud in California and described the DOJ’s arrests as “a drop in the bucket” of the state’s 23 million registered voters.

“They provided no — no basis, fact, evidence, substantiation, backing for that allegation, all they provided was a list of people and nothing about why they’re purportedly ineligible,” Bonta said, referencing the DOJ’s claims that it’s identified 20,000 noncitizens on California’s voter rolls.

“If they have such information we would be happy to review it, but they’ve provided none. And what words they’re using are very important,” Bonta continued. “They’re not saying that ‘we have conclusive proof,’ they’re not saying ‘we know,’ they’re not even saying ‘we think we know.’ They’re saying ‘we believe it’s likely.'”

Bonta then brought up the last time that the Justice Department claimed to have found tens of thousands of noncitizen voters in Nevada earlier this year. Those claims fizzled out entirely.

“We are not impressed by their case, we are not impressed by their position. Our north start is the law and the facts and they have neither on their side,” he said. “We believe their case is meritless and we’ll make our position very clear in court.”

The Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to flush out noncitizen voters with next month’s midterm elections approximately two weeks away. On Monday, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. The 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents with legal status in the country but are not citizens permitted to vote.

Noncitizen voting is incredibly uncommon, according to data on the issue, and has not been shown to influence the results of races. Not only does the practice create a paper trail, it carries steep penalties. “Federal law prohibits non-U.S. citizens from registering and voting in Federal elections; violators are removable and face up to five years in prison,” Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged in an October 2024 letter. “The evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended — it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”

That hasn’t stopped members of the Trump administration from upholding the recent DOJ arrests, dubbed Operation Protect the Vote, as evidence of cheating in the midterms. “This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the DOJ, said during a Los Angeles news conference.

The arrests come less than a week after the DOJ sued California and sent officials a list on an USB drive and a handwritten password, demanding to know who on the list was a citizen or not with only a 48-hour window to respond. Dean Logan, the Los Angeles county clerk and recorder, told The Guardian his office refused to review the list, in part because they didn’t consider the USB drive to be secure. “The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Logan said in a statement. 

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“If the regime truly believed California had an illegal voting problem — no such problem exists — they would have taken this action a long time ago, not as Californians are literally casting votes,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, posted on X. “This is all a political stunt to trick people into voting for Prop 39 (which will make it harder for citizens to vote) and to lay groundwork for a coup on January 3 by refusing to seat House Democrats based on bogus “voter fraud” claims.”

Prop 39, also known as the “Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative,” is basically a voter ID law. If passed, it would, among other things, require voters to present a government-issued ID for in-person voting or provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID designated during voter registration for mail-in voting.

Claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting are not new to the Trump administration. It was a strategy that Donald Trump explored in his 2024 presidential campaign, but it was largely dropped once he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and it became unnecessary to use. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “You can absolutely bet if Trump loses, he will claim there was widespread noncitizen voting without any evidence whatsoever,” Becker told NPR in September 2024. “And that is going to incite anger and potentially violence.”

The post Alleged voter fraud in California leads to 28 arrests appeared first on Salon.com.

A Crunchwrap Supreme and a bag of supermarket salad generally appeal to rather different notions of a good lunch. One offers the architectural pleasure of a crunchy tostada tucked inside a warm tortilla; the other, the satisfaction of having arranged to eat vegetables without chopping any. This summer, however, both came with a less welcome consideration: iceberg lettuce.

A massive cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg from Taylor Farms de Mexico prompted recalls extending from Taco Bell kitchens to supermarket produce aisles. Shoppers began trying to determine which seemingly unrelated groceries shared a supplier; someone even made a barcode-scanning app for precisely this purpose. (Such was the broader atmosphere of suspicion that an entirely unsupported rumor about the Trump administration’s promised bargain beef being horse meat eventually inspired online guides for distinguishing one animal from the other.)

It was, in short, Bad Lettuce Summer.

And according to a Gallup poll published October 8, Americans emerged from it considerably more cautious about what they eat. Nearly three-quarters now say they have avoided buying certain foods because of recalls or government advisories, up from 53% in 2024. This newfound vigilance crosses party lines: 81% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans report having taken such precautions.

What it did not produce was much agreement about the people responsible for keeping the lettuce safe.

In 2024, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, 74% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans expressed confidence in federal food-safety oversight. Two years and one change of administration later, those figures stand at 30% and 70%, respectively. 

