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ICE Agent Threatens to Shoot Ambulance Driver Helping Protester - 2025-10-14T21:50:24Z

Federal immigration enforcement agents allegedly interfered with—and even threatened to “shoot and arrest”—emergency personnel rescuing an injured protester last week in south Portland, as first reported Monday in Willamette Week.

Citing public dispatch records and two confidential internal reports filed by the ambulance workers, Willamette Week reported that agents blocked an ambulance on the evening of October 5 as it tried to exit an ICE facility with a protester who had suffered a collar bone injury.

Federal agents allegedly delayed the emergency workers manning the vehicle for several minutes, repeatedly requesting to ride in the ambulance to the hospital—even after having agreed, due to their lack of arrest paperwork, to simply follow along in their own vehicle instead.

After some delay, the driver began moving the vehicle toward the garage’s exit, when a plainclothes man with a partial face covering reportedly stepped in its path, urging the driver to stop so as not to hit a group of officers in riot gear standing about 15 feet away.

Eventually, seeing the group of officers line up in apparent “preparation for the gate to open so they could escort the ambulance” off, the driver reported having inched forward a bit further. But the delay stretched on, as federal agents stood “incredibly close” to the vehicle and behaved aggressively, the driver recounted. One of the crew members decided to get out to “calm and deescalate the situation,” they later wrote.

Deciding to join them, the driver, according to their report, put the emergency vehicle in park, which caused it to lurch forward slightly. An agent evidently interpreted the vehicle’s forward movement as deliberate, and is said to have begun threatening the driver.

The agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner,” the driver recalled, “and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.’”

“I was still in such shock,” the driver said, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”

After the driver’s crew member explained the situation—that the vehicle had not been driven forward, but rolled slightly as it was being parked—another agent replied “that this was not the first time this had happened,” wrote Willamette Week.

Trump Compares Charlie Kirk to Socrates as He Awards Medal of Freedom - 2025-10-14T21:27:08Z

Donald Trump on Tuesday compared conservative commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to Socrates as he posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which apparently means nothing now.

The award was announced on what would have been Kirk’s 32nd birthday, if not for his assassination in Utah at the hands of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

“Charlie never missed an opportunity to remind us of the Judeo-Christian principles of our nation’s founding, or to share his deep Christian faith. In his final moments Charlie testified to the greatness of America, and to the glory of our savior with whom he now rests in Heaven,” Trump remarked at the ceremony. “Charlie Kirk was a martyr for truth and for freedom. And from Socrates … and to Saint Peter, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, those who change history the most—and he really did—have always risked their lives for causes they were put on earth to defend.”

Trump also used the award ceremony to continue to spread falsities about the prevalence of organized left-wing violence.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was established by President John F. Kennedy to serve as the highest honor a civilian could receive, for people who “have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

Kirk did not embody that, no matter how much the right tries to sanitize his image. Aside from helping Trump successfully push a significant number of young people towards the MAGA movement, Kirk made his name by talking down to and clipping college undergraduates, pushing blatant anti-Black and anti-Latino racism, and using the Bible to deny the humanity of gay and transgender folk. His life was not one that held the essence of an award that has been given to cultural heavyweights like Maya Angelou, Desmond Tutu, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The medal has lost some of its shine in recent years, as Trump has awarded them to people simply for helping him, not adding meaning to American life and culture. In his first term, he gave the award to right-wing commentator (and Kirk inspiration) Rush Limbaugh, Zionist conservative mega-donor Miriam Adelson, and Republican Representative Jim Jordan. And in his second, Trump’s disgraced former attorney Rudy Giuliani and now Kirk have received the medal, with Ben Carson expected to be honored next.

Leaked Young Republicans Chat Filled With Slurs and Praise for Hitler - 2025-10-14T19:54:38Z

Politico got a hold of a group chat of leaders of Young Republicans groups across the country—which was teeming with racism, antisemitism, rape jokes, and other filth. Pejoratives like the homophobic f-slur, the n-word, and the r-word appeared more than 251 times combined in the Telegram chat, which contained Young Republican leaders from New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.

The chat, called “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM,” seemingly included young Republicans aligned with the “Restore YR” faction of the Young Republican National Federation, or YRNF.

Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the New York State Young Republicans, was “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages,” Politico reports. (He apologized for the messages but told the publication he has “no way of verifying their accuracy.”)

In the group chat, Giunta reportedly referred to Black people as “watermelon people,” and wrote of an NBA playoff game: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” While discussing his support of another young Republican group, he wrote that “they support slavery and all that shit,” which he approvingly called “Mega based.”

On another occasion, Giunta told his fellow chat members: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word.”

“I love Hitler,” Giunta joked elsewhere. He also said those who voted against his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become YRNF chair would be sent “to the gas chamber,” leading his fellow New York State Young Republicans to crack additional jokes about the Holocaust.

Giunta lost the YRNF chair in August to Hayden Padgett, whom Giunta referred to as “Hayden F—t.” Numerous other members of the group chat used demeaning language against Padgett; for instance, Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, wrote, “RAPE HAYDEN.”

Another joke about sexual violence, unrelated to Padgett, came from Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, who called rape “epic” in a separate exchange. (Walker, like Giunta, apologized but told Politico some of the chat could have been “altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated.”)

Another frequent contributor to the chat was William Hendrix, vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans and, until last week, a communications assistant for Kansas’s Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. Hendrix reportedly used variations of the n-word more than a dozen times in the chat, in addition to making jokes employing racist stereotypes and approvingly mentioning that the Missouri Young Republicans organization “doesn’t like f--s.”

Trump Threatens Violence Against Hamas as Gaza Ceasefire Outlook Dims - 2025-10-14T19:06:32Z

It looks like President Donald Trump may have jumped the shark on declaring peace in the Middle East: Less than 24 hours after declaring that the war between Israel and Hamas had finally finished, Trump promised to disarm Hamas by force, if they did not do it themselves.

During a meeting with Argentinian President Javier Milei Tuesday, Trump made a startling threat while dodging a question from a reporter about Hamas disarming. “How long will it take Hamas to disarm, and can you guarantee that is going to happen?” the reporter asked.

“Well, they’re going to disarm, because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump replied.

“How will you do that?” the reporter pressed.

“I don’t have to explain that to you,” Trump bit back, adding, “They know I’m not playing games.”

Trump continued in a weaving ramble before circling back to the issue of disarming Hamas. “We have told them, we want disarm, and they will disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. And it will happen quickly, and perhaps violently. But they will disarm. Do you understand me?” he said.

It quickly became clear that Trump lacked any actual details about disarming Hamas. The president claimed that he’d spoken directly to Hamas, but later clarified he’d heard of their plans to disarm “through [his] people at the highest level.”

When asked how long the group would be given to disarm, Trump said they’d have a “reasonable period of time, pretty quickly.”

On Monday, Trump attended the signing of a peace deal between Israel and Hamas in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, following the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages in Gaza and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, including 1,700 taken over the last two years and held without charges. Speaking before Israel’s Knesset that day, Trump said, “This is not only the end of a war, this is the end of an age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.”

While both sides have agreed to this first phase of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, it’s still unclear whether peace will persist. Trump announced Tuesday that the second phase would commence, meaning, “Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.”

Reuters reported Tuesday that Israel has continued to block essential aid into Gaza, while Hamas has begun executing political rivals in the streets, after receiving approval from Trump to act as police for a “period of time.”

If Trump’s latest comments are anything to go by, more bloodshed may yet be in Gaza’s future, following the formal end of Israel’s catastrophic military campaign that has killed more than 65,000 people—including medics and journalists—displaced nearly two million more, and caused widespread famine.

Trump Lashes Out at ABC Reporter After Disastrous Vance Interview - 2025-10-14T19:05:27Z

President Trump refused to answer a question from an ABC reporter at his sitdown with Argentine President Javier Milei on Tuesday, citing host George Stephanopoulos’s embarrassment of Vice President JD Vance on Sunday.

“You’re ABC fake news, I don’t take questions from ABC fake news,” Trump said as a reporter shouted a question at him. “After what you did with Stephanopoulos to the vice president of the United States—I don’t take questions from ABC fake news.”

Stephanopoulos didn’t “do” anything to Vance—he simply called him out on his B.S. regarding the $50,000 cash bribe the FBI caught current White House border czar Tom Homan accepting in a sting operation in 2024. Vance and the Trump administration continue to state that Homan committed no crime while being unable to say where the $50,000 went.

“Tom Homan did not take a bribe,” Vance told ABC on Sunday. “It’s a ridiculous smear. And the reason you guys are going after Tom Homan so aggressively is because he’s doing the job of enforcing the law. I think it’s really preposterous.”

“But, wait, you said he didn’t take a bribe,” Stephanopoulos pushed. “But I’m not sure you answered the question. Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?”

“George, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did he accept $50,000 for what?” Vance said, feigning ignorance.

“He was recorded on an audiotape in September of 2024, an FBI surveillance tape, accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money?” Stephanopoulos said.

“Accepting $50,000 for doing what, George?” Vance replied. “I am not even sure I understand the question. Is it illegal to take a payment for doing services? The FBI has not prosecuted him. I have never seen any evidence that he’s engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Nobody has accused Tom of violating a crime, even the far-left media like yourself.

“So I’m actually not sure what the precise question is. Did he accept $50,000? Honestly, George, I don’t know the answer to that question,” Vance continued. “What I do know is that he didn’t violate a crime.”

The nonanswer led Stephanopoulos to pull the plug on the interview, a move that clearly bothered Trump, especially given his past ire for Stephanopoulos.

Now the president is using the perceived slight to his vice president as an excuse to further censor the media.

Trump Flails When Asked How Argentina Bailout Helps the U.S. - 2025-10-14T18:50:52Z

Even the president can’t spell out how his Argentina bailout package will benefit the United States.

The White House is moving forward with its multibillion-dollar lifeline to Argentina, which will give $20 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to a nation on the verge of economic collapse. However, Donald Trump can’t seem to explain why Americans are the ones responsible for making “Argentina great again.”

“Just helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” Trump told one Spanish-speaking reporter during a meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei at the White House Tuesday. “Argentina is one of the most beautiful countries that I’ve ever seen, and we want to see it succeed, very simple.

“We don’t have to do it. It’s not going to make a big difference for our country,” he continued. “But it will for South America.”

Speaking to another reporter, Trump claimed that the bailout is “really meant to help a good financial philosophy.”

“So, when we can help our neighbors—you know we’re making tremendous progress in South America,” Trump said.

Whether or not Trump is willing to acknowledge it, $20 billion is no paltry sum. Stateside, the government is still shut down over how to fund Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

And the U.S. will need a bailout of its own very soon. American soybean farmers have been pummeled by Trump’s tariff policies, which have ripped the Chinese market from their grasp. However, after it came to light that Argentina had replaced the U.S. as China’s top soybean supplier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the anticipated Argentina-bound cash infusion had morphed into a “credit swap line.”

Mike Johnson Says ICE Shooting a Priest Doesn’t Cross the Line - 2025-10-14T18:28:14Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks faith leaders and journalists are fair targets for federal law enforcement officers that have descended on Chicago.

During a press conference Tuesday, Johnson flailed when asked where he’d draw the line on brutality by federal officers carrying out President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz.”

“We’ve seen images out of Chicago of federal agents shooting faith leaders with pepper balls and arresting journalists,” a reporter said. “Where’s the limit for you on what’s acceptable conduct by federal law enforcement? And when is it incumbent on Congress to amend oversight on federal law enforcement?” 

“I’ve not seen them cross the line yet,” Johnson replied, saying that there were some committees with jurisdiction over federal law enforcement. “It’s not risen to that level.” 

But the few instances cited in the question are evidence enough that federal forces have crossed several legal and ethical lines. 

In September, at the ICE facility in the Chicago neighborhood of Broadview, an ICE agent shot a Presbyterian minister in the head with a pepper ball. Last week, a federal judge barred federal law enforcement from firing certain kinds of crowd control tactics, including less-lethal projectiles and chemical irritants. The temporary restraining order required officers to issue two warnings before using riot control weapons. Still, federal agents reportedly released tear gas on residents responding to a violent arrest during a protest in Albany Park, without giving any warning. 

Also last week, Border Patrol agents violently arrested Debbie Brockman, a producer for Chicago television station WGN-TV, despite a judge’s temporary restraining order barring agents from detaining journalists. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed that Brockman had thrown objects at the agents’ vehicle and was “placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” Brockman was released without charges.

Johnson said he was much more concerned with the alleged “abuse of law enforcement by radical leftist activists.” The Louisiana Republican joked that “the most threatening thing” he’d seen yet was a parade of nude cyclists in Portland—a tame example of the violent dissent he hoped to demonstrate. As for the alleged “physical assaults” against “valiant, brave, patriotic” ICE agents, Johnson didn’t deign to summon a single example.  

Pope Leo Declares Whose Side He’s On—and It’s Not JD Vance’s - 2025-10-14T18:18:52Z

Pope Leo XIV last week released his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, and the message from the first American-born pontiff seems certain to rile conservatives in the United States. The first section, titled “A Few Essential Words,” declares, “Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor … contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us.” The teaching document also shames those who would blame the poor for their situations, saying those who do so reveal “their own blindness and cruelty.” Finally, in its closing sections, the document looks beyond economic poverty, stating, “By her very nature the Church is in solidarity with the poor, the excluded, the marginalized and all those considered the outcast of society.”

It is inarguable that in these theological and ethical arguments, Pope Leo, who was naturalized as Peruvian citizen in 2015, owes more to his Latin American ties than anything else. For Dilexi Te (“I have loved you”) marks the triumph of Liberation Theology, once derided and maligned by the Western Catholic establishment, as now a central part of papal teaching. The exhortation should also serve as a warning to politically conservative American Catholics, including Vice President JD Vance, about how far out of step they are with the global mood and direction of their church. In this sense, Dilexi Te is the most official reminder yet of the growing divide within American Catholicism, a divide intensified by the moral and political pressures of President Trump’s America. This outcome of this struggle has implications not only for the Catholic faithful but American democracy itself.

Both Liberation Theology and American Catholicism’s central role in American political life date to the turmoil of the mid-twentieth century. The Catholic Church was in the midst of the progressive reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and the United States was embroiled in the Civil Rights Movement and the massive social changes of the 1960s. South of the Rio Grande river, economic inequality (some of the worst in the world) and political strife deeply influenced the reaction to Vatican II in the overwhelmingly Catholic region. And many came to see the potential of the Catholic Church to improve the social and economic conditions of the most vulnerable. Through a series of conferences and books out of various Latin American countries throughout the 1970s, including Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1971), Liberation Theology began to take shape, at its core the belief that there was a “preferential option for the poor.” 

Liberation Theology spread quickly, but it was not without its opponents. In 1983, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Vatican office in charge of Church discipline), wrote a scathing critique that chastised Liberation Theology for its methods and denounced its Marxist influences. Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, was in many ways the leader of the conservative backlash to Vatican II—and of a nascent traditionalist movement that was growing increasingly popular, particularly in the U.S.

Vatican-approved reforms were not the only changes American Catholics were experiencing. For generations, anti-Catholic sentiment had been a predominant and consistent part of American culture, keeping Catholics out of America’s social and political mainstream. During John F. Kennedy’s successful 1960 campaign to become the first Catholic president, evangelical preacher Billy Graham declared that should he be elected, Kennedy would be taking orders from the pope rather than the public. In the end, though, it was not Christian love but political pragmatism that began to soften if not entirely erode this old prejudice against Catholics.

With the end of legal segregation, white evangelical Protestants reentered political life on the side of the segregationists—and they needed allies. The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which (temporarily, as it turned out) established abortion as a constitutional right, provided one. Although opposition to abortion had long been considered a “Catholic issue,” evangelicals seized on it as a moral rallying point, transforming it into the defining cause of a new political coalition. Out of that moment emerged the modern Religious Right, at its core an alliance between white evangelicals and conservative white Catholics united by a shared hostility to social liberalism and by a desire to preserve a moral order they felt slipping away.

Fueled by this new alliance and the elections of two conservative popes—John Paul II in 1978 and Benedict XVI in 2005—conservatives came to dominate both the public image and institutional structures of American Catholicism. They often, and quite cynically, used a play out of the evangelical handbook and used opposition to abortion as their trump card, a cudgel to pressure fellow Catholics into political conformity, regardless of anyone’s personal views on the issue. In this way, prominent American Catholics adopted increasingly hardline positions on a host of social issues, which in turn has attracted reactionary young men to the church. 

Nonetheless, the Catholic Church in America remained quite divided politically, and its demographics were changing. American Catholicism is increasingly ethnically diverse, and increasingly populated by immigrants and their children (which ironically is more how the Catholic Church in America looked at the turn of the nineteenth century). Moreover, white conservative Catholics like those in the U.S. are increasingly a minority in terms of the global Church. This is especially evident when we consider the particular nature of their conservatism, which mirrors the politics and rhetoric of American evangelicals. While it is true Catholics in Africa and to a lesser extent Asia might overall share conservative American Catholics views on issues of gender and sexuality, they break with them on questions like foreign aid, the treatment of refugees and migrants, and climate justice.

These divides, both at home and abroad, became increasingly visible during the pontificate of the progressive Argentine Pope Francis. Yet under Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pope, the division has become impossible to ignore. The anti-immigrant terror unleashed by the Trump administration on America’s streets has clearly and disproportionately targeted Catholics, because it has disproportionately targeted Latinos. Both the pope and many American bishops and priests have spoken out strongly in defense of these communities. Leo has even insisted that support for immigrants is an essential part of a truly pro-life ethic. “Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” he said earlier this month. “And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Now, with Dilexi Te, Leo is making clear that the moral center of contemporary global Catholicism is Latin America, where the theology of the poor and marginalized first formed half a century ago. To reject it is to reject official papal teaching. This puts conservative American Catholics, who for that same half-century have been more influenced by American evangelicals than any global Catholic force, in what might be delicately called an awkward position. Long accustomed to seeing their church as a pillar of national conservatism and now American nationalism, these Catholics now face a reckoning. Dilexi Te is not only a call to compassion but a reminder to them that the future of their faith—and perhaps of their nation—demands a new humility from them.

MTG Trashes “Weak Republican Men” Who Hate Republican Women - 2025-10-14T17:33:50Z

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene somehow continues to come off as one of the realest legislators in all of Congress, stating that the men in her party are “weak” and “afraid” of women like her.

Greene spoke to The Washington Post in an exclusive interview published on Tuesday, and continued her trend of bucking her party to speak out independently on how she feels about Republican leadership.

“My district knows I ran for Congress trashing Republicans.… They voted for me because they agreed with that. My district’s not surprised,” Greene said. “Whereas President Trump has a very strong, dominant style—he’s not weak at all—a lot of the men here in the House are weak.

“There’s a lot of weak Republican men and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women,” she continued. “So they always try to marginalize the strong Republican women that actually want to do something and actually want to achieve.”

Greene noted specifically that Speaker Mike Johnson had issues dealing with women like her, contrasting him to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom she said elevated women in the party, calling it a “night and day” difference.

“They’re always intimidated by stronger Republican women because we mean it and we will do it and we will make them look bad,” she said.

While Greene has her fair share of alarming, conspiratorial, and easily cancelable takes, she has been more on point than even many Democrats in recent weeks.

“I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year. Also, I think health insurance and all insurance is a scam, just be clear!” Greene said, just a week ago. “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!”

“I don’t think it’s believable to tell the American people that while we control the White House, the House, and the Senate, that we can’t return to work in Washington, D.C., because Chuck Schumer and six other Democrats won’t vote to open the government,” Greene said just days later. “I know people. They don’t believe that.”

She has been even more shockingly progressive on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, striking a more progressive tone than the likes of Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries.

“The relentless bombing of the Palestinian people—and many of them have just been innocent people. They’re not Hamas, they’re literally women and children, and you can’t unsee the amount of pictures and videos of children that have been blown to pieces,” she told CNN last week, just days after she called out her own party on health care. “They’re finding them dead in the rubble. Those aren’t actors, that isn’t fake war propaganda, it’s very real. And I think that is equally horrific. I wanna see an end to it, and I think most Americans do.” She doubled down on a podcast days later, stating that the IDF “is still unbelievably controlling and brutal to people at checkpoints.”

While Greene has by no means switched loyalties—and will likely say something appalling about Jews, transgender people, or immigrants before the month is out—there is no ignoring the transparency and resonance statements like these have carried. If it continues, the GOP will have a serious, loud problem on their hands.

Meta Caves to Pam Bondi and Takes Down ICE-Tracking Facebook Page - 2025-10-14T17:15:42Z

In an interesting turn of events, MAGA is now in favor of the government pressuring Big Tech platforms to censor users’ speech.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed that the Department of Justice got Facebook to remove a group page where users shared information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the Chicago area.

“Today following outreach from [the Justice Department], Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago,” Bondi announced on X Tuesday.

The attorney general, without evidence, attributed a “wave of violence against ICE” to “online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs.” She vowed to continue “engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.”

The Trump administration has lately accused those who videotape ICE agents in public, or share public information about ICE actions, of illegal “doxing”—despite legal experts and court rulings affirming that the First Amendment covers such activities.

As Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in response to Bondi, “Discussion of where ICE has been spotted operating, and even the identities of agents, is protected by the First Amendment.”

The removed Facebook group appears to be a page titled “ICE Sightings—Chicagoland,” which, ABC7 Chicago reports, had amassed over 90,000 followers prior to its removal.

The page had recently drawn the ire of MAGA provocateur Laura Loomer. Two days before Bondi’s announcement, Loomer accused Mark Zuckerberg, who controls Facebook, of “leftist subversion of Trump and his policies” for keeping the page, and others like it, online.

“Perhaps Zuck needs to be contacted by the DOJ as well since he has no regard for the life of [ICE] agents,” Loomer wrote on X. It seems like Bondi followed through, and Zuckerberg—despite his purported embrace of free expression just prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration—caved and censored speech at the government’s behest.

Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson Lose Their Minds Over Trump and Ukraine - 2025-10-14T16:36:28Z

Some of Donald Trump’s biggest fans can’t seem to grasp his new stance on Ukraine.

After spending months making concessions to Russia, the U.S. president has suddenly changed his tune on the foreign power’s invasion of Ukraine. Last month, Trump claimed that the non-NATO ally could reclaim all of its occupied territory and, this week, has publicly considered sending Tomahawk missiles—which have a range of more than 1,500 miles—to Kyiv should Russia not end its assault.

But notable MAGA talking heads aren’t understanding the rationale. Speaking with Tucker Carlson on the ex-Fox host’s podcast, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wondered aloud why Trump was “suddenly changing course.”

“We have to ask the calculus of why the president, who’s Mr. Peace Prize and has done a great job helping in seven other conflicts, which I totally support, why is he suddenly changing course?” Jones said, referring to Trump’s desperate (and unsuccessful) second-term bid to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Carlson was equally critical, damning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—a democratically elected official—as an “unelected dictator” and questioning why Trump would choose to invite him back to the White House this week.

“I don’t understand it; he does not have a Democratic mandate,” Carlson said of Zelenskiy. “He’s not an elected leader. He’s a murderer. They’ve sold our weapons to some of the worst terror groups in the world. And we’re treating him like he’s a head of state. Why are we doing that?”

But the dynamic duo have their own questionable histories with the Kremlin. Last year, Carlson conducted an eyebrow-raising softball interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin—who is actually a dictator.

The interview was the fruit of Carlson’s endless sucking up to Russia. For years, the conservative celebrity had advocated against U.S. support for Ukraine and called for Americans to revisit their prejudices against Putin and the Russian government—even after Russian military officials were caught interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That last detail helped the dead-end career commentator gain airtime in Russian state-run media outlets.

Jones, meanwhile, took part in a two-day event in Moscow in June “aimed at broadcasting Russia’s state ideology and an ultra-conservative, neo-imperialist vision,” reported the Moscow Times.

MAGA politics neatly align with Russian interests. Halfway across the world, between the borders of America’s Cold War nemesis, elements of the MAGA agenda have already been perfected: It is a crime to be gay or transgender, the majority of the country identifies homogeneously as Orthodox Christians, and NATO is a loathed institution rather than a celebrated one.

World Leader Caught on Hot Mic Asking Trump for Meeting With His Son - 2025-10-14T15:54:04Z

A conversation caught on a hot mic between President Donald Trump and President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia reveals that Trump was arranging a conversation between his son Eric and the Indonesian president, as world leaders gathered at Monday’s ceasefire summit in Egypt.

In the clip, Prabowo can be heard discussing a location that is “in a region” that’s “not safe, security-wise.” Trump says something in response, but can’t be heard clearly.

“Can I, can I meet Eric?” Prabowo asks the president, who promises to arrange a phone call: “I’ll have Eric call you,” Trump says. “Should I do that? He’s such a good boy. I’ll have Eric call.” Prabowo says yes, and, after an inaudible exchange, Trump thanks him.

It’s not certain what the two were discussing, but it’s possible the conversation was related to at least one of various existing and pending projects in Indonesia by the Trump Organization, where Eric Trump is an executive vice president.

In March, the president’s organization opened a new golf club in Indonesia, in a joint venture between the Trump Organization and MNC Group, an Indonesian conglomerate. The Trump Organization also lists a golf club and resort in Bali as “coming soon” on its website, and in February, development on a Trump Organization–MNC Group project was halted by Indonesian environmental authorities.

As the conversation continues, Prabowo adds, “I told Hary also”—possibly referring to Hary Tanoesoedibjo, a businessman who owns MNC Group and has partnered with the Trump Organization on its Indonesian projects.

Trump asks if Prabowo had spoken to someone whose name is inaudible, before Prabowo replies, “We’ll look for better place,” which Trump seems to agree is a good idea.

Trump then tells Prabowo to reach out to him at a later stage—“You let me know when something [inaudible],” he says—to which the Indonesian leader agreed.

“I’ll have Eric call you,” Trump assures him again, and Prabowo also mentions he would be open to speaking to Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., who is also a Trump Organization executive vice president.

“Eric or—Eric or Don Jr.,” Prabowo says.

After sharing more inaudible words, Trump calls Prabowo a “fantastic guy” and promises to “have one of them call you.” Trump continues: “Thank you, my friend. I like that you told me,” and their conversation cuts off as Trump says: “We don’t need—”

While the conversation was unclear, it certainly seems to be yet another example of Trump, as is his wont, blending the presidency with his personal business interests.

DHS Downplays Horrific ICE Arrest by Straight Up Lying About It - 2025-10-14T15:42:18Z

The Department of Homeland Security has been caught in yet another lie about the victim of a violent immigration arrest.

A shocking video that went viral Saturday showed the violent arrest of a young woman by law enforcement officers. In the video, unmarked cars swarmed a suburban street, as another vehicle screeched to a halt on what appears to be a driveway. As the driver was pulled from the stopped car, she could be heard loudly pleading with the arresting officer. The officer threw her to the ground and appeared to put his knee on her neck as he restrained her hands behind her back. Multiple X accounts claimed she had yelled, “I’m 15!”

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied that the arrest was part of a rash of brutal arrests by federal law enforcement that took place in Chicago over the weekend, claiming the footage wasn’t even from this year.

“Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago Police made over a year ago,” McLaughlin wrote on X Sunday. “This isn’t even ICE.”

But McLaughlin wasn’t telling the truth.

McLaughlin was referring to the 2024 arrest of a 15-year-old girl who was charged with attacking and robbing multiple people on public transit. But the video couldn’t possibly be of that arrest. The Chicago Police Department said the teen charged with robbery had been arrested on the 1200 block of West 109th Street, a location in South Chicago, CBS News reported. Block Club Chicago identified the location of the video as Hoffman Estates, a Chicago suburb an hour away.

CBS News confirmed late Monday that the video showed the Friday arrest of 18-year-old Evelyn, a U.S. citizen, and reported that she had not claimed to be a minor but shouted, “I’m not resisting!” during her arrest. Evelyn and her friends had been monitoring ICE’s presence in the area, according to independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet.

Evelyn’s parents told CBS News that their daughter and her two friends were taken in cars to the Hoffman Estates Police Department parking lot, where they remained for hours before being released without charges. It’s still unclear what agency was responsible for making the arrest.

Hoffman Estates police released a statement confirming that ICE was present in their parking lot on Friday. “Two ICE agents also came into the police department to make a police report regarding an incident that occurred while in our Village,” the statement said.

Illinois Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi condemned the brutal arrest and demanded transparency from DHS. “The events in Hoffman Estates embody everything that’s wrong with the Trump Administration’s militarized ICE raids: cruelty without accountability, secrecy without oversight, and power without restraint,” he said in a statement.

Since federal forces have been unleashed on Chicago as part of President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” DHS has appeared to bend the truth on several occasions. Last week, an attorney told a judge that Border Patrol agents had rammed into his client’s car, not the other way around as federal officials claimed, and one agent had menacingly said, “Do something, bitch,” before shooting his client five times. DHS claimed the officer had acted in self-defense.

Last month, DHS claimed that ICE had shot and killed “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving” while trying to detain him—but a closer look found that the man had no criminal history, and his last traffic violation was in 2013.

ICE Detains Citizen After Saying She Doesn’t “Look Like” Her Last Name - 2025-10-14T15:09:50Z

ICE agents kidnapped a U.S. citizen in Chicago who had just finished working a double shift because she didn’t “look” American to them.

Maria Greeley, 44, was on her way home from her job at Beach Bar earlier this month when she was surrounded, seized, and zip-tied by three ICE masked agents without cause or warning and interrogated for an hour. ICE determined she was an undocumented immigrant because she didn’t “look like” a Greeley. Greeley, who was born in Illinois, is Latina and adopted. She had her U.S. passport on her when she was detained.

“I am Latina and I am a service worker,” Greeley said. “I fit the description of what they’re looking for now.... They said this isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” she told The Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.”

Greeley was later released.

This type of indiscriminate racial profiling has been protocol for ICE for some time now, and is effectively legally codified. Last month, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction blocking federal agents in Los Angeles from accosting and harassing people based on their race or ethnicity. This is exactly what’s happening in Chicago and other cities nationwide, and there’s no sign of anyone stepping in to stop it. There will only be more Maria Greeleys in the near future.

Pete Hegseth Sent National Guard Troops Home for Being Too Fat - 2025-10-14T15:02:17Z

The military has no more space for overweight soldiers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegesth confirmed Monday that he had sent some of the Texas National Guard members stationed in Illinois back to their home state for failing to meet the department’s new height and weight requirements.

“Standards are back at The @DeptofWar,” Hegseth wrote on X, circulating a screenshot of an article announcing the sudden change of the guard.

The troops’ departure followed public backlash to a string of photos published by ABC News, which captured several heavyset Texas National Guard members as they arrived in the Prairie State.

“In less than 24 hours, Texas National Guardsmen mobilized for the Federal Protection Mission,” a department spokesperson told military news website Task & Purpose over the weekend. “The speed of the response necessitated a concurrent validation process, during which we identified a small group of service members who were not in compliance and have been replaced.”

But fat people aren’t the only individuals that the former Fox News host has chosen to discriminate against: Hegseth announced new physical expectations for U.S. troops during a rare assembly of the military’s top brass late last month. Speaking before hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person meeting in Quantico, Hegseth unveiled his latest efforts to de-woke-ify the country’s armed forces, including resetting military combat requirements to the “highest male standard only.”

“When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” Hegseth said during his speech. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”

In the same speech (that military leadership found pointless and uninspiring), Hegseth pledged that there would be “no more beardos” in the U.S. armed forces, a decision that will disproportionately affect Black service members due to the potentially injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces, given the curl pattern of their hair.

Ironically, Hegseth’s strict new standard is undermining one of Donald Trump’s goals: sending troops to U.S. cities.

Pete Hegseth Is About to Kick All Outlets Out of the Pentagon—but One - 2025-10-14T14:51:41Z

It looks like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new press policy will ensure that the only outlet with a desk inside the Pentagon is a MAGA propaganda machine.

Hegseth, who has reportedly been “consumed” by trying to stop numerous leaks from his department, has moved to install a new “pledge” for journalists covering the Pentagon, requiring them to abstain from receiving any unauthorized material. Under the new rules, all agency information “must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” and those who fail to follow the policy would have their credentials revoked.

If Hegseth wanted a press he could control, it seems he may be getting his wish. Nearly every mainstream outlet has balked at the policy. As of Tuesday morning, it looks like the only news outlet that will retain access to the Pentagon will be One America News Network, a right-wing news outlet that is outrageously pro-Trump.

In May, OAN partnered with the United States Agency for Global Media to replace Voice of America, a government-funded broadcaster the Trump administration was recently blocked from shuttering, with its own right-wing newsfeed.

Hegseth claimed in a post on X Monday that the new press policy would prevent the reporters from roaming free, require them to wear badges, and bar them from “solicit[ing] criminal acts.” But reporters were always required to wear badges and never allowed to wander the halls of the Pentagon. Still, the secretary had previously barred the press from certain areas of the building in May.

The Military Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit for journalists covering the military, published an article by military journalist Steve Walsh Monday urging reporters not to sign onto the new policy, calling it an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”

“Secretary Hegseth has not briefed Pentagon reporters in nearly four months, and Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson has not conducted a briefing in two months,” Walsh wrote. “The Defense Department has avoided questions from the press, all while U.S. troops are operating around the globe, the Pentagon has conducted legally questionable military strikes that have killed people in international waters and the administration has deployed troops to American cities.”

Even Fox News joined with ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC to release a statement Tuesday afternoon rejecting the policy, saying it was “without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”

This story has been updated.

Judge Delivers Trump an Early Blow in Revenge Crusade Against Comey - 2025-10-14T14:21:18Z

Former FBI Director James Comey scored an early victory this week, as U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff shut down the Justice Department’s proposed restrictions on Comey’s ability to access discovery, the evidence and information the prosecution provides to the defense before trial.

The DOJ had sought to prohibit Comey’s access to discovery when not under the supervision of his attorneys, citing the “sensitive” nature of the records. Comey’s lawyers disagreed, saying this would place the defense “at a severe and unnecessary disadvantage.” After all, they noted, throughout his prosecutorial career through his time at the FBI, Comey was “entrusted with some of the most sensitive and highly guarded information in the country.”

The court sided with Comey on Monday, with Nachmanoff ruling that “the circumstances of this case do not support the government’s proposed limitations on the sharing of ‘Protected Material’ with Defendant or prospective defense witnesses, which would unnecessarily hinder and delay Defendant’s ability to adequately prepare for trial.”

Comey was indicted last month on charges, widely regarded as politically motivated, of false statements to Congress and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Comey pleaded not guilty, and his legal team is expected to try getting the case dismissed for “vindictive prosecution.” Though such dismissals are rare, Comey seems to have a better-than-average chance, given President Donald Trump has made obvious his animosity toward him.

SCOTUS Just Shut Down Alex Jones’s Attempt to Avoid Consequences - 2025-10-14T14:14:52Z

The Supreme Court has tossed Alex Jones’s efforts for a renewed defamation challenge, denying his request to review and potentially overturn the $1.4 billion judgment against him for making conspiratorial comments that undermined the severity and legitimacy of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people including 20 children, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” Jones told the Supreme Court, in an appeal filed in September.

The families chose not to respond, and they were not ordered by the court to do so.

