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

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.

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.

‘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.”

Homan States Explicitly That Denaturalization is an Option

On Saturday, Tom Homan, President Trump’s “Border Czar,” made explicit what had only been reported before based on unnamed sources: the administration is looking at denaturalizing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an outspoken critic of the president and one of the first Muslim members of Congress.

“I’m not going to get ahead of the bureau or HSI, but I’ve been told they have a strong case, and we’ll let the evidence lead where it leads,” he said on Fox.

“Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody,” he said at another point, adding, “And certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen.”

Homan, the kindler, gentler face of Trump’s immigration crackdown after Greg Bovino was shown the door amid his too-explicit fascism, is developing a reputation for his blunt comments making clear the administration is doing exactly what it appears to be doing. Long before the raid, he had been saying during media appearances that Omar was under criminal investigation.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also made the “strong case” claim on a Turning Point USA podcast Friday. “This was about enforcing once again our nation’s laws, and it’s a strong case,” he said.

The Trump administration has attempted to ramp up denaturalizations, though it’s a complicated process and its ability to navigate it has seemingly fallen far short of its ambition. It’s filed hundreds of cases, though each of those cases is still pending.

This latest, politicized prosecution, ramped up, in violation of DOJ policy, within weeks of the midterms, has inspired widespread condemnation. “The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” former President Barack Obama said over the weekend, joining that chorus.

Omar’s lawyers said in a letter Friday, reported by multiple outlets, that the search violated her rights and the restrictions a magistrate judge placed on DHS. Her lawyers were not given a copy of the search warrant, they said, and DHS didn’t consult with the House general counsel, which would have given Omar an opportunity to prevent congressional work product from being seized.

“There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said the letter, per the Wall Street Journal.

A Talarico Win Downballot

Much of the national conversation has focused on the possibility that a James Talarico win would help Democrats flip control of the Senate. That level of support for a Democrat could, however, have significant effects down-ballot as well.

• Governor Greg Abbott is facing a strong challenge from state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, with Cook Political Report on October 1 shifting the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”
• In the U.S. House, there is the possibility that Republican’s attempt to gerrymander their way to a majority will backfire. In order to create five districts in which they hoped their candidates would win, they had to make many others less Republican; Democrats now have a real chance in some of those.
• Meanwhile, even the districts Republicans gerrymandered in such a way that they expected them to flip may not: they used a vote for Trump to measure the districts’ Republican lean, but many voters — especially Latino voters — voted for Trump in 2024 but still voted for Democrats down ballot.
• The Texas state legislature could also see a significant shift, as former Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan outlined in a fascinating recent interview with Texas Monthly. “People say eight Republican seats are at risk. I could see ten,” Phelan said. “I hear there’s more than that in the margin of error. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to lose. But these suburbs are nasty. Nasty. Houston, DFW, Bexar County [San Antonio]—you can’t spend enough money to keep up. And if Talarico wins this and gets the margin up to six or seven, it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot. I don’t know how people survive.”
• Early voting begins in the state today.

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

People love a grand conspiracy. The bigger the scheme is, the more people get drawn into it. And the more details and players that are involved, the more believable it seemingly becomes. After all, who would go to the trouble of making up something so complicated? It must be true.

And nobody loves a conspiracy more than President Trump. He and his inner circle especially seem to have fallen in love with what has literally been dubbed “The Grand Conspiracy.” It’s a hopelessly complex, entirely unevidenced theory claiming that a high-ranking group of political figures have been plotting in the shadows for years to stop Donald Trump from making America great again through investigations, indictments and impeachments. It has all the hallmarks of the type of grandiose schemes that Trump supporters especially fall for: countless players, sprawling plots, intricate secrets, and a total lack of evidence that it actually took place.

Despite lacking cogent answers to foundational questions such as “what it is” and “who is doing it,” revenge for the Grand Conspiracy has been a driving force in the administration, prompting an investigation that has trundled along over the last year and a half, involving dozens of officials looking for some reason to indict the president’s enemies.

And there are many, many enemies. They include a greatest hits of Trump’s obsessions and grievances, from former special counsel Jack Smith to minor players like former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and even former President Barack Obama himself. According to Grand Conspiracy believers, they are all powerful Deep State figures who supposedly worked together in a single, years-long scheme to destroy Trump and undo the will of the people. 

