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.
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.
America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously.
This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally.
The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger.
Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control.
Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.
Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.
Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.
As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP.
The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres.
The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans, almost two-thirds of Americans believe President Donald Trump is using the presidency for personal profit. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”
But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.
A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.
Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).
Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability.
That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularlyargues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”
Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.
“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.
This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?
And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”
This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.
“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”
The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it?
In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy.
While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing.
Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda
Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.
The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance.
In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.
The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.
Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress.
It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.
The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.
The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior.
The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.
To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.
Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers.
Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.
Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.
But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.
A golfer plays on the course at East Potomac Golf Links in Washington, DC, on October 19, 2026. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to take over a public park.
What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course.
According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees.
Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.
But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.
A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme.
Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts.
What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
President Donald Trump points after addressing attendees on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center on September 9, 2026 in Dallas. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.
Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards.
The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.
Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader(belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”
The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.
In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.
Poor people pay for your travel points
To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit.
Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.
Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method.
For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense.
This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.
As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.
What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits.
As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.
To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud.
Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries.
To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.
By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card.
In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used.
Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices.
This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.
The Credit Card Competition Act might not work
All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition.
Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.
Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees.
The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make.
After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.
Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points.
It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.
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.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he seemed like the leader, or at least the dominant figure, of a globalized version of the MAGA movement, a worldwide network of far-right parties sometimes described as the “nationalist international.” We can make a long list, starting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the not-quite-neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, along with other previously-fringe parties now creeping toward the mainstream in many different places.
If it strikes you that the term “nationalist international” contains its own contradiction, by the way, you’re miles ahead of JD Vance and Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trumpian pseudo-intellectuals, who still haven’t figured that out.
That vision of a MAGA-centric new world order was always an illusion, although it began with some fragments of plausibility and was enormously amplified by the Trump distortion effect, meaning our president’s uncanny ability to soak up media attention and make himself the main character of every narrative. Now that illusion has melted away like an ice cube in Europe’s catastrophic summer (where I personally experienced a 104℉/40℃ day in Berlin, the highest recorded temperature in that city’s history).
Indeed, the world now faces another apparent contradiction, or at least a historical irony. If Trump still looms over the American landscape like an unkillable ogre in a third-rate AI fairytale, he is all but finished as a political force. He has done more damage to his own country than anyone since Jefferson Davis, his disillusioned supporters are deserting him, he is universally despised around the world and he’s headed for a potentially historic electoral defeat in November.
Europe’s far right, on the other hand, is doing fine without him. It’s about a 50/50 proposition that by the end of this decade the four largest nations in Europe will be governed by right-wing populist parties. All of them at some time sought inspiration and financial support from Trump and his Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, and pretty nearly all of them have now ghosted him entirely, and pretend they never really knew the guy: “Neues Handy, wer bist du?”
Trump’s second term began with a triumphal sense that a hard-right “vibe shift” was transforming not just America but the world (which Americans are always ready to perceive as a picturesque but unreliable subsidiary). Those early months of 2025 were undeniably terrifying and inordinately destructive, but they were also ridiculous. In retrospect, from half a tick into the future, those guys were immeasurably high on their own supply, based on a narrow electoral victory over incompetent and disorganized opposition.
Early in Trump’s second term, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing candidates or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts.
As part of that extended touchdown dance, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing causes and candidates, or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts. That tendency culminated in the now-legendary 2025 National Security Strategy, a document that offers most presidential administrations a chance to deliver boilerplate language about shared values, human rights and democracy.
Not this time. As I wrote last year, the NSS featured a poisonous combination of “Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties” and “unhinged and unconcealed racist panic.” Europe was losing its cultural identity, the document warned, and faced the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” as well as the (entirely imaginary) possibility that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
That was one of many vainglorious MAGA failures to read the room, on an international scale. Right-wing European politicians traffic in similar rhetoric, to be sure. But nobody on that continent, of any dispensation, enjoys receiving arrogant lectures on history and civilization from Americans, and even extremist parties like Reform UK or the AfD prefer to cloak the bigotry in layers of euphemisms and some degree of plausible deniability.