The Sandy Hook ruling effectively bankrupted Jones, ordering the conspiracist to cough up more than a billion dollars to the victims of the tragedy. However, Jones has managed to hold off on paying out the massive sum by filing for bankruptcy in 2022. So far, he hasn’t paid a single cent.

Last month, it appeared that the Trump administration was willing to go to bat for Jones after the Justice Department pledged to investigate one of the witnesses in Jones’s defamation case, retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the first responder to arrive at the school. But that case unraveled quickly—just 24 hours after Jones announced the lawsuit, Justice Department officials shut it down.

Trump Melts Down Over His Hair Disappearing on Time Magazine Cover - 2025-10-14T13:43:46Z

President Trump was up in the middle of the night posting about how Time Magazine didn’t get his good side.

“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time. They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the president wrote at 1:36 a.m. on Monday in response to the glowing cover Time gave him titled “His Triumph,” which prominently pictures him from a close-up lower angle with the sun shining right behind his head, making his thinning blond hair appear even thinner.

X screenshot Square profile picture TIME @TIME The living Israeli hostages held in Gaza have been freed under the first phase of Donald Trump's peace plan, alongside a Palestinian prisoner release. The deal may become a signature achievement of Trump's second term, and it could mark a strategic turning point for the Middle East https://time.com/7325156/trump-... (photo of Donald Trump shot from below)

“I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out,” Trump continued. “What are they doing, and why?”

Leave it to Trump to take issue with a glowing cover story about a ceasefire deal that may come to define his term because he doesn’t like the way he looks in it. The picture isn’t even that bad—he always looks like that.

Trump Pleads With Democratic Governors to “Beg” Him for Help - 2025-10-14T13:42:11Z

It would be a whole lot easier for the president if Democratic governors just allowed him to send the troops to their cities.

That’s more or less what Donald Trump said while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his flight back from Egypt, where the country’s authoritarian regime seemed to inspire his approach to handling crime in the United States.

“Do you want to see some U.S. governors be more like Egypt?” asked one reporter.

“No, I want them to be stronger and tougher, and not allow us to have record-breaking crime in Chicago,” Trump said after midnight Tuesday. “I want them to admit they have crime.”

“I want them to say we have a problem, could Trump bring in the troops and solve the problem,” he added.

Trump also offered a direct petition to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, spelling out that he wanted the Prairie State leader to “beg” for the White House’s assistance.

“I think he should beg for help, because he’s running a bad operation,” Trump said.

Ultimately, Trump’s desire to wield the military for his political agenda is startlingly like Egypt, which he showered with praise while celebrating a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine Monday.

Egypt is categorized as “not free” by an analysis from Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization that formed nearly a century ago to rally the world against the threat of Nazi Germany. Political opposition in Egypt is nearly nonexistent. Civil liberties that are currently taken for granted in the U.S., such as the right to protest and freedom of the press, are choked by the tight fist of the Egyptian government, which has been dominated by the military since a 2013 coup.

Why Trump might admire Egypt’s regime is no secret. Trump has made enemies out of his stateside opposition, publicly calling for the political persecution of Democratic lawmakers who have dared to object to his agenda, including Pritzker, Senator Adam Schiff, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and more.

Just last week, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a nineteenth-century law that would let him utilize the military for domestic purposes, to quell fictitious bedlam that he has claimed has taken over Democratic cities.

One such area that Trump has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

Other crime stats that have informed his decision to federalize the law enforcement of American cities were completely imagined. When Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed the city’s rising crime data—from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by the FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

Why Would Trump Say This About Karoline Leavitt? - 2025-10-14T13:17:32Z

President Donald Trump won’t stop fawning over the White House press secretary in the creepiest way possible.

Speaking to a gaggle of reporters on Air Force One after departing Egypt Tuesday, Trump asked, “How’s Karoline doing? Is she doing good? Should Karoline be replaced?”

As the journalists on board began to lightly protest, Trump cut them off. “It’ll never happen,” he said.

A smile slowly spread across the president’s face as he continued to muse over the questions from the press. “That face, those [inaudible], and those lips. They move like a machine gun, right?” he said.

The president, who has a tendency to repeat comments he considers to be clever, was rehashing a remark he’d made in August during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty. Speaking about Leavitt, Trump remarked: “She’s become a star. It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips, the way they move. They move like she’s a machine gun.”

Setting aside that it’s a strangely sexual remark, it feels particularly inappropriate when directed at the 28-year-old Leavitt, the White House’s youngest press secretary to date.

Those outside of Trump’s world know that Leavitt isn’t doing so hot. Since the beginning of the month, she’s struggled to defend Trump’s outlandish claims about Democratic cities, publicly seethed over bad polls, and offered weak excuses for the president’s gleeful efforts to sack essential federal workers.

It’s clear from many of Trump’s remarks about the women around him that the most important thing they have to offer is their appearance—and this extends beyond his (mostly blonde) inner circle. Speaking about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Monday, the U.S. president called her “a beautiful young woman.”

“Now if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances,” Trump said of Meloni.

Transcript: Maine’s Mills-Platner Senate Race Is A Huge Dem Battle - 2025-10-14T12:33:07Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the Right Now show by The New Republic. I’m excited to be joined today by Alex Seitz-Wald. He was a national political reporter for a long time. We worked at NBC News together—he covered Hillary Clinton, he covered the Democratic Party particularly for a while, but he did a lot of great stories at NBC and other outlets.

He recently moved to Maine a few years ago, and now he’s the deputy editor at the Midcoast Villager. And so we wanted to bring him on today because it looks like Maine politics is getting interesting right now. The reporting is that Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, is likely to enter the Democratic race for the Senate, where you already have a few candidates—most notably Graham Platner, who’s become kind of this phenomenon both in Maine, as far as I can tell, but also around the country.

So, Alex, welcome.

Alex Seitz-Wald: Hey, Perry, great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Bacon: And so, I’m excited to have a person who’s in Maine now, but also someone who knows a lot about national politics because I wanna put this race in that context. So I guess my first question would be, how long [have] you been in Maine?

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, it’s a strange thing. I tried to leave D.C. and politics and campaign reporting, and then I go to Maine for small local journalism—and it just suddenly became an outpouring of politics. I’ve been here for about three years. My mom has lived here for a lot longer. We lived in D.C. for 15 years, where Perry and I worked together at NBC.

Then my mom got sick in 2021, and I was working remotely anyway, so we decided to move up and be closer to her and so our daughter could have some experience with her grandmother. And we’ve decided to stay. Then Villager started up just about a year ago, and I was so impressed with what they were doing—and obviously so concerned about what’s going on in local media—that I thought it was a really exciting opportunity to try to do a cool, innovative new thing. I started in February, and since then we’ve had one political race after another. It does seem like Maine is going to be the center of the political universe in 2026, although I’m obviously biased in making that assessment.

Bacon: Well, let me ask first of all, I don’t get the sense—I’m an outsider to this—that Graham ... in a lot of state politics, there are people who become famous nationally, but they’re sort of known activists, they’ve been in the community, people know that they are, they’ve been sort of building their profile for a while. My sense is that Graham Platner is not that. He sort of jumped on the scene. Did you know who he was in January?

Seitz-Wald: No, I live one county over from Graham Platner— a very similar kind of area economically, culturally, geographically. I do not know him. I know—his wife actually is from the next town over from me, so a lot of people in my area knew him. But no, this is... I mean, basically unprecedented. I’ve been, for the past six to seven weeks now since he’s been in the race, trying to come up with any kind of analog from my experience covering national politics, and it’s really hard to, because—not just the intensity of the energy that he’s found, but how unknown he was.

He was not a well-known guy at all. The closest thing I can think of is Jon Ossoff in his first run for the House race, where you go from total unknown to, kind of, national star supernova overnight. He’s a harbormaster. His highest position was chair of the planning board in his town of 1,200—which is small, even by Maine standards. My town is 3,500, so it’s just crazy. But the enthusiasm is real, it’s genuine. I drive around, I see Graham Platner signs everywhere.

Last week I was at an event at our family’s favorite pizza place where 1,000 people were there. It was insane. No one had ever seen anything like that. I talked to state senators and reps who’ve been around for a long time. They said that the closest they could think of is Bernie Sanders or Obama or, you know, maybe like a Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren—but in other words, presidential level. And the only other comparison I can think of is like Beto O’Rourke in his Senate run. But even then, he had been a House member. He was a known thing.

So this is a really intense outpouring of support for him, and Janet Mills looking like she’s going to get in tomorrow. So I think we’re about to have a very interesting primary kicking off here.

Bacon: So, I want to hit all three candidates. So let’s start with Platner and then I want to hit Collins and Mills as well. So Platner: There’s big crowds, who’s at the Graham Platner—is it older people, younger people? You can’t tell who’s college educated and who isn’t, but give me a sense of who’s there.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, I love playing this game, and it’s tricky around here because, you know, you can have like multi-generational wealthy people who dress like farmers because they are farmers, and you can have farmers who have PhDs, you know, so it’s tricky to do that kind of—but I try, of course.

So he definitely has young people, he definitely has some older, you know, there’s a lot of kind of former hippies or back-to-the-lander type people who—they just self-identify as such. Your usual suspects, in other words, is what I’m saying. The kinds of people who would turn up to a Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or somebody like that, who would read The New Republic.

But you also have a lot of others, and it’s people who are not engaged in politics, you know, actively. And what I’ve heard from a lot of people—these are kind of soft-progressive Democrats who don’t like Trump and are just kind of despondent about the state of politics in general—and this is the first thing since the second Trump election that has given them a sense of hope or purpose, that something possible can happen.

I have seen some evidence of real working-class, you know, bigger support. The joke that I make is, is it just brunch boots or is it work boots who are turning out? I’m not totally convinced yet that it is actually work boots. He did have some town halls this past weekend up in what we call “the county,” because it’s so big it’s the only one that can matter, but it’s way northern Maine—it’s super rural, incredibly poor and conservative—and he had big turnouts there. And I do think his message is the kind of thing that could resonate.

And we also have Jared Golden, the congressman who’s much more conservative but aesthetically sort of similar—you know, a younger guy, veteran, tattoos, doesn’t look like a typical politician. He’s been very successful. So I think Platner has all the ingredients. I’m not yet fully convinced that it will actually come together.

Bacon: Because I think you and I could say crowd sizes are something, but they don’t necessarily—Bernie always got bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton, at times got bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton in 2016. Obama got bigger crowds than Clinton in states Clinton won. I remember being in Pennsylvania—huge rallies in Philadelphia for Obama. Hillary won the state. So you can have enthusiasm among a—but I wonder if he just has a ... you know, Bernie has a very devoted base, and it looks like he’s drawing some of the Bernie people who show up at rallies but are intense but small in number, ultimately.

Seitz-Wald: Yes, it’s a great question. I remember a guy on the Bernie campaign in 2016 told me he realized he was going to lose. He had spent time touring with the Grateful Dead—because, of course—and when he started to recognize people in the crowd at Bernie rallies like he had when he was touring with the Dead, he knew that they were in trouble. He was like, “Oh, these are the same people who are coming to multiple rallies.” So that’s definitely, you know, something to be aware of.

And just, I mean, peaking too early is absolutely a thing, and his campaign is concerned about this. They didn’t anticipate—you know, you can’t plan or expect for this kind of thing—and to go from zero to 100 so quickly, without having really taken a single shot yet. I mean, no one has really come after him, no one’s really had to come after him.

But, you know, the durability of that support, and the length of time that they can maintain that—those are the big questions for me going forward. That was our cover story this week, a story I wrote about, you know, it’s incredible that he has this momentum, but can he sustain it for 15 months to the general and 12 months to the primary?

Bacon: So I’ve never heard him on the stump. I mean, he sounds—I assume he doesn’t sound like Mamdani, in that rent freezes are not necessarily an issue in Maine—but he sort of sounds populist, you know, fighting billionaires, outsiders. What does he sound like on the campaign trail?

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, he sounds like a Maine Mamdani, actually—you know, replace all the New York issues with lobstering and timber—but yeah. And that, so I got a—this is, I’d never heard of him, as you know. As I just said, I was trying to avoid doing politics this year. I got a text from a guy I knew from the John Fetterman campaign saying, “Hey, I’m working with a Senate candidate who’s about to launch tomorrow. Do you want to talk to him?”

You know, when he first announced, I was like, it’s going to be Janet Mills, or she’s not going to run, or this race is going to be boring. But fine—because I know you, I’ll talk to you. I did not expect to be impressed with this guy. A harbormaster in Sullivan—nice, sweet, maybe it’d be like a good Mr. Smith Goes to Washington story.

But then I got on the phone with him, and I was blown away by the intensity and the thoughtfulness of his message. I mean, it was clearly not—not the content so much, but that he had clearly thought it through. This was not the first time that he was talking about these issues. And he’s like, “I’m a four-term combat veteran. I’m not afraid to name the enemy. The enemy is the oligarchy. It’s housing. My friends can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Which is a very real phenomenon—I mean, it is everywhere, but particularly here. Coastal Maine—during COVID, people wanted to move here, including me—so real estate prices went up 40 percent, and now people who have been here forever are having trouble affording it. We’re not building houses fast enough for the same reason that everybody everywhere else isn’t.

Healthcare—we’ve had horrible rural healthcare experiences. We have basically two giant companies in the state that do all the hospitals and most of the primary care. The one that represents southern Maine, which is wealthier, is doing fine. The one that represents northern Maine, where he comes from, is in terrible financial straits. They’ve closed a bunch of hospitals, they’ve closed labor and delivery wards—they’re on the brink of bankruptcy.

So these issues are very potent and real. And he doesn’t really talk about Trump—it’s not a resistance-y kind of thing. In fact, he says, like, “I know people who voted for Trump. A lot of my friends voted for Trump. They’re not stupid. He told them the right problem—he just is the wrong answer. But they’re right to be upset. They’re right that the system is rigged.”

So, very populist, very progressive—and he came out with the Bernie Sanders endorsement a week after getting into the race, which is a big, you know, that’s a big swing, that’s a big choice to make.

Bacon: So let’s talk about Janet Mills now. I’m on the progressive side myself, but I don’t think of her as being the kind of centrist I find annoying. She seems to be pretty strong—like, she’s been critical of Trump, at times; she’s defended transgender rights. She was one of the people saying Biden maybe should consider moving on last year, early on. So I think she’s been— he’s not super progressive, but I think she’s been a pretty good Democrat. What’s your sense of her? Forget about the ideology I gave for a second—what’s your sense of her as a politician? Is she popular there? Is she well-liked? She’s won twice; that’s an indication of something.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, she’s—I think she’s reasonably popular and reasonably well-liked, definitely among Democrats. The whole, you know, spat with Trump earlier this year over the trans issues, where he called her out in a meeting of governors and she—he said, “You’ve got to change your policy on trans athletes.” She said, “We’ll see you in court.” And it’s been a major, monthslong saga, and she’s gotten a lot of goodwill from Democrats on that.

But the places where she has some preexisting things where Democrats feel like she hasn’t been as progressive as they’d like—on labor, on guns—she’s vetoed a red flag law even, which is, unusual in a state where Democrats are pretty pro-gun, maybe like Kentucky. But she’s been even more—she’s now to the right of Jared Golden on guns, for instance. So I think people like her and they think she’s competent. She’s a former attorney general. But, you know, she won in—we have a large independent history and a large number of independent voters—so there’s always an independent candidate on the ballot. So she didn’t, you know, win by overwhelming margins or anything.

And she’s 77. A lot of people have pointed out to me—and more than one person has pointed out—that she called on Biden to step down and now is kind of facing similar calls.

Bacon: How old is Platner, just briefly?

Seitz-Wald: He’s 42, so big gap. And he looks—you know, he’s a four-term combat veteran who hauls up oyster traps every day. He looks fit. Yeah, you can’t—I mean, as some people in my life said immediately upon seeing him—“Oh, he’s really attractive.” We have to acknowledge that that is a factor here.

But I think the other big thing that Mills is contending with is the kind of hangover from 2020, where the DSCC and Chuck Schumer—Washington Democrats—came in heavy for Sara Gideon, embraced her early, cleared the path, and she had an unobstructed path to the Democratic nomination against Susan Collins. She ended up outspending her more than two to one—and lost by nine percentage points—and ended up being a kind of easily mockable candidate. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already heard about her stove. This is six years later—five years later—which, her announcement video was in front of a 10-burner Viking stove, like a $10,000 stove.

So there’s this kind of knee-jerk reaction among a lot of people that anybody that Schumer or the DSCC—if they’re pushing Mills this hard, therefore, that’s bad, because we got burned last time. I think they’re kind of learning the wrong lesson. The real lesson is that Susan Collins is much stronger than they might anticipate.

Bacon: Let me come back to that: they are pushing this, like, this is a story. Schumer has been ... let’s talk about this a little bit. Explain how the Democratic Party has been involved in getting Mills to run in this race.

Seitz-Wald: From the beginning, the Democratic Party—[the] powers that be, whatever is left of the Democratic establishment—has been very clear that Janet Mills is their candidate, and their only candidate. They didn’t talk to Jared Golden. I know that. They didn’t talk to a number of the other Democrats in the state. They were just clear—and with good reason. Like you said, she’s won twice, and she’s the only Democrat to win a Maine election statewide since 2002, which is crazy. John Baldacci. Because Angus King is an independent, and Susan Collins wins a lot, and we don’t have other statewide elected offices. But the state is not that Democratic, and in the ’90s it was a Republican, a liberal Republican state, you know, Susan Collins [unintelligible].

So there’s a reasonable desire there with Mills to take the proven winner, because Collins is going to be tough to beat. But there are also concerns that she is really that tough to beat. So I think we’re going to end up with a big electability contest, very similar to the Hillary–Bernie thing. I think this is going to be a lot of both sides litigating with each other to convince primary voters that they are the ones who can best beat Susan Collins.

Bacon: Interestingly, I’ve seen a couple of polls—I don’t know who released them—which suggest that, I guess it must have been a poll from the Platner group, because it showed Platner ahead of Collins by a lot, but it also showed Mills ahead too. So that goes to the question of Collins—she’s won a bunch of tough races, including in, I think, 2014 and 2020. 2020 was a hard year. 2014 was a good year for Republicans; 2008 and 2020 were bad years for Republicans generally across the country. She won both times, which tells me she’s done a really great job in terms of electoral strategy. So her approval looks pretty bad right now, but do you think she’s still a strong candidate?

Seitz-Wald: Yes, I think underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk, without a doubt. I think that’s actually one of the benefits, is that people do underestimate her. She’s this tiny lady with a voice that sounds like it’s going to give out at any minute. She doesn’t hold a lot of public events, and when she does, she often gets protested. But she is one of those people who seems to have infinite energy for talking on the phone and texting and emailing. It just feels like every week, somebody I talk to has just gotten off the phone with Susan Collins, or was just texting with her.

She maintains these kind of one-on-one connections with so many people. It’s a small state where that really matters. People feel like they know her—you know, people say Maine is like a big small town—so that goes a long way. She is older, you know, she’s slowed down, but the Republicans have her back more than they did in ‘20, and I don’t think she’s going to have that much difficulty uniting the Republican Party.

And the argument that I find very convincing for Mills—really the only argument, electability argument, that I find very convincing for Mills—is that Collins wins on middle-aged women, mainly, in the coast and in the south, so Portland. You know, these are more moderate-leaning people who like her stance on—at least she’s always said she’s pro-choice. And if you look at the numbers, there’s a case to be made there. Collins basically won Biden’s number in Maine. She won all of Trump’s voters plus a bunch of Biden voters. So she is genuinely getting a lot of crossover support.

And the pro-Mills argument is: Those people are not going to like Graham Platner. A young, angry-coded guy is not going to be the suburban middle-aged woman candidate. So I think that’s something to contend with.

Bacon: And Collins still has enough votes against Trump to say, to argue she’s not a Trump crony, right? I haven’t studied her votes this year, but in the past she’s, like I think she voted against Amy Coney Barrett right before the 2020 election. She’s obviously not Ted Cruz; she’s done a good job—her brand is different than the typical Republican, right?

Seitz-Wald: It’s similar to the Manchin kind of thing on the Democratic side. She is definitely ... If you ask Democrats, they say she never—she just votes in lockstep with Republicans. If you look at the actual numbers, she is mostly voting with Republicans and very occasionally will take a no vote that actually does, you know, hurt. But usually she’s taking no votes on bills when they can afford to lose her vote, which is, you know, that’s standard practice.

Bacon: She’s a team player.

Seitz-Wald: She’s a team player, and everyone understands in her party. And I think she has done a better job of not antagonizing Trump this time too, and they’re smarter about ...

Bacon: Not attacking her.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah. So she is really good at picking those high-profile places to take a stand that will kind of overshadow the 50 places where she voted with Republicans.

Bacon: So you’re saying—the last thing we’ll zone in on—you think this is going to be a campaign about electability basically, where Graham Platner’s theory is, there’s this sort of working class of people disengaged from politics who want to hear an outsider, and Janet Mills’s theory is a group of moderates who are sort of swing voters that she appeals to better. You think this is going to be a primary about—which I hate—but a primary where we debate polling numbers and who … because it’s hard to know, the election is hard to predict. And so having an election about the next election is very complicated, but you think it’s going to be an argument about electability?

Seitz-Wald: I think that will be one aspect that will be the kind of highest level, which I agree—it’s very, it’s like playing Apples to Apples with a stranger from the future, you know, where you’re trying to imagine what a hypothetical swing voter in the future thinks. But yeah, I’ve already been contacted by somebody who is interested in partnering with the Midcoast Villager.

We have a café in downtown Camden that we use for public events, and they want to put on a kind of forum with swing voters asking Graham Platner and Janet Mills questions—with the hope of showing that Platner does a better job, you know, to the swing voters. And then you pitch that message out to swing voters.

I hope I’m not violating anything by talking about this, but then you would target that out to swing voters to show, “Look, these swing voters were convinced that Platner was more electable, therefore you, Democrat, now looking for who is going to be best...” So people are already anticipating that game and trying to establish data points to put on the board there.

Bacon: Anything else in this race I should mention or we should know about?

Seitz-Wald: One final thing: because Maine has to be weird about everything, we have ranked-choice voting, which will totally complicate how this plays out. And it hasn’t really come into play, not in a competitive Senate Democratic primary; it just came online in 2018.

Bacon: So this primary has ranked choice—because New York has, so the primary and the general are both ranked-choice. New York had it with the primary, but not the general ranked-choice. Let me be clear.

Seitz-Wald: That’s right, ranked choice in both. Ranked choice in both the primary and the general election for federal offices; ranked choice in the primary but not the general for the governorship, yeah. But yes, for the Senate. So there’s a number of other candidates in this race we haven’t even talked about, and they’re already looking to do the—to be the ... Brad— I’m forgetting the other ...

Bacon: Yeah, Brad Lander is the leading person who supported Mamdani.

Seitz-Wald: Right, yes. So there’s already a candidate who’s maybe looking to be the Brad Lander to Platner’s Mamdani in the ranked choice. So that will be an interesting dynamic too.

Bacon: What’s the person’s name?

Seitz-Wald: Jordan Wood.

Bacon: OK, the person who worked for Katie Porter, right?

Seitz-Wald: Correct, yeah—former chief of staff for Katie Porter. He ran End Citizens United, younger guy, moved back to Maine where he’s from. His dad is actually the new pastor at the church near me—because everything’s small.

And there’s a third candidate, who is the CEO of Maine Beer Company, which is a great brewery down in Freeport. He got in—and it’s so funny, you know, a beer brewer, you would think that that would be the most interesting candidate in the race. And he got in literally a week after Platner, but by then it was already like, you know, we’re on to this oyster guy. Sorry, beer man.

Bacon: I hate to ask this question—this is a very D.C. politics question—but I guess Platner has not been vetted in a certain way, right? We don’t know the ... He’s a new person running. There’s not a huge press in Maine, I assume, and he just started running. So on some level, are there any—I hate to say this—but we don’t, like, Susan Collins, Mills, we probably ... there’s been a lot of profiles written about them. Both parties have done investigative opposition research against them. Platner’s a new figure. There’s probably some unknown here, right?

Seitz-Wald: It’s a great question, and that’s my biggest asterisk with him. My two biggest asterisks: Can he actually get the work boots? Is it not just the brunch boots? And the second one is, what’s in his past? Because, yeah, I mean, that’s another thing that’s so unusual, and hard to think of a precedent for this.

Usually, if you’re one of these viral candidates—an Amy McGrath or something—you’re a fighter pilot. You’ve been vetted; you had to maintain a security clearance. Or you’re a CEO, or you’re a local elected official, or even a community leader who runs an important nonprofit. You’re some kind of public figure who has been somewhat vetted by some organization, and likely you’ve run for office, so the opposition has, you know, hired investigators and gone after you, and the press has done what they will with that.

Nothing like that on Platner. He is a total blank slate. And, you know, he’s spoken about coming back from combat tours and struggling, and we just don’t really know what happened in those years. So I suspect we will learn what happened in those years. I just don’t know what’s out there.

Bacon: So, talk about the Midcoast Villager a bit. I don’t know much about it. I’ve been to Portland, Maine—that’s the big city, I think, of Maine. So where are you? Where is your publication? Is it a newspaper? Is it a website? Explain kind of what the Midcoast Villager is, because I think we’re in a place where local media is dying, and I mentioned innovations in local media. So talk about the Midcoast Villager a little bit.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, I’m happy to mansplain a bit. This is—I’ll start out—this is Vern, our mascot of the Midcoast Villager. We are based in Camden, which is about an hour and a half north of Portland on the coast, and we cover Camden, which kind of sits right on two counties, Knox and Waldo County. So we basically cover everything from, like, Damariscotta, where a lot of oysters come from, up to kind of like Bucksport. There’s a bridge—before you get to Acadia, that’s down east, that’s where Graham Platner is from.

So it’s coastal, it’s big fishing and lobstering industries, also a big tourist and kind of second-home scene, huge arts and literary backgrounds. So it’s the kind of place that, if we can make this work anywhere, this is the kind of place that we can make this work—and by “this,” I mean like a new model for local media. But the scary thing there is, if we can’t make it work here, I’m worried. And it’s hard, but it’s really cool.

It’s an area of about 80,000 people, very literate, very community-oriented. People want to know what’s going on. They want to be involved, and they want to read good stuff. It also attracts an unusually high level of talent—amazing other people who joined with me came from New York Magazine and Dwell and have worked in, gone through, like, RISD, and been high-level designers. And everyone really just cares about this product and wants to make it really good.

The idea is that we can’t just tell stories and just be observers anymore—we have to be active members of the community, building community. So we opened this café that’s a physical space to have these conversations. I do office hours in the café—editor’s office hours—where people can just come and pitch a story, or, you know, complain about a headline or anything. We want to be as accessible and transparent as possible.

And it’s also a way to diversify revenue. Our owner owns the building, and he has the café, he has the newsroom, and he also has a little hotel that we’re using for writing retreats. So we just had our first writing retreat—Liz Lenz, if you know her from Iowa, came in and led the retreat. We’re trying to reinvent the model of local journalism because it is just fundamentally broken. It’s even worse than I realized.

I’m about to go this weekend first to the Maine Press Association and then to this national conference in Salt Lake City by this organization, Press Forward, which brings together a lot of innovative local media outlets from all over the country. I’m really looking forward to that—where we can all swap tips and, you know, try to figure this out together.

I’m a journalist—I come from editorial, that’s where my focus and my passion is—but I’m really increasingly seeing that I want to keep working as much on the business side, because we know how to do the journalism. We do the good journalism every single day. It’s figuring out how to make that— not just pay for it, but to make it vital and relevant in people’s lives.

And this is one thing where I disagree with some other views—I don’t think it should just be a purely philanthropically supported thing, where, you know, it’s a good cause. It should be something that people want to pay for. And so it’s a fun challenge and a very hard challenge, but it’s really exciting.

Bacon: And great. On that note, I’m excited about Midcoast Villager. It’s great to have Alex on. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for everybody who tuned into watch, and we’ll be back later in the week. Thanks, Alex.

Seitz-Wald: Thanks so much, Perry.

Bacon: Good to see you, bye-bye.

Maine Senate: Platner-Mills Is a Huge Clash Over the Dems’ Vision - 2025-10-14T12:32:55Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Read the transcript of Perry’s interview with Alex Seitz-Wald here.

Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, announced on Tuesday that she is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Susan Collins. Mills, having twice been elected statewide, is in some ways the perfect candidate for one of the few seats that Democrats have a realistic chance of flipping in next year’s elections. (They need to gain four seats for a Senate majority.) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spent months convincing Mills to run. But she’s not a shoo-in to be Collins’s opponent.

Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner, another Democrat, launched his campaign in August and has drawn both huge crowds in the state and attention nationally. (Read TNR’s Ana-Marie Cox’s excellent profile of Platner.) He’s running on a populist, anti-billionaire platform and has become a favorite of the party’s progressive wing, receiving an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. Platner is “Maine’s Mamdani,” according to Alex Seitz-Wald, deputy editor of a publication there called the Midcoast Villager.

In the latest episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Seitz-Wald discussed how Platner has come out of nowhere to be a phenomenon in the state. Seitz-Wald said the enthusiasm for Platner is real but questioned if Platner has real working-class supporters or if his base is largely college-educated progressives. He noted that Mills is fairly popular but will be bogged by questions about her age (77). Collins, according to Seitz-Wald, still has a very good chance of winning. While the state leans Democratic, Collins has done a great job distancing herself from Trump and building strong ties with local powerbrokers in Maine, he said.

Transcript: MAGA Rage at “No Kings” Boils Over—Exposing Trump as Weak - 2025-10-14T11:27:48Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Editor’s note: After we recorded, Trump’s MAGA-fied Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, joined the anger against “No Kings,” and MAGA influencers chimed in.

Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

It has become very clear that President Donald Trump is really, really worried about the No Kings protests that are scheduled for October 18. Suddenly, multiple Republicans are all using the same disgusting talking point about the protests, referring to them as agitators and terrorists. It sure looks coordinated. They’re all using the same vile language. This really displays extraordinary contempt for our whole political system. Yet we think it’ll backfire. It’ll only prompt the protests to get larger, and there’s nothing Trump hates more than seeing big crowds arrayed against him. Today we’re talking about all this with writer Jill Lawrence, who has a new piece for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of our system and of democratic voters. Jill, thanks for coming on.

Jill Lawrence: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So the No Kings protests are set for next Saturday. Let’s listen to what House speaker Mike Johnson had to say about this.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (voiceover): “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18. The antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all gonna gather on the mall. We got some House Democrats selling t-shirts for this event. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes.”


Sargent: So there you heard Johnson talk about antifa, pro-Hamas, Marxists, Jill. These are American citizens, millions of them exercising their right to peacefully protest. Your response to what you heard there from Johnson?

Lawrence: Well, I’m not surprised. And this is traditional, this is constitutional, this is a right, and they’re trying to turn it into something really evil. But that’s because they’re scared of it, and they know that it turns public opinion.

The problem here is that people like Johnson and the Republicans in Congress aren’t doing their jobs. They’re not putting any checks and balances on the president, and they’re not upholding American values or even American constitutional rights.

So this is where we are. The people have to protest, and I don’t really see this working out the way they hope.

Sargent: Well, they clearly hope for some sort of violence, which either will allow them to respond with violence of their own—state violence—or to demonize the protests as terrorism and extremism. You know, the funny thing about this is, as you alluded to, the more people show up, the more other people feel supported, and it really is a sort of snowballing effect that can take place in these situations. And I think that’s what really worries them.

Lawrence: I think they should be worried, because nothing they’re doing is popular. And people who may support them generally on issues like crime and immigration are seeing how they carry out these policies. And he’s down on his best issues in polls, and the midterms—if they go ahead fairly and freely—will put a check on Trump, at least through the House. So that’s the problem. And the more momentum the protests gather, and the more peaceful they are, and the more it’s obvious that there are troops hanging around with nothing to do except maybe provoke people, then the worse it’s gonna get for them.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to some more GOP rhetoric about this. Here’s representative Tom Emmer.

Representative Tom Emmer: (voiceover) “This is one, this is about one thing and one thing only: to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold as leader Scalise just commented on, a ‘Hate America’ rally in D.C. next week.”


Sargent: And here’s Senator Roger Marshall.

Senator Roger Marshall: (voiceover) “And then October 18 is when the protest gets here. This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protestors show up. The agitators show up. We’ll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it’ll be peaceful. I doubt it.”


Sargent: So, Jill, now not only are they calling protestors “terrorists,” but they’re talking about having to bring in the National Guard to suppress dissent. What do you make of that?

Lawrence: Well, we have the National Guard in D.C. because we don’t have control of our National Guard. And theoretically it’s here to keep people safe. But it’s never a great idea to have armed troops in the middle of an urban area or any area. I mean, we are a civil society. We are not a police state, and, you know, this is just a recipe for tensions. So no, I’m not a fan, and I think it could end badly no matter how peaceful the protesters are. I mean, we’ve all seen what’s going on in Portland and in Chicago—priests getting hit in the head with ammunition.

It’s a powder keg, and that is what Donald Trump wants. And so now he’s got it. And while this is happening, you know, the government is shut. They’re laying people off. They’re doing more and more things that people don’t like, and nothing’s undercover. Everyone knows what’s going on. It’s just so overwhelming that it’s hard to know how to fight, where to put your attention. You know, what’s the best way you can try to stop this?

Sargent: Well, to your point about them wanting something like a police state, or at least the searing civil tensions that are getting unleashed by what Trump is doing, I can’t help but notice that now that Trump is sending in the National Guard to deal with fake emergencies in multiple American cities. It’s now becoming just a casual and routine thing for Republicans to say, “OK, well if you’re going to oppose Donald Trump, well we’re gonna send in the military.” That seems like an ominous development that really shows what’s happening with this party and the Trump era. What do you think?

Lawrence: Well, it’s tremendously ominous, and it’s so different, well, from the Nixon era—which is what I wrote about for The Bulwark. There were not enough Democrats in the Senate to convict Nixon at an impeachment trial, but there were going to be 85 out of 100 votes to convict him. We didn’t pay enough attention when it was happening.

There were a lot of people who weren’t born when it was happening the first time—they never knew about it, they never lived through it. And so now, you know, we have depended on good character in presidents for a couple of centuries, and it hasn’t always worked out very well. And now we’re in a situation where it’s not working out at all, and it may be the end of the republic as we know it.

And so this calls out for huge structural reforms and lots of guardrails, and I’m not sure most Americans realize that this is necessary and what it will take to get them. I’m not sure most politicians even realize that.

Sargent: Well, since you brought up your piece, I wanna read a great line from it. “Nixon was driven by an enemies list and a quest for revenge. In the end, it crushed him. Now we have a president who thrives on hate and vengeance, whose enemies list extends beyond individuals to entire blue states and cities filled with Democrats.”

That’s really nicely done. This is the hallmark of MAGA and Trumpism, really, which is that they fundamentally treat large swaths of the United States as an enemy country within. Can you talk about that?

Lawrence: This was happening during his first term. And maybe Republicans liked that he was treating Democrats badly. Maybe they liked the way he talked about Democratic governors and said, if you’re not nice to me, I won’t give you COVID supplies. I mean, it was really obnoxious. Did they like the way he threw towels at Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria?