A 24-point Democratic advantage has become a 40-point Republican one, a remarkable 64-point reversal.

Ahead of the midterms, the findings illustrate a curious feature of American political life: People can encounter the same dangers, take similar precautions and nevertheless arrive at radically different conclusions about the institutions responsible for protecting them. And if there were ever a summer when one might have expected a little consensus about the importance of competent food-safety oversight, surely it was this one.

The outbreak, the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, sickened nearly 13,000 people across 21 states, hospitalizing 570 and killing two. The recall included lettuce served at Taco Bell and Marketside iceberg salad sold at Walmart. Taylor Farms maintained that its own branded salad kits were unaffected, a distinction that mattered scientifically, if not necessarily psychologically, to shoppers eyeing the refrigerated wall of greens.

The trouble with becoming an amateur food-safety inspector is that the job is never quite finished. You can establish that the blueberries in your refrigerator haven’t been recalled, but this tells you remarkably little about the blueberries you’ll purchase next Thursday. You can discover who owns the company that packaged your broccoli, though what to do with that information is another matter. Every new discovery yields a little more knowledge, if not necessarily a corresponding increase in certainty.

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There was a policy dimension to this uncertainty, too. In March 2025, the FDA announced plans to delay compliance with its Food Traceability Rule, which requires businesses handling higher-risk foods, including leafy greens, to maintain records that help investigators identify and remove contaminated products more quickly. Originally scheduled for January 2026, the compliance deadline was proposed to be extended to July 2028; Congress subsequently directed the FDA not to enforce the rule before then. The agency said businesses needed additional time to coordinate their systems.

The delay did not cause the summer’s outbreak. Still, there is something peculiar about postponing industry-wide traceability requirements while ordinary shoppers are left scanning their broccoli with smartphones, hoping to learn something useful about where it came from.

During Bad Lettuce Summer, even the official answers required some translation.

In July, the FDA announced that a lettuce sample had tested positive for cyclospora, then corrected the finding as a false positive. Taylor Farms emphasized the correction; federal investigators maintained that their broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still implicated the company’s shredded iceberg. Subsequent environmental testing strengthened that evidence, without conclusively establishing how the contamination occurred.

One could read the competing statements carefully and emerge with some more information, but not much more confidence about dinner.

Then came the political subplot. As the investigation intensified, Taylor Farms representatives met privately with White House officials. The company and its leadership had donated substantial sums to Republican-aligned political groups, including $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently sought answers about whether the company had attempted to influence the investigation. The White House denied compromising public safety, and no evidence established that political access changed the FDA’s findings.

Still, it is an extraordinary distance to travel from wondering whether the lettuce in your taco is safe to wondering who has the ear of the White House.

The Gallup numbers do not establish why Americans’ confidence has diverged so dramatically. Someone may distrust the industrial food system while enthusiastically supporting an administration promising to reform it. Someone else may have specific objections to that administration’s regulatory decisions. But the speed of the partisan reversal suggests that who runs Washington matters enormously to how Americans evaluate its institutions — though there is a certain irony to this in the age of Make America Healthy Again, which has elevated suspicion of the conventional food system into something approaching a civic virtue.

Its influence has extended all the way to the fast-food fryer: Steak ‘n Shake announced that it had “RFK’d” its French fries by replacing vegetable oil with beef tallow, a development Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated over burgers and fries during a televised appearance with Sean Hannity. The nation’s health secretary had become a verb, and the French fry a political statement.

It is, admittedly, easier to stage a photo opportunity around a basket of fries than a database of food-traceability records. Both involve questions about what Americans eat, but investigating foodborne illness requires a rather different kind of governmental attention.

Of course, Americans did not suddenly begin losing confidence in food-safety oversight under Trump. 

Gallup found that overall confidence has fallen from 85% in 2004 to just 47% today. And recalls themselves contain an uncomfortable ambiguity: They reveal that something dangerous entered the food supply, but also that someone detected a problem and warned the public. The same event can look like evidence of a system working or a system failing, depending on which part of the story one chooses to emphasize.

With the midterms approaching, that distinction matters. The lawmakers elected in November will have a say in how federal food-safety agencies are funded, scrutinized and held accountable when the next outbreak arrives. Yet Americans are approaching that election with increasingly different assessments of the institutions charged with protecting them, even as their own precautions suggest a broadly shared sense of vulnerability.

The next outbreak, unfortunately, will not wait for everyone to agree on whom to trust.

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