Precisely what these conspirators have actually done remains unclear — even, seemingly, to the prosecutors themselves, who, per the Wall Street Journal, complained to the Justice Department that they weren’t getting much guidance from the local U.S. attorney. The probe is now being run out of Washington, where it continues to baffle those assigned to move it forward. 

In the last few weeks, there have been a host of indications that DOJ efforts to prosecute these figures — and tie them all together into one grand scheme — are falling apart. And, as the Grand Conspiracy prosecution flails at DOJ, the claims also aren’t doing much in the court of public opinion, where Republicans are looking for anything they can find to shore up their crumbling midterm prospects.

Jesse Watters can’t seem to stop admiring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. The Fox News host loves to talk about how Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate is “in great shape” and how “Abdul . . . beat the machine” — meaning the party establishment’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — in a hard-fought primary. During an interview in August, Watters clearly enjoyed El-Sayed’s jokes and blunt speech, which included calling his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, a “beta,” and asking the host if he was circumcised when Watters tried to corner him on gender-affirming surgery for minors. The next day, Watters made no bones about El-Sayed’s appeal. “I like him,” he said. “I don’t want to like him. I like him for some stupid reason.”

But the reason was obvious. The doctor-turned-politician has an aggressive bro style that appeals to someone like Watters. Quick-witted with bulldog energy, El-Sayed never backs down from a fight. But despite Watters’ admiration, Fox News has become obsessed with taking El-Sayed down. It’s not because he’s Muslim, though Republicans are ratcheting up the racism in their efforts to derail his campaign. It’s because he is a model for how Democrats can escape their reputations for being weak and feckless. 

El-Sayed has a lot going for him. He spent years running public health services in the Detroit area and speaks eloquently and with authority about people’s struggles to afford healthcare, even writing a book about Medicare for All. Most importantly, he’s an excellent communicator who can boil down complex policy ideas into easily digestible concepts without dumbing them down. A video of him explaining to Trump voters why universal healthcare is cheaper than the insurance system went viral for good reason. One can see that, for these voters, it’s likely the first time someone plainly explained how removing executive salaries and profit incentives from healthcare makes it cheaper. 

Other politicians, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are good at explaining progressive policy. But what really seems to scare Republicans about El-Sayed is his political persona as a brawler — and for good reason. Vice President JD Vance learned this last week when he lobbed a strange insult at El-Sayed during a rally in Michigan for Rogers. The Democrat, Vance said, is “a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude.”

This is a common and deeply racist attack from Vance, who portrays non-white progressives as undeserving recipients of white people’s largesse — a caricature that has no relation to reality. El-Sayed left a position as an assistant professor at Columbia University to work in public health, where he won awards for his success in protecting children’s health from environmental pollution. During this same period, Vance worked as a venture capitalist who was close with tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

El-Sayed resisted the temptation to “well, actually” Vance, and instead hit back by calling the vice president and those around him “carnival barkers” who “are small and want to make us small like them.” His response was smooth. “JD Vance called me a little weasel today,” El-Sayed said. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a Wolverine,'” a reference to the mascot for the University of Michigan, where the Democrat got his undergraduate degree. 

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently wrote, El-Sayed has been courting Fox News viewers by appearing on the channel and running endless ads on it, all without softening his left-leaning message. He clearly hopes his bravado will woo some of the network’s audience, just as it won over Watters. 

For his part, President Donald Trump is worried that El-Sayed is right. He’s been openly complaining at rallies and on Truth Social about how charming the candidate is in his Fox appearances. In early October, Axios reported that the White House contacted the network to complain about El-Sayed’s coverage. Trump was especially miffed at the Democrat’s interview with Martha McCallum, during which the host’s efforts to bait him into saying something that could be spun as “radical” failed. Instead, MacCallum embarrassed herself by defending billionaires hoarding wealth, to which El-Sayed said that he’d rather pay for schools than be so “focused on allowing a billionaire to make another billion.”

Since then, it seems that Fox producers got the White House’s message that they have to do something to dirty up El-Sayed. But they’ve learned the hard way that it won’t work to come at him directly, because he ends up dominating interviews and beguiling those who, like Watters, love his commanding and clever style. MacCallum later tried to redeem herself by interviewing progressive activist Corbin Trent and pretending he was a stand-in for El-Sayed.