You know, it was just—he never made a secret of being on his own team and playing against the other team. And it was such a contrast to Barack Obama and the whole, there’s no red America and no blue America, there’s the United States of America. So it was this whole different, very overt partisanship. And if you don’t vote for me, and if you’re not nice to me, I’m gonna cut off your projects. And so we see that—I want to say on steroids, which is a cliché—it’s even worse than that.

I mean, he’s stopping projects in blue states that would lower costs for electricity and other types of expenses. And he is putting tariffs on everything and sending away crop workers and immigrants who pick our fruit and vegetables. And in that respect, some of what he’s doing is broad brush because, you know, you can’t get more agricultural than Iowa, and he wrecked their soybean market last time around. And now he is doing wholesale tariffs across the country and across many, many products, not just agricultural.

So the economy is gonna be tanking, before long. We’re gonna be going back to some—one century, two centuries, three—you know, our research is being cut. And now we have RFK Jr., who—you know, the irony of some of these steps that he’s taking, as I mentioned, is that it’s the red states that are gonna be hurt the most. It’s the red states that are gonna listen to RFK Jr. talk about how vaccines could hurt you, you know, or even kill you. It’s the red states that are the agricultural states. So, I mean, it should by all rights backfire, and yet too many people have too big a stake in it all.

Sargent: Well, I wanna pick up on what you said there, because it really gets at another hallmark of MAGA, which is that they are absolutely screwing over their own people every which way—from the tariffs, to the government shutdown, to the ACA subsidies expiring. In every conceivable way, they’re screwing the shit out of their people.

But they are selling to their people the notion that they’re making Democratic areas suffer. So you really see this with Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought. He’s now crowing about the fact that he’s going to pursue layoffs. He’s canceling the funding for programs and projects that are in Democratic areas.

But at the same time, it turns out that vulnerable House Republicans are seeing some projects canceled in their districts. It’s almost comic, in a way—if it weren’t so disgusting. The way, the fundamental approach of MAGA is to say, “Oh, don’t worry about how badly we’re fucking you, because we’re making the people we’re telling you to hate suffer.”

Lawrence: You know, it’s very interesting. I don’t know if you saw the other day that Vivek Ramaswamy—he used to be in the inner circle and now is running for office in Ohio—said, let’s stop owning the libs. He said, you know, essentially that’s not enough for a political party, you know. He said, let’s be less confrontational.

It was amazing to me. I mean, I guess now he doesn’t owe anybody anything anymore, so he can say what he wants, but he did say that. I’m not saying this is gonna be a sea change here—it’s just him so far—but maybe people are gonna realize that that shouldn’t really be the point of your political policies.

Sargent: Trump is deeply unpopular. He’s failing on multiple fronts. His presidency is a disaster. The economy is is on the skids. The tariffs are a catastrophe. He’s admitting, and his own agencies—the Labor Department is admitting—that his mass deportations are screwing the economy in various ways. He’s underwater on his big issue of immigration. He’s underwater on the economy. He’s underwater on everything. He’s got a really low approval rating.

And MAGA and Republicans aren’t allowed to acknowledge that, so any sign of opposition to Trump has to be immediately put in the box of, oh, these are just terrorists and extremists. ’Cause nobody’s allowed to admit that, that the despot is failing.

They’re obviously gonna try and supercharge tensions around these peaceful protests to whatever degree they can. I think they’re likely to fail. We’re gonna see very large, peaceful demonstrations.

But it just occurs to me that Trump and MAGA and the right-wing media, and the MAGA media figures in that whole ecosystem—they just don’t care about being perceived as arrayed against Americans. It just—it’s only a positive in their bubble. And that seems like a really, really serious place to be.

Lawrence: They’ve successfully turned everything inside out because, you know, their line is that these are ‘Hate America’ rallies. These are people who hate America, when they’re the ones who are destroying it. And they’re the ones who are applying labels to people. I mean, they—they’ve been burying for years, since Trump’s first term, any reports or indicators that right-wing violence is the greatest danger, that right-wing extremism is the most common kind of violence in this country. And they don’t want to admit it, and they won’t let their supporters learn about it.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, so how do you see this all playing out in the end? I expect largely peaceful protests. I suppose—God forbid—there could be incidents here and there, but my suspicion is that the story will be that the Republican warnings were just all pure bullshit.

The problem, though, is that in their media ecosystem they will just seize on some little incident to make it true that these protests were violent. So there’s no point at which they ever, ever are held accountable—not by their own media sources, anyway. The only conceivable way we can hold them accountable is with enormous turnout at these rallies and then with a victory in 2026, right? Is there any other way out?

Lawrence: Well, we see what’s going on in Portland, with all the sort of cartoon-character costumes being depicted as violent extremists. And, you know, it’s almost laughable, as you said. But they have people believing—as Trump said recently—that there are no stores with regular windows in Portland, that everything is boards in the windows. Well, that’s not how Portland sees it. They go shopping all the time at stores with windows. But, you know, you’re up against a lot here. You’re up against a president not only with a bully pulpit, but with a bunch of people who believe everything he says. So I think you’re right: In numbers, there can be evidence.

What makes me very upset—and I don’t want to make this any more depressing than it already is—but, I mean, we’re coming onto the 250th anniversary of our country, when all of these rights were defined and set out and thought to be permanent—as permanent as we could make them. And so I really hope that these protests work out, that people keep their heads—and I include the National Guard troops and anyone else there in a law-enforcement capacity—because they can’t be happy about having to do this, most of them. So hopefully everyone is calm, and we get through this, and it’s a great demonstration of opposition to the administration.

Sargent: Folks, the right answer to them calling you terrorists is to turn out in as much force as you possibly can. Jill Lawrence, thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Lawrence: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Jafar Panahi’s Revenge Road Trip Masterpiece - 2025-10-14T10:00:00Z

“I’m not that brave,” the Iranian director Jafar Panahi told Film Comment in an interview earlier this year. “I’m just doing my job. I’m making my films…. I feel a bit embarrassed when this is seen as courage.”

Such humility is becoming in any filmmaker, especially one clutching a Palme d’Or. The citation, bestowed at Cannes upon Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, gave the 65-year-old director a lifetime sweep of the world’s top film festival prizes, along with a Golden Bear from Berlin and a Lion from Venice. Panahi’s modesty serves as an extension of the humane sensibility that suffuses his films—an empathy that transcends simple technique. It also belies the obvious and lamentable fact that Panahi has had a very hard time doing his job for some while now.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution didn’t just transform the Iranian film industry. It rendered it a shadow of its former self, with directors forced to observe strict limitations on form and content in the name of religious purity. Panahi began working as an army cinematographer in the early 1980s, enrolling in film school after his military service and producing a series of television documentaries before shooting his beguiling, child’s-eye debut, The White Balloon, in 1995. He is a fluid, intuitive storyteller and a conscientious social critic; he has a gift for crafting deceptively conceptual story structures and for making the quotidian signify beyond itself.

Rather than submit to the dictates of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance—where the buck stops for filmmakers in search of official support or theatrical distribution—Panahi has continually striven for creative freedom, whether via procedural ruses like submitting fake scripts for committee approval or else by ignoring the authorities’ input entirely. The extravagant praise bestowed on his films by international critics has, predictably, served to exacerbate his perceived enemy-of-the-state status at home; in 2010, following a series of increasingly public skirmishes with the authorities, Panahi was detained and imprisoned by the Iranian government on charges of disseminating propaganda against the regime. He was sentenced to six years in prison (a stretch eventually reduced to house arrest) and also a 20-year ban on travel, foreign media interviews, and filmmaking of any kind. The latter, it seemed, was a cruel and unusual punishment: an edict designed both to staunch a fearless artist’s output, and also to break his spirit.

It didn’t work—at all. Throughout the 2010s, Panahi conjured up a series of small, clandestinely shot films that dramatized, fictionalized, and allegorized his experiences, often with a wry sense of humor. The Magritte-inspired title of Panahi’s 2011 masterpiece This Is Not a Film, a ruefully funny video diary primarily shot on an ­iPhone in the director’s apartment, precisely annotated the nature of its maker’s resistance: It proclaimed that he was following the rules set down from on high even as he was breaking them, an act of cinematic sleight of hand in manacles, and with his fingers crossed slyly behind his back.

Jafar Panahi at the Toronto International Film Festival in September

“Nothing can prevent me from making films since when being pushed to the ultimate corners I connect with my inner self,” said Panahi in 2015. “Despite all limitations, the necessity to create becomes even more of an urge.”

That urgency can be felt throughout It Was Just an Accident, which is the first movie that Panahi has made on the other side of his filmmaking ban, as well as his first since being released from a seven-month stint in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2023. (He was jailed for inquiring about the status of a fellow anti-establishment director, Mohammad Rasoulof.) Technically, It Was Just an Accident is the work of a free man, but it feels more obsessive than liberated, as it plunges deeply into the minutiae and metaphysics of imprisonment. In formal terms, it might be Panahi’s most conventional piece of work since the 1990s, but accessibility shouldn’t be mistaken for compromise. It’s a bristling, brilliant piece of work: a swift and rollicking comic thriller whose autobiographical subtext lies under the surface, like an engine beneath a chassis, or a body stowed in the trunk.


Things begin innocuously enough. We open on a prosperous-looking family puttering their way back to the city down a country road at night, their car’s interior illuminated from within by the glow of a little girl’s iPad. The driver, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is middle-aged and handsome, framed head-on through the car’s windshield, a camera setup nodding directly to Iranian art-film tradition (including Panahi’s own Taxi). Suddenly, there’s a bump in the road. Eghbal has driven over a dog. He doesn’t seem too broken up about it. “What will be will be,” sighs his wife. “God surely put it on our path for a reason.” “He killed a dog,” replies her daughter evenly from the back seat. “God has nothing to do with it.”

Like his wife—who, it turns out, is pregnant with their second child— Eghbal may be a true believer, but he isn’t given any opportunities of his own to opine about divine intervention. Rather, he’s swiftly reduced to a prop: drugged, battered dead weight, trussed-up and locked away in the back of a van driven by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), the film’s true protagonist. Vahid was working the late shift at a roadside warehouse when Eghbal brought in his wrecked car for repairs; watching from the shadows, Vahid recognized the interloper’s voice—and the squeaking of his prosthetic leg—as belonging to the notorious torturer at Evin known colloquially as “Peg Leg.” Vahid is a quiet man with no desire to revisit his past, but one accident begets another. What will be will be. The question: Did God put Peg Leg in Vahid’s path for a reason? Or does God have nothing to do with it?

There is one obvious precedent for Panahi’s scenario: Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s acclaimed play Death and the Maiden, in which an ex-political radical suffering PTSD reencounters—and then abducts—the Pinochet stooge who brutalized her behind closed doors. That play was adapted for the screen (very effectively) by Roman Polanski in 1994, but the movie that came to mind more for me during It Was Just an Accident—a good deal of which is set inside Vahid’s vehicle as it winds its way through town, taking on passengers at regular intervals—was Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, which stands at the very apex of the New Iranian Cinema. In Kiarostami’s film, a man named Mr. Badii drives around in search of a stranger who will agree to quietly bury him after he commits suicide; his peregrinations provide a microcosmic glimpse at the surrounding society. The same picaresque principle applies to Panahi’s film, but where the hitchhikers and bystanders in Taste of Cherry are reluctant to abet a religiously forbidden act of self-negation, Vahid’s fellow passengers—a bookseller, a bride-to-be, a wedding photographer, and a construction worker—are all ex-detainees like himself. They express a shared desire to dance on Peg Leg’s grave, which has already been dug in the middle of the desert, much like the one for Mr. Badii.

It is a thin line between parable-like simplicity and outright contrivance, and It Was Just an Accident circumnavigates its chosen route smartly; the slight bumpiness of the dramaturgy works in a story where the man at the wheel isn’t always sure where he’s headed. Panahi has written the script to have a sense of the absurd; at one point, a character name-checks Beckett, and there are various satirical threads woven through the storyline. Vahid pays off a pair of skeptical security guards via a portable card reader—a bit of business that gets repeated later on at a hospital. At least the bribery is convenient: no cash required. Throughout, Panahi cultivates a strain of mordant comedy around the problems of transporting a body through a busy city (this is surely the first Palme winner to evoke Weekend at Bernie’s). There’s also humor in the group’s sputtering, fractious interactions, but it’s rooted in authentic trauma. “He made me feel his rotten leg with a blindfold on, to prove his exploits in their fucking holy war,” moans Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), the construction worker, after examining the unconscious Eghbal’s body. “I’ve been running my hand over his leg for five years, in my nightmares.”

Hamid is ready to wring Eghbal’s neck where he lies and stands appalled by the idea of offering mercy to a man who destroyed so many lives. Others are more cautious, whether out of guilt, or doubt, or a sense of self-preservation. Shiva (Mariam Afshari), the wedding photographer, cannot be sure that the man in the van is Peg Leg. Like Vahid and Hamid, she never saw his face in prison. Moreover, she doesn’t know what should be done with him even in the case of a positive ID. Their captive is, after all, a husband and a father; when Eghbal’s cell phone inevitably rings, it’s his daughter—the little angel who mourned that poor dead dog—calling with news of an emergency that reroutes the movie’s plot (and the audience’s sympathies) while spiking the tension about whether or not the group has passed the point of no return.

There’s an element of gauntlet-dropping to Shiva’s character: Afshari is the first woman to appear in one of Panahi’s films without a mandatory hijab, and her vibe—thoughtful and cosmopolitan beneath a fashionable shank of silvering hair—makes her a complex avatar of social change, especially in a movie that maps the collateral damage of principled resistance. (In a nicely calibrated irony, Vahid’s van resembles those of the so-called morality police, whose remit is to enforce religious dress codes.) It’s Shiva who tries the hardest to pump the brakes on Vahid’s plan, and yet she also ends up delivering the film’s most harrowing speech, an outburst of pure fury that gives the impression of Panahi—who has necessarily had to play himself on-screen, for the last 15 years or so—addressing his captors through a distaff surrogate.

This penultimate sequence—lit expressionistically by deep-crimson brake lights and captured in a single, static, unblinking take—represents some of the most remarkable staging and direction of Panahi’s career; it sears through the screen, and lifts the veil, already thin and fluttering, on the film’s fiction. The coda, meanwhile, suggests a different kind of exposure, a gaping psychic wound that neither time nor distance will ever quite suture shut. The final moments find a key character paralyzed with fear and doubt, rooted to the spot as his past creeps up on him, one creaky footstep at a time. We’ll never know if he’s able to move on; the bravery of Panahi’s film lies in its maker’s own refusal to be overtaken. The movie is evidence of his mobility. He pushes forward, with his camera in hand: another job well done.

The Lawyers Who Gave Up Big Money to Fight Trump - 2025-10-14T10:00:00Z

While lawsuits against the Trump administration are nothing new—one law journal at NYU School of Law currently counts 434 legal challenges to the Trump administration—if you look closely, you’ll see that there’s been an uptick in a particular kind of case in the last few months: suits from high-profile public office holders like Lisa Cook fighting removal from their posts. And if you look even closer, you’ll see that these cases share a very specific kind of attorney—former Big Law lawyers who took leave of their former firms right after their paymasters started capitulating to Trump’s attacks on the legal industry.

In case you are unfamiliar, the term “Big Law” refers to the 100 or so most prestigious and profitable law firms in the United States. When Trump began his assault on these firms this past February, he was breaking virtually every legal and political taboo that existed. But it was the weakness of character of so many of these industry leaders that ultimately proved to be the biggest surprise.

It began on February 25, when Trump issued a memorandum calling out the firm Covington & Burling for representing Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who helped to investigate Trump and build criminal cases against him in relation to the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack and his mishandling of government records. On March 6, Trump followed up that memorandum with his first official executive order targeting a major law firm, in this case Perkins Coie.

The executive order was not exactly shy about the reasons that Trump was targeting Perkins Coie—it referred to the firm’s association with both Hillary Clinton and George Soros in the first few sentences—and sought to punish the firm in various ways, including by stripping the lawyers who worked there of security clearances and directing the termination of any existing government contracts with the firm. Trump then followed up with orders targeting several other firms for similar reasons.

These orders shocked the legal industry in several ways. The frontal assault caught the industry by surprise. While lawyers are used to representing clients in the firing zone, they are far less used to being in the firing zone themselves. Additionally, the fact that the administration brought such a weak legal case against exactly the category of people—high-powered litigators—who were best suited to beat it was thoroughly unexpected. The administration’s brazen unconstitutionality, which was egregious even by Trump’s standards, was just the icing on the cake.

Part of what made these orders so egregiously unconstitutional was that Trump was clearly using his presidential power for personal retaliation. But from a legal perspective, what was even more grievous was the fact that Trump had launched a hot war against the legal system itself. By going after not only his political enemies but the lawyers who represented them, Trump was stating loud and clear that he did not believe that his opponents deserved the same legal rights as his allies. This undercut a fundamental tenet of American democracy—equal access to the law, regardless of viewpoint—and constituted one of his most serious attacks on the rule of law to date.

But the most appalling part of this whole sordid conflict? The speed with which most of these high-powered firms immediately decided to roll over and play dead.

The first to go was Paul Weiss, which had previously been a firm that proudly touted both its litigation expertise and its ties to various Democratic causes, and which made a deal with Trump less than a week after he issued an executive order targeting the firm. The next firm to capitulate was Skadden Arps, which is regularly ranked as one of the top three most prestigious firms in the whole country. Then came Wilkie Farr, then Millbank; and then the rest of them began to fall like dominoes—including Kirkland & Ellis, which is the largest law firm not just in the United States but in the whole world.

When all was said and done, 11 of the most prestigious law firms in the country had made deals with Trump. Perhaps most astonishingly, most of these firms sought out Trump preemptively, seeking to make deals with him before he ever actually took any action against them, effectively making promises to get him to stop doing something that he hadn’t yet done—hardly the kind of behavior that one would expect from the country’s top-paid dealmakers. Even Trump was surprised at how quickly these firms rolled over—and for Trump to be surprised at his own success, the ground he was standing on must have been tenuous indeed.

What was also surprising was just how bad these deals were, both in terms of their vagueness and in terms of how unfavorable they were toward the firms. When pressed by Congress for details of what their deal contained, the firm Milbank just told Congress to go look at Trump’s post on Truth Social for the entire contents of the deal. Another firm, A&O Shearman, told Congress to go look at an email that had been reprinted in an industry trade magazine behind a paywall—not exactly a model of effective and diligent advocacy. The vague terms that did exist were incredibly unfavorable to the firms, including not only a commitment on behalf of the firms to do away with various diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives but the promise to devote nearly a billion dollars of the firms’ collective services toward causes of Trump’s choosing for free—in exchange for no express promises on Trump’s part whatsoever.

These deals received a huge amount of public scrutiny and condemnation, both from the legal community and from the public at large. This led to a number of efforts from various parties to hold the capitulating firms accountable for their cowardliness, including: law students organizing to deprive the capitulating firms of access to talent; the aforementioned congressional inquiry into the firms’ behavior (an inquiry that was just resurrected a couple weeks ago); and, perhaps most significantly, a not-so-quiet exodus of lawyers who were so fed up with their firms’ capitulation that they got up and left their six- and seven-figure salaries behind.


One of the earliest and loudest of the attorneys to leave was Rachel Cohen, an associate at Skadden, who began agitating for Skadden to fight back as she saw other firms begin to capitulate. She went so far as to post her conditional notice of resignation to LinkedIn, declaring publicly that she would leave her position at Skadden if the firm did not agree to fight back.

When the firm did not agree to fight back, two more Skadden associates—Brenna Frey and Thomas Sipp—followed in Cohen’s footsteps shortly thereafter, also making public statements regarding their unwillingness to continue working at a firm that would not stand up for the rule of law. Then associates at other capitulating firms began to exit, as well: Siunik Moradian and Taylor Wettach both left Simpson Thacher, with Moradian sending an internal email stating that the firm was “kissing the ring of authoritarianism.” Andrew Silberstein left Wilkie Farr after sending a similar email that stated, “The principles this firm purportedly valued over the years I’ve worked here are now so deeply compromised.” Nathaniel Zelinksy left Milbank around the same time; the list goes on.

Nor was the phenomenon confined to associates. Peter Davis, a partner at Latham & Watkins, decamped from the firm for a new partnership a few months after his firm made a deal; Damian Williams similarly abandoned his partnership at Paul Weiss around the same time. Paul Weiss—the first firm to capitulate—also saw an additional four litigation partners leave to start a new firm … which then immediately hired another three partners and three associates away from their former firm. Steven Banks, the head of pro bono at the firm, left after making a statement that he felt he belonged “on the front lines fighting for the things that I have believed in.” Meanwhile, at Wilkie Farr there was a “mass exodus” of partners over the course of the summer after the firm’s deal with Trump. And Cadwalader has lost at least 10 partners and nearly 40 total attorneys this year since it made its deal with Trump.

In the world of Big Law, this kind of movement is extraordinary. Getting a job at a Big Law firm is a bit like getting a golden ticket. It gives you the best résumé line in the industry and the possibility of working anywhere you want after. It promises to hone you into one of the best lawyers in the world. It puts you on a salary ladder that starts at $250K a year and ends at per-partner profits of roughly $6 million a year (at Skadden, at least). These are not jobs that people leave lightly—particularly when you add in the need to pay back the $130,000 in debt that the average law student carries with them after graduation. And yet the few months after these firms made their deals with Trump saw a veritable flood of lawyers running away from these coveted positions.

But the most striking part was not what these lawyers were running from—it’s what these lawyers were running to.

This movement of lawyers away from the capitulating law firms was highly directed, with many of them ending up at organizations that were expressly devoted to fighting the fights that their former firms wouldn’t. This included not only existing firms but brand-new organizations devoted to defending the rule of law—organizations that are now handling much of this new wave of litigation on behalf of high-profile public servants suing Trump over their jobs.

Lowell & Associates is one such organization. It is a firm that was launched this past May, headed by a veteran Washington lawyer. Lowell quickly scooped up two of the aforementioned Skadden associates (Cohen and Frey) who publicly quit in protest. The firm’s self-stated mission? “The provision of pro bono and public interest representation in matters that defend the integrity of the legal system and protect individuals and institutions from government overreach and other threats to fundamental rights.” They are currently representing Lisa Cook, three senior FBI agents who were fired for improper political reasons, and Susan Monarez, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

The Washington Litigation Group is another firm that emerged in the months following Big Law’s Big Capitulation. It is a new “boutique non-profit firm” that was launched this past August, and whose stated mission is to “represent individuals and institutions who have been unlawfully targeted for exercising their rights.” It hired Nathaniel Zelinsky, an associate who left Milbank in the aftermath of the deal, and is currently representing three members of the Financial Oversight Management Board who were improperly relieved of their positions; Tara Twomey, who was ousted from her position as the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees; and Cathy Harris, a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board who was removed by Trump from her post, among others.

There are also organizations that have built out new capacities that expressly take advantage of all this Big Law talent, such as the new appellate practice at Democracy Forward. Democracy Forward is a “national legal organization that advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy and public education, and regulatory engagement” that was formed as an express response to Trump’s election in 2016, and has been at the forefront of recent litigation against Trump. Its new appellate practice was launched in August—and then immediately hired a number of big-name former Big Law partners. They are now representing Shira Perlmutter, whom Trump removed from her position as register and director of the U.S. Copyright Office; Alvin Brown, who was removed from his post as vice chair of the National Transportation Safety Board; and Jocelyn Samuels, who was removed from her position as commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, among others.

Then there are all the lawyers who fled the capitulating firms for organizations that, while not new, have nevertheless taken up the fights from which the capitulating firms fled. Jenner & Block—one of only four Big Law firms targeted by Trump that actually fought back (along with my former firm, WilmerHale)—has been a destination for many. It is now home not only to former partners from Latham & Watkins and Paul Weiss but the “mass exodus” of partners from Wilkie Farr. And the new firm started by former Paul Weiss attorneys, Dunn Isaacson Rhee, makes it clear on its website where the firm stands: “While others may shy away from difficult cases, we seek them out. We’re not afraid of big fights, powerful opponents, or hard challenges.” Heavy emphasis on the “others.”

In short, Trump’s attacks on law firms—dire as they were for the rule of law itself—seem to have had an entirely unexpected effect: He’s pushing a large number of lawyers away from the biggest-name firms and into positions that are better aligned with traditional lawyerly principles.


A Big Law firm is a mess of contradictions. On the one side, there is the ideal that every lawyer learns in law school: A lawyer is someone who represents the rule of law at its best and constitutes an essential part of the American legal system. And on the other side, there is the harsh reality that these firms are massively profitable businesses that care primarily about protecting those profits. Trump’s attack, and the industry’s divided response, exposed this contradiction very publicly for the first time—and in the case of the capitulating firms, made it very clear where those firms stand.

This seems like it was sufficient to prompt significant numbers of attorneys not only to give up these plum positions but to alter the course of their careers toward pro-democracy causes to such an extent that a series of new organizations have been created—organizations that are not quite Big Law firms and not quite a direct service organization either, but something that combines some of the best attributes of both. This is a striking development, particularly in an industry that is not exactly known for its rapid innovation.

It is difficult to say with certainty if it is the existence of these new organizations that has enabled so many public servants like Lisa Cook and Rebecca Slaughter to affirmatively take their fight to Trump, or whether these firms are simply good at being in the right place at the right time. But the degree to which this particular type of litigation has increased in tandem with these new organizations’ involvement certainly suggests that there is some correlation.

Regardless, it seems that an unexpected countermovement to Trump’s authoritarian overreach may have begun in a place not exactly known for its underdog resistance: the highest-paid echelons of the legal industry. And with young legal talent clearly moved by this issue, there is even hope that it may continue to grow.

In short, by doing something so blatantly unconstitutional that nobody else ever dared to do it—attack lawyers for representing his political opponents—Trump inadvertently may have managed to do the one thing no one else thought possible: make highly paid lawyers stand up for what they believe in.

Another Nobel Prize That Trump Will Never Win: Economics - 2025-10-14T10:00:00Z

If the awarding of any Nobel this past week can be read as a rebuke to President Donald Trump, it isn’t the Peace Prize. The notion of Trump as Peace Prize laureate was always grotesque. As TNR’s Alex Shephard noted, Gaza or no Gaza, “he is running an increasingly violent, murderous, and despotic government.” And anyway, the actual winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, sees herself as a Trump ally.

No, it’s the awarding of a Nobel Prize in economics to Northwestern’s Joel Mokyr (along with Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and Peter Howitt of Brown) that’s the real spit in Trump’s eye.

This rebuke may not seem obvious, given that press coverage of the award focuses mostly on Aghion and Howitt’s mathematical models of “creative destruction,” the economic principle Joseph Schumpeter introduced in 1942. Destruction is one of the Trump administration’s favorite pursuits as it targets government agencies and rival power centers.

But let’s clear up a misconception. Silicon Valley egomaniacs and, I suspect, Project 2025 architect and White House budget chief Russell Vought wrongly think Schumpeter intended to praise destruction by calling it “creative.” Not true! As I explained in my 2023 review of Samuel W. Franklin’s underappreciated book The Cult of Creativity, “creative” was not, at the time Schumpeter wrote, a term of praise. It was, rather, a neutral adjective that meant “tending to create.” An act of disruption is no work of art.

In any case, Mokyr’s work runs in a different direction. Mokyr is interested not in what must be destroyed for economic growth to flourish, but rather in what must be present. Very high on Mokyr’s list is that MAGA bête noire the university.

The rise of universities, Mokyr writes in A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (2016), enabled “the sons of the elite” to gain exposure to “information and beliefs beyond their early socialization” and “be exposed to intellectual innovations.” Mokyr notes that the University of Wittenberg, then “barely 15 years old,” employed a professor named Martin Luther who nailed 95 theses to the church door; that Galileo “did some of his best work at the University of Padua,” where William Harvey and Nicolaus Copernicus were also graduates; and that the University of Leyden was instrumental in the spread of Newtonian physics.

“Progressive universities rose and fell,” Mokyr observes, “and few remained innovative over the very long haul. But because they were numerous … it was rare that there was not some innovative activity taking place at some university in Europe. When such intellectual innovation occurred, central authorities had difficulty suppressing it.”

The “notable technological ideas” incubated by university lectures, Mokyr observes in The Lever of Riches (1990), include:

Tesla’s polyphase electrical motor, inspired by a professor at the Graz Polytechnic; Hall’s aluminum smelting technique, which was begun after a professor at Oberlin College mentioned the possibility; and Diesel’s engine, which was first clearly defined in his mind during a lecture at the Munich Polytechnic.

Like the Beach Boys said: Be true to your school!

None of these observations may strike you as earth-shattering, but Mokyr argues that universities and other institutional components to what he calls the “Republic of Letters” (monasteries were another) were far more essential to the uniquely strong sustained economic growth in the West during the last few hundred years than is generally recognized.

He would appear to believe that’s even more true today. In a 2008 interview with Peter Marsh of the Financial Times, Mokyr said that America’s lousy mean scores in science and technology, unfortunate though they may be, will have no bearing on its prospects for future economic growth. “What matters is we have Caltech and MIT,” Mokyr said. “It is the top 0.1 percent of smart people, the whizzkids and brilliant geeks, who will move the world.”

MIT, you probably heard, is in the news because on Friday it became the first to reject Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which was sent to nine research universities: Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona.

The compact is Mokyr’s worst nightmare. It conditions future federal funding on limiting foreign students to 15 percent; allowing the federal government to dictate criteria for admissions, curricula, grading, hiring, gender identity, tuition, and student protests; agreeing, at the wealthier universities, not to charge any tuition to students in the hard sciences (except for “families of substantial means”); and remaining silent on “societal and political events.”

In her reply, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that to the extent the compact is intended to reward merit in admissions, open doors to students who can’t afford to pay tuition, and encourage free expression, MIT already does that. But “the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” as opposed to an institution’s willingness to “restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.”

This is all part of Trump’s much larger war on universities, including the cutoff of $4 billion in grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Medicine; revocation of visas for more than 300 students said to have taken part in demonstrations protesting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; a shakedown of Columbia University for $200 million and assorted concessions, including the government-approved appointment of a university monitor; the freezing of $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University, which a federal judge last month ordered unfrozen; and so on.

If you think any of this is motivated by sincere concern about antisemitic incidents on campus (and yes, there has been an increase) then you haven’t been paying attention. Trump has a history of tolerating antisemitism in his own administration that is unmatched in modern memory, including from the Sieg-Heiling Elon Musk.

The real reason Trump is punishing America’s research universities is that voters in those communities don’t support him, whereas voters who lack a college degree increasingly do. Trump’s share of the non-college vote rose from 49 percent in 2016 to 51 percent in 2020 to 56 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, public confidence in universities, which approached 60 percent a decade ago, has dropped to 42 percent, according to Gallup. It was an even lower 36 percent in 2024, the year of Trump’s reelection.

The reasons for this decline are not as straightforward (wokeism, elitism) as is often supposed. A lot of the resentment has to do with rising tuition costs at state universities, which means that a lot of academia’s detractors, far from wanting to hurt universities, just want to get in. And indeed, 56 percent of the public doesn’t support Trump’s war on higher education, according to a May poll by the Associated Press. The Republican base, though, loves it, with about 80 percent telling AP they approved of Trump’s higher-ed policies. That was higher approval than Republicans gave Trump for his handling of the economy.

But if Mokyr’s work is right, then we aren’t going to have a strong economy if we let our colleges and universities go to seed. The United States is the world’s leader in higher education, but according to Inside Higher Education, that lead was slipping even before Trump started slashing university grants and revoking foreign-student visas. As recently as 2018, 125 American universities placed among the top 500 in the world. In 2025, that’s down to 102. If this trend continues, the United States won’t just lose its preeminence in higher education; it will lose its preeminence in the global economy.

That’s how I read Mokyr. By giving him a Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is telling Trump that his undermining of American universities is lousy economics. I doubt he’ll notice, but this is the real insult—and it’s richly deserved.

Has the Supreme Court Abandoned Originalism? - 2025-10-14T10:00:00Z

The Supreme Court is poised to deliver a series of rulings this term that dramatically expand President Donald Trump’s powers. Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues will likely claim that they are faithfully applying the original public intent of the Constitution, as their professed interpretive method of originalism demands.

A growing number of conservative legal scholars and self-identified originalists disagree with the court’s Trump-friendly jurisprudence. The most recent addition is Caleb Nelson, a University of Virginia law professor, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, and an avowed originalist. He recently wrote a widely read article critiquing the court’s approach to the unitary executive theory and sketching out an alternative view of the president’s removal power.

As The New York Times’ Adam Liptak noted this week, Nelson is frequently cited by the Supreme Court’s conservative justices for his work in this area, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh even including him on a list of “respected scholars” who study the Constitution’s original meaning. That makes it all the more noteworthy that he has dismantled the justices’ prevailing approach toward the separation of powers—and, indeed, toward the fundamental nature of the American constitutional order.

In the Roberts court’s view, the presidency is a unique and unparalleled office in that constitutional order. The unitary executive theory’s premise is twofold. First, the president has absolute control over the executive branch’s functions and decisions unless otherwise explicitly constrained by the Constitution. Second, the legislative and judicial branches cannot interfere in the executive branch’s internal workings through subpoenas, investigations, oversight measures, regulations, and so on.

The theory’s proponents, whom Nelson calls “unitarians,” point to the vesting clause of Article 2, which vests the “executive power” in a “president of the United States,” as well as writings by the Framers that refer to an “energetic” executive who is able to effectively channel the democratic will of the people who elected him. They claim this is the natural order of things and the last century or so—they are usually vague on the exact date—is an aberration.

Our current situation is the unitary executive theory in action. Trump has claimed that he can fire anyone in the executive branch at will and without legal or judicial recourse, even if Congress passed laws protecting officeholders from unjustified removal. He has seized Congress’s power of the purse by blocking congressional appropriations at will, dismantling and shuttering agencies and departments established by Congress, and spending money from his likely illegal tariffs to fund programs during a shutdown.

In perhaps the most constitutionally alarming move, Trump has even signaled that he will keep paying soldiers this week during the government shutdown despite a lack of congressionally authorized funds. (Other Pentagon outlays will be transferred instead.) The Framers went to great lengths to ensure that Congress would maintain civilian control of the military by controlling its funding. Trump has obliterated that 250-year-old check on the armed forces’ power with a single stroke.

This is a stark, zero-sum vision of constitutional power where the branches can only check each other through hard means like impeachment and removal. The theory is also largely hogwash, as Nelson articulates much more politely. Most of his article is focused on the problems as applied to the removal-power question, but his reasoning applies in other contexts as well.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has leaned heavily on a few vague and dubious sources to articulate its expansive view of presidential power. “The President’s power to remove—and thus supervise—those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text of Article II, was settled by the First Congress, and was confirmed in the landmark [1927] decision Myers v. United States,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2020 case that eliminated for-cause removal protections for the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Article 2 does not mention a removal power. Nelson began with the basic observation that all federal agencies and officials are the creations of Congress, and it is Congress that defines those offices’ duties, powers, and responsibilities. While the president can nominate people to fill top-level positions in those agencies and departments, it is also Congress—through the Senate—that confirms them. The president’s power over them, Nelson argued, is much more limited than it seems:

When officers are duly appointed pursuant to the Appointments Clause, moreover, the Constitution requires the President to “Commission” them—which, in the case of executive officers, entails either conferring executive power on them or attesting to the executive power that their appointments confer. To my way of thinking, neither the Vesting Clause nor anything else in Article II compels the inference that after officers have been duly appointed, and after the President has issued the commissions that the Constitution requires, the President must be able to terminate the appointments and rescind the commissions at will, or to dictate how all such officers must use any discretion that the law attempts to give them.

