A crazy, crazy story unfolding tonight in the online virtual terrain of political social media and poll-watching. It’s late. But I will to give you the bare outline. Seemingly out of the blue earlier this evening an outfit called “Wedgewood Polling” put out a press release stating that all but one of their polls had been fake and that the fakery was all part of a “social experiment” to test how easy it would be to produce fake polls that got aggregated on the big aggregation sites and made their way into news stories. If you’re thinking, wait, didn’t I hear something like this last summer? Yes, you did. There was a smaller scale version of this, with the same “social experiment” rationale back in August. ‘Wedgewood’, though, released a lot of polls, in a number of high profile races, not just two or three of them. And there’s at least an argument that they meaningfully impacted some Democratic primary races. They certainly helped shape some campaign narratives. They had appeared to be the only independent poll of the Mississippi Senate race and the only one at all since August.

But then it got weirder.

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I corresponded with a TPM Reader from the tech world recently who marveled at the political salience of data centers when data centers have been around since the late 90s. Many data centers today are orders of magnitude larger than their pre-AI relatives, gobbling up much more energy, making more noise and physical pollution. But he noted that the bulk of them aren’t nearly that large. These points each have some truth to them, though I think it understates the real-world impact of hyperscaler data centers. And, as I’ve noted, a lot of our collective social angst about data centers and AI is really focused on oligarchy — the way that it appears to be the tech oligarchs’ world and we’re just living in it. The ability for town and county councils to say no to data centers is irresistible precisely because it’s the one case where democratic self-government is in a position to say “NO!” and that’s so contrary to all our other experience these days. But there’s an entirely different vantage point on this question I want to focus on.

The impact of particular data centers in particular places is one issue. But the macro-story is even bigger and more jarring. Axios has a piece this morning about how the housing sector is getting hammered by the hyperscaler AI boom, both buildings and buyers. And as you may have heard the lack of affordable housing is a rather pressing issue in American society today. This applies to everything from inflation/scarcity of the physical building blocks that are used for building housing to the scarcity of capital to fund it. If that sounds overstated look at this chart from a study we discussed late last month and which got written up in various publications.

In my earlier posts on the Habba-Grenell mutual self-immolation spectacle, I’d told you that while Ric Grenell is as nasty as they come, I was skeptical that he was quite dumb or reckless enough to be involved in what Alina Habba and her new husband were alleging.

But I may heve been wrong!

There’s a new report out in Axios that adds a bunch more detail to the story. But before getting to that report, there’s some important context and caveats. I wouldn’t see this new Axios report as quite a “report” in the sense of new reporting that advances the story. It’s better to see this as three players (the White House, Grenell and Habba/Mildon) each of whom are trading a very hot potato back and forth between the three of them and hoping not to be the one left holding it when the music stops. But instead of a literal potato, that lashing out is taking place through new batches of leaks. We need to be clear that each batch of new leaks is from an interested party, with its own goals and agenda. And it may include some false details or more likely ones that are misleading. But on balance each batch of leaks is probably mostly true, helps fill out the emerging picture and sinks both adversary parties (Grenell and Habba/Mildon) deeper into the quicksand.

Today’s world would be a fascinating object of study if one weren’t also living in it. The price of energy isn’t the cause of Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But for months it’s been driving it to new depths. The price of oil plateaued in early October, which seemed to blunt some of Democrats’ electoral momentum. On Friday though it jumped up again, with the Brent Crude price hitting $110 a barrel, the highest since May. That was the worst of all possible worlds for Trump and that clearly played a key role in his decision to waive sanctions against Russia. Reuters reports that the prospect of greater supply from Russia knocked oil off those highs in early Monday trading in Asia. That was clearly the main goal of that waiver. But just in the last hour, reports have come out that Ukraine launched a massive volley of 1,000 drones targeting Russian energy infrastructure.

Last week, as part of the emerging “‘Layla’ Coda” moment around President Trump, I flagged this story about a nasty feud between Alina Habba and her erstwhile pal and Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba went to the White House with the explosive charge that her now-husband, a Turkish nepo-oligarch named Turhan Mildon, had given $6 million to Grenell for the Kennedy Center, then Trump’s top vanity/legacy project. But Grenell, she claimed, had siphoned the money off, presumably for himself. At the time Grenell was running the Kennedy Center. Mildon first came into the Trump orbit because he had major ties to the Maduro regime and major holdings in Venezuela. So he needed to get juice in Trump world so he didn’t lose his toys when MAGA started dividing up the spoils after the U.S. invasion. But now it seems Habba, now Alina Mildon after her marriage last month, may have bitten off way more than she and Turhan can chew.