At first glance, Trent performed as Fox producers no doubt hoped he might. He took MacCallum’s bait by defending the Muslim Brotherhood, something that the host could not get El-Sayed to do. The problem, though, is that Trent has no discernible relationship to the candidate. While he has worked for other progressives, including Sanders, I found no evidence that he has even met El-Sayed, much less is qualified to speak for him.

This attempt to hobble El-Sayed was revealing; it’s clearly all Fox News has. If the network tries to bring El-Sayed on again to ask him the same questions, they know from experience that he’ll probably just win over even more of their viewers. This isn’t idle speculation. MS NOW recently conducted a focus group with regretful Trump voters in Michigan and found that five out of the six are voting for El-Sayed. Republicans should be worried about the young male demographic in particular. Trump won male voters under 30 by a narrow margin in 2024, but they are jumping ship and now strongly favor Democrats.

El-Sayed is a compelling model for a new kind of Democrat. Polling by Strength In Numbers/Verasight shows that even Democratic voters take a negative view of the party, but not because they think their leaders are too progressive. “[T]he single most common complaint about their own party is that it is too weak, too cautious, or not fighting hard enough,” writes G. Elliott Morris in an analysis of the poll.

The Democratic base wants the party to take a more aggressive stance toward their GOP opponents, which will be key to building a more lasting coalition — especially one that includes younger and more male voters. El-Sayed is doing just that, and it has the right scared.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s fighting style terrifies MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump relished delivering two devastating words — “You’re fired” — in his role on the reality show “The Apprentice,” and years later, he repeated them incessantly on the campaign trail, much to the delight of his audiences. But the president has a dirty little secret: He does not like confrontation. In real life, he prefers to delegate the unpleasant task to an underling. 

This emerged as a pattern during his first term, when personnel churn was a constant. Trump often had his chiefs of staff — there were several — deliver the bad news, and sometimes he would even fire people on social media rather than confront in person. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, famously learned of his dismissal from his staff via a printed tweet after returning from a diplomatic trip to Africa. FBI Director James Comey saw the news of his firing on TV news reports. Once the person was gone, Trump often publicly insulted them, portraying them as “lowlifes,” “nutjobs” and worse, never seeming to realize the glaring contradiction — that a man with his alleged business savvy should have had better judgment than to hire such people in the first place. According to a Brookings analysis, the president had a 92% turnover rate among his “A team” during his first administration, the highest of any president in history.

Trump’s second term has been much more stable. Where before Trump had hired qualified people — aside from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — recommended by experienced Washington hands, this time around he has surrounded himself with nothing but the most loyal sycophants. As a result, there has been much less personnel drama. Still, there have been a few notable departures. 

The first was the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. After a bromance budded between the billionaire and Trump during the transition period, when Musk essentially moved into Mar-a-Lago, the president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency and take a chainsaw to the federal government. Then there was a rupture in the relationship and Musk departed, although they seem to have mended fences. Since then, Trump has only fired a few people: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. (The latter three “resigned” under duress.) On Friday afternoon, after only a few days on the job and widespread criticism of her tenure, Trump dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zacharia.

The White House has insisted it’s entirely coincidental that all the firings have been women. But as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, “In many instances, the female officials who departed appeared to have failed some kind of loyalty test to Mr. Trump.” (You know how women are.) The departures of these women isn’t because none of the administration’s men have been implicated in misconduct or corrupt dealings. To the contrary: Some of Trump’s male officials and staffers are stunningly incompetent and dishonest, but their behavior has either been overlooked or rewarded with promotions and transfers. 

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So when reports surfaced that another high-profile female staffer may be on the chopping block, it would have come as no surprise — if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in question is the single most powerful female in the administration. 

Susie Wiles has earned the distinction of being Trump’s longest tenured chief of staff, and with good reason: She has managed to stay on the president’s good side by enabling him and never telling him what he doesn’t want to hear. She has admitted that herself, saying, “These seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

One would certainly think that would guarantee her job security. But ahead of the monumental loss Republicans are expected to endure during the upcoming midterm elections, Trump is reportedly raging — and looking for a scapegoat. Apparently, it’s going to be Wiles. According to recent reports, the president has been calling around to friends to see what they think of his chief of staff — a common precursor to a Trump firing. According to POLITICO, plenty of people have their knives out for Wiles, with one person close to the White House saying, “She’s burned a lot of people.” 

This, though, is an occupational hazard for any Trump chief of staff. It’s also not unusual for turnover following a midterm election. But the GOP is facing what looks to be a massive loss, attributed to the president’s historically low approval ratings among the American people. Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026 — along with her partners James Blair and Chris LaCivita — she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone. 