In a long and painful video interview with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes published this past week, for instance, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel professed horror and amazement when asked whether her party contains overtly racist or proto-fascist elements. As Weidel took pains to point out, she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan ancestry, which presumably cleanses her of any bad intentions when she rejects “gender theory” or insists that all the Syrians and Afghans now living in Germany must leave.
That interview is an instructive experience in other ways. Beddoes repeatedly asks Weidel why she can’t just be a normal budget-cutting conservative, of a variety less frightening to readers of The Economist. Oh, but she absolutely is, Weidel insists, lulling her interlocutor for a while with prodigiously dull business-school chatter before returning to her central theme: Germany’s financial woes will be cured, somehow, by expelling the Muslims.
To return to our main theme, Weidel mentions Trump only twice, with evident distaste, in that hour-long conversation. That’s not exactly news at this point. By the time the above-mentioned NSS was published last December, Europe’s far-right populists had already reached the conclusion that Trump was a loser. Or, in the more delicate phrasing of Armida van Rij in the newsletter Strategic Europe, that “Trump’s repeated threats to invade Greenland, his attacks on the pope and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and his trade war on the EU have made the friendship electorally costly.”
That became obvious to the entire world last April, when MAGA darling Viktor Orbán was routed in Hungary’s election after JD Vance’s campaign visit provided the “political kiss of death,” in the words of Daniel Hegedüs of the Institute for European Policy in Berlin. That was the same month, as it happens, when Meloni publicly broke with Trump over the latter’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV.
But Marc Bassets of the Spanish newspaper El País identifies the real turning point a full year earlier, in the Canadian elections of April 2025, when Trump’s threats and mockery drove mainstream liberal Mark Carney to an unexpected victory over a MAGA-friendly opponent who seemed to hold the advantage.
That result, coming just three months into Trump’s term, “became an example closely watched in Europe,” Bassets writes, which was replayed in several subsequent elections. Then came Trump’s threatened annexation of Greenland, his raid on Venezuela and his disastrous war with Iran, all of which were blatant violations of national sovereignty, the core principle of Europe’s new right.
Like Trump’s capricious tariff war and his public feuds with Meloni and the pope, this reflected the president’s profound ignorance about the world and a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes or arbitrarily renamed bodies of water.
All of this reflects a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes.
That quotation comes from Robert Benson of the centrist think tank Center for American Progress, who argues that the Trump administration “has mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment” in empowering political parties like the AfD that may “share mutual enemies” with MAGA — such as multiculturalism, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and climate policy — but “do not share American interests, or even the interests of this administration.”
As Europe’s far-right leaders draw closer to holding power (or already do, as in Meloni’s case), Trump’s support “appears almost as a liability,” as Dominique Moïsi of the Paris think tank Institut Montaigne tells El País. Trump has long been massively unpopular among European voters across the political spectrum, and his approval ratings cratered to new lows after the Iran war drove energy prices into the stratosphere. Across Europe, the U.S. is now viewed less favorably than either Russia or China, a remarkable accomplishment whose long-term effects are impossible to calculate.
In France, Marine Le Pen is focused on winning next year’s presidential election and has conspicuously avoided saying Trump’s name throughout his second term. She leaves that to her deputy and potential future prime minister, Jordan Bardella, who has repeatedly castigated Trump’s “totally erratic” war with Iran: “No one can say what the ideological backbone of this war is, a war whose end seems nowhere in sight.”
Meloni recently became the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II — an extraordinary fact in itself — and over her four years in office has gone from “Trump whisperer” to the evident conclusion that Trump is a “toxic asset,” in Bassets’ phrase. (The “Trump whisperer” label has also been affixed to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with dire political consequences.)