The Constitution gives presidents the power to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” which Trump and some of his predecessors have cited as the source of much broader powers over these officials. Nelson counters that Congress’s powers through the Necessary and Proper Clause allow it to grant removal powers to the president if it deems them necessary to that faithful execution of the law.

How does this work in practice? Members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors cannot be removed from office by the president except for cause. The Trump administration has challenged this limit while trying to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook by arguing that Congress is unconstitutionally limiting the president’s constitutional power to remove officials. Nelson’s interpretation suggests that it’s actually the other way around: To whatever extent Trump can remove Cook from her position, it is only because Congress granted him the power to do so. (Nelson does not address the merits of Cook’s dismissal or the particulars of the case.)

Roberts’s claim that the removal power was “settled by the First Congress” is a reference to what he and others call the “Decision of 1789.” The First Congress debated a bill that would establish the “secretary of foreign affairs”—now known as the secretary of state—and a provision on whether the president could remove them from office. Lawmakers ultimately scrapped the removal provision, which led some—including then–Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former president, in his Myers ruling—to conclude that Congress had implicitly recognized a presidential removal power.

Not so, said Nelson. He concluded that the First Congress had not settled on any one coherent position on removal. “In any event, even some members of later Congresses who agreed that the point had been ‘settled’ came to believe that the original decision was wrong—and by the 1860s if not before, Congress stopped following the purported decision,” he noted. “For the past century and a half, Congress has been enacting statutes in conflict with the position that unitarians take the First Congress to have settled.”

Unitarians have defended their pseudo-monarchical vision of the American presidency by arguing that the executive branch inherited some, most, or all of the royal prerogatives once held by the British monarchy. This argument dovetails with the unitarians’ general disdain for Congress. Former Attorney General Bill Barr claimed in a 2019 speech that the Revolution was a rejection of Parliament, not the king, and that the presidency has “brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.”

“One of the more amusing aspects of modern progressive polemic is their breathless attacks on the ‘unitary executive theory,’” Barr wrote, perhaps anticipating this column. “They portray this as some new-fangled ‘theory’ to justify executive power of sweeping scope. In reality, the idea of the unitary executive does not go so much to the breadth of presidential power. Rather, the idea is that, whatever the Executive powers may be, they must be exercised under the President’s supervision. This is not ‘new,’ and it is not a ‘theory.’ It is a description of what the Framers unquestionably did in Article II of the Constitution.”

Nelson disagreed in the removal context. He pointed to scholarship on the king’s power to fill offices and how it differed from the founding-era practice, as well as sharp differences between the “executive power” understood by the Framers and the “royal prerogative” exercised by British monarchs. “Even if removal authority was part of the royal prerogative, most members of the founding generation did not think that they were giving the president the royal prerogative, and the Vesting Clause of Article Two does not do so,” he noted.

In the end, Nelson ultimately concluded with some general agreement with the unitarians on what he described as the current constitutional “taxonomy of powers,” which treats executive power as a catchall category for anything that is not Congress’s legislative power or the federal courts’ judicial power. But he also urged the justices not to embrace presidential maximalism because of the broader systemic consequences.

“The current Supreme Court may likewise see itself as interpreting the Constitution for the ages, and perhaps some of the Justices take comfort in the idea that future Presidents will not all have the character of Donald Trump,” he wrote. “But the future is not guaranteed; a President bent on vengeful, destructive, and lawless behavior can do lasting damage to our norms and institutions. As one member of Congress argued in 1789, we should not gravitate toward interpretations of the Constitution that ‘legaliz[e] the full exertion of a tyrannical disposition.’”

Nelson is far from the only originalist to criticize the Supreme Court’s Trump-era rulings. Michael Rappaport, an originalist law professor at the University of San Diego, lambasted the court’s decision in Trump v. Anderson as a “disaster” that was “not originalism.” Even those predisposed to criticize originalist arguments can’t help but agree: The court’s decision to shield Trump from disqualification under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment was so slapdash that it did not even really try to reckon with the original meaning of the amendment.

“In the end, it is understandable that the Supreme Court would have decided the case on this nonoriginalist basis,” Rappaport wrote. “It does not want to wade into the question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection. The Republic will not fall because the Court engaged in an unprincipled, pragmatic resolution where its self-interest was severely implicated. But let’s not kid ourselves that this was originalism. It was not.”

The presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States received even more criticism along those lines. Legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum assailed the justices in the majority for refusing to engage with the historical evidence and for inventing an immunity that the Constitution’s plain text does not grant. David French, a lawyer and conservative columnist at The New York Times, argued that the two decisions were ultimately rooted in the justices’ policy preferences instead of the constitutional text.

“I disagree with the Supreme Court’s rulings for the most basic reason of all—they do not square with the text of the document the justices are supposed to interpret, and that means they’re granting the presidency a degree of autonomy and impunity that’s contrary to the structure and spirit of American government,” French wrote. “In both Trump cases, the liberal minority was more originalist than the conservative majority. This time, it was the conservatives who created a living constitution.”

There is a certain irony in that switch, which French likely intended. Justice Elena Kagan, a member of the court’s liberal wing, famously remarked that “we are all originalists now” during her confirmation hearing, in recognition of that method’s ascendancy. But the problem isn’t that the Supreme Court has adopted one interpretive method for the Constitution or another. Instead, it has largely abandoned interpretive methodology altogether in favor of results-oriented outcomes that for the last two years have almost uniformly favored Donald Trump.

If there is one big question for the Supreme Court this term, it is whether the conservative justices will continue down the path toward hyperpresidentialism and personalist rule, or whether they will hear the critiques from Nelson and other originalists like him and change course toward the Framers’ civic republican intent. I wish I could be confident that they will make the right choice.

The Mainstream Media Is Moving Right. Here’s What We Can Do About It. - 2025-10-14T10:00:00Z

Bari Weiss is settling into a big new job at CBS News, empowering her to send Elon Musk–style memos demanding staffers justify their employment at the network. The Washington Post, which had already dumped its only Black female columnist, recently dismissed more left-leaning writers and editors while hiring several conservative ones. Skydance, the company that bought CBS News’s parent company and then installed Weiss as editor in chief, could soon also be in control of CNN. Outlets such as The New York Times and NPR, while not overtly becoming more conservative, have been chastened by Donald Trump winning a second term and often downplay the radicalism of his actions. 

There’s no doubt about it: The mainstream media is moving to the right. That’s a huge problem for those of us fighting President Trump and his authoritarian aims—and one we didn’t face in his first term. At the same time, there are strategies and tactics for pro-democracy Americans to both elevate alternative news sources and force honest coverage from mainstream outlets. It is urgent we adopt those and truly understand that the media environment is a critical battlefield in combating authoritarianism. 

A growing number of Americans get their news from social media. The audiences for traditional network news programs have long been stagnant; same for the Post. So the issue is not that the Post or CBS will deliver pro-Trump news that reaches a wide swath of Americans and makes the president dramatically more popular. Those outlets just don’t have that kind of reach. I am not sure the entire mainstream media does anymore. 

Instead, what we should be worried about is the mainstream media’s agenda-setting and framing powers. Outlets such as ABC, CNN, and NPR often all decide something is a big deal, with nearly every outlet covering it extensively, resulting in that issue or event showing up in everyone’s social media feeds and becoming a national conversation. The media made Trump separating children from their parents at the border the issue in June 2018; same for the killing of George Floyd two years later. That’s agenda setting. Framing is the tone and tenor of that coverage. For example, in 2017, the media rightly cast Trump’s remarks after a white nationalist group marched in Charlottesville as crazy and unbecoming of a president. In Trump’s first term, mainstream media outlets often made Trump’s actions the central focus of their coverage and covered them very negatively, combining the agenda-setting and framing powers into a force against the president. 

Not anymore. The media should be covering the Trump administration’s invasion of Chicago as an enormously important story, but it’s not. Trump’s comments regarding Charlottesville pale in comparison to the radical actions he takes almost daily in his second term. But the media often frames Trump’s words and actions more neutrally and calmly than before, for example giving some credence to Trump’s arguments that his deployments of the National Guard are legitimate efforts to reduce crime.  

CBS’s entire operation, and the Post’s opinion pages, now under the leadership of Trump-sympathetic leaders, are likely to go even further in this direction, not using their agenda-setting and framing roles to be a check on Trump. This media shift removes a huge weapon from the arsenal of anti-authoritarian forces, one that was very helpful from 2017 to 2020. 

“I think what’s going to be left of mainstream media in a couple of years is very consolidated and largely aligned with Trump,” Arkadi Gerney, who advises Democratic politicians and left-leaning organizations on how to combat Trump, said in a recent edition of Right Now, the show I host. “It doesn’t mean that all the pillars of media are falling apart.… But it’s a real challenge.” 

So what can be done? First of all, average voters, activists, elites, and left-leaning politicians need to adjust their media consumption. CBS News and the Post, in the midst of Trump attempting to become America’s dictator, have intentionally shifted their coverage and leadership to be more favorable to him. Move on from those outlets. You can keep subscribing to the Post or watching 60 Minutes for the occasional big investigative story they break. But outlets such as The Guardian provide comprehensive daily news coverage that isn’t trying to appease Trump. Add those to your daily or hourly news consumption, and drop outlets or at least sections (Post Opinions) that aren’t fully committed to defending democracy. 

There is nothing new about the mainstream media either not forcefully defending democracy or undermining it. Because of Watergate and other instances in recent American history, we think of the mainstream media as a democratizing force in the United States and a check on autocratic politicians. But as Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explained in a recent Right Now episode, news organizations have been part of “antidemocratic projects” throughout American history, mostly notably Southern newspapers that defended Jim Crow segregation. We can have a successful pro-democracy movement in America without CBS News—and it appears we must. 

Second, we need a change within the media itself. Many left-leaning outlets have traditionally offered alternative framing of the news, but not an alternative agenda. So those outlets cover the same stories as the mainstream media but with a more liberal perspective. That’s not the right approach for today. The mainstream media is failing (intentionally) in what stories it chooses to cover and how much: i.e., agenda setting. They are refusing to offer coverage (or the volume needed) on stories that make Trump look like the authoritarian that he is. So liberal outlets should not just offer opinion pieces and analysis of the events that traditional news outlets are covering but should also have their own agenda for which events are worth covering and how much. Pro-democracy news organizations should be ones that editorialize more in favor of democracy; they should also be ones that cover threats to democracy more rigorously than other outlets. 

For example, TNR is known for its essays and opinions. But I increasingly find the website’s Breaking News section valuable because I can learn the newest radical thing Trump did without the equivocating I would see in the Times or CNN. 

Third, people in the anti-Trump camp should embrace a certain kind of media criticism. While CBS and the Post are intentionally moving right and are probably fine with losing some anti-Trump consumers, I’m not sure that the rest of the mainstream media is in that same place. They want to appear neutral but not lose audience share. So they are susceptible to being influenced and shamed into more honest journalism. 

Here’s how to do it. When their coverage is criticized, mainstream editors and reporters will quickly cite stories and paragraphs that portray Trump negatively. This isn’t hard: Trump is one of the most dishonest and unethical politicians in American history. Of course news outlets can find some stories they have done that are critical of him! What these reporters are ignoring is that the headlines, social posts, and first few paragraphs of their pieces are often framed in ways designed not to offend conservatives. They want to cast themselves as not liberal to conservative readers but claim to liberals they are taking on Trump. We can’t let them have it both ways. NPR, the Times, and other outlets should be flooded with criticism of not the stories they select to cover, which are generally fine, but the tone and tenor of them, which often goes out of its way to cast Trump as acting presidential in the same way that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden did. 

None of my suggestions come close to addressing the calamity we face right now. One of the main ways autocrats gain power is by capturing and controlling the news in their countries. That is happening here too, like so many other signs of authoritarianism. Bari Weiss isn’t qualified to be a correspondent at CBS, never mind editor in chief. But at least now, Americans can choose non-Trump-friendly news, other news outlets can cover the stories that the Trump-friendly outlets won’t, and many important news organizations don’t want to be too pro-Trump. News appeasing Trump has gone mainstream, but we still have other media. 

MAGA Rage at “No Kings” Boils Over—and It Quickly Backfires on Trump - 2025-10-14T09:00:00Z

President Trump’s allies are suddenly raging over the October 18 No Kings protests. MAGA Mike Johnson and MAGA-fied Representative Steve Scalise are angrily sliming expected attendees as America-haters, antifa, Marxists, and terrorists. MAGA influencers and other GOP figures have done the same, with one hinting that the National Guard should crack down on them. This unanimity of messaging about “terrorists” means it’s all almost certainly being coordinated by Stephen Miller. Yet it’s backfiring: Democrats and rally organizers are using it to galvanize attendance, which will likely succeed. Robert De Niro amplified the call to turn out, inspiring more anger on Fox News. Indeed, the GOP demonization of legitimate protests itself ratifies the “No Kings” message. We talked to Jill Lawrence, who writes well for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of blue America. We discuss why large legitimate protests infuriate Trump-MAGA, why the correct response to their smears is to turn out in force, and why that’s likely to happen. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Would CBS News Have Run This Story a Week Ago? - 2025-10-13T21:20:57Z

In an early taste of CBS News’s editorial direction under its newly anointed editor in chief, the anti-woke pundit Bari Weiss, the storied outlet elevated a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York City Democratic mayoral nominee.

CBS News on Friday published a segment featuring Olivia Reingold—a reporter for the Weiss-founded Free Press, which is now owned by the same parent company as CBS. Reingold, whose previous work for Weiss includes a much-criticized August story that attempted to downplay the Israel-induced famine in Gaza, shared her reporting on Mamdani on a CBS morning program.

“Some NYPD officers worry about Mamdani becoming the NYC mayor, The Free Press reports,” reads the title of the segment posted on CBSNews.com. (Until Monday, “Mamdani” had been misspelled “Mandani.”)

Reingold reported that officers in the New York Police Department are worried about Mamdani, with some “considering retiring.” The evidence? In total, her Free Press article contains quotes from four of the at least 33,000 uniformed officers serving in the NYPD. None of them are named.

One lieutenant was worked up over whether Mamdani is “going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget” and whether his caseload will “keep piling up while we just get more and more short-staffed.”

Mamdani has proposed reducing the NYPD’s overtime budget and establishing a Department of Community Safety to take on certain nonviolent situations in the city, thereby freeing up the department’s ability to focus on serious crimes.

Another was worried about a possible reduction in the department’s overtime budget. But not all NYPD officers would view reducing overtime negatively; according to The New York Times, many officers have actually quit their jobs because of the significant demands of compulsory overtime.

Another source of Reingold’s was a Republican cop who has been dissatisfied with the department’s direction since the tenure of Bill de Blasio, the city’s Democratic mayor from 2014 to 2021. The other interviewed officer said he plans on staying in the department but is concerned about its waning “culture of brotherhood”—though he did not directly attribute that to Mamdani’s expected election.

All told, the story is thinly sourced, fearmongering, tabloid drek. It elevates the voices of a handful of cops who happen to share The Free Press’s editorial line: hostility toward Mamdani’s election. It’s highly unlikely that CBS News would have published a story like this—one unquestionably elevating questionable reporting from a biased outlet—before Weiss took the reins last week.

Trump Cabinet Secretary Thinks Peaceful Protesters Are Terrorists - 2025-10-13T20:57:04Z

Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy thinks that those who attend No Kings protests this weekend are members of antifa.

“The ‘No Kings’ protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of antifa, paid protesters, it begs the question who’s funding it,” Duffy told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Monday. “Democrats wanna wait for a big rally of a No Kings protest when the bottom line is, who’s running the show in the Senate? Chuck Schumer’s not running the show, the No Kings protesters or organizers are running the show. Is AOC threatening a primary against Chuck Schumer, is she running the show?”

He then went on to say that Schumer had surrendered all his power to the No Kings protesters.

Duffy calling the No Kings protests “antifa” is ironic given how tame they have been. They are peppered with veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people of the #Resistance ilk. The rally is supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America—not antifa, which doesn’t exist. But it’s clear that the Trump administration has no issue labeling any kind of organic, organized resistance to them as antifa, which they have labeled a terrorist organization.

Duffy’s comments were similar to ones House Speaker Mike Johnson made last week.

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson ranted last Friday on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.”

Trump’s Hunt for Antifa Is Already Falling Apart - 2025-10-13T20:06:54Z

Antifa be warned: The Trump administration is coming for you, but first they have to speak with some podcasters.

Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck insisted Monday that the FBI was turning over “every single stone” to locate members of the famously decentralized anti-fascist movement—a fact he became aware of when they allegedly arrived at his door to discuss a recent series he did discussing the supposed antifa network.

“We dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network, and we went from the street thugs to the support groups and eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” Beck said. “It is so clear to me that they are exploring all angles of this and they are talking to anyone and everyone that can give them any kind of information.”

“How do I know? Saturday, I get a phone call,” Beck continued, recalling the conversation.

“‘The director would like to send over some agents to speak to you, Glenn.’ I’m like, ‘The director? FBI agents?’ ‘Yes, you said some things that they need to talk to you about.’”

The fact that Beck might catch FBI Director Kash Patel’s attention should come as no surprise, especially since Patel used to host his own conspiratorial political opinion show before he was tasked to run America’s lead investigative agency.

“They sat in my—three agents—sat in my living room for almost two hours,” Beck said. “It was surreal at one point.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s supposed “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

Last week, Trump designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that anti-fascists fail to commit a fraction of the violence that the far-right extremists they oppose do.

“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” Trump’s order states.

But Trump’s action flouted the fact that he doesn’t have the authority to designate antifa as a terrorist organization—that power resides with Congress. And critics have warned that this could just be the beginning, as the White House works toward a broader crackdown on political opposition to its immigration agenda, as evidenced by Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to subdue alleged unrest in the hipster paradise of Portland, Oregon, or by the elevation of rhetoric that has lumped fervor against antifa with legitimate political parties, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.

Trump Fumbles Repeatedly While Bragging in Front of World Leaders - 2025-10-13T18:46:24Z

President Donald Trump humiliated himself Monday at a summit of world leaders gathered to sign a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas.

The historic peace deal was signed in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, following the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages in Gaza, and the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, including 1,700 taken over the last two years and held without charges. While both sides have agreed to this first phase of Trump’s 20-point peace deal, it’s still unclear whether peace will persist.

While celebrating his momentary victory in front of his fellow world leaders, Trump spoke incoherently and made several embarrassing comments.

Speaking about being escorted to the signing on Air Force One by Egyptian military aircraft, Trump came across unintelligibly.

“But Air Force One was really—it was covered with Egyptian desert just a few months ago, if you think about it. Just a few months ago it was Egyptian desert, and now it was just a few feet off our window, and it was a spectacular sight, and I appreciate it very much,” said Trump.

It’s not clear what Trump was attempting to convey here. The U.S. president has a tendency to steer into meaningless remarks when speaking without a teleprompter. And that was only the beginning.

In a room full of world leaders the U.S. president claimed that his opinion was the only one that mattered, while directly praising Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.

“You are fantastic, all right? I know a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I’m the only one that matters. You are fantastic,” Trump said. “He’s a great leader. I endorsed him in the last election he had, and he won by 28 points. You’re gonna do even better next time.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had a pained expression as she stood behind the babbling U.S. president. She looked particularly horrified as Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he’d nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, which the U.S. president lost last week.

In another cringeworthy moment, Trump turned his attention to Meloni to fawn over her appearance.

“We have a woman, a young woman, who’s uh—I’m not allowed to say it ’cause it’s usually the end of your political career if you say it. She’s a beautiful young woman. Now if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances,” Trump said.

He added that Meloni was very respected in Italy. Clearly, he was not party to that respect.

Later, while patting himself on the back for his work on the peace agreement, Trump mistakenly called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “president” of Canada.

After Trump’s remarks, Carney was caught on a hot mic joking, “I’m glad you upgraded me to president!”

“Did I say that?” Trump laughed. He leaned in, adding, “At least I didn’t say governor.”

Trump Spends Peace Summit Whining How He Wants a Police State - 2025-10-13T18:23:25Z

Donald Trump is in Egypt celebrating a historic ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Gaza—but he can’t stop fixating on the imagined crime crisis he believes is taking place back on U.S. soil.

Seated next to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi on Monday, Trump’s proud exaltation of the authoritarian state offered some startling insight into the way he seems to want to manage America.

“We’re in a country where a friend of mine is a very powerful leader, and my friend of mine is right here,” Trump said. “The reason I call him the general is because he’s both, and he’s good at both, he’s done a fantastic job.”

“They have very little crime, because they don’t play games, that’s why. They don’t play games like we do, in the United States, with governors that have no idea what they’re doing,” the U.S. president continued. “But they don’t have crime. I ask about crime, and they almost don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

Egypt is categorized as “not free” by an analysis from Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization that formed to rally the world against the threat of Nazi Germany nearly a century ago. Political opposition in Egypt is nearly nonexistent. Civil liberties that are currently taken for granted in the U.S., such as the right to protest or the freedom of the press, are choked by the tight fist of the Egyptian government, which has been dominated by the military since a 2013 coup.

“Most of Egypt’s provincial governors are former military or police commanders,” Freedom House assessed.

Why Trump might admire Egypt’s regime is no secret. Trump has made enemies out of his stateside opposition, publicly calling for the political persecution of Democratic lawmakers who have dared to object to his agenda, including Senator Adam Schiff, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and more.

Just last week, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a nineteenth-century law that would let him utilize the military for domestic purposes, to quell fictitious bedlam that he claims has taken over Democratic cities.

One such area that Trump has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said at the time, referring to a phone call he had with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking, and there are fires all over the place.… It looks like terrible.”

Trump Tells Fellow World Leaders He’s “the Only One That Matters” - 2025-10-13T18:22:55Z

At a meeting of world leaders Monday, President Donald Trump claimed he is “the only one that matters” while heaping praise on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“We love Viktor,” Trump said onstage at a Gaza “peace summit” in Egypt, where he told the prime minister, “You are fantastic, alright?”

“I know a lot of people don’t agree with me,” Trump went on, “but I’m the only one that matters when—. You are fantastic.”

Trump continued to honor the Hungarian prime minister, who has indeed earned his fair share of critics for striving to dismantle liberal democracy in his country. Since taking office in 2010, Orbán has seized control of independent governmental institutions, curtailed press freedoms, and targeted his political opponents, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

“He’s a great leader,” Trump said. “I endorsed him the last election he had, and he won by 28 points. So you’re going to do even better this time if you have another election,” he added, assuring him, “We’re behind you 100 percent.”

With parliamentary elections taking place next spring, Orbán’s ruling party, which has dominated Hungarian politics for 15 years, appears to be trailing a new opposition party in public opinion polls. As the Center for European Policy Analysis notes, this has raised concerns—which may ring familiar here in the U.S.—that if Orbán were to lose, he may refuse to accept defeat and instead challenge the integrity of the vote.

This Is How Slavishly Devoted Marco Rubio Is to Trump - 2025-10-13T17:46:29Z

Donald Trump’s Cabinet has once again demonstrated that it is just as blindly devoted to the president’s cult of personality as his most ardent MAGA supporters are.

“It’s about transforming the region,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Egypt, right after stating that Trump’s Middle East Peace plan was bigger than “restoring” Gaza. “We have an incredible partner and a long alliance, a tremendous collection of leaders. This is clearly, in my mind—and I think in the mind of everyone in this room—probably one of the most important days for world peace in fifty years. And that’s not an exaggeration.”

“Only fifty?” Trump chimed in.

Rubio then proceeded to exaggerate.

“Maybe 100! Really since the end of World War II.”

Rubio responded to Trump’s comment like a dog would respond to its owner, and he isn’t the only one. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and countless other Cabinet members have turned positions that are historically aimed to be independent of the president into glorified sycophants.

Peace in Gaza is tenuous at best, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he would prefer to keep the conflict going indefinitely. This deal is not a switch to flip, it will take years to fully come into fruition—if it isn’t broken by Israel.

And peace for whom? Rubio’s comments come as Poland prepares its military for increased violence from Russia, as war rages on in Sudan, and as the National Guard tears through the streets of U.S. cities.

Trump Touts Peace While Poland Prepares for War - 2025-10-13T17:14:43Z

While President Trump continues to tout his supreme international peacemaking abilities, Europe prepares for all-out war. 

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Poland has increased its military spending to the point that it is 4.7 percent of its entire gross domestic product. For reference, military spending is around 3 percent of the U.S. GDP. 

This comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin ratchets up aggression against Poland and its neighbors to the west. Just last month, Russian drones were seen in Polish airspace, forcing the NATO ally to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to ready its defense systems against the incursion. Poland’s leadership invoked Article Four of the NATO Treaty the next day, calling the ​​situation the “closest” that Poland had come to armed conflict “since the Second World War.” Three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace just days after, in yet another significant display of aggression meant to test NATO’s cohesiveness. 

Now Poland is prepared to stop its former invader’s current one. 

“This is our war,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Warsaw Security Forum in September. “We decided to arm Poland and modernize the Polish army on a massive scale.”

Poland’s increased military spending has produced a situation where the nation now has more than 210,000 military personnel (trailing only the U.S. and Turkey in NATO); a large territorial defense force; and $50 billion of American-made weaponry, including Abrams tanks, and a Polish version of the U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Poland is also armed with multiple South Korean rocket launchers and had its soldiers participate in monthslong war games to test out the new equipment.

“In the case of war, Poland will be a very busy country because the military will mobilize, the economy will mobilize, but we would also have to prepare for NATO coming to—and through—Poland,” Armed Forces Operational Commander Lt. Gen. Maciej Klisz told the Journal. 

These developments paint a stark contrast to President Trump’s endless rhetoric in which he presents himself as the “President of Peace,” claiming to have ended six, seven, and sometimes even 10 wars. While that is obviously a severe exaggeration, the war preparations in Poland and the greater European NATO region only further weaken that tenuous claim.  

Airports Are Pushing Back Against Kristi Noem’s Shutdown Propaganda - 2025-10-13T16:50:09Z

Last week, the White House bragged that a video of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming the ongoing government shutdown on Democrats is “currently playing at every public airport in America.”

But according to local reports, airports across the country—from Washington state to New York—have announced their refusal to subject travelers to the propaganda.

“It is TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe,” Noem says in the video, which is intended to be shown to people waiting in Transportation Security Administration lines. “However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.

“Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government,” the homeland security secretary continues.

Travelers at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington will be spared the message. “The Port of Seattle will not play the video on its screens at SEA Airport, due to the political nature of the content,” a Sea–Tac spokesperson told local outlets.

Also in Washington, Spokane International Airport is refusing to play the video, due to the airport’s “First Amendment Policy,” which prohibits the display of political advertising content on airport-owned monitors in public spaces.

Oregon’s Portland International Airport won’t show it either, on the grounds that the video could violate the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from certain partisan political activities. “We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging,” said a PDX spokesperson, who also cited state law prohibiting public employees from promoting or opposing “any political committee, party, or affiliation.”

In New York, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which oversees the Buffalo Niagara International Airport and the Niagara Falls International Airport, has declined as well, citing a “long-standing policy” against “partisan messaging.”

Ditto Westchester County Airport in New York. According to the Westchester County executive, the message was determined to be “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials,” as it “politicizes the impacts of a federal government shutdown on TSA Operations” and has an “unnecessarily alarmist” tone.

“I Don’t Know”: Mike Johnson Ducks Key Question About Shutdown Layoffs - 2025-10-13T16:37:46Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Monday he had no idea that President Doanld Trump’s sweeping layoffs of federal workers had gutted the department overseeing special education. 

During a press conference, Johnson was asked if he was “comfortable” with cuts that had reportedly decimated special education services at the Department of Education. 

“I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know,” Johnson said. 

“I do know that each of the Cabinet secretaries were asked to assist OMB to determine what the most essential programs are, and what the priorities are for the policies and all of that. And I’ve been so busy on all this I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details of each division, and how it’s happened,” he said. 

But those so-called “details” Johnson overlooked are quickly coming to light—and they’re a huge problem.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees released a statement Monday saying: “We believe that all remaining offices in Office of Special Education + Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), incl. the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) + the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), have been eliminated.”

The Education Department laid off practically every employee responsible for administering funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which authorizes grants to states, schools, and nonprofit organizations, one agency staffer told USA Today. The Biden administration had requested $14.4 billion for these grants for FY2025, including $545 million for the Grants for Infants and Families program.

Secretary Linda McMahon, who presumably directed the cuts, has previously suggested that the office would be better positioned in the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said he hopes to manufacture proof of his outlandish claims about the causes of autism. 

It’s still unclear how many positions were terminated within the special education office. The Education Department fired 466 employees as part of Trump’s broader reduction in force of some 4,200 jobs amid the ongoing government shutdown. 

Johnson seemed content Monday to defend Trump’s massive cuts, purportedly without even knowing what they are. He claimed that federal agencies were “in a triage situation” as a result of the government shutdown and blamed Democrats for the massive layoffs executed by the executive branch. 

But in past government shutdowns, including in the previous Trump administration, federal workers were furloughed, not laid off en masse. It seems clear that Trump is simply using the shutdown as an excuse to carry out a long-planned reduction in force and obliterate essential programs he doesn’t like.  

Trump’s Newest “Hoax” Claim Will Blow Your Mind - 2025-10-13T16:16:55Z

Throw out the history books—even settled modern American history is up for MAGA revisionism.

Despite the fact that he’s since won the 2024 presidential election and, presumably, has bigger fish to fry (see any rotating issue: the government shutdown, the rise in political violence, the stumbling economy, or escalating domestic and international tensions), Donald Trump once again took to social media Sunday to gripe about his impeachments. But this time, he opted to rebrand a little more history than usual by suggesting that Watergate was another supposed “hoax.”

“The Ukraine Impeachment (of me!) Scam was a far bigger Illegal Hoax than Watergate,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I sincerely hope the necessary authorities, including CONGRESS, are looking into this! Adam ‘Schiffty’ Schiff was sooo dishonest and corrupt.

“So many laws, and protocols, were violated, and just plain broken!!!” he wrote.

Rewriting the national recollection of Watergate will take more than one social media post. Nearly 50 years later, the involvement of President Richard Nixon’s aides in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters still lives on as one of the most seismic scandals to shake the office of the president—so much so that simply adding “gate” to the end of an event can suggest another political calamity.

Watergate, and Nixon’s forced resignation in the face of certain impeachment, resulted in the end of his political career. But in the last several months, Trump has taken some concrete steps to rewrite his own impeachment history.

Trump is the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021. In August, the Smithsonian removed Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House, in the wake of an art director’s ousting. That left the exhibit focusing on Presidents Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review.

The Smithsonian has since re-added Trump to the impeachment exhibit, but with some changes to how the proceedings against him are described, most notably regarding his actions during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

ICE Spends the Weekend Terrorizing Chicago - 2025-10-13T15:32:29Z

Federal agents terrorized Chicago citizens over the weekend, as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown on a major Democratic city.

On Friday, Border Patrol agents violently arrested Deborah Brockman, a producer for Chicago television station WGN-TV. Two agents held down Brockman while zip-tying her hands, before multiple agents shoved her into an unmarked van. Her arrest seemingly violated a temporary restraining order made the day before barring agents from detaining journalists. 

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin alleged in a statement that Brockman had thrown objects at the agents’ vehicle and was “placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” Brockman was later released, and WGN told Newsweek that no charges were brought against her. 

As the vehicle carrying Brockman drove away, it slammed into a seemingly stationary vehicle before continuing on. 

McLaughlin claimed that “several violent agitators” had attempted to block the vehicle from leaving. “In fear of public & law enforcement safety, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that the incident “reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers.”

In a video of the incident, multiple bystanders berated the officers, but none appeared to approach them or their vehicle. 

DropSite News’s Ryan Grim said that McLaughlin’s justification was “Orwellian.” 

“To explain why ICE rammed its car into another vehicle, the spokeswoman says it ‘reflects a growing and dangerous trend of … agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,’” he wrote in a post on X. “Um, the opposite happened. Clearly. So weird.”

On Saturday, at least 15 people were arrested while protesting at an ICE processing center in Broadview, a neighborhood of Chicago. Detainees reportedly face charges ranging from criminal damage to government property to disobeying police orders. 

One of the individuals arrested was Elias Cepeda, an organizer and martial arts instructor who has reportedly been on the lookout for ICE agents in his neighborhood since the beginning of the school year. He and other advocates hoped to warn residents of Pilsen, where many Mexicans reside, about ICE activities so that they could avoid arrest or violence. 

DHS claimed Cepeda, who was armed at the time of arrest, was a “violent rioter” with “suspected ties to antifa and previous social media posts calling ICE Nazis.”

In a viral video posted Saturday by Joshua Reed Eakle, an executive director at Project Liberal Action, four law enforcement vehicles swarmed a car on a suburban Chicago street. An agent pulled the driver from her car as she pleaded with officers that she was only 15 years old. The arresting officer then threw her to the ground and appeared to put his knee on her neck as he restrained her hands behind her back. Block Club Chicago reported the arrest took place in Hoffman Estates.

Meanwhile, roughly 400 protesters gathered in Rogers Park Saturday after a tamale vendor and at least three others were arrested nearby earlier in the week, Block Club Chicago reported.   

And on Sunday, federal agents released tear gas on residents responding to a violent arrest during a protest in Albany Park, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

Attorney Samay Gheewala said he was among many residents forcefully pushed to the ground by federal officers, after he’d approached to do “usual lawyer stuff” on behalf of people being arrested. Federal agents reportedly gave no warning before administering tear gas canisters, despite a temporary restraining order issued last week that required officers to issue two warnings before using riot control weapons.

Alderman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and state Senator Graciela Guzmán came running with a group of rapid responders, but by the time they arrived, one man had already been taken.

“This is part of the chaos they like to bring to our communities,” Guzmán said. 

Rodriguez-Sanchez told the Sun-Times that one person “was saved due to the efforts of our communities, but unfortunately, somebody was [still] kidnapped from our neighborhood today.”

Ghislaine Maxwell Keeps Getting Special Treatment - 2025-10-13T15:21:26Z

Ghislaine Maxwell—currently serving hard time for helping deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein abuse minors—has been taking secret meetings and receiving special treatment at her new Camp Bryan prison in Texas, only further stoking fears that she is working with the Trump administration to receive a pardon. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that in August, Maxwell, who is serving time for sex trafficking and conspiracy until at least 2037, had the prison locked down while she met with unnamed visitors in the prison chapel. A fellow inmate reported that Maxwell returned from the meeting smiling, and said that it had gone “really well.” 

Additionally, Maxwell has been treated like more of a celebrity than a convicted sex trafficker and child abuser since she’s been transferred from her more serious facility in Florida to the grassy, minimum-security Camp Bryan. Her fellow inmates include Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah. Shah and Holmes are in Camp Bryan for fraud. And while other inmates have taken to harassing Maxwell for being a “chomo” or sex predator, the prison warden essentially rolled out the red carpet for her visitors. 