The big question now centers on Wiles’ replacement. POLITICO reported there are three likely candidates. One is Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a fierce Trump loyalist known most recently for spending as much time as possible with the president, feeding him memes and ideas on big white poster boards. Another is Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who once told an aide to fill a jar with only the red Starburst candies for him to give to the president because he had noticed that Trump preferred them, earning him the presidential sobriquet “My Kevin.” Then there is Stephen Miller, the notorious senior adviser of everything.

The choice of Pulte or McCarthy would signal a continuation of current practices, albeit with less discipline and adult behavior in the White House, which may be inevitable no matter who wins the job. Pulte is dramatically unqualified, but since Trump once made him acting director of national intelligence, that distinction is obviously not an impediment.

McCarthy is one of the most incompetent and ignorant leaders in GOP history, but this is likely a plus, since Trump likes people who are just like him. If anyone expects that the president is looking for someone who is stronger than Wiles, the fact that McCarthy is being considered should lay those thoughts to rest.

The most frightening prospect is, of course, Miller, who is already serving as the shadow president and would, as chief of staff, essentially have the full power of the presidency at his fingertips. Trump is obsessed with his legacy projects and making as much money as possible, and the only other thing he cares about is vengeance on his enemies, a desire he shares in equal fervor with Miller. If Miller has the full power of chief of staff, we can assume that he will be ordering and approving the most authoritarian policies the United States has ever seen, and Trump may not even know it’s been done. That is clearly Miller’s mission, and given the power to enact such policies, he will not hesitate. 

Being far more ruthless and determined, Miller would no doubt run a tighter ship than Pulte or McCarthy. Trump, though, will still be in charge, and it’s easy to imagine that Miller’s actions would make him even more unpopular than he is now. That could make the legacy-concerned president uncomfortable as he confronts the possibility that he will leave office with a personal reputation far worse than Richard Nixon’s and a record of failure lower than Jimmy Carter’s.

It’s not too early to start blaming Miller for Trump’s unpopularity, and Democrats would be wise to start doing that publicly as soon as possible. If he becomes the chief of staff wielding power with fascist fervor, it may just be too late.

The post A blue wave could take out Susie Wiles appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

Bobby Pulido is in the middle of everything. 

The famed Tejano singer is trying his hand at politics in his home state of Texas, which is a crucial part of Democrats’ pathway to a potential House majority in Washington. And the blue wave that has made those lofty ambitions more and more realistic has been partially fueled by Latino voters’ shift away from President Donald Trump amid mounting anger with ICE and his mass deportation agenda. 

Donald Trump’s new White House “pep secretary,” Katie Zacharia, introduced herself to America in the Brady Briefing Room this week, to anticipated criticism from Democrats and some unexpected criticism from Republicans.  

At first, the press pool acted like that was just business as usual. It didn’t last long. As of Friday afternoon, multiple news reports indicate that Trump has already seen enough, and has asked Zacharia to step down from her role at the White House after just five days on the job.

According to a post on X by reporter Aaron Rupar, Trump told the press corps he had said to Zacharia that “she was treated very, very unfairly by the news. Let’s call it the fake news. I said, ‘Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.’ We’re talking about doing something. I want her to have a good life. She’s being brutalized by the media.” 

In all likelihood, that will end one of the shortest tenures of any Trump White House official, only about half the length of the notorious Anthony Scaramucci during Trump’s first term.

Maybe Zacharia was just unlucky. After all, she made her debut on Oct. 13. She showed up 15 minutes late. She spent the next eight minutes telling us how great Trump was. She took questions from just three people. She was gone 15 minutes later. In her praise of Trump, Zacharia sounded like former press secretary Sean Spicer talking about Trump’s inaugural crowds nearly a decade ago as she made dubious claims about the number of attendees at the president’s recent campaign rallies in high school gymnasiums and small arenas. 

“Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hard-working Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump,” she said with a straight face. Yep. The lies have already begun. Don’t act surprised. 

When she finally took questions, only Breitbart (which lavished her with praise for allowing them in the building), Fox News and the Daily Mail got to ask questions. She dropped one legitimate piece of news: The president had asked for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation as U.S. ambassador to Greece, based on her evident corruption and widely reported misbehavior, which even Trump didn’t try to defend. The punchline to that incident came a short time later as Trump was departing the White House, when he barely acknowledged Guilfoyle’s existence: Kimberly? Kimberly who? 