After making the initial accusation, the Turhans have been talking much less than Grenell. Her story had also shifted around a bit, according to the initial Times report. The $6 million, or possibly $5.6 million, was to be carved out of a $17.6 million check for some other unspecified business deal. But when Habba, or rather her husband’s, lawyers presented the White House with the evidence for this transaction, the source of cash was redacted.

I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”

From the Miami Herald (gift link) …

A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.

The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.

Fascinating nugget of data from an Economist deep dive cross-referencing polling data with the location of datacenters: “Voters across the country are shifting towards Democrats, but for those living within 2km of a data centre the veer has been even sharper. Americans who live near a data-centre site are around six percentage points more likely to support the Democrats than those who live further away (see chart 2). Six months ago there was no such difference.” Link (requires sub).

One collection of data people obsess over in the weeks before a big election is the early vote – a relatively new feature of American elections. You can’t know who people voted for but you can know who is voting by different metrics and you can draw inferences from that. Take all this early vote data with a huge, huge grain of salt. On the one hand it’s just way to easy to interpret the numbers through the prism of one’s hopes. But there’s a bigger and more immediate reason for skepticism today. To understand what early numbers mean you need to have some theory of who is going to vote early and who late. And basically, I think, we don’t. Or not a good one.

Following up on the MAGA-under-pressure, intra-MAGA knife fights breaking out, whack everybody front. From this morning’s Politico Playbook …

PLAYBOOK IN PRINT: Natalie Harp printed a copy of yesterday’s Playbook about Susie Wiles’ future for President Donald Trump, according to two people with knowledge. It caused a “freakout,” as three people described it to Playbook. The president “blew up” over more bad headlines about his chief of staff, and Wiles and allies “burn[ed] up phones around town” trying to quell the situation.

Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.

Today on TPM’s Untitled Friday Live Show (Name TBD), one of TPM’s true passions: Grifting in the USA.

TPM editor Nicole LaFond, investigative reporter Hunter Walker and Head of Product Derick Dirmaier and I wanted to discuss if we are living in a golden age of grifting. But, we were interrupted by some breaking news: Katie Zacharia’s very, very special time as press secretary has come to an end.

We’re asking readers to help us with something important as well. If you’ve been reading The Brief, you know each day John Light selects a Man of the Hour. If you can’t guess who won this week, well, I doubt you really read the site.

Check it out!!

Earlier this week, we saw former Don Jr. fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle summarily canned because she became a scandal lightning rod, in a particularly pitiful way, right when Donald Trump doesn’t need any scandal headlines — not just going into the midterms in a couple weeks but also into 2027 when it seems highly likely that at least the House will be in Democratic hands. Then yesterday, we had this new MAGA war break into the open which pits Alina Habba and her new Turkish oligarch boy-toy husband against Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba claims that Grenell either pocketed or misdirected a $6 million check her now-husband wrote as a contribution to the Kennedy Center. I suspect that Habba may be out over her skis on this one. Grenell is the worst. But he’s not stupid. I’m skeptical he’d try something quite that reckless.

In any case, today we have yet another new story just kind of breaking out into the open out of nowhere.

“Democrats have been way too timid and modest in their expectations in the past. There’s a real chance for something big happening with this election, and I’m kind of old. So why not see if you can if there’s anything you can do to help?”

That’s a quote from Steve Pajcic, who was a politician himself decades ago and appears to have made a bundle of money over the years and has become a fairly prodigious philanthropist. There’s a Times write-up of him today — that’s where the quote comes from — and it’s about his and his children’s decision to drop about $7 million late dollars in the longshot quartet of southeastern Senate contests in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and the no-longer-so-long-shot race in Kansas.

Back in August I did a write-up on a deep dive on polling error put together by Republican consultant/pollster Pat Ruffini. When it comes to Ruffini’s work, I have a funny mix of assumptions and impulses. Ruffini’s a data guy and not a bullshitter. His numbers and analyses are real and solid. He’s also a Republican partisan. So he’s not above looking for the most favorable possibilities in the numbers. And I think it’s fair to say the series he’s done on this is generally aimed at Republicans and trying to send the message, “It might be okay” or “It’s not as bad as it looks.” At the same time, I am eager for it to be as bad for Republicans or worse than it looks.

Take that for what you will. Just a little truth in advertising and transparency for all involved. Ruffini just did a follow-up on this deep dive where, amazingly, there’s a new reason to think it might not be as bad for Republicans as it looks! Again, though, Ruffini’s a smart guy with a lot of data up his sleeves and he might be right.