Even the AfD, despite its aforementioned “cultural affinity” with MAGA and a mutual eagerness to throw Ukraine overboard and make nice with Vladimir Putin, has evidently concluded that glowing endorsements from the likes of Musk, Vance and Rubio are a mixed blessing when the U.S. “has become so unpopular in Europe that being close to Trump is not a source of legitimacy,” in Moïsi’s words. Weidel has reportedly described the Iran war as a “catastrophe” in private meetings, while Björn Höcke, the most inflammatory figure on the AfD’s right flank, has mocked mainstream politicians as “German-speaking Americans” and demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from German soil.
All of this points us toward the inescapable conclusion that Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He became a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, but was not the reason for it. As he fades from the scene, the global crisis he came to represent is more urgent than ever.
Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He was a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, not the reason for it.
As Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi recently observed in a New York Times panel discussion, “Mainstream liberal politics, in both its left- and right-wing versions, failed to deliver on its promises, not only in terms of welfare and economic growth but also in the more complex realm of identity and meaning.” What we see around the world today, in the ascendant far right and in a newly radicalized generation of young people from Paris to New York, are “expressions of the same disillusionment with liberalism and its policies.”
It has become almost irresistible to compare this era to the 1930s, when “bourgeois democracy” collapsed in Europe, plunging the world into murderous darkness. If the parallels are clear enough, the world is a very different place in this century and the outcome does not have to be the same. The future remains unwritten, and Donald Trump will not be its author.
Ein mögliches rot-grün-rotes Bündnis in Berlin schlägt bundespolitisch hohe Wellen. Während z.B. Grünen-Chef Felix Banaszak vor radikalen Kräften warnt und die Tür zur CDU taktisch offen halten will, ist Friedrich Merz wiederum hart und unerbittlich im Ton gegenüber Grünen und der SPD, wenn es um die Gespräche mit radikalen linken Kräften geht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, wie nun auch in der SPD der Widerstand wächst und Parteichef Lars Klingbeil sich derweil zurückhält.
Die Junge Union fordert derweil drastische Konsequenzen: Eine künftige Berliner Landesregierung soll z.B. von Geheimdienstinformationen des Bundes abgeschnitten werden. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der CDU-Abgeordnete Johannes Volkmann, warum er Teile der Berliner Linken als Sicherheitsrisiko sieht und eine politische Ächtung der Partei verlangt.
Auf internationaler Bühne sorgt die Kehrtwende der USA für Entsetzen, nachdem Donald Trump die Sanktionen gegen Russlands Schattenflotte auf Eis gelegt hat. Hans von der Burchard analysiert, wie dieser Schritt Europa sicherheitspolitisch erneut herausfordert und welche Folgen der Wegfall amerikanischer Unterstützung für die Ukraine im nahenden Winter haben könnte.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Sunday that the United States temporarily interrupted intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, as a Republican congressman demanded an investigation into separate disruptions affecting Ukrainian battlefield communications.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Zelenskyy said American intelligence used to detect incoming Russian missile strikes had been restored after a brief interruption.
“We are very thankful for this,” Zelenskyy said. “Now it works.”
President Donald Trump previously maintained that intelligence-sharing had never stopped, despite Ukrainian officials reporting that some Russian attacks occurred without warning.
Zelenskyy also criticized the administration’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports and waive new sanctions targeting Moscow, warning that Washington’s actions could undermine Ukraine’s defense.
“If the United States will officially take the side of Russia … we will not prevail and we will not be able to stand,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, appearing on the same program, declined three times to directly answer whether the United States considers Ukraine an ally.
“I’m not the secretary of state. I’m not the president,” Bessent said after repeated questioning by moderator Kristen Welker.
Bessent pointed to continued American intelligence and military assistance, arguing that Washington was seeking a negotiated end to the war.
Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, called for a congressional investigation into disruptions involving SpaceX’s Starshield satellite communications system, which Ukrainian forces rely on for battlefield operations.
“Absolutely not,” Turner said when asked whether Rubio’s explanation was sufficient. “There needs to be a congressional investigation.”
Turner warned that interrupted communications could endanger Ukrainian lives and urged Trump to reconsider waiving sanctions on Russia.