A handful of defenders noted that the new press secretary had only a day to get ready for her debut. “Katie Zacharia had less than 24 hours to prepare for her inaugural briefing, as she juggled a cross-country move, and only received briefing materials this morning,” the Wall Street Journal reported. OK, so who forced her to go on stage, and why? 

She could have taken all the time she needed. It’s not like we were getting press briefings every day anyway, and Trump always says he’s his own best press secretary. So there was no pressure from the press, although more reporters than usual showed up to be part of Zacharia’s inaugural standup routine.  

I’ve worked with incoming press secretaries at all levels, from City Hall to the White House. The best of them took the time to study policy briefings, meet department heads and the most active beat reporters before holding their first briefing. By doing that, they avoided being criticized for a lack of preparation and having to look for names on an index card. They also got a feel for the issues and questions they needed to address. Getting to know someone is the key to any long-term relationship, whether professional or personal.

That sort of protocol has long since been forgotten and abandoned, at least at the White House. Today we can’t get into the upper press area of the West Wing to talk with the press secretary. She didn’t take the time to get to know us, and as a result we once again got a low-grade sideshow. Don’t expect anything more, and don’t expect the press to push back. The White House Correspondents’ Association is in “go along to get along” mode. It’s cringeworthy to watch and heartbreaking to endure.

There was no reason to expect much of Zacharia’s first staged appearance, and that’s why no one should be surprised to see her draw as much criticism for her attire and demeanor as for the content of the information she provided. She appeared nervous, at one point calling her husband “my president.” She giggled at herself for that: “That’s a good one.”  That was self-deprecating, which I appreciate. As for her attire, it was professional, but not something I would wear. As for being nervous, that’s to be expected. But again, why did she feel the need to brief us on her first day in the office?

She called on Trump-friendly media exclusively, and then excused herself, saying she had to travel to Alaska with the president, who’s hoping to shore up support for incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of many struggling Republicans this fall. 

Mind you, if Zacharia had arrived on time, she could have doubled her time with us. Why start late and then cut it short? If she knew she was going to leave with Trump, there was no reason to soil her laundry doing a shortened briefing. Either show up on time or do it upon your return, after you get settled. Nobody would have said anything about that — and nobody would care if they did. That might have given the president another excuse to belittle the press.

I know some Republican lawmakers and even some reporters who believe that Trump set up Zacharia for failure by ordering her first appearance. That certainly isn’t beyond Trump. He’s the best when it comes to lowering expectations.

Those expectations at the moment are so low as to defy measurement. 

Just this week Trump has announced his pleasure with a DHS investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration papers, a deal to import diesel fuel from Russia, and possible new air strikes on Iran, while Vice President JD Vance made a weird homophobic joke about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to have no idea why gas prices are spiking. Meanwhile, Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not ending a war that began with Russia’s invasion of his country.

Of course, none of these issues were brought up in the new pep secretary’s very short briefing, the strangest of those issues being the bizarre deal made with Russia. In an attempt to lower prices at the pump, which have spiked because of the war Trump started, the president now says he’s ready to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin’s government.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Russia is backing Iran in its war with the U.S., reportedly providing intelligence on U.S. bases to the Iranian military. In essence, Trump agreed to pay an enemy government that is helping those trying to kill Americans in a war that’s entirely his doing. And all this to eradicate a supposed threat that Trump had claimed didn’t exist at all because he “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year earlier.

Come to think of it, a two-hour briefing on just that subject wouldn’t have been enough to explain that insanity. How do you tell the press that we’re paying our enemies to attack us?

Even so, that wasn’t the peak of insanity this week. 

A few days earlier, a judge in Virginia ruled that the Trump administration had misled the public with a long list of false accusations about Mary Comans, the former chief financial officer of FEMA. 

“Armed only with false statements, high-ranking government officials undertook a premeditated campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans, a non-partisan, career public servant,” U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick said. “Their intent was to disseminate false and derogatory information about Ms. Comans as widely as possible.”

Comans was accused of money laundering, willfully violating a presidential executive order, undermining public safety and misspending federal funds. As the judge found, none of that was ultimately true. He added that “high-ranking” government officials accused her of such things while “knowing they were false.”

Dealing with that insanity might also require a two-hour press briefing. 