“According to sources who spoke to WBTV on the condition of anonymity, the text thread between some Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers includes a competition over who can pull over the most black drivers. There are also numerous uses of the ‘n-word’ related to use of force and discharging firearms at black residents.”

— WBTV3

I was waiting to hear how White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia would explain how and why she claimed she’d taken the bar exam in China despite that not being completely possible. She’s still mainly refusing to answer this question. But the Journal reports that Zacharia sat for the bar exam in California in 2011 but didn’t pass. (In fairness, many people don’t pass on their first try. California is known as a challenging bar exam.) The Times meanwhile got a moment of phone time with her on a tarmac in Arizona and asked her about taking the bar exam in China.

It was all a misunderstanding, apparently.

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Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently defenestrated and soon-to-be-former Ambassador to Greece, has that stench about her of third-string corruption, the type that is hated by the righteous and sneered at by the corrupt. In Trumpworld setting up your own bribery-faucet meme coin and making billions is a baller move. Begging a MAGA-adjacent huckster to settle your Amex bill on the strength of once being Don Jr’s fiancée is sad. “Steal a little and they throw ya in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king …” But we seem quite suddenly to be seeing MAGA world become quite leaky. That’s not what we’re used to — what we’re used to is mammoth kinds of Trump and MAGA corruption more or less in plain sight. But now various MAGA capos are accusing each other, or dropping dimes on each other, as the reality of a possible Blue Wave or more comes into view.

Another only-in-MAGA corruption story hit this afternoon. Or, I guess, alleged corruption story since it’s not altogether clear which player in the story is the crook or more of a crook.

Since I was revising the post below as I got more information, here’s the latest on White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s apparent claim to have taken the bar exam in China.

Judd Legum revealed yesterday that notwithstanding Trump’s and Zacharia’s claim that she was an attorney, it doesn’t appear that she ever took or passed the bar in the U.S. Today reporters pressed her on whether this was true. Had she passed the bar? In what state? Zacharia responded that she took it “when I moved to China.” Reporters took that, understandably, to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam when she lived there between 2011 and 2013. The Washington Post reported, for instance, that Zacharia “said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.” But it’s more than that. Foreign nationals are not allowed to take the Chinese bar exam or practice law in China under any circumstances. Her LinkedIn bio says she worked at a Chinese law firm, Zhong Lun, while living in China. And that is possible. I assume it’s true. Foreigners can work at Chinese law firms but only for the purpose of advising on the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice law. They are specifically barred from advising clients on Chinese law. I don’t know whether not having passed the bar in the U.S. would have been an issue on that front or not. Bottom line: In her first day on the job Zacharia gave everyone the impression that she took the bar exam in China. But that’s not true. Because she would not have been allowed to.

As I noted in the earlier post, new Press Secretary Katie Zacharia claims she passed the bar exam in China and to thus be an “attorney” despite never having passed the bar in the U.S. A Post article said that foreign nationals aren’t allowed to appear in Chinese courts. And I took that to mean that perhaps you could take the bar exam but not appear in court. (Many U.S. attorneys never appear in court. That’s only one part of practicing law.) But it looks more stringent than that. And it looks like Zacharia’s claim is likely false. It’s difficult to confirm a technical point like this about a foreign country. But numerous websites which provide information about practicing law in China say that foreign nationals can’t take the bar exam under any circumstances. Starting in 2021 there appears to have been a pilot program which would allow foreign national to take the patent bar. But even that required foreigners to have permanent residence which is apparently quite difficult to get. Foreign lawyers can work in Chinese law firms, but only to provide guidance about the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice. (She appears to have worked in that capacity.) They’re specifically barred from interpreting Chinese law or acting in the capacity of a Chinese lawyer. So it’s pretty tight.

Again, maybe there’s some technicality that made this possible for her which doesn’t come up in any of the explanations I’ve found. But it seems like a pretty across-the-board ban.

Perhaps Zacharia was being cagey. She was asked at her appearance today where she’d passed the bar, in what state. She responded, “When I moved to China.” Reporters understandably took that to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam. But perhaps she was trying to hoodwink them.

More to come.

Late Update: This just-published article in the South China Morning Post says definitively that at the time Zacharia claims to have passed the bar in China foreign nationals were barred from taking the bar exam.

Eligibility rules for China’s national judicial examination in 2011, when Zacharia reportedly began working in Beijing, required candidates to hold Chinese nationality.

Foreign nationals were therefore ineligible to take the examination, a step towards qualification to practise mainland Chinese law.

Employment at a Chinese law firm does not, by itself, establish that someone holds a licence to practise Chinese law. SCMP has asked Zhong Lun to clarify Zacharia’s role and qualifications. The firm did not immediately respond.