The tensions also provided material for Saturday night’s “SNL UK,” which spoofed Zelenskyy’s meeting with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
James Austin Johnson, reprising his Trump impersonation from the American “Saturday Night Live,” crashed the meeting as the fictional Zelenskyy pleaded for restored Starlink access. Johnson’s Trump offered to help Ukraine with anything, “provided it’s not help with war.”
The nationwide “No Kings” protest movement took its opposition to President Donald Trump from the streets to the ballot box Saturday, holding rallies across the country to encourage early voting ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Organizers billed the latest demonstrations as a nonpartisan effort to increase voter participation and protect election integrity, marking a shift from the massive anti-Trump marches that have defined the movement since his return to the White House.
In Washington, demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial carrying signs reading “VOTE EARLY” and “HANDS OFF MY VOTE!” Similar events took place in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and communities across the country.
At an Atlanta rally, City Councilman Michael Julian Bond urged participants to recognize the power of their ballots.
“You don’t see Superman giving up his power,” Bond told the crowd, according to The Associated Press. “You don’t see Black Panther giving up his power.”
But the movement’s officially nonpartisan message did not prevent some demonstrators from explicitly advocating Democratic victories.
In Alexandria, Virginia, protesters told Fox News Digital they wanted Democrats to win control of Congress, despite national organizers’ instructions against endorsing candidates or political parties.
“We got to take the power away from Trump, from the Republicans,” one participant said.
No Kings spokesperson Eunic Epstein-Ortiz defended the movement as a peaceful, nonpartisan coalition. Individual protesters’ political statements do not, by themselves, establish that organizers violated election laws.
The rallies also came amid escalating disputes over voting access. On Thursday, the Trump administration sued California election officials over mail ballots from people federal authorities identified as potential noncitizens. The Justice Department subsequently warned local election officials about possible criminal investigations involving such ballots.
With Election Day approaching, the movement’s latest demonstrations reflected a new emphasis: turning public opposition to Trump’s administration into participation at the polls.
President Donald Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reelection Sunday, warning Israeli voters against choosing the “wrong Leader” just nine days before the country’s national election.
In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump praised Netanyahu as a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” and a partner in confronting Iran, while suggesting that electing someone else could complicate future U.S. military action against Tehran.
“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.
Trump also threatened to “soon finish the job” against Iran unless its leaders “change their ways, rapidly.”
The endorsement marks a shift for Trump, who had spent months declining to publicly back Netanyahu despite their longstanding alliance. Earlier this month, when asked whether he supported Netanyahu’s reelection, Trump told Time magazine, “I’m not involved in politics anymore.”
Their relationship has been strained by disagreements over the nearly eight-month war with Iran, Israeli military operations in Lebanon and efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza.
Netanyahu welcomed Sunday’s endorsement.
President Trump, my friend Donald – thank you for your extraordinary endorsement. Israel has never had a greater friend in the White House. Together we will never let Iran’s regime get nuclear weapons. Thank you for your clarity, courage and unwavering support.
@realDonaldTrump https://t.co/GqaOVB74Dj
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 18, 2026
“Thank you, President Trump, for the tremendous support and work together,” Netanyahu wrote on X. “Together we will complete the mission!”
His Likud party also circulated a campaign video featuring the two leaders.
Netanyahu faces a competitive election against opposition parties led by figures including former military chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Recent polls suggest Netanyahu’s governing bloc could fall short of the 61 seats needed to command a majority in Israel’s 120-member parliament.
Trump has increasingly departed from the traditional U.S. practice of avoiding explicit endorsements in foreign elections, backing candidates in countries including Hungary, Japan and Argentina.
Israelis vote Oct. 27 in their first national election since Hamas’ October 2023 attack.
When Donald Trump clinched the presidency in 2016, my wife broke into tears on camera as a local journalist interviewed patrons at a bar in Queens that had advertised a presidential watch party, complete, in its wide-eyed audacity, with Clinton cocktails. As an immigrant and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who had to navigate the cruel vagaries of the U.S. immigration system, she grokked then what it would take many people years to understand. Not long after, Trump attempted to dismantle DACA, the executive order that defended immigrant children in lieu of the DREAM Act. While my wife is now a citizen, the raid of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home is a reminder that not even U.S. citizenship guarantees the safety of immigrants in Trump’s United States.