Finally, there’s the matter of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MSNOW and Politico against the Trump administration. Judge Timothy Kelly ruled Tuesday night that the temporary restraining order preventing Trump from banning those outlets from the White House would remain in force while their lawsuit proceeded. 

Trump had also engaged in “unlawful viewpoint discrimination” by banning those reporters, Kelly said. The president also apparently never gave those news organizations any meaningful list of standards they had to comply with or risk losing their press passes. Trump’s actions, the judge said, “likely did not … come close to satisfying Karem.” 

Yes, that’s me. He was referring to the Karem v. Trump case in 2019, when I beat the administration in court on three occasions and got my press credentials back. And the judge is right, by the way: Trump’s actions don’t satisfy me. But unpacking my own victory over Trump would be a tough task for the best press secretary. So would dealing with any of this week’s issues, let alone dealing with a president who seems to have reached peak insanity, especially for a brand new press secretary who just moved to town with questionable credentials.

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To be completely fair, Trump threw Zacharia to the dogs with no prep time, no knowledge of the issues she would have to handle and no readiness to handle even the straightforward questions about her own legal background. (She graduated from law school but is not a licensed attorney in any state.)

Zacharia read a bunch of lies off a written statement, smiled at us and got out of there. It now seems possible that her first day briefing the White House press will also be her best day, as well as her last day. The aforementioned Anthony Scaramucci publicly mused that she may not last as long as he did at the White House (which was 11 days). I’ve heard some reporters saying they won’t even bother to learn how to spell her name. 

But what we saw in the briefing room this week was far more troubling than one woman falling on her face. It was a panicky president approaching peak insanity throwing a scapegoat on stage in an effort to deflect attention from his ruthless and corrupt conduct. True to form, the press corps took the bait, and seemed more interested in what Zacharia was wearing and whether she’d exaggerated her qualifications than in the important issues facing this country as a result of the president’s insanity.

I have plenty of empathy for anyone working in the Trump White House, but no sympathy for anyone who willingly joins the lunacy, particularly at this late date. 

The midterm elections are at hand. Trump is criminally negligent and mentally unwell. Anyone who goes to work for him now is just asking for trouble.

Just ask Katie Zacharia. If you can find her. 

The post After that disastrous debut, Katie Zacharia is already history appeared first on Salon.com.

Of Course a 2020 Fake Elector Is Involved in This Saga

As key members of the Trump administration refuse to give straight answers about whether they intend to send armed federal agents to polling places in a few weeks — which is against federal law — Wisconsin election officials are grappling with the vacuum that that ambiguity has created.

For more than a year, we’ve been covering the wishy-washy responses from Trump administration officials like Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to serious questions about the matter. President Trump has remained vague on the issue as well. The reason executive branch officials are facing questions about whether this is something they’re considering is twofold. The Trump administration has made it clear it has every intention of pulling out all the stops to interfere in states’ rights to administer their own elections, and Trump’s election denying allies outside the administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are agitating around the idea. Trump himself has also expressed profound regret about not enlisting members of the military to seize voting equipment in 2020.

Hegseth has creatively dodged on the matter repeatedly in public, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee back in April that he has “never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t” when questioned about deploying service members to voting sites. Patel and Mullin have been a bit less slimy about it by essentially admitting its something they’ve thought about doing. Patel recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he plans to have agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices during the election in case there are any election security-related issues that need to be investigated. And Mullin has walked a similar line that leaves the door open for armed officers at polling places in particular (if far-fetched) circumstances.

“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said last month.

Election officials are now being forced to step in and address the potential for disruption should the administration concoct some sort of emergency justification for sending armed federal officers to key precincts. Federal law prevents the government from sending any armed troops, agents or officers to polling place unless it is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on Thursday to sign off on guidance that will be sent to local election officials to help them navigate such a situation. Here’s what the guidance says, according to the Associated Press:

The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.

If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.

Only one member of the board, a Republican, reportedly voted against sending out the guidance, in comments that actively diminished the threat and potential for major disenfranchisement in key parts of the country.

“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said, per the AP.

It may not surprise you to learn that Spindell was one of Trump’s fake electors in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.

For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

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And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts. 

Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.

The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.

Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.

Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.

But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration. 

Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms. 

But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.

The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion. 

The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.

People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”

The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him. 

The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers. 

Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.

The post Democrats have discovered the key to midterm victory appeared first on Salon.com.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.