One inmate told the Journal that the prison notified them that “someone important was coming to do a walk-through” and did a deep clean of the entire facility before Maxwell arrived. The warden even called a “town meeting” warning other inmates not to harm Maxwell. Since then she has been allowed to eat alone in her dormitory, has a security escort for when she wants to work out, and is allowed to shower well after other inmates are supposed to be in their bunks.  

This is all yet another strange wrinkle in a fairly obvious effort from the Trump administration and the GOP to tie up loose ends and absolve the president (who was quite close with Epstein and appears multiple times in his “files”) while simultaneously attempting to satiate their base’s deep desire for the truth about the Epstein files. 

Just last week President Trump indicated that a pardon for Maxwell was still on the table. 

“Her only chance for getting out of prison is a pardon from you. Is that something—”  CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said before Trump interrupted to ask who was being discussed. “Ghislaine Maxwell,” Collins clarified.

“You know, I haven’t heard the name in so long,” Trump said. “I can say this: that I’d have to take a look at it. I’d have to take a look.”

Trump Thinks Netanyahu Should Get Away With Corruption—Just Like Him - 2025-10-13T15:01:15Z

President Trump—a man regarded by some as the most corrupt president in U.S. history and a flagrant abuser of the presidential pardon power—on Monday called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be pardoned for corruption charges.

During a speech before Israel’s Knesset, Trump strayed from his prepared remarks to lobby Israeli President Isaac Herzog for such a pardon.

“I have an idea. Mr. President,” Trump said. “Why don’t you give him a pardon? Give him a pardon. By the way, that was not in the speech, as you probably know, but I happen to like this gentleman right over here [Netanyahu], and it just seems to make so much sense.”

He went on to call the Israeli prime minister “one of the greatest wartime presidents,” asking, “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about that?”

Netanyahu has been on trial since 2020 for three cases involving bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In one, he allegedly granted regulatory favors, to the tune of $500 million, to a telecommunications billionaire in exchange for positive news coverage.

In another, he is accused of accepting nearly $300,000 in gifts—including cigars and champagne, as Trump mentioned while underplaying the allegations—from billionaires including film producer Arnon Milchan, in exchange for actions advancing Milchan’s business interests.

The third case involves the prime minister allegedly negotiating a deal with the owner of an Israeli newspaper, under which Netanyahu would receive positive coverage and enact legislation to weaken a competitor publication.

As Trump has during his own legal battles, Netanyahu dismisses the accusations as a political “witch hunt” and “attempted coup” by his liberal enemies in the judicial system and media.

Trump in June called the charges against Netanyahu “politically motivated”—and the trial a “ridiculous Witch Hunt,” “Horror Show,” and “TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’”—on Truth Social. “Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero,” he wrote.

Netanyahu also faces active arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to which the Trump administration responded with sanctions on ICC personnel.

JD Vance’s Best Defense for CDC Layoff Chaos Is … Blame Democrats - 2025-10-13T14:49:55Z

The White House’s government shutdown blame game isn’t turning out to be a very effective cross-topic strategy.

Speaking with CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance couldn’t muster an answer as to why more than a thousand staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been mistakenly laid off just days prior without lazily pointing the finger at congressional Democrats.

“Some of them were involved with the federal measles response. Some of them were involved with the response on Ebola,” said host Margaret Brennan. “How does a mistake like this happen? Did the White House even talk to the CDC?”

“So, you ask, how does this mistake happen? It happened because Chuck Schumer shut down the government, and we’re trying to make sure that essential services still function in the face of that shutdown,” Vance said in a sprawling answer that both blamed Democrats for the critical bipartisan failure and suggested that the layoff error was little more than water under the bridge.

“But that was a White House decision to lay off these individuals,” Brennan pressed.

“You heard the president talking about that. That—that wasn’t Chuck Schumer’s decision. I understand your broader point on the negotiations, but the layoffs came from the president and the White House.”

“But my point is, Margaret, that we have to do layoffs because we have to preserve necessary resources to do the most critical things that the government does,” Vance said.

“All these conversations about whether it’s a temporary layoff or a permanent layoff, we are dealing with a terrible, chaotic situation because Chuck Schumer and a few far-left Democrats decided to shut down the government.”

Roughly 10 percent of the CDC received layoff notices Friday amid a wave of some 4,100 government firings under the cover of the government shutdown. Once the news became public on Saturday, a federal health official indicated that some of the CDC’s pink slip recipients had been mistakenly let go, including members of the agency’s infectious disease outbreak team as well as its science and health data analysis team.

Approximately 700 employees were reinstated that day, according to their union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

So far, the government has been shut down for more than 12 days. The federal closure is the result of a boiling disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, leftover from the spring, about how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget.

Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would provide the executive branch with unfettered funds to advance the president’s agenda as outlined in his July legislation. That would include ruinous cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, a position that Democrats have demonstrated for months is a nonstarter.

Be Glad the Hostages Are Home. Be Worried About the Rest. - 2025-10-13T14:11:28Z

I happened to be on the floor at last year’s Democratic convention when Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, spoke about their ordeal. There were press reports that they were a little nervous about the reception they were going to receive, given the hostile sentiment toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza among rank-and-file Democrats. Some on the right were saying they were going to be booed, or at best greeted with indifference.

At conventions, journalists get floor passes for brief periods of time. You often can’t choose when you’ll be so close to the action, so it was just an accident that I happened to be there at that time. As for their reception, well, you could have heard a pin drop. I studied the faces of delegates. Everyone I saw was paying rapt attention. I noted Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, whom I know a bit, sitting at the head of his state’s delegation. I went over and said hello. He knew the Polin-Goldbergs well, had met with them many times, and told me what remarkable people they were.

Hersh, who was taken at gunpoint on October 7, 2023, at the Nova music festival, is not among the 20 hostages who finally went home today. His parents spoke in Chicago on August 21. Ten days later, the Israeli military announced that he and five others had been killed by Hamas.

How do we think about a day like today? The first reaction is one that should transcend partisan politics. Everyone should be glad that the hostages have been freed. Partisan politics was not visible on the faces of those Democratic conventiongoers that night last August. They were focused, rightly, on two grieving parents. My friend and sometime TNR contributor Jo-Ann Mort travels to Israel frequently and has told me, as one can also glean from media reports, that the hostages’ faces have been everywhere, and every Israeli knows their stories intimately. On a simple human level, this is a day to be celebrated.

I’ll add a thought on behalf of the hundreds of Palestinians freed today as well. Many of these people are rounded up in broad sweeps and either held without specific charges or tried by military-style tribunals where they aren’t accorded the usual rights enjoyed by civil defendants. That’s a lot of grieving families too.

The second reaction is to hope, however we feel about Netanyahu and Donald Trump, that this peace process succeeds. I still want to believe a two-state solution could be possible. That will require different Israeli leadership. Netanyahu has made clear for many years that he doesn’t believe in peace with the Palestinians. As Israeli analyst and former diplomat Alon Pinkas wrote at TNR last week, there’s a strong chance Netanyahu will bide his time and find an occasion to blow this peace deal up. His speech this morning in the Knesset wasn’t about peace at all; it was a victory lap. According to MSNBC’s David Noriega this morning, Netanyahu’s speech was broadcast briefly on the large video screens above Tel Aviv’s hostage square. He was booed. The screens returned to testimonials from the hostage families.

And it will obviously require different Palestinian leadership. If Hamas is as decimated as Israel says, they’re out of the way for now, and that’s great for the Palestinian people, whose true interests Hamas has never served, to put it mildly. The Palestinian Authority is corrupt and compromised and desperately needs new leadership. We should all be hoping that somehow or other these things happen, and this process stays on track.

The third reaction is tougher to think about than the first two, as it requires us to entertain the possibility that the Trump-Netanyahu worldview got it right this time. Did it? Well, the hostages are home, and a peace process is underway, and these, as noted, are great things. But only time will really tell. Even now, as Trump and Netanyahu bask in the glow of what they tout as unqualified success, we must never concede, for example, that 60,000 civilian deaths were necessary here. And those Gazans still alive are returning to find their homes gone, along with their schools and hospitals.

A U.N. report estimates that it will take 10 years just to clear Gaza’s rubble, and another 15 to make its farmland arable again. How can normal life take hold in such a place? In addition, rubble clearing is itself a deeply political act, because it requires contracts. Who’s going to get them, and how much are they going to be paid? The Times of London speculates that the Bin Laden family is likely to get a piece of the action.

I’m willing to give Trump this much. At a couple of crucial points, he did lay down the law on Netanyahu in a way most U.S. presidents don’t—in a way, let’s face it, Joe Biden probably wouldn’t have done. It’s also true that Netanyahu never would have given Biden, or any Democrat, the satisfaction of presiding over a deal like this. So the traffic on that street of mistrust runs both ways.

Still, writing in Haaretz today, editor Aluf Benn notes that Trump drew a line for Netanyahu on some crucial matters. When Netanyahu wanted to try to topple the Iranian regime last summer, Trump said no; he also made him recognize the new regime in Syria; and finally, as has been widely noted, after Israel bombed Qatar, Trump had had enough. Benn writes: “Attacking a country that bought him his presidential plane, and which hosts the largest American base in the Middle East exceeded the limits of the freedom of action Washington afforded Israel. At that moment, the countdown began to the cease-fire imposed on Netanyahu.”

Naturally, he’s still the Donald Trump who is destroying democracy and ruining lives here in America. Regardless of what happens abroad, we have an obligation to oppose his autocracy tooth and nail. That opposition, in fact, stems from the same humanitarian and democratic impulse that fuels our hopes for Middle East peace. The hope here is not naïve, but a rather cold-eyed one: Maybe the Middle East and the world will see a more benign Trump than his own country sees—that is, it may be that he’s willing to cut transactional deals with Israelis and Arabs in a way he’s obviously not with Democrats and liberals and American universities. But usually, people revert to who they are. We shall see.

Steve Bannon Gleefully Promises More Methods to Keep Trump in Office - 2025-10-13T13:56:27Z

Steve Bannon claimed that President Donald Trump’s team will launch tactics to keep him on the ballot in 2028 after the midterm elections.

During an interview Saturday on NewsNation’s BATYA!, host Batya Ungar-Sargon asked the MAGA movement architect if he believed the Twenty-Second Amendment was a “barrier” for the president.

“I think that there are many different alternatives that at the appropriate time after the midterms in ‘26, we will roll out,” Bannon said. “But I think there are many different alternatives to make sure that President Trump is on the ballot, and if he’s on the ballot, he’ll win.”

It’s not clear that Trump, who hocks “Trump 2028” hats, sees himself as constrained by the Twenty-Second Amendment, either—not to mention the U.S. Constitution. In March, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “not joking” about considering a third term, claiming that there were “methods” by which he could remain in the White House.

Still, the Twenty-Second Amendment is clear as ever: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” It’s just a matter of whether the Supreme Court will enforce it—and based on recent remarks from Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas, it’s not clear that it will.

It seems the quiet part about reelecting a man who once refused to concede the results of a presidential election has become quite deafening now. And ironically, Republicans have recently moved to criminalize “No Kings” protests across the country.

JD Vance Freaks Out After Defense of Tom Homan Bribe Is Cut Off on Air - 2025-10-13T13:44:58Z

The Trump administration is flailing to protect its border czar, Tom Homan.

Undercover federal agents handed Homan $50,000 via a paper Cava takeout bag in a 2024 sting operation, according to FBI surveillance tapes referenced in federal reports. But the public corruption investigation into Homan had no clear resolution—instead, it ended abruptly when Donald Trump took office and Homan was appointed to government office. By the time the dust settled, it appeared that Homan had never actually returned the taxpayer funds.

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi deflected direct questions by two senators during a Judiciary Committee hearing about the missing “buy money,” grousing about the apparent “gotcha.”

But Vice President JD Vance didn’t have a better approach, either. Speaking with ABC News Sunday, Vance zigged and zagged on the topic until the network cut him off for refusing to answer the question.

“Tom Homan did not take a bribe,” Vance told the network. “It’s a ridiculous smear. And the reason you guys are going after Tom Homan so aggressively is because he’s doing the job of enforcing the law. I think it’s really preposterous.”

Vance went on to complain about the severity of public backlash that Homan has faced while trying to “enforce the country’s immigration laws,” but failed to actually answer host George Stephanopoulos as to whether Homan had accepted the cash or given it back.

“But, wait, you said he didn’t take a bribe,” pressed Stephanopoulos. “But I’m not sure you answered the question. Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?”

Vance regurgitated the same answer, to which Stephanopoulos asked again if Homan had accepted or rejected the $50,000. But by that point, Vance had decided the best course of action was to play dumb.

“George, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did he accept $50,000 for what?” Vance said.

“He was recorded on an audiotape in September of 2024, an FBI surveillance tape, accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money?” Stephanopoulos said.

“Accepting $50,000 for doing what, George?” Vance tossed back. “I am not even sure I understand the question. Is it illegal to take a payment for doing services? The FBI has not prosecuted him. I have never seen any evidence that he’s engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Nobody has accused Tom of violating a crime, even the far-left media like yourself.

“So I’m actually not sure what the precise question is. Did he accept $50,000? Honestly, George, I don’t know the answer to that question,” Vance continued. “What I do know is that he didn’t violate a crime.”

After Stephanopoulos asked a third time, Vance began to ramble and rave about how the inquiry into Homan’s alleged impropriety was little more than a “left-wing rabbit hole,” claiming that ABC had misallocated its resources by investigating a public corruption story rather than airing more 24/7 coverage of the government shutdown.

ABC then pulled the plug on Vance, cutting off his blatant hedging—and he did not take it well.

Taking to X shortly after the failed interview, Vance further distorted the reality of the investigation by claiming that ABC wasn’t interested in “peace in the Middle East” or U.S.-China trade relations.

“George S doesn’t care about that. He’s here to focus on the real story: a fake scandal involving Tom Homan,” Vance wrote in a post that received more than 68,000 likes.

How $50,000 in cash got lost in translation is a bit of an anomaly for federal investigations. The Justice Department outlines strict regulations on exactly how federal agents can parcel out “buy money” during sting operations. Those funds are government property, and the DOJ requires clear accounting of how much was withdrawn and how much was returned to government accounts.

Several experts that spoke with The New York Times noted that $50,000 was a significant sum in the scope of public corruption investigations, and would suggest that agents had amassed “considerable evidence” that Homan was preparing to provide for-cash “kickbacks” once he entered public office.

JD Vance Completely Undercuts Pete Hegseth on Qatar Military Base - 2025-10-13T13:17:40Z

Vice President JD Vance appeared desperate to claim “fake news” Sunday about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s wild announcement that a Qatari Emiri air force facility would be built in Idaho.

Last week, Hegeth announced that the United States would build a facility in America’s heartland to “host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots,” summoning a tidal wave of disapproval from both sides of the aisle over the first foreign airbase to be built on U.S. soil.

But in an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Mornings Futures With Maria Bartiromo, Vance tried to backtrack the secretary’s claim, saying the whole thing was the sad product of “misreporting.”

“What is the function of this Qatar facility? People are wondering is this an airbase? What is Qatar gonna be developing in Idaho?” Bartiromo asked.

“Yeah, I saw some reporting about this, Maria. I actually talked to the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this morning. This is largely a fake story,” Vance said.

“We continue to have, with countries that we work with, we have relationships where sometimes their pilots work on our bases, sometimes that we train together, sometimes we work together in other ways. The reporting that somehow there’s going to be a Qatari base on United States soil, that’s just not true,” he said.

“We are continuing to work with a number of our Arab friends to ensure that we are able to enforce this peace, but we’re not gonna let a foreign country have an actual base on American soil, so there was a bit of misreporting on that, as there often is, as you know, Maria.”

But there was nothing to misreport. Hegseth clearly said Friday that the Pentagon was “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri air force facility at the Mountain Home Airbase in Idaho.”

Within days, either the White House seems to have shifted the goalposts on this deal, or Vance is simply lying to calm the angry mob. Or maybe no one knows what the hell is going on. Either way, the Trump administration is being less than transparent about its deal with Qatar, a country whose gifts the White House has readily accepted.

The House Republicans Getting Rich Off Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill - 2025-10-13T10:00:00Z

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1992, says that whenever Congress gives itself a raise an election must intervene before it takes effect. This turned out to be a solution in search of a problem, because poor-mouthing demagogues usually keep Congress from giving itself any raises. The last one, which increased salaries to $174,000, was way back in January 2009. Since then, inflation has whittled down congressional pay by one-third.

What Congress does instead is vote itself tax cuts. That isn’t especially helpful to nonwealthy members (there are a few), but it is to the richest members, whose net worth is often in the hundreds of millions.

Granted, some of these rich legislators are Democrats—Nancy Pelosi, for instance, is worth $274 million, according to the “alternative data” firm Quiver Quantitative, which tracks congressional stock trades. But not a single Democrat voted in July for the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts contained in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill. The only legislators who voted themselves tax cuts were Republicans; not a single Republican voted against the bill.

The nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, and Accountable.US took these facts as a cue to examine how much tax 10 of the wealthier congressional Republicans will recoup from the One Big, Beautiful Bill. For most of this sample, it’s in the five figures or more. That dwarfs the $5,600 maximum pay raise that Congress denied itself last December—and these members won’t have to wait for the next election to collect their windfall.

Representative Rob Bresnahan, Republican of Pennsylvania, refuses to accept his paycheck during the government shutdown, in solidarity with his district’s 10,000 federal employees, Social Security recipients, and recipients of housing and food assistance. The longest government shutdown in history (late 2018 and early 2019, prompted by then-President Trump’s hissy fit over funding for his border wall) lasted three weeks. In the unlikely event the current shutdown lasts that long, Bresnahan will be out about $10,000.

But it’s unlikely he’ll notice. Bresnahan’s net worth is about $48 million, according to Accountability.US, and his tax bill next year will drop by up to $23,600 thanks to the One Big, Beautiful Bill. Perhaps half of that savings will come from the “pass-through” provision in the bill, which, as I explained in July, is both eye-glazingly boring and very necessary to understand because it was the oligarchs’ big prize. The short description is that it’s a 20 percent deduction on income that goes untaxed as corporate income and instead is taxed as personal income. Bresnahan’s income last year was up to $1.97 million, and his pass-through income was up to $715,000. (The “up-to” calculations reflect the fact that members of Congress make public their financial information only within a certain range.) Nationwide, the pass-through provision will next year reduce taxes for the top 1 percent in the income distribution by an average of $27,000, according to ITEP.

Bresnahan is a piker compared to Representative Robb Wittman, Republican of Virginia. Wittman too has arranged for his pay to be withheld during the shutdown. As with Bresnahan, Wittman’s sacrifice won’t cramp his style because he’s worth about $6 million, according to Quiver Quantitative. The $10,000 Wittman would lose in a three-week shutdown is dwarfed by the $59,000 maximum his tax bill will go down next year thanks to the One Big, Beautiful Bill. (It’s also about half the minimum amount his tax bill will go down.) The tax’s pass-through provision is doing most of the work here. Bresnahan reported earning up to $883,000 in 2024, of which $508,000 was pass-through income.

Other maximum tax savings next year from the One Big, Beautiful bill: Representative Thomas Kean, Republican of New Jersey: $17,900; Representative Nick Begich, Republican of Arkansas: $10,000; Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican of Montana: $51,000; Representative Bill Huizenga, Republican of Michigan: $50,000; Representative Ken Calvert, Republican of California: $35,000; Representative Mike Carey, Republican of Ohio: $50,000; Representative John James, Republican of Michigan: $12,400; and Representative Ann Wagner, Republican of Missouri: $18,700. The pass-through tax break plays an outsize role in the biggest of these tax reductions.

None of these legislators, incidentally, ranks among the top 10 richest House members, or even the top 10 richest Republican House members, according to Quiver Quantitative. That group’s tax bills will go down considerably more.

I’ll gladly concede that the Republicans on ITEP’s and Accountable.US’s list didn’t vote for the One Big, Beautiful Bill entirely based on how they’d benefit personally. If you’re a Republican legislator and you vote against a Republican president’s tax cut then you’re committing political suicide. That’s one of many reasons why Republicans long ago—well before Donald Trump—ceased being a party that’s able to govern. They’re even less able now.

Still, rather than cluck over the paltry raises Congress never seems able to grant itself, we’d do much better to focus on the much larger raises that the wealthier congressional Republicans granted themselves in last summer’s tax bill. It likely benefits Trump even more, but that assumes—perhaps rashly—that he’ll pay any tax at all on his huge run-up in net worth in 2025.

Trump’s Lies About Portland: An Excuse to Create a Police State - 2025-10-13T10:00:00Z

This past weekend was a typical one in this urban American milieu: There was a street “faire” with local vendors, face-painting, live music, and Bard-inspired story telling; a free performance of classical music; the standing up of a special fall produce market featuring local fresh apples and pears, just now ripe; a design-month exhibition staged at various locations across the city; a grand reopening of an independent science fiction bookstore; a show bringing together more than 100 local artists to display their work; and of course a lot more in the way of concerts, readings, political gatherings, and so on.

What’s the locale? Here, in my city of Washington, D.C.? Maybe in a nice safe, “real American” place like Tulsa or Boise? Or some Trumpy retirement village like, well, The Villages, Florida?

No, no, and no. This was in war-ravaged Portland, Oregon. And the fact that these events somehow miraculously managed to go off without dozens of people being assaulted by those ISIS-like zealots of antifa tells us what a sick, disgusting pack of lies Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and the rest of them have been peddling about the city.

The weekend prior, Trump had infamously and preposterously said that Portland was “burning down to the ground.” The only real mayhem in Portland, though, is that which Trump and his hench people have created. Their twisted tale has been amplified by Fox News and other propaganda outlets and fed to a gullible army of people across the country for the purpose of manufacturing an excuse to create a quasi–police state.

A Washington Post headline over the weekend made a useful and long-overdue point. It read: “Inside the online battles streaming from a single block in Portland.” The story itself elaborated: “Much of the footage from Portland doesn’t originate from traditional TV networks but from a phalanx of activist-journalists, on both the right and the left, filming on their phones. Despite the protests largely being confined to one city block, it has resulted in a cascade of videos that has bolstered the conservative depiction of Portland as a city under siege by left-wing terrorists—video the White House has cited to justify and build support for deploying the National Guard to cities across the country.”

I don’t know Portland well, but I’ve visited there twice, the most recent visit just a few months ago. I stayed in a hotel along the Willamette River maybe three-quarters of a mile south of downtown. On a tasty Saturday afternoon, I walked along the river through a lovely riverfront park, cut over to Chapman Square, walked up past the Pioneer Place shopping center, and then zipped a few blocks north to the amazing Powell’s bookstore. I ate lunch in a charming little Middle Eastern restaurant not far from Powell’s, walked part of the way back, got a little tired, and ordered up an Uber.

What did I see? Not very much. Downtown was pretty deserted. To the extent that there was activity, mostly around Powell’s, it was very urban-normal: groups of millennial friends lingering, a couple of street guitarists busking. Did I ever sense the vaguest whiff of trouble? Not in the slightest. There was a small pro-Palestinian demonstration going on in Chapman Square. I took the heedless risk of walking within about 10 feet of these unwashed ruffians, but lo and behold no one so much as sneezed on me.

Oh, and that one block to which The Washington Post refers? Well, according to Google Maps, the Portland ICE facility is a little more than a mile south of my hotel—which, remember, was south of downtown to begin with—and it’s wedged between the river and Interstate 5. Pretty cut off, in other words. There’s a small residential neighborhood there, but for the vast majority of the people, you have to want to go there—and go out of your way to do so. To put it in, say, New York terms, its location is roughly equivalent to a place like the East 20s over by FDR Drive: a place where, yes, a few people live, but no one else ever goes. I lived in New York for 20 years and don’t think I ever went there once.

Portland, like any city, has its problems. A woman was found dead in a parked car over the weekend, the apparent victim of a shooting. However, homicides are down by more than half for the first half of 2025 compared to 2024. They’ve dropped from 35 to 17. That’s in a city of 635,000 people. The city has a homicide rate of 10.75 per 100,000 people, which ranks it sixty-ninth nationally. That’s less than Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and about the same as Oklahoma City.

But Portland is a useful symbol to our American neofascists in a way those cities are not. It is, to be sure, pretty left-wing—another activity this past weekend involved Gaza food drives, and the weekend culminated in an “emergency” Naked Bike Ride, a summer ritual that organizers called for Sunday to protest the attempt to bring the National Guard into the city.

The city did have those troubles with antifa protesters in the wake of the George Floyd murder, when a number of protests did reach the downtown core and did devolve into violence. That was five years ago now, but Trump and Miller want us to think it never ended and is worse today and has engulfed the entire city.

Why would a president and his top aides lie so nakedly about an American city? For one thing, because they hate it and what it represents—heterodoxy, counterculturism, the questioning of authority. But mostly, because they want to make this nation a fearful one. They want people, in blue places especially, to be afraid.

By my reckoning, they are actually attempting to instill two distinct types of fear. They want liberals and immigrants and people of color and trans people especially to live in literal fear of the state. And they want their people to live in fear of liberals and immigrants and people of color and trans people. They want half the country to hate the other half. It’s a morally unconscionable thing for a presidential administration to do.

I used the term “quasi–police state” above. When I think of police states, I think of places like North Korea and Turkmenistan. We’re a long way from those. But Trump’s impulses and instincts are all running in that direction. That’s why he lies the way he does about Portland. And while I think our laws and traditions are strong enough that he and Miller will never be able to execute the worst of their plans, with this Supreme Court, who knows? I can’t believe I’m writing this about the United States of America.

Trump’s DOJ Cuts Are a Disaster for Sexual Violence Survivors - 2025-10-13T10:00:00Z

The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to the nation’s network of programs designed to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as those that serve to support the survivors of these harrowing crimes. That doing so would be part of President Trump’s agenda came as no surprise to some in the field: “There’s a real denial of sexual violence and a minimizing of the seriousness of sexual violence [in the Trump administration],” said Judith Levine, co-author of The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence.

“There is, in fact, a glorification of violence by the state and also a glorification of misogyny,” Levine continued. In Trumpworld, influential individuals accused of sexual misconduct are rewarded with Cabinet positions, while organizations that provide services to survivors are forced to scramble to keep their doors open.

Problems began soon after Trump returned to office. In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated hundreds of grants, valued at over $800 million. Among the canceled grants were those funding hundreds of web-based resources for survivors seeking support, interpretation services for deaf and hard-of-hearing survivors, emergency housing for those fleeing domestic violence, and training programs for law enforcement on how to serve disabled survivors of sex trafficking.

Form emails sent to grant recipients claimed the “awards no longer effectuate[d] the program goals or agency priorities.” Other federal grant recipients received similar emails while Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency was running roughshod over federal agencies early in Trump’s term.

“The purpose of these grants was to prevent violence and keep communities safe, and that is not happening right now because the grants were terminated, and a lot of these organizations can’t function without the funding,” said Lisa Newman, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, who is representing plaintiffs in Vera Institute of Justice, et al. v. DOJ, et al., an ongoing lawsuit challenging the grant terminations.

In May 2025, the White House’s 2026 Budget request reduced the DOJ’s grant-making budget by about 15 percent from the previous year and stripped funding and power away from the Office on Violence Against Women, or OVW. That office was established following the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, or VAWA, to respond to and reduce gender-based violence.

When OVW announced funding opportunities that same month, the application included sweeping new conditions requiring potential grantees to adhere to President Trump’s executive orders banning federal funds from being used for “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or “gender ideology.” Several of the grant opportunities stated that OVW would prioritize applications from local law enforcement agencies that “certify they comply with federal immigration law,” part of Trump’s broader attack on sanctuary cities.

The Trump administration placed similar conditions on grant opportunities from the Departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development. Those agencies administer funds for programs to reduce the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses, secure emergency and transitional housing for survivors of domestic violence, and investigate cases of suspected child sexual abuse and exploitation.

Moves to impose ideological conditions on grants and terminate existing funding agreements are also part of an effort to frame sexual violence as isolated criminal acts, rather than a systemic issue. New conditions on OVW-administered grants put it plainly: “Activities that frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses [are] out of the program scope and will not be funded.”

Gracia Dodds, a survivor advocate and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan studying the sociology of sexual violence, said that framing is troubling because “sexual violence thrives on isolation … Not thinking about it systemically keeps survivors quiet, it keeps survivors from seeking resources, [and] it allows for violence to continue.”

Progressive legal organizations are challenging the new funding conditions in two lawsuits filed this summer on behalf of several state domestic violence and sexual assault coalitions: Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence et al. v. Pamela Bondi et al. and Rhode Island Coalition et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., et al. Amy Romero, chief legal counsel at Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island—and a lawyer for plaintiffs on both cases—said the conditions “presented a conflict not only with the authorizing statutes, because [VAWA] says you have to serve people regardless of gender identity and alienage status, but also with the missions of [the plaintiffs].”

Indeed, Martina Shabram, executive director of Sexual Assault Support Services, or SASS, in Eugene, Oregon, said: “Certifying in that way would require us to engage in activities that are not in keeping with our values, that are not trauma-informed, [and] that are not survivor-centered.… The entirety of our mission would be unallowable under those requirements.” SASS is one of 39 member programs in the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, a plaintiff in the ongoing cases challenging the funding conditions.

The costs to survivors are already being felt. “We’ve had to scale back some of our programming, especially around health support, counseling, and outreach,” explained Shaniyat Turani, development and program specialist at Asiyah Women’s Center in New York City, an organization that focuses on serving the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian population. Trump’s DOJ cancelled a $200,000 grant to Asiyah Women’s Center in its April terminations. “We’re very limited right now with how many new intakes we can take, so survivors who are depending on us for stable shelter and wraparound care now face an even longer wait time, and there are very few options for them,” Turani said.

Organizations such as the Asiyah Women’s Center that focus their services on survivors of color, immigrants, or the LGBTQ+ community will likely find it more difficult to secure federal grants if Trump’s new funding conditions are allowed to stand. Experts and advocates argue that those organizations are vital to a functioning survivor services network because marginalized populations experience sexual violence at disproportionate rates: One in two women of color experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, while almost half of all transgender people have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. That rate is even higher for trans people of color and disabled trans people.

Additionally, Dodds said that survivor services organizations focusing on specific populations offer “some of the most impactful” programs. “It’s important for someone who holds a shared identity to say, ‘This happened to me, too,’” they explained.

Turani said he has seen the power of culturally specific programming at Asiyah Women’s Center: “Because of that cultural connection and also language access, there’s a sense of safety and connection whenever someone comes in.”

Elsewhere, the uncertainties around future funding opportunities have left organizations in the lurch. “Every quarter gets more and more precarious,” said Shabram. Federal grants have been one of SASS’s most stable sources of funding for much of its 35-year existence, accounting for as much as 40 percent of the organization’s budget in some years. With lawsuits over the new funding conditions ongoing, it is unclear what role federal funds will play in the organization’s budget going forward.

“Pretty much one hundred percent of my job right now is ensuring that we have stable alternative funding streams, such that if the worst happens, we won’t have to lose any services,” said Shabram. Focusing on fundraising has pulled her away from supporting other aspects of organizational development and programming.

Making matters worse, when the government shut down on October 1, 2025, the Trump administration shuttered the DOJ’s grant-making offices, furloughing the OVW grant managers responsible for administering what federal support remains to aid survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. Those workers have typically worked through previous shutdowns.

If ongoing lawsuits are successful in restoring canceled funding and rolling back the sweeping new conditions on grant programs, advocates are concerned that the shakeup will nonetheless have a chilling effect on both organizations and survivors. “We have heard from service providers that it seems too risky to move forward in even applying for federal grant dollars at this point, so that will have an impact on resources,” explained Dawn Dalton, executive director of the District of Columbia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an organization with 17 member programs and a plaintiff in the cases challenging new funding conditions at DOJ, HHS, and HUD.

Additionally, Dalton said, in the current climate, “survivors from certain populations don’t feel like it is safe for them to reach out for support and resources, and there’s the ripple effect of that, of staying in an abusive relationship and continuing to experience further harm.”

Everybody Around Trump Hates the Unhinged Laura Loomer. Except Trump. - 2025-10-13T09:30:00Z

In mid-August, Laura Loomer—a woman who has posted lewd and evidence-free tweets about Kamala Harris’s sexual history, who calls people she disagrees with “cunt,” and who has called for Gaza to be flattened and glassed, picked up the phone and got Marco Rubio on the line, the evening after he attended negotiations in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. The Loomer emergency that the American secretary of state needed to attend to? A U.S.-based charitable organization had obtained visas for about 60 severely ill Gazan children to come to the United States for treatment. After talking to Loomer, Rubio turned from negotiations with the world’s other nuclear-armed superpower to shut down that visa program. 

In her power and profanity, in her smashing of walls between “influencer” and “journalist” and “presidential adviser,” Loomer is a mile-marker in the descent of the American political discourse into depravity, and of our government into chaos and farce. One of the most outré political actors ever to appear on the American scene, eclipsing even Alex Jones in bug-eyed malice and paranoia, she is also one of the most powerful women in Trumpland. She has taken credit for over a dozen “scalps”—her word for people let go within hours or days of her public assaults. Among them are a surgeon-general nominee; national security apparatchiks, some with decades of experience in China-U.S. relations and cybersecurity issues related to Russia; the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (who later returned to his job); and random Biden holdovers who seem to have been targeted by MAGA co-workers.

As self-appointed truffle pig for rooting out Trump’s enemies, Loomer has a signature methodology: She doxes and slanders her targets, often with references to cannibalism, oral sex, and other eating-related images that suggest some sort of Hannibal Lecter–ish pathology. She eschews sleep and social life, scouring social media and other public histories of government officials and politicos, looking for hints of disloyalty and then hounding these enemies publicly, on Rumble, Twitter, and Telegram. She solicits tips, some of which she claims, in tweets, come from intelligence sources, others clearly from MAGA appointees and maybe others with obscure special interests.

The White House itself tries—and fails—to keep Loomer away from Trump. But “the president likes her tenacity and loyalty,” Steve Bannon told me. “He sees her as a killer. And the fact that people are blocking her makes him pay attention more.” Clearly, he wants her around. “She is his Omarosa,” said another source who has worked with Trump, referring to now long-forgotten Trump ex-amanuensis Omarosa Manigault Newman. “He understands people and ratings. He understands how to get coverage.”

But increasingly, Trump supporters—including several of the former mentors who helped build Loomer’s career—are cowering themselves. The right-wing Christian producer Lauren Witzke, who launched Loomer’s podcast Loomer Unleashed, put it this way: “Trump needed a pit bull, and we went all in to create his pit bull.… And we created a monster.” 

Many a MAGA influencer could be awarded the red-H Badge of Hypocrisy, but in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Loomer has performed a triple axel. In July, she went on a tear about Kirk’s supposed disloyalty to Trump. “I don’t ever want to hear Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again,” Loomer posted on X on July 13, after Kirk demanded Trump release the Epstein files. “After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as [a] political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years. Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next. TPUSA was only able to thrive thanks to the generosity of President Trump.” After Kirk’s murder, that didn’t escape attention. She has so far brazened out a wave of criticism while demanding the doxing and firing of people who have posted critically about Kirk, or about the White House effort to martyr him. 