The case against Omar worries me, not only because it’s bald-faced political vengeance, a grim milestone in our collective lurch toward fascism, but also because of what it means for naturalized citizens in the United States — people like my wife, my sister and my mother. Attacks on citizens who did not arrive on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island is an extension of the Trump administration’s remorseless persecution of immigrants in the U.S. Child of immigrants? Side eye. Naturalized citizen. Well, let’s revisit that paperwork, shall we?
On the first day of his second term, Trump attempted to end birthright citizenship, how I became a U.S. citizen, via executive order. Over the summer, the Supreme Court ruled against the president, but a month later, he signed two more executive orders targeting so-called birth tourism and birthright citizenship. As this latest attack on immigrants faces fresh challenges, the Department of Homeland Security is focusing on denaturalization.
In June 2025, DHS issued a memo about “prioritizing denaturalization,” a process that enables the federal government to strip people of their citizenship, which historically was reserved mostly for Nazi war criminals. At the time, I worried the memo signaled the escalation of an effort to broaden the discretion of the federal government to determine, even retrospectively, who deserves to be a U.S. citizen. Given Monday’s sweep of Omar’s Washington, D.C., home by Homeland Security Investigations agents, my fears appear to be well-founded.
The federal case against Omar follows years of accusations and innuendoes — and even a review during Trump’s first term that reportedly found no issues with her citizenship. But the president has still repeatedly called for her denaturalization and deportation, saying on social media earlier this year that she “should be in jail” and “sent back to Somalia.” He has called people from Somalia “scammers” and “lowlifes.” Vice President JD Vance has also suggested that Omar is likely guilty of immigration fraud. But what is the actual case against her?
Unfortunately, the judicial warrant is sealed, and as usual, the Department of Justice hasn’t revealed much information except to say that it is an “ongoing criminal investigation.” The involvement of Immigration Customs and Enforcement in the search, however, gives weight to comments made by public officials about potential immigration fraud. Is there any merit to the accusation? Not really.
The U.S. government granted Omar’s family, refugees from Somalia, asylum in 1995. Five years later, Omar became a U.S. citizen via a law in which minors are eligible for citizenship once their parents naturalize. Some critics have suggested without evidence that Omar was born a year earlier, which would have made her ineligible for citizenship through the aforementioned law. The bigger question is: Why now?
It’s been over 25 years, and the federal government happened to unearth “incriminating” evidence of a vocal Trump critic three weeks before the midterm elections? It’s dubious at best, and a rank abuse of power at worst.
It’s been over 25 years, and the federal government happened to unearth “incriminating” evidence of a vocal Trump critic three weeks before the midterm elections? It’s dubious at best, and a rank abuse of power at worst. Even in the worst-case scenario, Omar was a girl at the time, so any fudging of numbers would have been done by her late father, who filed the paperwork.
But this is nothing new for Trump. Casting doubt on a political adversary’s right to be in the U.S. was how Trump made his presidential bones. His 2011 birtherism tour, in which he suggested President Barack Obama was not born in the United States but rather in Kenya, was his beautillion ball, laying the groundwork for what would become his primary political strategy: Attack with conspiracy theories. Never bother to substantiate. Repeat ad infinitum. The difference now is that he has a loyal Justice Department and DHS at his back.
The birtherism lie was not unlike the current mudslinging campaign against Omar. But between then and now, a couple of major changes have taken place. One, Trump became president, and two, in his second term, he has, through a series of executive orders, communiqués and personnel rejiggering, weaponized DHS, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, Border Patrol, U.S. Marshals and other federal agencies by affording them a dangerous amount of latitude.
A salient example is the expanded 287(g) program, which allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement, thereby entangling local and federal police, effectively eliminating a peacekeeping backstop against federal overreach. Congress established the 287(g) program in 1996 through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, but in Trump’s second term, the program has so far ballooned from 140 memorandums of agreement to 2,660 agreements in 38 states and two U.S. territories.
Combine that with $70 billion in immigration funding, donning masks, failing to produce identification and eschewing judicial warrants in favor of administrative warrants — nothing more than a performative gesture — and Trump has effectively created a paramilitary domestic force that does his bidding, including going after political foes with impunity.
Denaturalizations are up, owing to this administration’s expressed priority, and naturalizations are down 75%, a consequence of intimidation tactics and the practice of federal agents ambushing immigrants at green card and naturalization hearings.
Omar’s case will be a litmus test for this administration’s authority, both in terms of carrying out political vendettas and processing denaturalization. Even if Trump’s DHS fails to denaturalize and expel the congresswoman from the country, the mere attempt sends a chilling message to naturalized citizens across the country, including my own family: You’re not safe in Donald Trump’s America.
In January, my wife and I will return to the U.S. for the first time in 15 months — the longest time we’ve been away from the country. Before becoming a U.S. citizen four years ago, my wife hadn’t left the country since she arrived as a toddler. Suddenly, she was free to come and go as she pleased, so when her postgraduate program in Versailles accepted her application, we went. Now, as our return to the U.S. approaches, a worm of doubt squirms within us. We’re both U.S. citizens, safe on paper, but what if the value of our papers has changed? What if the manner by which we obtained our citizenships — birthright and naturalization — now invites skepticism and scrutiny?
Before we moved to Europe, we went on a weekend trip to Montreal. Ahead of our return, prompted by horror stories I had seen in the news about people being detained for something as innocuous as a meme, I deleted media on my phone that could be construed as critical of the Trump administration, and I turned my phone off while going through customs. It was the only time in my life I’ve done that.
“A decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy wrote Saturday.
Yesterday, the Russians carried out one of their largest attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector – more than 15 critical power generation and transmission facilities were targeted across different regions of Ukraine. Restoration work is ongoing, with all necessary services and all available resources of Ukrainian energy companies involved. I thank everyone working practically nonstop to restore power.
The most difficult situation was in Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Shepetivka, Slavuta, and Netishyn. Energy facilities in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and other regions were also hit. The Russians have scaled up their anti-energy operation and are trying to stretch our reserves and repair capabilities as thin as possible. Between 7 p.m. yesterday and 7 a.m. today alone, more than 320 jet-powered and gasoline-powered “shaheds,” along with loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, were used against our energy sector, our cities, and our communities. And although our warriors are shooting down a significant number of them, the sheer scale and unrelenting pace of Russia’s strikes, specifically against our energy sector, are unfortunately having severe consequences.
It is important that our European partners have already prepared new support packages for Ukraine. I am grateful to them for this. And it is important that everyone in America also sees what is really happening. At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, a decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end. This Act could have helped enormously – and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters.
Russia is trying to cause a blackout in Ukraine – right before winter. Russia is trying to leave millions of our people without electricity and heating. Pressure is needed to stop this. A U.S. sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, financial rewards for Putin – all of this only encourages him to keep attacking. We must not give up ground. We must keep trying to end the war. To end it, not give Putin every reason to continue it indefinitely. I thank everyone who is truly fighting for peace and helping Ukraine!
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 17, 2026
“This Act could have helped enormously — and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters,” he added.
The White House said the waiver was in the national interest. The order suspends the new penalties but leaves existing sanctions against Russia in place.
Moscow, meanwhile, welcomed the decision. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, called it an “important and truly historic moment,” suggesting it could open the door to renewed economic cooperation with Washington.
The move comes as Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine‘s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Zelenskyy said Russian forces targeted more than 15 energy facilities in an overnight assault. Ukraine’s air force reported 332 drones and four cruise missiles launched during the attacks.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., accused Trump of undermining bipartisan efforts to pressure Moscow.
“Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression,” Beyer said.
Trump just waived all of the sanctions on Russia provided for in the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, just as I and others warned he would.
Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.
Trump has proven he will twist this law and abuse the powers it conferred on him, and while he has let the tariff powers lie for the moment, the law as written also empowers Trump to weaponize new trade authorities against our allies and trading partners.
Congress must fix this flawed law to stop Trump from capitulating to Putin and ensure that it truly supports Ukraine.
The Graham Act authorized new economic penalties, including tariffs targeting countries that purchase Russian energy, but also granted the president authority to waive them on national-interest grounds.
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.
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.”
Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026, 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.
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.
Grandpa Pudding Brains has spent a week making up reasons he calls Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed "Mohammed," as if we don't already understand. Apparently, after reading the man's full legal name, Encyclopedia Trump made a huge discovery and announced today: "his middle name is Mohammed." — Read the rest
White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia speaks during a news briefing at the White House on October 13, 2026. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is out of a job after only five days.
What happened? Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews.
The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot.
“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.)
What’s the context? Zacharia’s remarkably short stint behind the podium unfolded as the White House is engaged in an unprecedented attack on press freedom: The administration is still trying to ban three media outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, though as of earlier this week, a judge is still blocking the ban from taking effect.
The diminished nature of the press secretary job was on full display in Zacharia’s sole briefing on Tuesday, when she took questions from just three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail.
Why does this matter? Zacharia’s no good, very bad week is not likely to leave much of a lasting mark in its own right — other than, perhaps, as pub trivia — but as NBC’s Garrett Haake points out, it’s a very tangible manifestation of a White House that seems to have no idea how to spin itself out of crisis with just weeks until the midterm elections.
Most recently, Trump has landed on flat-out lying about the state of the economy — but like Zacharia’s time as press secretary, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go all that well.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
The underlying trend — municipal inaction — may be infuriating, but I loved this story about “tactical urbanism” from my colleague Sara Herschander.
As she writes, vigilante activists have taken to painting their own crosswalks, building benches, and even installing makeshift bike lanes in their neighborhoods — and every time they do, “they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live.”
You can read Sara’s full piece here, no gift link needed. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!
Katie Zacharia will no longer have to struggle with the public-speaking part of the White House Press Secretary job, as she was fired. The White House calls this: "transitioning into a new role."
On Tuesday, the White House celebrated its new Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia, for delivering a "commanding inaugural press briefing." — Read the rest
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.
Zacharia didn’t take the time to get to know us, and as a result we once again got a low-grade sideshow at the White House. Don’t expect anything more, and don’t expect the press to push back.
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.
In essence, Trump has agreed to pay an enemy government that is helping those trying to kill Americans in a war that’s entirely his doing. All to eradicate a supposed threat that he claimed he had “obliterated” a year earlier.
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.
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.
Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.
The president’s remarks followed past comments in which he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they “aren’t people that work.” Last week, Trump demanded on Truth Social that Minnesotans “fight back,” saying, “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” Just in case his violent implications weren’t clear enough, Trump promised “the Federal Government will come to your rescue” should anyone follow his instructions.
It’s worth remembering Trump’s history of condoning violence. In January 2025, on his first day back in office, the president pardoned people convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. A year later, his administration took pains to shield officers responsible for the shooting deaths of pro-immigrant protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country.
Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search.
No matter how many insults or threats Trump flings Omar’s way, he cannot hide that the congresswoman is exactly the opposite of the racist stereotypes he traffics in. She is smart, beautiful and hard-working. Unlike Trump, who grew up a spoiled rich kid in Queens, Omar has overcome steep odds to be where she is. At only eight, she fled war-torn Somalia with her family after gunmen attacked their home and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. Whatever one’s views of her politics, there can be no denying that everything Omar has attained, from her education to her career, has been earned against high odds.
Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them.
Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them. He calls her “crooked” and “terrible,” but in reality it’s Trump who was convicted of defrauding New York State to the tune of half a billion dollars. It’s Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election, and it’s Trump who is using gerrymandering and frivolous lawsuits to try to cheat his way out of Republicans losing the midterms. It’s Trump who has amassed over a billion dollars in shadily sourced wealth as president through cryptocurrency schemes. He even regularly cheats at golf because he’s so incapable of playing fair.