This latest unblushing mendacity has, I’m told, put Loomer even further on the back foot with Washington MAGAs, many of whom have been living in terror of her notice.

Loomer, 32, has emerged as the radical right’s Madame DeFarge, the remorseless, bloodthirsty woman in A Tale of Two Cities, the Dickens novel about the French Revolution, knitting the names of enemies while sitting beside the guillotine. Loomer is adamant that the sole reason for her freelance “vetting” is that Trump’s own staff has failed to root out Biden holdovers and other current and prospective hires wobbly on the president and his policy whims. But one MAGA Republican, who asked not to be named because of fear of retribution, likened Loomer’s M.O. to shakedowns. “It’s extortion, political intimidation, and trying to eliminate competition in the dirtiest backhanded disgusting tactics,” they said. 

And in the face of all this, the Washington political media—flailing under the avalanche of Trump’s second-term abuses of power—has been sane-washing Loomer for months. CNN and The Washington Post have run essentially normalizing features. Politico harvests her opinions for articles like those of any other strategist. And why not? Besides strolling into the Oval Office to denounce national security aides with orders of magnitude more experience and education than herself, she meets personally with the vice president and the secretary of state, who apparently also takes her calls while in the middle of superpower negotiations. She claims to have spoken to Trump on the phone about 50 times. The New York Times profiled her recently as “Trump’s Blunt Instrument.” In fact, the opposite is true: She is a blunt instrument for getting to Trump. A close read of her Loomerings suggests her project surpasses just hunting down crypto-libs in government. As she’s gained mainstream notoriety, she’s been the recipient of ever more “tips,” as she puts it. And she appears to have attracted actors who might want to use her to channel their own influence. As one of the most reprobate nodes in the influence system around Trump (Boris Epshteyn perhaps a notch above), Loomer is a textbook gauge of the rise of corrupt authoritarian cronyism in American politics today.  

“LLP. Activate.”

On a recent spring evening at the Kennedy Center, as staff and security were waiting for Trump and Melania’s motorcade to arrive for a performance of Les Misérables, a certain code crackled across all advance-team comms: “LLP. Activate.” 

Everyone with an earpiece in the vicinity understood the acronym. Laura Loomer Protocol. According to my source, this is an actual strategy understood by White House advance teams. When a sighting is shared, the teams know to keep eyes on her and, in the patois, “initiate containment.” 

Somehow, Loomer had slipped into the VIP room without a ticket, positioning herself within a clutch of donors waiting for photos with Trump and Melania. “It was a very small group, he wasn’t there yet, it was pre-staging, and she’d positioned herself as the first person in line,” a source close to the advance team said. “They removed her from there and put her in an outer perimeter. As she was being gently guided away, she was talking the whole time, strenuously objecting. ‘I’m supposed to be here! I have to let the president know what press to talk to! The president wants to see me, and in the presidential box.’” 

That LLP activation was successful. But successful Loomer containment has not been the norm in Trump’s second term. With the help of well-placed insiders, Loomer has frequently found ways to hustle past perimeters and into Trump’s inner sanctums—most famously when she spent at least two hours in the Oval Office with Trump and other top government officials naming supposed internal national security enemies before he ousted six of them, followed by national security adviser Mike Waltz later. 

That day, she was not on the president’s schedule, according to the White House press office. She might have leveraged an invitation to the Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s first big tariffs announcement to work her way over to the Oval Office. “She finds a way to get herself on the campus wherever he is, and then uses her cunning and ability to speak her way past people, to get them to get her closer to him, until he sees her,” a source close to the White House told me. “Once he recognizes her, there is a 50-50 chance he will say, ‘Hey Laura, come on over here!’” (After Kirk’s death and other critical notoriety in late summer, the source revised those chances down to 70–30.) 

Loomer insists, “I had a meeting on his calendar.” She said Trump personally invited her to come two days earlier, but she was delayed when bad weather in Florida canceled her flight. 

Fame via Islamophobia

Loomer’s audacity and attention seeking were always aspects of her personality. She grew up in Arizona, in what she described, in a memoir, as a climate of fear and violence in her home. “The truth is, at a very young age, I learned that most people can’t relate to the horror show that was my childhood,” she wrote. “Having friends over at my house was never an option because my brother’s severe mental illness and unpredictable violent episodes meant the police were at my home on a weekly basis. Most of the time I didn’t even have a bedroom door,” she wrote, because her brother would kick it down if she locked herself in “to escape getting beaten or stabbed.” 

Loomer spent high school hundreds of miles away at a ranch-style boarding school in northern Arizona with a graduating class of 32. She was blonde and pudgy, nearly unrecognizable from the raven-haired sylph of today. One classmate recalled an awkward teen who acted out in bids for attention that elicited classmates’ pity. “We were all close, you kinda just dealt with Laura,” this classmate said. “You felt bad for her.” The classmate recalled one incident that exemplified her situation: At one point, she had to have a surgery. Neither her mom, a nurse, nor her father, a doctor, traveled the few hours’ drive from Tucson to be with her. She was nursed in the dorms by the mothers of two other students. “I think they just placed [her] there, her dad wanted her gone,” the classmate said. 

Her conservatism was already chiseled: As a teen John McCain supporter, she often unleashed extreme anti-Islam sentiments, even screaming at two Turkish exchange students that they were terrorists while they were praying, according to the high school classmate. As she came of age, Islamophobia became her brand. At Florida’s Barry University in 2014, Loomer caught the attention of Gateway Pundit and Breitbart News with an Islamophobic Facebook post about how her school’s interfaith service on 9/11 was opened by, as she put it, “an imam … literally chanting Allahu Akbar.” That bit of notoriety got her invited to a 2014 David Horowitz Freedom Center gala in West Palm Beach, where she met, and offered her services to, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. 

At Veritas, she pulled stunts like going undercover in Hillary Clinton’s campaign to try to get aides to accept illegal contributions on hidden cameras. She appeared as a contestant on a show as one of three women vying to date “Cannibal Cop” Gilberto Valle, who had just finished a 21-month prison stint for going on chatrooms and fantasizing about raping, killing, and eating various women he knew, including his wife. 

Her bilious communication style attracted a devoted and large social media following. But by 2019, she was wandering in the cold, attention-less world of the canceled. Loomer’s Islamophobia (Islam is a “cancer,” Muslims are “savages”) got her booted from Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Paypal, and even, she has said, de-banked by Chase. Broke and desperate, she cried over her plight on a cringeworthy Alex Jones Infowars broadcast. “My life is ruined!” she sobbed. 

Her emotional volatility was well known among her peers. As Trump 1.0 wound down, Loomer, wandering in the desert of social media banishment, decided to try her hand at retail politics in Florida. Shortly before her first election loss in 2020 (in a Republican congressional primary), Loomer texted mentor Roger Stone that she was driving past Lowe’s and “thinking of buying rope.” She has alienated other mentors and friends along the way, most notably in a long, bitter feud with her former friend and campaign communications director Milo Yiannopoulos, who claims he cut ties because she sexually harassed a young male campaign aide—an accusation she denies. It wasn’t the first time she’s fielded such an accusation: A prominent MAGA Republican recorded a six-minute video accusing her of sexual aggression and stalking that is still online. 

But in late 2022, Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk and renamed X, reinstated her account, allowing her to get back to her brand, turning her name into a verb and “Loomering” adversaries, and allowing her following to grow, now, to one that is roughly the size of the city of Phoenix. She started her own show, Loomer Unleashed, eventually joining the unmoderated right-wing streamer Rumble. In the first episode, posted in October 2023, she talked with her mentor Roger Stone about Hamas. 

Fateful Day at Bedminster 

Loomer apparently first attracted Trump’s attention in February 2023, with a stunt at a DeSantis book signing. But her easy access to Trump seems to date to later that summer, when she was delivered to Trump’s country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, by Paul Ingrassia, a New York Young Republican, now in the Trump administration. Ingrassia brought Loomer to Trump, helping her pick out a “fuchsia bodycon dress” on the drive over from New York. On Instagram, Ingrassia posted a picture of himself, Loomer, and his sister in the back seat of a car, with the caption: “Trump’s posse off to the #livgolf tournament at Bedminster to see the King!” At Bedminster, one of Trump’s aides reportedly pointed her out to Trump in the handshake line, and the rest is social media history.

Loomer later that day posted pictures of herself with a grinning Trump on a balcony overlooking the golf course. Over the next 14 months, Trump shared Loomer content 86 times. By the end of the 2024 campaign, she was riding around on Trump Force One, most famously swanning down the Trump jet stairs when he arrived for a debate with Harris, and later standing by his side in huge dark glasses on a trip to New York for a 9/11 memorial service. Trump’s late-campaign buddy inspired raised eyebrows—and intra-campaign panic. Social media buzzed with allegations that their friendship was more than platonic. Loomer’s own tweets—including hand-holding emojis, expressing her “love” for Trump, and even crowing that he “blew me a kiss” at the Republican National Convention—did not cool the gossip.

Last September, Bill Maher took the proverbial bull by the horns and said he believed Trump was “fucking” Laura Loomer. After that broadcast, according to Loomer, she was officially banished from rides on Trump’s plane. And there was no further discussion of a job in the administration.

Loomer blamed Maher and hired Larry Klayman, the former longtime head of the right-wing group Judicial Watch, to file a defamation case that is currently wending its way through a court in Florida. Maher’s lawyers are mounting a spirited defense, and the judge has so far seemed unsympathetic to Loomer, demanding to see her financial information, an order to which she has so far not submitted. Her case is not being helped by “four White House officials” who recently leaked to Bari Weiss’s Free Press that “Laura is more trouble than she’s worth” and speculated that she is influenced by lobby firms.  Loomer responded to that with a set of tweets threatening to expose the leakers.

The Maher case has already produced a revealing and extremely combative 228-page deposition. Maher’s lawyer forced Loomer to read some of her own tweets on videotape at her deposition at the Washington office of the law firm Davis Wright Tremain, accusing Kamala Harris of “sucking dick” for professional gain, having “an infested snatch,” and having “been ridden harder than the community bikes in San Francisco, but no kids ever”—implying that she’d had abortions.

Loomer and Klayman snickered throughout.

Asked how she knew those sexual allegations were “facts,” she replied that they must be true since Harris never denied any of it. “In reality, I’m a professional person,” Loomer stated. “I dress very professionally. I can carry myself very professionally. I am an investigative journalist.” 

Waltz’s Last Waltz

The Oval Office National Security Council bloodbath in April was the first—but not the last—time Loomer was publicly linked to firings by the Trump administration. The move was clearly a coup for the MAGA camp of isolationists, a group including Steve Bannon. The diminishment of the NSC is a longtime project of Bannon’s “smash the administrative state” program. “No one in the history of the National Security Council has ever taken out six guys like that,” Bannon exulted to me over the phone, explaining that Trump had wanted to drastically cut the NSC in his first term and failed. Bannon said the Loomerings enabled Rubio to cut an additional 125 people from the NSC. “Nobody has had that effect on the NSC, including Kissinger and Brzezinski, that Loomer has had,” he said, referring to former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Much—but not all—of what she advocates for falls in line with garden-variety MAGA paranoia, isolationism, and Zionist propaganda. But other Loomer passions are more niche. The breadth of her areas of “expertise” and the extent of her influence is beginning to resemble that of a D.C. lobbying firm that might sell its connections to a wide array of clients. She told The New York Times in early summer that she had five clients—but wouldn’t name them. That list appears to have grown, but she remains cagey about them. She told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer recently that “several billionaires” have retained her for “political vetting.”

Her first “scalp” in the second Trump administration was that of an obscure, California-based assistant U.S. attorney named Adam Schleifer. Less than two hours after she targeted him as a “Trump hater” on X, the White House fired him. Schleifer has since filed a wrongful termination case, arguing that Andrew Wiederhorn, an American businessman under indictment for a multimillion-dollar fraud charge, had engineered a targeted smear funneled through right-wing influencers like Loomer. The DOJ recently dropped charges against Wiederhorn, and Loomer fired off a celebratory post on X. 

In late July, Loomer accused hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad, who was named in May to run the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, of being a closet leftist Bernie bro. He soon resigned. But a small group of influential MAGAs—in a highly unusual move, given the climate of Republican terror around Loomer—fought back. They accused Loomer of working on behalf of a genetic medicine company, Sarepta, that makes an extremely expensive drug—$3.2 million per patient—that the FDA had just banned. Loomer began her campaign against Prasad a few days after the ban. Prasad’s supporters smelled a rat. American Majority CEO Ned Ryun, a legacy right-winger, son of Jim Ryun, a Trump Medal of Freedom recipient and former Olympic athlete, unleashed a volley of tweets claiming Loomer essentially lobbied for Sarepta, speculating she was paid six figures by a firm called Michael Best Strategies. 

Loomer replied by tweet: “This is a blatant lie.” Ten days later, Susie Wiles brought Prasad back into the fold.

The Best firm also represents a nonpartisan group called the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, with a history of lobbying around the Puerto Rican economy, and specifically a debt-restructuring plan. In her years as an influencer, Loomer has mentioned Puerto Rico mostly in the context of body-shaming “Porky Puerto Rican” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On July 17, she took a sudden interest in Puerto Rico’s 10-year-old debt-restructuring program. “This smells like USAID 2.0,” she wrote, “another scheme where corrupt bureaucrats and well-connected insiders get rich off of other people’s suffering.” Trump soon fired the majority of the board of the bankruptcy authority. 

Loomer vehemently denies taking direction or money from lobbying firms. To admit to doing so is, of course, the kiss of death with Trump. The eat-or-be-eaten foundation of the MAGA movement does presume everyone has a side hustle, a grift, something to upsell. If you’re not making bank on your access and advantages, you’re a chump, leaving money on the table like the libtard betas who pay their taxes on time. But the flipside is that if you’re making bank off your access to the Boss and not cutting him in, you are very much risking his rage and your own banishment. And without him, as one MAGA Loomer critic put it to me, “You’re just a speck of dust.”

Why It’s Pointless for Democrats to Negotiate a Shutdown Deal - 2025-10-12T10:00:00Z

The popular way of describing what’s going on in Washington right now is to say that on October 1, the federal government shut down as a result of Congress’s inability to pass an appropriations bill to keep it funded. Chief among the sticking points was the fact that Democrats and Republicans could not come to terms on the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Republican bill did not include them; Democrats balked at signing their name to a budget that would cause skyrocketing premium costs for millions of mostly low- and middle-income Americans.

You wouldn’t be faulted if that was your capsule summary of the shutdown. It’s essentially the story to which most of the political press is sticking, and there’s nothing fundamentally untrue about it. It would appear for now, in fact, that the broad public acceptance of this state of play is boosting Democrats’ fortunes in the game of who “owns” the shutdown. CNN’s Harry Enten reported this week that voters blame the GOP more, by an average of 12 points, and he noted that historically speaking, the party blamed at the outset is who gets blamed at the end. (It probably helps Democrats’ cause that those perusing the Obamacare exchanges for plans right now are already seeing the huge spikes in premium costs.)

Still, these facts only tell part of the story. This government shutdown isn’t merely about an appropriations bill, and it’s not entirely about health care subsidies. This shutdown is actually the culmination of a much deeper dysfunction, to which blame can indeed be wholly attached to President Donald Trump and his GOP apparatchiks. But the underlying cause of the shutdown is tricky terrain for Democrats to negotiate, and it calls into question whether they can—or even should—speedily resolve it. And the key to understanding the problem begins with acknowledging that this didn’t start in October. The government shutdown began a few weeks after Trump was sworn in.

Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.

But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.

I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.

Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.

bluesky post: “we are telling you right now that we do not intend to honor anything we agree to” is certainly a negotiating position one can take

What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, “If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances.”

So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, “If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness.” Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.

It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.

MAGA Implodes Over Kristi Noem’s “Stare Down” With Man in Chicken Suit - 2025-10-11T10:00:00Z

This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem staged a bizarre photo op in Portland that appeared designed to bolster President Trump’s effort to deploy Oregon’s National Guard against ICE protesters in the city. Noem stood on a rooftop observing protesters below, and MAGA influencers hailed it as a moment of extraordinary heroism against a powerful, implacable enemy. “Noem just stared down violent Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” one wrote.

Alas, it turned out there were only a few protesters milling around far in the distance, including one man in a chicken suit. Intense online mockery ensued, and this buffoonish display is now at the center of a good New York Times piece, which details how the White House is relying on MAGA media personalities to spread the deceptive impression of a city in large-scale civil collapse.

However, the Times piece commits one misstep: It keeps describing those MAGA personalities as “provocateurs.” In fact, they are propagandists. Mainstream news outlets appear uncomfortable wrestling with the degree to which pro-Trump media figures practice propaganda undertaken in bad faith toward expressly instrumental ends. We need them to get past that.

This may seem like a churlish objection given that the Times piece is well reported and informative. But this euphemistic “provocateur” language risks diminishing the force and quality of the paper’s own reporting. The piece notes that federal and state law enforcement have reported that protests there are small-scale, and nothing like the civil breakdown depicted by Trump to create a rationale to federalize Oregon’s National Guard (a measure that’s temporarily blocked in court). Then it reports this:

But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape”—as the White House described Portland on Wednesday—and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.

The piece also refers to “dueling versions of reality.” But this isn’t a case of one side genuinely seeing things one way (as “comparative calm”) and the other side genuinely seeing them differently (as a “hellscape”). It’s a case of one side (law enforcement, local journalists) trying to faithfully depict what’s really happening and the other side (MAGA) concertedly lying about it to serve corrupt ends that are comprehensively, even intentionally disconnected from facts on the ground.

One influencer, for instance, accuses the Portland police chief of “allowing violent terrorists” to “run the city,” which is horseshit of the highest order. The Times piece quotes another MAGA personality suggesting that right-wing agitators might be handing out flags and trying to bait protesters into burning them.

Other MAGA figures have described the city as a “war zone” and “under siege by antifa” or “fallen to antifa” and even in a “state of open insurrection.”

Indeed, as Media Matters documents, the gap between what MAGA media are portraying and what local press is reporting (the protests are mostly small and peaceful) has grown to enormous proportions. As one reporter put it, many protesters are “in pajamas, sharing pastries, throwing a frisbee, and playing board games.”

The point is not that there are zero examples of leftist protesters getting violent—as the Times notes, a handful of leftists are getting prosecuted for just that. Rather, it’s that none of this remotely matches what Trump and MAGA are conjuring into being.

The word “provocateur” doesn’t do justice to any of this—and we don’t mean to pick on the Times here, as that euphemism is constantly used elsewhere too. “Provocateur” implies that all this is akin to plucky showmanship—political theater designed to needle, satirize, provoke, and entertain, as opposed to manipulate and deceive.

Some of these personalities probably do see themselves, to some degree, as putting on a show. But the broader aim of all this agitprop is far uglier. Trump has employed a form of state propaganda that may be unrivaled by any presidency in modern memory, and these MAGA influencers are generating material for that vile effort.

This is partly about producing endless online content to keep the MAGA base well fed. Noem has chroniclers around her capturing her every move: When she gazed down on the man in the chicken suit, several depicted her as bravely confronting antifa mobs, even though the man stood with a few other people hundreds of feet away.

But the absurdity of this episode doesn’t diminish how sinister and carefully elaborated much of this propaganda truly is. When ICE raided an apartment complex in Chicago, where Trump is also trying to deploy various National Guards, state propagandists produced a slick video portraying it as a heroic operational triumph against a dangerous, determined, dug-in enemy. Stephen Miller declared that the complex was “filled” with Tren de Aragua “terrorists.”

Yet as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, all of two people were identified as possible members of the gang, per CNN. While some others reportedly had criminal histories (some just involving drug possession), surely that doesn’t justify a massive hypermilitarized operation that terrorized scores or hundreds of people (the building has 130 units) and dragged children into the street.

If Miller were being honest about his true project, he’d forthrightly admit that he consciously intends all this as deliberate propaganda. It’s geared toward establishing unlimited discretion for Trump to simply invent emergencies with an eye toward vastly expanding presidential power. Miller wants Trump to bulldoze the courts into surrendering on fact-finding, into granting him quasi-absolute authority to declare into existence—merely by fiat—the conditions needed to justify whatever law enforcement or domestic military operation Trump (i.e., Miller) launches next, including ones targeting Americans.

If inflicting these operations on civilian populations incites violence in return, from Miller’s perspective that’s surely all the better. Asawin Suebsaeng reports for Zeteo that Trump advisers are nudging him to invoke the Insurrection Act if necessary to circumvent judicial checks on these authorities. That’s plainly what Miller hopes for.

Yet the conventions of political reporting today are poorly suited to capturing this naked use of sheer pretexts and the bottomless bad faith they rely upon.

Headlines in the Times, for instance, regularly fall short in just this way. They treat Trump and his administration’s stated rationales as things they authentically believe, whether it’s the claim that Harvard violates students’ civil rights to justify his state crackdown on academic freedom:

or the insistence that Portland is under siege from domestic terrorists to justify deploying the military there:

In these cases, casual readers will have zero inkling that these are bad-faith pretexts as opposed to genuinely held positions. The media needs to find new tools to convey these basic realities.

Propagandists are not “provocateurs.” Trump’s stated grounds for his abuses of power are not actual reasons, they are pretexts created for purely instrumental ends. And Kristi Noem did not “stare down” mobs of antifa terrorists in Portland. That’s because there isn’t any serious network of organized leftist violence in the United States, no matter how loudly Miller shrieks otherwise. Grasping how committed MAGA is to such industrial-scale deceptions is critical to getting this broader moment right.

Surprise! Vivek Ramaswamy’s Turning Point Event Derailed by Racism - 2025-10-10T21:11:06Z

Try as he might, Vivek Ramaswamy will never be fully accepted by MAGA world.

The Ohio gubernatorial candidate and former DOGE co-chief came face-to-face with the racism rampant among American conservative youth culture Tuesday when he headlined a Turning Point USA event in Montana.

Speaking at Montana State University, Ramaswamy fielded disturbing questions about how he believed he could adequately participate in electoral politics when his religion and ethnic identity don’t align with stereotypical white American ideals.

“Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God,” said a male student. “How can you represent the constituents of Ohio who are 64 percent Christian if you are not a part of that faith?”

“If you are an Indian, a Hindu, coming from a different culture, different religion than those who founded this country, those who grew this country, built this country, made this country the beautiful thing that it is today,” he continued. “What are you conserving? You are bringing change. I’ll be 100 percent honest with you—Christianity is the one truth.”

A female student asked Ramaswamy why he chose to “masquerade as a Christian.”

Before he became an alternative fixture in Trumpworld, Ramaswamy was a biotech investor, an entrepreneur, and a 2024 Republican presidential candidate. But none of those notches on his belt could atone for the color of his skin or his religion with some members of the Turning Point USA crowd, which was apparently more fixated on Christian nationalism than honoring the First Amendment’s allowances for freedom of religion.

“I’m an ethical monotheist, that’s the way I would describe my faith,” Ramaswamy said in another jarring exchange with a student. “Do you think it’s inappropriate for someone who’s a Hindu to be a U.S. president?”

“No I think it’s—” another male student started, before stopping himself. “But isn’t Charlie Kirk’s organization founded on Christian values as well? And isn’t America based on what Protestantism is and based on how those values are? Wouldn’t that contradict what your beliefs are?”

The tour stop had been scheduled before Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September. Kirk launched Turning Point to spread conservative ideology among America’s youth.

There are some 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters of Turning Point USA across the nation, but the conservative advocacy nonprofit received more than 54,000 inquiries for new campus chapters in the 48 hours after Kirk’s assassination, TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet announced last month.

Why Trump Will Never Win a Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T20:58:31Z

On Friday, President Donald Trump got tantalizingly close to the Nobel Peace Prize he has been on a weird, quixotic quest to win since his second term began. Trump wasn’t recognized by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but he was given a shout-out by its 2025 recipient, Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, a strident advocate for free-market ideals and a staunch opponent of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator who has ruled her country since 2013.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on X. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause.”

That is the best Trump could hope for, though he certainly will keep begging for the Nobel Prize in the coming year, pressuring foreign leaders to advocate on his behalf like a pleading toddler and threatening Norway with sanctions or worse. Trump will not win the prize even if the Gaza peace deal he helped broker between Israel and Hamas miraculously holds in 2026, because his other policies are pushing regions around the world—including Venezuela—very much in the opposite direction of peace.

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the few truly genuine missions of Trump’s second term. He is often checked out in official meetings, and seems to have left the functioning of the government to Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget—who are using their power to inaugurate fascism and purge the bureaucracy. But Trump has earnestly pursued diplomacy in the Middle East while also desperately, embarrassingly campaigning for the prize.

Trump’s obsession with winning it is fairly easy to understand. Five years ago, he left office having accomplished very little besides a corporate tax cut that any Republican president would have signed into law. The legacy of that term was largely defined by the day-to-day chaos of his lead-by-tweet approach and two massive failures during his last year: his woeful mismanagement of a pandemic and his effort to overturn a legitimate election. The Peace Prize is tantalizing because it’s a tangible and rarefied accomplishment—proof that he’s a winner, not an incompetent loser. (And the man does love awards, so much so that he invents them to honor himself.) Also, Barack Obama won one.

Much of Trump’s diplomatic work suggests that he is both incompetent and a loser, however. He is fond of claiming that he has stopped seven wars and ended conflicts that had been ongoing for “decades”—like one between Azerbaijan and Armenia (which he almost always confuses with Albania). For the most part, though, Trump’s work has consisted of swooping in to help halt relatively minor escalations. The full-fledged wars that he promised to end on his first day in office on the campaign trail last year—in Ukraine and Gaza—are still very active and only recently paused, respectively. After eight months of costly dithering, he has finally begun aiding Ukraine against Russian invaders, albeit to a lesser extent than his predecessor. In Gaza, the recent truce is a positive sign—and an accomplishment that Joe Biden could not achieve, due to a combination of his own spinelessness and Benjamin Netanyahu’s eagerness to continue the conflict (and aid Trump’s reelection effort).

It’s unlikely that the Gaza peace deal will hold—Netanyahu clearly wants to continue the war, and the thorniest part of the negotiations are yet to come—but even it does, Trump will never win the Nobel for a simple reason: He is running an increasingly violent, murderous, and despotic government. Masked goons from the Department of Homeland Security are kidnapping and disappearing people from the streets, shooting priests with pepper balls, and handcuffing naked children. He is ordering the wanton bombing of small boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, claiming that they are filled with drugs and “narcoterrorists” without providing any evidence, in clear violation of U.S. and international law. And his administration is inching closer to war in Venezuela.

The fact that Machado was awarded the prize may ironically make that war more likely. She advocates for regime change in Venezuela, though she has stopped short of endorsing a U.S.-led overthrow—but she has endorsed America’s extralegal strikes in the Caribbean, claiming that they are necessitated by Maduro’s oppressive narcoterrorist government. By endorsing her project, the Nobel Committee has given it greater legitimacy. It has handed a potent argument to figures in the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who are pushing the United States to remove Maduro from power through military force.

For these reasons, Machado might seem like an odd laureate. But in truth, looking to the past, the Nobel Peace Prize has never only been about peace. You can applaud the bombing of fishing boats and still win one—or, in the case of Henry Kissinger, you can order the secret bombing of a country not even involved in a war and still win one. Trump has blood on his hands, but that hasn’t stopped the Norwegian Nobel Committee before. So I guess there’s a glimmer of hope for Trump after all.

Stephen Miller Accidentally Says “I” When Discussing Trump’s Powers - 2025-10-10T19:52:09Z

Stephen Miller may have just accidentally confirmed that he, not President Donald Trump, is the one calling the shots in regard to deportation raids and National Guard deployments.

“Illinois governor says we’re provoking actions that are unlawful,” Miller said on CNN on Monday. “Why would the mere presence—just think about this for a second. If I put federal law enforcement and National Guard into a nice sleepy Southern town, is anyone gonna riot?”

Miller’s use of the first person is alarming here, suggesting that he—an unelected deputy chief of staff—has either the complete authority or an outsize influence on the administration’s most authoritarian decisions.

“Miller says quiet part out loud,” one user wrote on X. “He determines where to put ICE, CBP & other federal agencies, but he is also doing the same for various National Guards. An unelected staffer making these decisions, where is the president? Both Miller and Vought are running this admin.”

Additionally, Miller misrepresents small Southern towns and the actions of the National Guard. If hundreds of armed military members descended on some remote Southern locale and started violently rounding up neighbors, employees, and friends, I’d be willing to bet that it wouldn’t go so peacefully.

Miller made the remarks in the same interview where he claimed Trump has “plenary authority,” after being asked whether the administration would abide by court rulings blocking his deployment of troops to American cities.

Republican Rep Claims Everyone at “No Kings” Protest Is a Terrorist - 2025-10-10T19:35:47Z

GOP congressional leaders on Friday smeared an upcoming anti-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., in the most hysterical, demonizing terms.

After House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise referred to the peaceful “No Kings” protest planned for October 18 as a “Hate America rally,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer went one step further, calling it a “terrorist” event.

At a press conference, Emmer accused Democrats of causing the government shutdown in order to “score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold … a ‘Hate America’ rally in D.C. next week.”

Earlier, Johnson had also baselessly attributed the shutdown to the event. Calling the prospective protesters “pro-Hamas” and “antifa,” he told Fox News that Democrats will not “reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base.”

“No Kings” events have taken place in towns and cities across the country since President Donald Trump was elected. On June 14, when Trump held a massive military parade in the streets of Washington, D.C., millions of people—of varying political stripes—peacefully protested against his antidemocratic second-term agenda.

The upcoming event will take place nationwide. According to Ezra Levin, who co-leads Indivisible, one of the organizing groups, it is set to be “the largest peaceful protest in modern American history.” And as emphasized on an organizing page, “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action.”

That hasn’t stopped Republican fearmongering.

Emmer’s remarks echo the ongoing, authoritarian efforts by the Trump administration, spearheaded by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, to crack down on the Democratic Party and political left based on ludicrous accusations of ties to “terrorism.”

Federal Workers Might Not Know They’ve Been Fired Thanks to Shutdown - 2025-10-10T19:26:31Z

President Donald Trump’s administration announced Friday that the government initiated sweeping layoffs of furloughed federal employees—but they might have some trouble actually delivering termination notices amid the government shutdown.

White House budget director Russell Vought announced that the reductions in force were finally underway, after he’d warned federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs as means to force Democrats to approve a stopgap funding measure.

But federal employees sent home on furlough are typically barred from accessing their email accounts, except for in limited cases, CNN reported Friday. The Antideficiency Act—the same law that places some constraints on whether Trump can actually fire federal workers during a shutdown—bars federal employees from doing any work during the shutdown.

One employee at the Department of Agriculture suggested this could delay workers receiving termination notices. “So I guess we won’t find out we’re laid off until after the shutdown ends?” the person told CNN.

Trump administration officials said that employees would also be notified by mail, and that furloughed employees were permitted to use government-issued equipment to check for updates on the reductions in force. So, rather than waiting indefinitely with an axe over their heads, they may know in just a few days, as USPS has not been affected by the shutdown.

Responding to the announcement that layoffs were underway, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 government workers, wrote on X, “The lawsuit has been filed.”

MAGA Melts Down Over Trump Giving Qatar a Military Base in U.S. - 2025-10-10T19:08:06Z

The Trump administration’s approval of a Qatari air force base in Idaho isn’t popular with either of America’s political parties.

Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the forthcoming Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in America’s heartland Friday morning, thanking the Middle Eastern nation for playing a “core part” in negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. Mountain Home Air Force Base will host Qatari F-15 fighter jets and pilots, and allow Qatari forces alongside American troops for F-15 pilot training.

The move, which stands in stark contrast to the president’s “America first” agenda, seriously rattled some of Donald Trump’s most outspoken supporters.

“Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans,” posted far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has operated as Trump’s informal “loyalty enforcer” since August. “I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026. I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis.”

“This is where I draw the line,” she wrote.

Other conservatives were left bewildered by the seemingly nonsensical decision.

“What’s the strategic rationale for this? Either ours or Qatar’s?” posted the National Review’s Noah Rothman. “You could rattle off all the problems/risks we’re inviting easily. But I have no idea what the steelman case for this would be? I’m sure we don’t need to import any more Qatari covert assets into this country.”

And still others pointed out the inconsistent hypocrisy of the administration’s policies.

“Joe Biden was criticized for a Chinese balloon flying over our airspace,” wrote GOP consultant Mike Madrid. “They’re giving Qatar an entire f’ing air base.”

Dan Caldwell, who was forced out of the DOD during Hegseth’s Signalgate disaster, wrote on X that the joint air force operation was being blown out of proportion.

“The freak out around this is of course totally unwarranted since this is actually a pretty common practice with countries that buy and operate a lot of U.S. military aircraft. Singapore has a similar facility and detachment for its F-15 training unit at this very same airbase,” Caldwell said.

But even beyond the Air Force base, Qatar appears to have bought itself a very sweet spot in Trumpworld. Just months ago, Qatar solidified a deal with the Trump Organization to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. The tiny nation also bestowed a wildly controversial super luxury jumbo jet on to Trump, all in an apparent attempt to shore up its relationship with the U.S.’s notoriously flighty leader.

Those transactions began to pay off earlier this month, when Trump signed an executive order that pledged to give the tiny, energy-rich, non-NATO ally the same level of protection from the U.S. as some of America’s most powerful allies.

GOP Candidate: It’s Not Discrimination to Fire Someone for Being Gay - 2025-10-10T18:56:03Z

Virginia Republican gubernatorial hopeful Winsome Earle-Sears seems to have a very loose definition of what is and what is not discrimination. 

Earle-Sears and Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger got into a back-and-forth exchange about transgender people and bathrooms during the Virginia gubernatorial debate on Thursday, before moving on to Earle-Sears’s record on discrimination. 

“My opponent was asked about her record of discrimination,” Spanberger began. “And importantly, my opponent has previously said that she does not think that gay couples should be allowed to marry—” 

“That’s not discrimination!” Earles-Sears interrupted defensively. 

“She is quote unquote ‘morally opposed’ to same sex marriage—”

“That’s not discrimination!” Earles-Sears interrupted again. 

“My opponent has also previously said that she thinks it’s OK for someone to be fired from their job for being gay, that is discrimination—” 

“That’s not discrimination, nooo,” Earles-Sears said yet again.

Earles-Sears did not immediately respond to Spanberger’s examples, instead accusing her of wanting to defund the police. 

If being “morally opposed” to gay marriage and supporting firing people for their sexual orientation isn’t discrimination, what is? 

Sears has been a vocal right-wing firebrand long before she joined Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as his lieutenant governor. The state’s first Black lieutenant governor has suggested it’s time to move on from slavery, supported making abortions illegal at six weeks and threatened violence against reproductive rights activists, held an assault rifle in her 2021 campaign posters, and thinks “critical race theory” creates “morale problems,” among other things. She and Spanberger are currently fairly close in the race for Virginia’s gubernatorial seat, as The Decision Desk has Spanberger at 51 percent and Earles-Sears at 44 percent.   

The election is on November 4.  

White House Begins Mass Firing of Federal Employees Amid Shutdown War - 2025-10-10T17:23:19Z

Russell Vought, the White House budget director, announced that the administration has begun firing federal workers en masse.

Vought warned last week that “consequential” layoffs were forthcoming amid the ongoing government shutdown. On Friday, he tweeted, “The RIFs have begun,” referring to “reductions in force.”

Vought, as anticipated, is now using the government shutdown to cull the federal workforce, fulfilling Trump’s recent vow to cut “vast numbers of people out,” as well as slash programs that he says Democrats “like.”

An unnamed White House official told MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, “We expect thousands of people to unfortunately be laid off due to the government shutdown.” CNN’s Alayna Treene reports that a White House official said that fired workers have begun receiving notices and, “It will be substantial.”

Agencies poised to be affected, according to Politico, include the Departments of the Interior, Treasury, Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reacting to Vought’s four-word social media announcement, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 government workers, shot back: “The lawsuit has been filed.” The AFL-CIO told Vought, “America’s unions will see you in court.”

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Latest Posts Show He’s Pissed He Lost Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T16:43:22Z

President Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday—but that isn’t stopping him from trying to make the prestigious award all about himself.

The president took to Truth Social to share a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing past winners and praising Trump’s peace efforts on long-standing crises.

“There have been cases where the committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to people who have done nothing for peace,” Putin said, according to the AP’s translation. “A person comes, good or bad, and [gets it] in a month, in two months, boom. For what? He didn’t do anything at all. In my view, these decisions have done enormous damage to the prestige of this prize.

“[Trump’s] really doing a lot to resolve such complex crises that have lasted for years and even decades,” Putin added. The Kremlin had announced earlier Friday that it would support Trump’s bid for a peace prize—but clearly Moscow’s efforts were too little, too late.

“Thank you to president Putin!” Trump wrote when resharing the video.

Trump also shared an X post from this year’s winner, María Corina Machado, a pro-democracy activist and the leader of the opposition party in Venezuela, where she partially dedicated her win to Trump for supporting Venezuela.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on X. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Trump then proceeded to go back to posting about his efforts to prosecute his political enemies, namely New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was indicted Thursday for mortgage fraud by the president’s (seemingly incompetent) former lawyer who was recently installed as a prosecutor in Virginia.

While Trump seemed to avoid having a total temper tantrum (for now, but he’s speaking late Friday afternoon), the White House didn’t spare fighting words.

In announcing the award Friday morning, the Nobel Committee warned about the dangers of unchecked leaders. “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee said.

Mike Johnson Blames Shutdown on “No Kings” Protest in Absurd Rant - 2025-10-10T16:09:32Z

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson thinks the “No Kings” rally planned for next week is a “Hate America” rally meant to extend the government shutdown—something someone who has never been to a “No Kings” event would say. 

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson said Friday morning on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.” 

The “No Kings” rally is a nationwide action with a very simple goal: oppose the blatantly authoritarian tilt of the Trump administration. The protests are supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America, among others. The rallies have been very tame, and I have run into veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people who love America but hate what President Trump is doing. No one there is particularly close to being pro-Hamas, and antifa (whoever that is) would likely consider the action to be insufficiently leftist for them. 

But Johnson can say ridiculous things like this because his party can’t fathom that not everyone who opposes them is some militant anarchist with a Molotov cocktail locked and loaded. The government is shut down because Republicans refuse to negotiate with Democrats on extending health care subsidies millions of Americans rely on, not because Democrats want antifa to destroy the government.  

Bari Weiss Just Sent an Elon Musk-Style Memo to CBS Staffers - 2025-10-10T16:04:38Z

Bari Weiss must have pulled a lot of management inspiration from the Department of Government Efficiency.

The new editor in chief of CBS News issued a memo to staff Friday, ordering them to send her memos by Tuesday denoting how they spend their workdays and what they believe could be improved.

“By the end of day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization,” Weiss said in a copy of the email obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani. “I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy. I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.

“Then I’ll use your memo as a discussion guide for when I meet with most of you (ideally, all of you if time permits) in the coming few weeks,” Weiss added.

That strategy is remarkably similar to the one employed by Elon Musk when he ran DOGE. The parallels weren’t lost on CBS staffers, either: One lamented to Status newsletter writer Oliver Darcy, “We just got Elon Musk-ed.”

In February, Musk ordered federal employees across the government to email his office weekly summaries of their achievements. Failure to do so, under Musk’s rule, would be grounds for immediate firing.

The mandate was remarkably unpopular and scantily enforced by agency heads—some of whom butted up against Musk for making demands outside of his purview as a special government employee. The program met its quiet demise in August, when the Trump administration officially axed it—months after Musk was forced out.

Weiss’s version will have her inundated in paperwork. CBS News on its own employs thousands of individuals. A memo from each person on staff would lend itself to a tremendous amount of work.

The anti-woke, pro-Israel grifter became CBS’s newest chief last week. Her far-right, pro-genocide blog, The Free Press, was simultaneously scooped up by CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for roughly $150 million. It will also be Weiss’s first foray into running a major news operation. The Free Press, by comparison, employed more than 50 people as of last month.

The acquisition—and Weiss’s whopping promotion—mark the beginning of a radical new era for the historically middle-ground, traditional news conglomerate. Weiss is expected to bring a notably right-wing slant to CBS, which has served as the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, including Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

America First? Hegseth Announces Foreign Air Force Facility in U.S. - 2025-10-10T15:48:31Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday announced the establishment of a Qatari military installation in Idaho.

Seated beside Qatar’s defense minister, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Hegseth announced that the United States is “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.”

The facility, the defense secretary said, “will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability”—though he provided little else by way of detail.

The two officials signed a letter green-lighting the move, after Hegseth praised Qatar for its role in securing a peace deal in Gaza. Notably, the announcement also comes from an administration heavily criticized for corruption involving Qatar, a country the president accused of being a “funder of terrorism” in his first term.

The agreement builds on an existing U.S.-Qatari military relationship. Under a $12 billion deal signed in 2017, the U.S. gave aircraft and U.S.-based training to Qatar. In 2022, it was reported that about 170 Qataris were to be sent to train with F-15s at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Base, which already hosts Singaporean forces and would be expanded to accommodate the new arrivals.

Representative Mike Simpson, a pro-Trump Republican of Idaho, called the development “fantastic news.” But some proponents of the president’s so-called America First cause disagree.

Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and frequent purveyor of Islamaphobic hysteria, decried the administration’s decision. “What the hell is going on? Why are we trying to train more Muslims how to fly planes on US soil? Didn’t we already learn our lesson?” she wrote, saying it would allow “the Islamic enemy to gain so much ground in our country.”

“The Boys Are Fighting”: Team Trump Is Locked in Internal War - 2025-10-10T15:42:14Z

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and White House Budget Director Russell Vought are reportedly at odds over massive cuts to clean energy projects, Politico reported.

One senior administration official told Politico Thursday night that the White House Office of Management and Budget was annoyed that Energy Department senior staff had prepared a broad list of clean energy projects the agency hoped to target without sharing its contents with the White House. The list was the product of nearly 100 DOE staffers working to identify potential cuts, with a committee of roughly eight making selections and Wright making final determinations, people familiar with the process said.

That senior administration official said there was some friction within factions at the DOE, and that a “Colorado and DOGE crew” that lacked experience in government wasn’t interested in running decisions by the White House. “The tension is between the people who worked in government before and this other team who worked in the private sector and don’t think they need to follow processes or rules and think they can turn things on their heads,” the official told Politico.

Another person with direct knowledge of the discussions told Politico that Wright’s office was ready to drop the ax on a whopping $30 billion in funding awards but was told to wait so that OMB could use the funds as leverage against states.

Cut to last week, when OMB Director Russell Vought—not Wright—declared that the Trump administration would cut $8 billion in lawfully approved funding for energy projects, targeting 16 Democratic-led states. At the same time, a copy of the complete list began to circle around the Capitol, alarming energy advocates and lawmakers, including Republicans whose districts could be affected by the cuts. The fate of the remaining $22 billion, which is mostly earmarked for Republican districts, remains unclear.

Politico reported that the White House had forced Wright’s hand on the timing of the announcement. “Timing of announcements, I don’t control that always, but these decisions are made all in the Energy Department, all based on facts,” Wright told CNN last week.

There seems to be even more infighting at the DOE, but it’s not totally clear why. Two people told Politico that the DOE was looking to oust Undersecretary Preston Griffith Wells III. “It’s toxic af over there,” one person who works with senior DOE staff texted POLITICO. “The boys are fighting.”

But another person said that Wright had a good relationship with Griffith.

GOP Rep Reveals Nonsensical Revenge Plan After Trump Loses Nobel Prize - 2025-10-10T15:19:33Z

Donald Trump did not win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, so his GOP allies in the House are working to slap together the next best thing: a resolution to get him one.

Speaking with Fox Business Friday morning, Representative Buddy Carter said that (instead of working to end the government shutdown) he and his colleagues were going to file a resolution “today” to honor the president with the Nobel Prize.

“[Donald Trump] deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Carter told the network. “That’s why I’m introducing a resolution today for a sense of Congress today that will honor him with the Nobel Peace Prize.

“If need be, we’ll call for a discharge petition on that. I hope we can work with the speaker though and get it on the floor for a vote,” Carter added.

That would imply that congressional Republicans would rather scratch Trump’s back than chip away at their actual jobs, which includes urgent work such as ending the government shutdown, passing appropriation bills, and swearing in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva.

But simply asking for one is not how winning the Nobel Peace Prize works. Speaking with reporters on Friday, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes explained that Trump’s covetous, multiyear campaign to snag the prize had no impact on the judges’ deliberations.

“In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Watne Frydnes said. “We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what, for them, leads to peace. This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

It’s no secret that Trump has pined for the international honor: The ego-driven U.S. president even phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that four other U.S. presidents have received the award, including Trump’s political nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s obsession with obtaining the prize has led to some odd boasts over the last several months, including that he has resolved eight wars around the globe within the span of his second term. Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Israel and Iran, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and for “doing the Abraham Accords,” all while complaining about a lack of recognition by the Norway-based judges’ panel.

As Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out last month, practically all of Trump’s war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the listed examples were never even at war.

Trump Nominee Accused of Sexually Harassing a DHS Colleague - 2025-10-10T14:45:44Z

The president’s nominee to run the Office of Special Counsel was recently investigated for harassment.

Paul Ingrassia currently serves as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump tapped him to man the independent agency in June, but one month later, Ingrassia allegedly effectively coerced a lower-ranking female colleague to share a hotel room with him, reported Politico.

Ingrassia’s junior, another Trump appointee, had arrived with Ingrassia and other DHS colleagues at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando in late July. But it was only when the group reached the front desk that she learned she had not been provided a room of her own.

“Eventually the woman discovered that Ingrassia had arranged ahead of time to have her hotel room canceled so she would have to stay with him,” three administration officials told Politico anonymously.

The unnamed woman initially protested the arrangement, but relented to prevent making a scene in front of her colleagues. The two went to their room and slept in separate beds, according to Politico.

But the incident has remained a hot topic amongst DHS staffers ever since.

Ingrassia’s attorneys denied the allegations, and said that no last-minute changes were made to the hotel reservation.

“Mr. Ingrassia has never harassed any coworkers—female or otherwise, sexually or otherwise—in connection with any employment,” Edward Andrew Paltzik wrote in a letter to Politico, acknowledging that the DHS co-workers shared a hotel room but that “no party engaged in inappropriate behavior” on the trip.

The unnamed woman told Politico in a statement that she “never felt uncomfortable” with Ingrassia’s behavior and said she never made a complaint.

“A colleague misjudged the situation and made claims of alleged harassment that are not true,” the woman said. “There was no wrongdoing.”

The woman wasn’t the first to file a complaint. Instead, a career official filed one, with Ingrassia’s female colleague filing her own complaint afterward. The woman later retracted her complaint, which three officials said was out of fear of retaliation.

But in her interview with Politico as well as the legal complaint, the woman underscored that she wanted Ingrassia to change his tone with her and to begin communicating in a more professional manner. Five administration officials told Politico that Ingrassia’s behavior was “affecting her ability to do her job.”

A DHS spokesperson told the publication that its investigation into the incident had been fruitless.

“Career human resources personnel thoroughly looked into every allegation and concern and found no wrongdoing,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Ingrassia was already a controversial pick before news of the investigation became public. Republican senators have raised concerns about the 30-year-old’s lack of experience and his ties to multiple antisemitic extremists. That would include white nationalist Nick Fuentes and self-proclaimed misogynist and proud woman-beater Andrew Tate, whom Ingrassia worked for as a member of Tate’s legal team.

The incident also casts Ingrassia’s nomination for the Office of Special Counsel into doubt, particularly as the agency’s work primarily focuses on sensitive matters, including federal employee whistleblower complaints and discrimination claims.

The Undiscussed Reason the Democratic Party Might Wither and Die - 2025-10-10T14:45:12Z

Don’t miss: Watch the entire discussion between TNR host Perry Bacon and Democratic strategist Arkadi Gerney here, or read the interview transcript here.

Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It - 2025-10-10T14:35:32Z

David Axelrod is far better known these days for occasionally wagging his finger at his fellow Democrats than for breathing partisan fire, so it caught my eye when he posted this on X Wednesday: “So far, the ICE gang has shot & killed an unarmed man & lied about the circumstances; shot a woman 5 times for obstructing their vehicle; roughed up elderly women and zip-tied small children; shot a clergyman in the face with a pepper ball; marched through downtown Chicago, masked and armed. And they’re not going after the ‘worst of the worse,’ [sic] as promised. Most of the people they’re snagging have clean records. Some are citizens. To be clear: This is NOT making Chicago safer. It’s state-sponsored mayhem; dangerous political theater calculated to provoke.”

Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I’m here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.

That’s fascism. It may be—for now—a comparatively mild form of fascism. Political opponents aren’t being jailed or shot, opposition media outlets aren’t being shuttered, and books aren’t being burned. But a lot of things are happening that are terrifying. And last year, we lived in a country where the three scenarios I just listed were barely conceivable. Today, we live in a country where they are more likely only a matter of time.

Let’s go back to Axelrod, and specifically, his use of the phrase “state-sponsored mayhem.” That is exactly what President Trump is imposing upon Chicago. To take just one of the incidents Axelrod cites: Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church was with a small gaggle of protesters outside a Chicago ICE facility. Three agents stood on the roof of the two-story building as Black and the others stood on the sidewalk maybe 15 feet away from the building. Black raised his arms to the sky, as if in prayer. Someone who appears to be a fellow protester approached Black to confer with him. Next thing you see in this video is a considerable puff of smoke explode from Black’s forehead as he falls to the ground. That’s a clergyman. Exercising his First Amendment right (he’s fine, and he’s suing). Black later told CNN: “We could hear them laughing.”

Shooting an unarmed and peacefully protesting pastor is by definition an act of state-sponsored mayhem. State-sponsored mayhem starts at the top, with the president’s thuggish, lawless threat to imprison the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago (by the way—Greg Sargent speaks to said governor, JB Pritzker, on his Daily Blast podcast today). From there, the people with the uniforms and the badges and the guns get the message, and they go out and do the things Axelrod listed above.

Administration officials pile lie upon lie upon lie. With respect to Portland, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refers preposterously to “the radical left’s reign of terror” there. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declares antifa to be “just as dangerous” as ISIS, which was killing perceived apostates by the thousands at its peak and raping little girls. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, rants nightly about armed confrontations that either don’t exist or exist solely because the administration creates them so it can have the footage that will air over and over on its propaganda network, Fox News. It’s all toward the purpose of erasing dissent, erasing democracy. As Zeteo’s Kim Wehle put it last week, reporting on two Trump-issued “national security” directives: “The president is taking steps to criminalize being anti-Trump in America.”

When a president and his aides are doing that, it’s no longer America.

When masked government thugs take potshots at a priest, it’s no longer America.

When a handpicked hack prosecutor with no prosecutorial experience indicts two honorable American citizens within a month of the president ordering their prosecutions, and when two real prosecutors quit rather than pursue these obscenely political prosecutions, it’s no longer America.

When the third-ranking official in the country, the speaker of the House of Representatives, delays the swearing-in of a duly elected member of that body because he knows she will vote to release files that potentially may shed light on unsavory behavior by the president, it’s no longer America.

When the presidential administration announces that it’s going after nonprofit charitable groups that have operated unmolested in this country for decades under Democratic and Republican administrations because they donate to causes the president disfavors, it’s no longer America.

When naturalized citizens are canceling overseas trips because they can’t be certain they’ll be welcomed back to their own country upon return, it’s no longer America.

When the Department of Education is bullying universities into agreeing to a “compact” under which they’ll promise not to “belittle” conservative ideas, it’s no longer America.

When the president and his family have used his office to enrich themselves to the tune of $3.5 billion in nine months, and when the Congress, controlled by the president’s party, refuses to do a thing about this rancid, dictator-level corruption, it’s no longer America.

When the Supreme Court of the United States has sold its soul to all this barbarity, it’s no longer America.

And when this thuggish dictator-wannabe is also a buffoonish man-child who sits there in his breathtakingly tacky Oval Office with his fake face and fake hair next to another head of state (the president of Finland) as he boasts yet again about passing a simple dementia test that a 10-year-old could ace, and we realize that this man-child is the sitting president, it’s no longer America, at least for anyone who cares about how we look to the rest of the world.

Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Trump Attorney Makes Embarrassing Error in Letitia James Indictment - 2025-10-10T14:30:35Z

MAGA prosecutor Lindsey Halligan is already making basic errors in her indictment of New York Attorney General (and Trump target) Letitia James. In an official court filing Thursday, Halligan listed James’s address as “Brooklyn, New Jersey” instead of New York, where Brooklyn is.

Screenshot of a tweet

This is a pretty glaring mistake that someone trying to prosecute a state attorney general for false statements to a financial institution should not be making. Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, also brought forth charges last month against former FBI Director James Comey for lying to Congress, after her predecessor refused to. In that indictment, Halligan too made basic errors, like misspelling words and submitting the wrong documents to the judge.

Halligan, previously Trump’s personal lawyer, is a deeply unqualified pawn whose only mission is to head these obviously politicized legal attacks on people Trump doesn’t like. She had literally never prosecuted anyone before Comey, and has most of her experience in insurance cases.

“When you bring a case against the former director of the FBI, you definitely want it to be the maiden voyage of an insurance lawyer,” Last Week Tonight host John Oliver said sarcastically after Halligan indicted Comey. “What she lacks in prosecutorial experience she more than makes up for in random insurance facts and a shitload of undereye concealer.”

Now those same concerns are bubbling up again as Halligan makes an easily avoidable blunder in her newest politically motivated prosecution. All this from the administration obsessed with merit.

The Vindication of László Krasznahorkai - 2025-10-10T14:19:40Z

As soon as László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in literature, I started getting congratulatory texts. Not because I have played any role in the Hungarian author’s success but because for years I have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to convert friends to his intricate charms. I keep a copy of Seiobo There Below next to my bed as a source of emergency bedtime balm; I have pictures of its three-pages-long first sentence in an email that I send to seemingly persuadable readers. I first read Krasznahorkai by accident, frozen in a bookstore and vulnerable to the holograph on Seiobo’s cover. As befits the cascading form of his novels and the fanatics among his characters, one book led to another and another and another. Except for those still only in Hungarian and the novella Animalinside (of which only 2,000 copies were printed, each costing $300), I have read every one of his books. I’ve wanted to write about him for years: about his style, his themes, his lonely acolytes. But until now, no one has been too interested.

Krasznahorkai’s following is small but extraordinarily devoted; his most loyal readers have a tendency to fall into frenzied, minutely detailed conversation about his writing. Its complexity has aggravated some and deterred many. Critics tend to describe Krasznahorkai’s style, with his long sentences—Herscht 07769 is technically one sentence—as hypnotic or mesmerizing. His layered digressions are called unsettling, his novels likened to an abyss. There is no doubt that reading him can be challenging. Two hundred and eight pages into the sentence that comprises Herscht, for instance, presents:

… it comprised a much more abundant wholeness, itself only apprehended by means of another viewpoint, radically differing from the conventions of science, although not unscientific or antiscientific, not some kind of mystical or transcendent or other foolish gobbledygook, but instead an image of the real obtained via a different view, only that the construction of this reality, its logic, is not yet before us, because we cannot know, here, what exists there in place of a causal system, and this is what he wished to say: the decisions of the Security Council must emphasize the fully justified concern over the catastrophe that might ensue at any moment, and yet as we stand in the dreadful shadow of this total catastrophe, we must yet realize: the experiential world as sensed by ourselves, from the viewpoint of this veritable realm, is only an idea, a mere idea, Mrs. Chancellor, of what reality truly is …

To pick a fairly mild example. In my experience, however, reading Krasznahorkai is challenging not because it is unwieldy and frenetic but because it is meticulously, precisely, intricately ordered. Antecedents are answered by consequents, clauses that are left open find closure, chains of thought eventually relink—even if we must track them over pages. We are not used to this task. For me, reading his sentences, following the subtleties in his worlds, serves as a dose of rare and cleansing concentration. It is a visceral experience of feeling one’s brain struggling with, but ultimately embracing, a mental mode far different from the one conditioned by emails and group chats, social media, and screen time. It doesn’t feel like getting lost: It feels like finding oneself precisely coordinated, grounded in a mass of text. It is a pure antidote to the worst cognitive tendencies in the rest of our lives.

Consider “He Rises at Dawn,” one of my favorite chapters in Seiobo There Below, a book described as a novel but which will read for most as an anthology of stories about art and creation. One of many works that engages Krasznahorkai’s interest in Japanese craft and culture (those with similar interests should try the novella “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East”), this chapter is about an expert mask maker working on a single mask. He works

a month and a half, so, roughly, that much time, here on the tatami placed in his work-box from early morning to early evening, and as for speaking, he doesn’t speak, not even to himself; if he makes any sounds at all, it’s only that he is lifting the piece of wood and quietly blowing off the wood shavings chiseled off the mask, and sometimes when he changes his physical position in the work-box and sighs while doing so, and once again he bends toward the block of wood, for at first it all begins with the Okari wood-merchant located in the one-time Imperial Palace, below Gosho to the south, in the person of Okari-san, who is of about the same stature as he, therefore very short, a good fifteen years older, and fairly gloomy, Okari-san, from whom he has been buying wood for years—he just bought this newer piece—he trusts him, the price is always good, the annual rings are thick and dense, the lines are without defects, namely the hinoki from which the chosen block of wood originates grew slowly; in addition, the wood is delivered from Bishu, in the prefecture of Gifu, from a forest that has the highest reputation, from a forest renowned for the quality of its material—the whole thing is a simple rectangular-shaped block of wood, that is how it all begins, with the circular cutting with the saw on the basis of the stencil to the desired proportions; he does not think, because he doesn’t have to, his hand moves by its own accord, he does not have to control its direction, the saw and the chisels know by themselves what they have to do, so it is no wonder that this first, this very first phase of the work is the fastest, the most free from the later, frequently tormenting anxiety …

Roughly the same plot of this story could be covered in a “Come With Me as I Make a Japanese Noh Mask” Instagram reel, from the montage of the idyllic woods to the time-lapse of a wood block shaving into shape. The vast majority of our media consumption and communication is now defined by this compression of complicated, unwieldy life into tidy little rectangles. Social media videos, television, and films are designed to demand the smallest of sustained attention, and to capture it as quickly as possible, as part of a larger project of sustained attentional extraction. TikTok is the apotheosis of this trend: To prevent the viewer switching to other content, the content will continually switch for the viewer. That infinite carnival, I think we all can recognize, is the real hypnosis, the true abyss.

In contrast, any time I sit down to read Krasznahorkai, it feels like launching into space: a terrible roar, a series of bumps and shakes, and, mostly, an irrepressible forward motion that eventually sustains itself. If I’ve spent hours or days flitting about threads and feeds, the initial resistance can be intense. He rejects the smoothness, synopsis, and universal flavor of our modern digital culture. Our mask maker is a very specific one, in a very specific space, found at a very specific time. In another of my favorite chapters from Seiobo There Below, “Il Ritorno in Perugia,” Krasznahorkai spends nine pages describing the exact steps a fifteenth-century workshop takes to prepare a canvas so that its maestro may paint.

But his heterodox style or esoteric subjects don’t ultimately make for fitful or circular reading. It’s all headed somewhere, and sometimes it’s headed there fast. Krasznahorkai will kill off a character amid a bush of commas, barely noting their demise as he gets on with, say, the cataloging of a desk’s items. You can’t look away because you can’t afford to. War & War and The Melancholy of Resistance both offer stretches of Krasznahorkai at his most propulsive, aided by plot where characters themselves are flowing forward, rather than solely considering existential puzzles in decrepit hovels. A spirit of a chase, in the latter novel, is described with this sentence:

The bitter, evil pleasure of seeing these three lonely shadows helplessly swaying ahead of us, not even knowing for certain what was in store for them, exceeded even the power of the spell cast by the sight of the smashed-up town, meant more than the satisfaction occasioned by all the pieces of useless stuff we had trampled underfoot, for in that perpetual holding back, in the sheer joy of deferral, in that infernal putting off, we savoured something wry, mysterious and ancient that lent our least movement a fearsome dignity, the kind of unimpeachable pride possessed by all barbaric hordes, even when they know they might be scattered far and wide the day after, mobs whose momentum is unstoppable since they have appropriated even the thought of their own death, should they decide to make an end, their mission done, having had their fill for ever of both earth and heaven, with misfortune and sadness, with pride and fear, as well as with that base, tempting burden which will not allow one to give up the habit of pining for liberty.

Part of the challenge of selling Krasznahorkai beyond a Nobel jury is that his work is not compellingly summarized nor easily excerpted (see: this essay). He resists the passive absorption that we’re accustomed to. Instead, you might consider his texts as a building. Viewed up close, we see a variety of mundane materials pressed together; given a longer view, a grand architecture emerges.


Not just for this reason, brevity is not a sign of accessibility in Krasznahorkai’s works. It’s actually his longer novels that offer more traditional footholds for fiction readers. Although Herscht is written as one long sentence, it offers the most recognizable form of plot and the themes are urgently contemporary. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming conjures a world in a town, and its coda is nothing like I have ever read before or since. The Melancholy of Resistance offers some of both, with shorter sentences. For those resolved to start small, Spadework for a Palace can offer a taste of the archetypal style and madness. In any attempt, I might suggest new readers think of the experience like running: difficult at the beginning, euphoric at stages, biologically limited, and good for your health.

Seiobo There Below was an unorthodox place for me to start, but a revelatory one. It asked things of me that a book had not asked before: to simultaneously hang on tight and relinquish all control. It showed me a writer whose work is often perceived as chaos but in whom a reader can find meditation; escape from the rest of our frenzied world. I have since sought this feeling across his work. Revisiting that first sentence I’d read—the one people might actually want to try after this week’s prize—I see that it doesn’t just induce that feeling, it describes it. Krasznahorkai writes of a bird, that it

may bring its snow-white body to a dead halt in the exact center of this furious movement, so that it may impress its own motionlessness against the dreadful forces breaking over it from all directions, because what comes only much later is that once again it will take part in this furious motion, in the total frenzy of everything, and it too will move, in a lightning-quick strike, together with everything else; for now, however, it remains within this enclosing moment, at the beginning of the hunt.

Nobel Committee Warns About Rising Authoritarianism as It Snubs Trump - 2025-10-10T14:05:41Z

Passing over Donald Trump (in spite of his less-than-subtle appeals), the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday gave Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado the Nobel Peace Prize.

The award’s announcement cautioned that democratic backsliding is accelerating globally—a trend to which Trump has made no small contribution.

The Nobel Committee said it was recognizing Machado for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights” in an “authoritarian state.”

“Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace,” the committee stated. “However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence.”

The “same trends” of repression and consolidation of power seen in Venezuela are happening globally, the committee said: “rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee continued.

In these warnings, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the United States today under Trump—the militarization of American cities, weaponization of government against political opponents, violations of civil liberties, deportation of dissidents, and attacks on the press, academia, and other institutions.

Last month, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a global democracy watchdog, reported that it had flagged twice as many instances of the U.S. government eroding or abolishing “rules, institutions, and norms” that shape American democracy in the first four months of Trump’s second term as in the previous two years. Examples included “efforts to restrict academic freedom, criminalize protest activity, question the legitimacy of certified elections, selectively restrict media access to the executive and circumvent due process norms.”

Three More GOP Reps Split From Mike Johnson Over Shutdown - 2025-10-10T13:57:22Z

It’s been three weeks since House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers back to their districts, and Republicans are getting seriously sick of his WFH strategy. 

During a private conference call with House Republicans Thursday, at least three lawmakers raised concerns about keeping the House out of session after it passed a stopgap funding bill that never made its way through the Senate, sources told MSNBC.  

California Representative Jay Obernolte warned that staying home would make it seem like Republicans were “prioritizing politics over government.”

“I think we’re gonna get to a point where it’s damaging to continue to keep the House out of session,” he said. 

Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice said she had “concerns” about lawmakers staying in their districts during the government shutdown, and that constituents probably “wonder why we’re not there,” according to one source. She warned leadership to imagine the optics of staying home next week, when lawmakers could just as easily deliver messaging from Washington. 

North Dakota Representative Julie Fedorchak expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that their messaging would be stronger and more consistent if they weren’t all working from home. 

Some Republicans have already voiced their disapproval publicly. 

California Representative Kevin Kiley fumed at the speaker’s comment Thursday, claiming that the House would likely remain out of session for another week because “we’ve already done our job.”

“What the House has done is pass a 7-week Continuing Resolution. The entire reason a CR is necessary is that Congress has not done its job in passing a timely budget,” Kiley wrote on X. “The Speaker shouldn’t even think about cancelling session for a third straight week.”

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has found herself at odds with party leadership, has slammed Johnson all week for sending lawmakers home.

“I think he should really bring the House back in session for many reasons. We have appropriation bills that need to get passed. There is a new Democrat that’s been elected that does deserve to be sworn in. Her district elected her. We have other bills that we need to be passing,” Greene told CNN Thursday. “Any serious speaker of the House is going to build consensus within his conference behind a plan. It’s not something secret that gets worked on in a committee.”

Earlier this week, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie suggested that Johnson had scattered lawmakers to the winds to avoid swearing in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who would be the tie-breaking vote on a petition to discharge the Jeffrey Epstein files in full. When pressed about it on Tuesday, Johnson struggled to explain why he was waiting for the House to be in full session, when she could be sworn in in a short pro forma session. 

Two Republican Governors Slam Trump’s Use of National Guard Troops - 2025-10-10T13:16:33Z

Two Republican governors have broken with the Trump administration, condemning the president’s decision to release the National Guard into American cities.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott called it an “unnecessary” and “unconstitutional” move that only “further divides and threatens people.”

“We need stability right now in this country—we don’t need more unrest.… I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” he told VTDigger on Thursday. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago.”

Scott also said he would reject a request to deploy Vermont’s National Guard elsewhere, and that Trump calling for the jailing of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was “wrong on many, many different levels.”

Scott did not support Trump in 2016 and called for his removal from office after the January 6 insurrection.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has been much more supportive of Trump than Scott has in the past, attending rallies and receiving endorsements from him since 2018. Even he thinks this is a bit much.

“We believe in the federalist system—that’s states’ rights,” he told The New York Times on Thursday. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

“I was surprised that Governor Abbott sent troops from Texas to Illinois,” Stitt continued. “Abbott and I sued the Biden administration when the shoe was on the other foot and the Biden administration was trying to force us to vaccinate all of our soldiers and force masks across the country.… As a federalist believer, one governor against another governor, I don’t think that’s the right way to approach this.”

Stitt, who made the comments shortly before Scott, indicated he isn’t the only Republican governor who disapproves of Trump sending military from other states into the streets of Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C.

“Maybe you just haven’t asked the right ones,” he said. Only time will tell.

White House Flips Out After Trump Loses Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T12:54:54Z

“This is an achievement of a whole society,” said Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado upon receiving the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. “I am just, you know, one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, did not receive the honor, despite believing—and asserting incessantly—that he deserves it more than anyone.

The White House on Friday lamented that the prize was not bestowed upon the man who felt the most entitled to it: “President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives,” wrote Steven Cheung, the notoriously feisty White House communications director, on X. “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” Cheung continued, in a seeming slight to Machado, whom Trump has previously praised for her pro-democracy activism and resistance to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Screenshot Truth Social Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado and President-elect Gonzalez are peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime. The great Venezuelan American community in the United States overwhelmingly support a free Venezuela, and strongly supported me. These freedom fighters should not be harmed, and MUST stay SAFE and ALIVE! Jan 09, 2025 5:14 PM

Trump and his team have vociferously campaigned for the award in recent months, spuriously claiming the president has ended eight wars during his second term. In August, the president reportedly called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, “out of the blue” to say “he wanted the Nobel Prize.”

World leaders seemingly caught on to Trump’s yearning for a Nobel as a way to the president’s heart, with the rulers of several countries, such as Pakistan, Israel, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, scoring points with him by stating publicly that he deserves it.

Transcript: Trump ICE Raids Worsen as Pritzker Drops Bombshell Warning - 2025-10-10T11:47:05Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

(After we recorded, a judge temporary blocked National Guard deployments in Illinois).