But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers.
Trump’s attack on Omar is reminiscent of his previous accusations that Barack Obama was not a real U.S. citizen. In 2011, Trump, who was then a host on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” started a noisy public campaign demanding the then-president produce his Hawaiian birth certificate, implying that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, could not be a legitimate citizen. Obama eventually did release his birth certificate, but that ultimately didn’t matter to Trump and others who promoted and believed the birther lie, because this was never about the legal definition of “citizen.” It was about the way that the erudite, charismatic Obama revealed the insecurities of the people who, only a few years later, would call themselves “MAGA” by disproving their hopes that whiteness confers an excellence that they, on their own merits, could never produce.
Trump made this especially clear by also trying to prove Obama secretly had bad grades in college. The president’s psychological projection isn’t subtle. Unsurprisingly, he has not been keen on releasing his own grades and test scores, but he is quick to assure us he’s a super-genius because he was able to tell the difference between a man and a woman on a medical exam to diagnose dementia.
Another pointed reminder of MAGA’s true fears came recently when Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, tweeted a photo of non-white students celebrating a University of Texas football win and complained, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later whined about the university accepting foreign students, though he had no evidence these young people in the photo were born outside the country and neglected to offer any rational arguments for why the school should discriminate against worthy students from overseas.
French’s outburst kicked off a debate among right-wing commentators about what they crudely called “the Indian question,” an apparent nod to a Nazi euphemism for antisemitic ideas that eventually led to the Holocaust. This revealed an unbelievably noxious racism, and also served as a tacit admission that concern about immigration is not, despite all the “garbage” talk, about immigrants dragging down the country. The MAGA coalition’s fear is that immigrants will make it a lot harder for mediocre white people to compete for plum jobs and school admissions. While decades of right-wing blather about meritocracy was always a lie, now conservatives are basically admitting it: Racism is a protection racket to shield white D-level students from the consequences of their own laziness.
This understanding exposes why Trump and MAGA have it in for Somali-Americans. Like any group of people, the Somali immigrant community contains good and bad people in it, but on the whole, their very existence is a testament to human tenacity. Like so many waves of refugees before and after, these are people who took huge risks to survive, and many of them, like Omar, are thriving. Even though the community suffers from extensive poverty due in part to discrimination and the few resources refugees from a war-torn country are able to marshal, it has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents.
In other words, Somali-Americans are living the industrious values that a lot of MAGA types valorize but at which many, especially rich boys like Trump, fall short. This, too, would be fine, if only conservatives could just relax. Part of the American dream is being able to move beyond working that 60-hour week that so many recent immigrants have to put in to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a C student — as long as you don’t take your insecurities out on the A students who just so happen to have darker skin. That’s what makes this racism so baffling. It’s not just that it’s immoral. It’s also a waste of a one precious life to be so angry that someone who looks a little different might be better at some stuff.
For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself.
The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed. As the U.S. economy teetered on the brink, President Barack Obama was sending multi-million dollar drones to strike Yemeni weddings. Outside of a few million protestors that no one felt the need to listen to, most Americans were fine with the whole business, but with one caveat: They didn’t want to see it.
Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House.
The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices.
But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.
He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death.
Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.
That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. Where previous administrations were content to project strength around the globe through quasi-legal military actions for a small audience composed of other world leaders, Trump may as well have projected the operation on the side of one of his resorts.
Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die.
The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed.
But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. “Citizen: Vigilante,” a film starring Armie Hammer that was boosted by Elon Musk, follows a landlord who kills his way through an unnamed European city after migrants attack a young girl. The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings.
In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange. The defense secretary floated the idea of broadcasting the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former major in the Army, who was convicted in 2013 of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, four years before. In his court-martial proceedings, Hasan said he carried out the attack in response to U.S. killings in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to . . . watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, “because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”
Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed.
On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.
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