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Trump’s invasion of Chicago has really gone off the rails. The imagery is jarring: hyper-militarized raids of apartment buildings, children being pulled out into the streets and potentially traumatized, a priest being shot by a smoke pellet. And Stephen Miller is boasting about it all over right-wing media, relishing every minute of these horrors. He and Trump plainly want to incite violence to justify further authoritarian crackdowns. In response to all this, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois has taken a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power and warning that our ongoing slide into authoritarianism could end in true catastrophe. We think Democrats as a party could be doing a lot more of what Pritzker is doing. So today we’re fortunate to be talking to Governor Pritzker about all this and where it’s all going. Governor, thank you so much for joining us today.
Governor JB Pritzker: Great to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: So, Governor, can you just bring us up to date on what’s going on in Chicago with the National Guard and ICE right now at this moment?
Governor Pritzker: Sure. Well, I think I’m making news if I tell you this, but we have seen in addition to the Texas National Guard, which have not been deployed but they are on the ground, we now have seen that there are 14 so far California National Guard on the ground. And then, of course, they’re federalizing our Illinois National Guard. So, none of them have been deployed. Again, we don’t get direct information from the feds, but we do get reports from folks. That’s how we know anything really is that sometimes it’s people who work for me, sometimes it’s other law enforcement around the state, or just bystanders. So we know that they’re on the ground but not deployed.
Sargent: Well, I want to get your response to something Stephen Miller said on Fox News about the raid on Chicago’s South Side. He called it one of the most successful law enforcement operations that we’ve ever seen in this country. He said it targeted an apartment complex full of Tren de Aragua terrorists and that this operation saves many lives. Is any of that true? What’s your response?
Governor Pritzker: Well, I mean, if you—if this was Pinochet’s Chile, if this was Argentina under authoritarian rule, maybe you’d call it successful, meaning that they went after a few people in a building by absolutely terrorizing everybody in the building. There are about 130 people living there, a few of them being targeted, and everybody else—U.S. citizens, people with documentation who may not be U.S. citizens, and even undocumented people, who are not Tren de Aragua—who were held for hours and zip-tied. This is middle of the night: troops dropping—not really troops; they were agents—dropping from Black Hawk military helicopters onto the building, ransacking the place, breaking down doors and windows and so on.
And they arrested a few gang members. And by the way, I’m for—let’s go get the bad guys. Let’s get the bad guys. That’s why we have police. That’s why we have FBI and DEA. Let’s get gang members who are selling drugs or killing people. But that’s not how you do it. That’s not how we do it in the United States. You don’t round up the usual suspects—all the brown people who live in a building—and then ask everybody for their proof of citizenship before you’ll let them go while you’re arresting the people you actually were aiming at.
Sargent: So he said the building was full of Tren de Aragua terrorists. False?
Governor Pritzker: Absolutely false. Although I must say, you know, whenever the ICE and CBP agents say something, they put out a release or, you know, you’ve got Stephen Miller talking about it, they are lying.
I mean, there are several times now where it’s just obvious they’re lying. You know the story of the man, Silverio, who was shot and killed on a street in Chicago. They claimed that he had dragged an officer and that the officer was seriously injured. Look, we don’t know all the details. They don’t wear body cams and share any of the information with us. They just sort of put a release out later about what happened.
But now the news media has reported, the Sun-Times, that actually that’s not what happened—that the officer stepped in front of the guy’s vehicle, that the officer was, in fact, hit at the corner of the vehicle, but he was not severely injured, seriously injured, as they first said. And yet these officers opened fire and killed the guy who was driving it. And this is a guy who was dropping off his kids at daycare. I just—that plus, you know, the recent shooting. So this is two shootings.
We have one dead person, somebody else who went to the hospital. It turns out, you know, that they were saying that ICE was saying that there were ten vehicles that surrounded the ICE agents. But apparently, according to her attorney, there is body cam footage that shows something different, and that in fact this one ICE agent rammed her and got out of his vehicle, was yelling things—including the B-word—at her, and that she ended up being shot at because she has a gun in her car. So I’m just saying that you can’t believe anything that they say. We now have to investigate all of it. I’ve called on DCFS, for example, our Department of Children and Family Services, to investigate what happened to the children at that South Shore building that they attacked.
Sargent: I did want to ask you about that, Governor. I understand that that’s what you’re doing now. Several state agencies are looking into what happened at this raid. Any information back yet?
Governor Pritzker: No, they’re still doing their work. It’s going to take a few days for sure. The first thing we wanted them to do was less of an investigation, more just support for the families and the children. You can imagine, these children are totally traumatized. Right? Some of them are very young children, totally traumatized, and they’ve been attacked like they were in Fallujah.
Sargent: Is that what you’re hearing—that they are—that you’re getting back, that they are traumatized, the children?
Governor Pritzker: That’s what I—well, first of all, we start out imagining that that is what happened because we look at the building, look at any of the video that Kristi Noem now posted. If you were a young child in that building sleeping, and all of a sudden agents are coming through your door—they’ve got big weapons, they’re grabbing people and taking them out—and you get zip-tied, and maybe your grandfather gets zip-tied too. You know, this is... you can imagine what that would do to a young child.
Sargent: Well, so clearly Stephen Miller is using footage from Chicago as part of a vast national propaganda campaign. I wonder though, are you or Illinois law enforcement getting any briefings at all from the Department of Homeland Security or anyone else in the federal government about what they’re actually finding in raids like this one? It seems to me you’d want to be able to coordinate with them in some sense? Do they talk to you at all before they do these things?
Governor Pritzker: Greg, they have not called me once. Not once. I mean, we literally have almost no information. When they called out the National Guard—when they federalized our National Guard—they told me that I was going to get a call. This is the first time, by the way—no calls from the president of the United States, no calls from Kristi Noem about any of this, no calls from Greg Bovino, who’s the officer on the ground with CBP who’s in charge of all these agents, who just seems to be a terrible human being. And on the day that they were going to call in the National Guard and federalize them—the Illinois National Guard—I was told and informed by someone from the Department of Defense that the Defense Secretary, [Pete] Hegseth, was going to call me at a specific time. I said, I’d cleared my calendar to make sure that I would have time to call him, that I would not miss the call, and waited. Two and a half hours I waited for the phone to ring. Never called. I obviously kept my phone on me the entire rest of the day. They never called. Never called the next day. Still have never called. And it turns out that Secretary Hegseth was actually at a football game, taking part in a push-up contest. And this is all while he’s calling out the National Guard on my state and unwilling to call me to even let me know that that was going to happen.
Sargent: Well, know, pushups are important. It’s important to do that to keep in good health, Governor. But I do want to ask you, though, have you been trying to reach out to them in any sense, like very recently, and just to get a sense of what’s coming next? And are they answering your calls? What’s the state of the communication?
Governor Pritzker: So unfortunately, they don’t seem to want to respond to my entreaties. And I have said, you know, many times in public, on television, clearly the president is listening to what I’m saying on television about what it is that we want. What we’re getting, the way we’re getting any information from them has been either by people in their departments leaking things—maybe they’re people from Illinois or maybe they’re people who care about Illinois, but they’ve been leaking things. That’s one way.
A second is that we have some staff or people in our departments who regularly work with people in other departments in the federal government who just, knowing those people, have called to say, what do you know? And can you give us any information? So I think that the combination of that has given us a little bit, but you’re, what you said is a hundred percent accurate, Greg. If they would let us know, we’re not looking to impede. I mean, I want to impede the what some of the things they’re doing that are breaking the law. But we’re not going to stand in the way of them executing federal law. We can’t, we literally are prohibited by law and we follow the law here.
But what we could do is make sure that the neighborhoods are safer and that the officers themselves might be safer if they weren’t just surprising people in a neighborhood and showing up with these unmarked vehicles, wearing masks, banging on doors, disrupting people. Because you know what’s happening? Spontaneous protests. It’s not, you know, we have a couple of, we have a couple of blocks, two blocks across from an ICE facility in Broadview where people are showing up to protest every day. But in a neighborhood when these cars descend on and these people in masks, people in the neighborhoods are, first of all, they’re naturally freaked out.
And second, they have an extremely negative reaction to it. They love their neighbors, you know, they love their community. And so they’re yelling things at the officers like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this? I know those people!” That kind of thing. And some of that could end up with something terrible happening, violence or otherwise. We would like to be able to prevent some of that just by our local law enforcement knowing what they’re doing. They don’t do any communication with us. It is truly an invasion of the city of Chicago, even without the troops being called up. And now potentially those troops will be showing up shortly if we don’t win in court.
Sargent: Well, Governor, the president has called for your arrest. I just want to ask you this pretty bluntly. Do you expect to be arrested soon?
Governor Pritzker: I do not expect to be arrested. And the President of the United States says a lot of crazy things. I genuinely think there is something wrong with him. I wish that his family would intervene, because I do think he needs mental health help. And I don’t think anybody around him that works for him is going to do that, because they’re benefiting from his failure of mental health, his dementia. I wish somebody would help out the President of the United States.
Meanwhile, you know, he says a lot of crazy things. He doesn’t have authority to arrest elected officials or really anybody where you don’t have any example of a crime being committed. And I find it ironic that this guy who’s a 34-time convicted felon is saying that I should be jailed. I’ve never been accused of, or convicted of, or, you know, gone on trial for anything. He’s the guy who’s done that so many times, and cheated, by the way, in civil court. And I don’t take it seriously other than I think the man has so much power at his fingertips because he’s president of the United States that the people around him might try to take it upon themselves to just make something up and come after me, or Gavin Newsom, I know they’ve mentioned that they might jail him, or the mayor of the city of Chicago.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about that. Do you think Stephen Miller is whispering in Trump’s ear that he should start arresting Democrats like you?
Governor Pritzker: Well, he’s saying it out loud. I don’t know why he isn’t whispering in the president’s ear. I mean, he’s basically claiming—and the president repeats these things—but Stephen Miller is claiming that, you know, antifa is involved somehow. Believe me, come to Broadview, would you, to these protests—there’s no antifa there. I mean, nobody’s revealed themselves to be antifa. I’m not even sure what antifa would look like, but they haven’t revealed themselves or caused any mayhem there. There are people who’ve broken the law, by the way, in those places, but it’s usually like their refusal to step out of the street, you know, when they should be. But Stephen Miller has essentially demonized any opposition, any opponent of the president of the United States, and made them seem like they’re terrorists. He’s used that word. And he’s called Democrats part of that sort of terrorist network. It’s ridiculous. Stephen Miller is a dangerous individual on his own. He’s very dangerous when he’s got the power of the president backing him up.
Sargent: Well, I wonder if Democrats as a party could be doing more to raise alarms along the lines of what you’re talking about—about Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. When Trump calls for the arrest or the prosecution of this or that Democrat, couldn’t the party leadership all stand up as one and warn that this is an emergency—that Trump is threatening to arrest and prosecute members of the opposition, and this is the onset of authoritarian rule? Couldn’t Democrats do more of that kind of thing in unison? Would you like to see more?
Governor Pritzker: Yeah, don’t you think? [Laughs] And I mean, look, I understand there are people who’ve stood up, I want to say, and we should give kudos to those people. I think Cory Booker has been terrific. I think that we’ve seen people standing up—Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom—you know, there are people who are regularly calling it out. Right. But I wonder about lots of other folks.
And it’s not something that’s like, well, maybe, you know, if something happens this month, I’ll say something. No, it’s happening every single day. I mean, I’m living it here in Chicago and in Illinois that it’s happening, but it’s happening in Portland. It’s happened in L.A. It’s happening in Washington, D.C. And those are just the troop movements. We’re also seeing ICE in places that, you know, nobody expected them to be—in suburbs and rural areas of my state and elsewhere. So I am surprised that more leaders have not stood up. I don’t think we should just say Democrats—like, “Why haven’t Democrats”—because that sounds political. And to be frank with you, this isn’t about politics. This is genuinely about the future of our country. Do we believe in a constitutional republic, or do we think that it’s okay if this becomes the law of one—the president of the United States, the law of Donald Trump—that that is what we’re going to go by and not the law that is set out in the Constitution of the United States.
Sargent: Well, Mike Johnson was just asked about the threat to arrest you. And he basically said, I don’t really follow that stuff too closely. Go ask the attorney general. So it seems to me the Republican Party is mostly a lost cause. Assuming that, yes it would be better if Republicans join Democrats. Doesn’t the party, just the Democratic Party, really does have to step up a little bit here, doesn’t it? It seems like what we need is a party that’s sending signals loud and clear that we’re in the middle of an emergency. Would you like to see that?
Governor Pritzker: Yeah, Greg, I guess what I’m really trying to say when I say don’t just say Democrats is, there are business leaders—yeah, they might be a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent. You know, there are university leaders—again, what party they belong to doesn’t matter. What matters here is that people speak out. Look, I’ll give a little bit of credit today to Governor—I don’t know if you saw that Governor Stitt, Kevin Stitt in Oklahoma, finally said he doesn’t agree with the president, doesn’t think that, you know, the National Guard of one state should be sent into another state. I don’t think he’s doing anything about it as chairman of the National Governors Association, which he should. But the fact that he spoke out about it is at least evidence that there are some people that have rational thoughts about what the future could hold if we let Donald Trump do the things he’s doing now. Because think about if the situation were reversed and there was some other party—the Democratic Party,  there’s a Democratic president—who was calling the National Guard into a state to confiscate guns. I mean, everything I just said is against the law, unconstitutional. And yet the reverse of that is essentially happening right now. So people have to project forward: What does this country look like if we allow this to happen now?
So I think that’s the reason that I’m not focused just on Democrats. I do think there are good Republicans out there. I know it feels few and far between—people who are Republicans and speaking out—but we’ve seen some of them, Bill Kristol and others, over the last few years. I think more and more we’re seeing Republicans now saying, “Wow, there are limits to what I think Donald Trump should be able to do.” I wish more people in Congress, though, would do it. They are genuinely afraid in their Republican primaries that they will lose. The people who’ve been willing to stand up and speak out—Don Bacon, others, right—have to leave office because they know they’re going to get defeated in the next election.
Sargent: Well, I think a lot of members of Congress are frankly afraid of getting killed, aren’t they?
Governor Pritzker: I mean, look, this is the world that we’re living in for sure. I mean, if they’re afraid, you can imagine that there are Democrats ... I have threats now happening at a much higher pace than ever before.
Sargent: Is that right? Can you talk about that?
Governor Pritzker: I just—to say that, you know, when I ask our state police who protect me—because they don’t tell me about every threat that comes in—but when I ask them just, you know, what’s the level of threats, what are the numbers, they say there are more—a lot more—now. And it’s really been since before Charlie Kirk. And you saw that. I mean, look at the Speaker of the House of Minnesota and what happened to her and her husband. It’s been going on for a long time now.

I find it abhorrent that this is now part of our world—our political world. But this is, I think it’s a dangerous world. Republicans are getting threats; Democrats are getting threats. But I think there is a tone that gets set at the top. From my perspective, this wasn’t happening the way it is now under Obama, or before Obama under George W. Bush, or before that under President Clinton. But now we’re seeing it, and I think it happened sometime during Trump’s first term. I think there was a lot of rhetoric that he put forward that, I think, enticed—incited people, rather. And I think it’s being amplified now.

Sargent: So what more are Illinois state officials going to do to protect Chicagoans and Illinois residents from ICE? What’s in the pipeline? What are you going to do?

Governor Pritzker: So I think there are probably two levels of things that we look at doing. One is what we’re doing in the courts focused on Illinois specifically and Chicago specifically. And what can be allowed. We’ve seen a federal judge now expand a court order that limits what ICE can do in enforcement. That happened before today.

Sargent: But law enforcement on your side, what can be done?

Governor Pritzker: Well, again, what we are doing is protecting the protesters. We’ve got Illinois State Police out there with protesters. Protecting them, meaning they’re standing in between ICE and the protesters in order to because you saw that ICE was firing pellets and you know gas pellets and rubber bullets and so on. That’s rarely happening now at the Broadview facility. So that’s an example of of our local law enforcement protecting our people.

Sargent: Will there be more of that?

Governor Pritzker: We’re continuing to do that. We want to make sure that—look, if you want to protest peacefully, we are going to protect that right. If you’re not protesting peacefully, then we are not protecting you from potentially arrest if you’re going to be aggressive and violent. But I want to just say what the other level of fight that we’re putting up is: This is a national fight.

And what’s good, if we can fight this on a national level, too—if we can get people incited to protest peacefully across the country, like, for example, at the No King’s rally that will happen on October 18. If we can have that happen, and we’ve seen a lot of spontaneous peaceful protests across the United States, I think that’s a really good thing. I think it sends a signal to the rest of the public—the folks who are just trying to get to work and pay the bills—that something’s going on here that they better pay attention to. That’s a very important thing for us to have happen, because if we don’t win the 2026 elections—those of us who want to preserve democracy... If Democrats don’t win that election, Katy bar the doors. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and whether we’re actually going to have elections.

Sargent: Governor Pritzker, thank you so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it. 

Governor Pritzker: Thanks, Greg. Great to see you.

Trump Is Following in the Footsteps of a Failed English King - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

The federal government is currently shut down because Congress and President Donald Trump couldn’t agree on a funding measure. Earlier this week, the Trump administration claimed that it would keep funding WIC, a federal nutrition program for low-income families, despite the lapse in congressional appropriations. How do they plan to do that? By using revenue from Trump’s tariffs to make up the shortfall.

Is that legal? Probably not. For one thing, the tariffs themselves are likely illegal because the president invoked a law to levy them that doesn’t actually mention tariffs at all. (The Supreme Court will hear a case on the matter in November.) Using illegally obtained revenue to fund unrelated programs without Congress’s permission is likely a violation of the separation of powers as well, even if the programs are otherwise unimpeachable.

Few legal experts have applauded Trump’s attacks on Congress’s power of the purse. But he would likely find a kindred spirit in Charles I, the seventeenth-century English king whose own taxation policies and preference for absolute rule led to civil war. Charles’s downfall during the English Civil War helped transition England from the divine right of kings to parliamentary supremacy. It also inspired the Founders as they built a republican government around rights and liberties on these shores.

Trump’s second term reads like a list of the Founders’ worst fears. Over the last 10 months, he has blocked congressional appropriations at will and levied billions of dollars in tariffs on Americans without the consent of Congress. He has deployed troops onto the streets of the nation’s capital for pretextual reasons and sent the National Guard into states without the consent of their governors. He has claimed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution while targeting his political opponents with malicious indictments. “We took freedom of speech away,” he even remarked in a recent White House event.

All of this is at odds with two and a half centuries of American political thought. But it also extends even further back through the Anglo-American legal tradition to lessons that the Founders learned long before the Revolution. The Trump administration has done many things over the past 10 months on the specious grounds that doing so was necessary to protect our “culture” or our “way of life.” Its actions show that it knows nothing about them.

English kings and parliaments often quarreled over money. The medieval English monarchy was responsible not only for the king’s personal expenses but also for the salaries of royal officials, the maintenance of warships and docks, the upkeep of castles, palaces, and other holdings, and so on. In times of war, the king would also be responsible for paying armies in his service. War in the medieval era, as well as today, could be ruinously expensive.

The Crown had held its own land and estates since the Norman Conquest, but this was almost always insufficient to cover its costs on its own. By the time Charles took the throne in 1625, his predecessors had worked out a solution of sorts. Parliament would grant newly crowned monarchs permission to collect “tonnage and poundage,” a form of import-export duties, for the duration of their reign. In times of war, the Crown could also ask for additional funds as necessary.

It is important to emphasize that Parliament did not function as a full-time legislature as we know it today. English monarchs could summon and disband parliaments at will. (They technically retain this power today but now only exercise it at the prime minister’s request.) Elizabeth I only summoned it a dozen times during her reign, often with great hesitation and annoyance. Her successor, James I, whose only experience was with Scotland’s more deferential counterpart, quarreled with Parliament more openly than Elizabeth, though not as bitterly as his son.

Charles took the throne in 1625 amid religious and political tension. Henry VIII had cleaved England from Rome almost a century earlier, but the exact contours of what the English church would look like remained an open question. Charles, though Protestant himself, often sided with those who favored a church that more closely resembled the Catholic one it had left. His marriage to Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic, stirred distrust among Protestants who feared a return to papal authority.

Further complicating matters was that Charles was also an avowed proponent of the divine right of kings, in which a monarch’s right to reign came from God and no one else. This was not unusual in and of itself: His father, James, had written treatises defending the same principle during his own reign, and the Tudors before them—most notably Henry VIII—had adopted the same stance. Nor was this concept alien to Christendom in general. But in the English cultural mind, Catholicism and despotism were closely linked, and Charles’s perceived crypto-Catholic views amplified fears that he threatened their liberties.

What set Charles apart from his father was his absolutist stance on the matter coupled with his lack of political skill. Parliament was not merely a legislature as we know it today but an assembly of the wealthiest and most powerful subjects in the realm. Its privileges and powers had been carefully asserted and entrenched over the preceding centuries. It was one thing to insist that the king could govern without Parliament as a matter of law and philosophy. It was another to suggest that he could actually reign without the realm’s aristocrats, bishops, and landowners altogether.

When Charles became king, he asked Parliament to grant him tonnage and poundage. It declined, at least not without conditions that Charles was unwilling to meet. He responded by dismissing Parliament and beginning an 11-year era known as the Personal Rule, where he governed exclusively through his royal prerogatives and refused to summon Parliament at all.

This did not really solve the king’s problems. Without the Lords and Commons, Charles had to turn to other means to shore up his finances. He sold off lands and titles, granted illegal monopolies to supporters in exchange for cash, and taxed his Scottish subjects much more heavily, a move that would later backfire. He also leaned on other traditional forms of taxation. The most notorious of them was known as “ship money.”

Ship money was a quintessentially English tax. The island nation was naturally vulnerable to naval invasions. In times of war, medieval English kings had required coastal towns and villages to either provide warships for a royal navy or some sort of monetary equivalent when threats arose. Charles expanded these taxes in two significant ways. First, he began to require it from inland communities that had never had to pay the tax before. Second, he began to levy the tax on more vague grounds of national emergency instead of actual wartime.

Charles’s taxation efforts fueled discontent across the English countryside. Historian Jonathan Healey described it as “the most controversial of all the Crown’s financial policies, and something that would become the defining constitutional issue of the decade.” Among those unhappy with paying ship money was John Hampden, a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire. His refusal to pay in 1637 set up a test case of sorts on the legality of the taxes. Charles and his advisers welcomed it because they assumed the 12 royally appointed judges would rule in his favor and legitimize the taxes.

Oliver St. John, who would serve in the Cromwellian government after the Civil War, was among the lawyers who represented Hampden. A complete rejection of royal authority was still years away. Instead, he argued that Charles could only lawfully demand ship money in a genuine emergency. “St. John accepted that the king was the ‘fountain of justice,’ but claimed that ‘though all justice which is done within the realm flows from this fountain, yet it must run in certain and known channels,’” Healey noted in a recent book on the fraught and fateful era, with St. John referring to Parliament and the courts.

The king’s lawyers, as one might expect, took a more expansive view of his powers. “Bankes made the royalist case eloquently,” Healey wrote. “‘This kingdom, it is a monarchy,’ he said, ‘it consists of head and members, the king is the head.’ The head, he continued, ‘is furnished with entire power and jurisdiction.’ It was an emergency because the king said it was, and it was in the monarch’s power to anticipate danger and to act in the public interest.” It did not matter if the king’s claims were pretextual or not; all that mattered was that he made them.

Charles received the victory that he sought, but not the legitimization that he desired. Seven of the 12 judges sided with the king, with the remaining five judges dissenting. Charles grew dissatisfied that almost half of his own judges had ruled against him. The maximalist argument that his lawyers had made was constitutionally transformational as well, inflaming the opposition and delegitimizing the courts. Copies of the dissenting judges’ opinions were widely distributed among the public.

“What [the king’s lawyers] had done was convince the judges that England was, if one looked closely enough, a truly absolute monarchy,” Healey explained. “‘If we grant ship money,’ one critic would write, ‘we grant all besides.’ The king, when it came down to it, had an absolute right to take his subjects’ property as and when he felt that he needed it. To those versed in Roman history, it implied that the English people were little better than slaves, for they had no secure control of their lands and goods. More to the point, it underlined the viability of Charles’s rule without Parliament for the foreseeable future.”

Events only deteriorated even further from there. The Scots rose up in revolt once again, frustrated by overtaxation and religious differences, and Charles struggled to fund an English army to counter them. (It did not help that more than a few Englishmen sympathized with their northern neighbors.) The revolt forced Charles to end the Personal Rule and summon Parliament in 1640 to request additional funds. It would prove to be a momentous decision: The Long Parliament, as it became known by historians, would ultimately wage war against Charles in the English Civil War, overthrowing him and establishing England’s first and only republic.

Even the Stuarts’ restoration in 1660 could not fully reverse Parliament’s ascendancy. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw James II’s ouster in favor of an avowedly Protestant succession, furthered England’s transition to parliamentary sovereignty. The English Civil War and its aftereffects would also be felt in the fledgling colonies in America. New England, the ideological cradle of American liberty, was drawn from the same cultural stock as the Parliamentarian forces in the war: Puritan in religiosity, egalitarian in sentiment, and democratic in local governance.

When the American colonists spoke of “the rights of Englishmen” in their protests against British rule, they referred to a liberal (and occasionally idealized) vision of the rights that they and their ancestors had enjoyed. The turmoil of the seventeenth century in England imparted to early Americans a strong cultural belief in representative government, both in laws or taxation. The English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship, and the British occupation of American cities during the Revolution also instilled them with a strong cultural aversion to standing armies.

The Constitution is extremely well informed by these hard-won lessons. Article 1 explicitly gives Congress the “power of the purse,” as it was known in England, by granting it the exclusive power to levy tariffs and duties, to fund and regulate armies and navies, and to declare war. While the president is the commander in chief, military officers must be confirmed by the Senate and funding for the army must be renewed every two years.

These protections were seen as obvious and necessary for republican government by the Framers. Standing armies, as Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 10, tend to “strengthen the executive arm of government, in doing which their constitutions would acquire a progressive direction toward monarchy.” He added that it “is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.” Charles and Cromwell likely loomed in his mind when writing that maxim.

John Adams, the eventual second president, recounted in his diary about visiting two historical sites during a tour of England with Thomas Jefferson in 1786. “Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,” he wrote, alluding to the Parliamentarian victories that had been achieved there in the Civil War. Adams also expressed surprise at what he saw as a lack of reverence from the locals.

“The people in the neighborhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester,” he wrote, “that I was provoked, and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.’ This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.”

Trump knows little of this history and tradition, and the American civic tradition has left no visible imprint on him. He does not speak the common language of American political leaders, nor does he share the republican values that are so bedrock to our national identity that they went largely undisputed for the last two and a half centuries. Just as the English of the seventeenth century found themselves ruled by a Scottish-born king who did not believe in their rights and liberties, so too do Americans find themselves under a half-Scottish landlord who claimed that he has “an Article Two [of the Constitution], where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

A reporter asked Trump this week during a roundtable session at the White House whether he would try to suspend habeas corpus. “Suspend who?” the president replied, then referred the matter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. So ignorant of our Yankee culture and traditions is Trump that he was apparently under the impression that “habeas corpus” was the name of a person to be arrested or deported. Even Charles I knew better than that.

The Candidate Caught in a Nazi Porn Scandal Is Today’s GOP Personified - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

With his normcore style and measured, talk-radio voice, John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia, is no internet-pickled groyper. He’s a stock MAGA uncle, smarmy and bluff. But for six months now, he’s been giving lech. He’s been giving Gaetz lite.

Back in May, research from an anti-Reid faction in the state GOP alleged that he was behind a Tumblr account, “JRDeux,” which posted penis pics. (Reid’s Instagram account has the same handle.) At the time, Reid denied he was responsible for the account, claiming he was the victim of a smear campaign for being openly gay; he stayed on the ticket over the objections of his own party, including Governor Glenn Youngkin.

But you can’t keep this sordid story down. Last week, with early voting well underway in the November 4 election, American Journal News revealed that, on the same porny Tumblr blog, JRDeux didn’t just serve up lewdery. He boosted a user who brandished swastikas. (See: “Republican Candidate in Virginia Caught in Nazi Porn Scandal.”) Back in 2015, JRDeux also shared an image of a male college student posted by a user who self-described with a racial slur and sought the company of “superior white men.” Turns out Reid’s alleged Tumblr clique was devoted to the eroticization of slavery and “overt Nazi fetishism.”

“No one’s ever seen a candidate like me in Virginia and quite frankly most places across the country,” Reid boasted not long ago to a Charlottesville media outlet. He’d be right—except that, for those keeping count at home, Reid is the second Republican to be engulfed in a Nazi porn scandal in just over a year.

So that’s all deeply bleak. But what’s weirdest about Reid is not his weirdness. It’s how MAGA-typical his whole career is. Billing himself as an “American Patriot, Reagan Conservative, Virginia Gentleman,” Reid has a personal story that doubles as the spiritual journey of four decades of GOP putrefaction. Reid has Zelig-ed his way through just about every stage in the GOP’s metamorphosis from anti-fascist family-value conservatism to its current incarnation as the profa (as opposed to antifa) party of pervs.

Four decades ago, Reid started strong. He graduated from tony St. Christopher’s prep school in Richmond, and then Baylor, the Christian university that later brought in Ken Starr as president, only to fire him for licensing campus sexual assault. In 1993, Reid moved to Los Angeles to intern for former President Ronald Reagan.

What telegenic Reagan conservative of the 1990s didn’t want to be on TV? Reid then spent a decade as a reporter and then anchor for a morning show at the ABC affiliate in Richmond. Years later, he built on this success by hosting a conservative radio show on WRVA. Trump called in to his radio show last February, and Reid buttered him up.

In the 2000s, Reid flacked for then-Senator George Allen during Allen’s infamous racist interludes. (A longtime friend to the Sons of the Confederacy, Allen, as Virginia governor, declared April “Confederacy Month.”) All along, Reid has had a soft spot for Richmond’s racist monuments. “We must not let angry mobs and corrupt lawless Democrats destroy and erase our history and our public artwork, monuments, memorials, and tombs,” he posted to Facebook in July.

And the Virginia Flaggers have never forgotten Reid’s kindness to their movement. Last month, the Flaggers, a neo-Confederate group known for espousing Lost Cause ideology and installing massive Confederate battle flags over highways, posted to Facebook: “John Reid for Lt. Governor of Virginia is the ONLY candidate for statewide office who is not afraid to speak out and speak up about the war on our history and heritage!”

In 2011, Reid joined what has been called the Torturers’ Lobby, the K Street “communications” firms whose dark arts for whitewashing foreign authoritarian regimes were pioneered in part by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In 2011, Reid rose to partner at Qorvis, the strategy firm notorious for counseling barbaric governments like Saudi Arabia and Libya. (Most recently, Qorvis helped Saudi Arabia sweep under the rug the torture and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by government agents.)

At Qorvis, Reid became a registered foreign agent. “Reid’s experience normalized influence-peddling for repressive governments,” David Leblang, who teaches public policy at the University of Virginia, told the Virginia Mercury. On September 8, Qorvis CEO Matt Lauer (not the disgraced TV guy) appears to have attended a Reid fundraiser on Capitol Hill, along with loose-collared Dancing With the Stars personality Sean Spicer.

Though Reid came out as gay in the 1990s, and has been with his boyfriend, Alonzo Mable, for eight years, he opposes enshrining gay marriage (along with voting rights and reproductive rights) in Virginia’s constitution. He regularly orates on “predatory” trans women, “the physical mutilation of children,” and the rest of the MAGA urban legends.

Meanwhile, his whole ticket is troubled. At the top, gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears is polling well behind her Democratic rival, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. Youngkin, for his part, is whipping up made-for-Fox outrage about Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, who not long ago shared high-key disturbing fantasies about committing political violence. And on Tuesday, the Republican Governors Association dropped another $1.5 million into the race to boost Earle-Sears.

So it’s gonna be another nutty month in Virginia. But have no fear for John Reid. If he wins, he wins. But if he leaves Richmond for D.C. in some Trumpy capacity, he might also get a hero’s welcome there. The perv-fascist solidarity in Trump’s Washington has come to seem like the #MeToo movement in reverse. Lechy newcomers get to burst onto the scene at Butterworth’s—“me too, guys!”—into the loving arms of the sex-scandal-plagued elite: former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, and of course Trump himself.

Trump’s Tariffs Should Force a Reckoning With America’s Soy Industry - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

Usually, the best thing about being in the American soy business is the predictability. Buy seeds from the same companies, sow them, water them, harvest the crop, and sell to the same buyers who have been buying it for decades. The last few years have been particularly profitable, with historically high prices and a consistent client in China, the world’s biggest buyer of soy. The United States is the world’s second-biggest producer of soy, after Brazil, growing over 80 million acres of the oily bean across vast swathes of the country’s farmland. About a quarter of all that crop goes straight to China, bringing in $13.2 billion last year alone.

Now that market is gone, as is any predictability. After the U.S. levied heavy tariffs on Chinese imports in April, China responded by refusing to buy American soy. That was in May. Now, with the American soy harvest nearing the end of its season, American farmers are panicking. As the global soy value chain rearranges in real time, Brazil has become China’s biggest supplier while Americans go hat in hand to small markets like Nigeria and Vietnam hoping to cut some deals. The Trump administration has hinted at a bailout. And to add insult to injury, Argentina, which the administration just promised a $20 billion currency swap to rescue its flailing economy, is now selling shiploads of soy to China.

This agricultural drama has been getting a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, in part because it is exemplary of the helter-skelter policymaking of the Trump administration and its unpredictable global implications. The bigger story about soy, though, isn’t the current trade war but the fact we’re producing far too much of the crop—not so humans can eat it, but so animals can.

In 1962, China’s per-capita gross domestic product was $71 and the average Chinese person ate about nine pounds of meat per year. But as the country industrialized and urbanized, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, increased consumer spending power fed a growing appetite for meat, especially pork. That, in turn, drove the country to pursue agricultural modernization, replacing smallholder farms with industrialized ones and embracing an “industrial meat regime” rooted in factory farming pork and poultry. In remaking its economy, China also remade its diet. Today, China’s per-capita meat consumption is 154 pounds. The country has grown into the world’s biggest pork producer and pioneered massive pig production facilities like a 26-story megafarm in Hubei province.

Factory farming entails taking animals out of fields and growing them for the entirety of their lives in enclosed warehouses where their diets can be optimized to maximize quick growth for slaughter. But to feed all those animals, the fields need to be used to grow feed like corn and soy in massive quantities. China embraced soy production, but soon its demand for meat far outstripped its supply of available land. Today it imports 85 percent of the soy it uses, representing 60 percent of all global soy imports.

While China’s embrace of a meat-heavy diet is remarkable in its speed and scale, it is only catching up to Europe, which has long practiced factory farming, and still lags the United States, which pioneered industrial animal farming and where per-capita meat consumption is 220 pounds per year (and more if you count fish). The geographer Tony Weis calls the remaking of food systems to serve factory farming “meatification,” which entails diverting grain and oilseed production from human food toward animal feed. In the U.S., 35 percent of all corn and over 90 percent of soy becomes animal feed. In fact, 67 percent of all crops go to animal feed while 27 percent go directly to humans (the rest goes to biofuels). (Globally, 77 percent of all soy goes to animal feed; only 7 percent goes to human food like soy milk and tofu.) While this is inefficient and environmentally dubious, at least the U.S. can handle its domestic demand. The EU and China can’t. Hence the huge market for American soy abroad and Brazil’s and Argentina’s massive soy economies.

As China’s demand for foreign soy grew, American farmers grew more of it: U.S. soy production and exports have doubled over the past 30 years, roughly tracking increases in Chinese meat consumption and soy demand for feed. The same was the case in Brazil. Importing soy amounts to offshoring demand for land. And that means offshoring deforestation. Most deforestation to create new soy farms takes place in South America. And with the U.S. cut off by China, Brazil is ending a moratorium on deforestation to cash in.

This is just one of the many harms caused by a global appetite for meat. The recently released “EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems”—a collaboration between the Swedish food nongovernmental organization EAT and the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—shows that the global food system is outstripping planetary boundaries and driving unsustainable climate change, land use change, and eutrophication of water. The single biggest culprit by far is meat. China may have offshored deforestation, but its glut of factory farms has caused a series of crises at home, as well, such as widespread pollution and animal disease outbreaks, including a swine fever epidemic in 2019 that killed tens of millions of animals.

The irony here is that soy itself is an incredible crop and food. It’s hardy, adaptable, cheap to grow, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil, minimizing the need for fertilizer. The soybean is highly nutritious, packed with 35 percent protein and easy to cook or process into a variety of products, from oil and soy milk through to edamame, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meats like Impossible burgers. This polyvalence and ease of use is precisely why it’s so widely used in animal feed. It’s just that feeding it to animals, beyond the environmental downsides, is inefficient. Any animal will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it will yield as meat; the average pig will only yield about 9 percent of the protein that it consumes. Eating soy directly requires far less soy (and land) than feeding it to animals.

It’s not that soy is inherently harmful. It’s how we use it that’s harmful.

Yes, American soy farmers are suffering. But we should take this moment to reflect on why we use so much American farmland to feed pigs both at home and in China, giving fuel to an environmentally destructive industry. How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing but for how unsustainable it is.

Hold That Nobel Prize: This Peace Plan Will Die, and Bibi Will Kill It - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

“For years, Netanyahu manipulated American Presidents. He tricked Bill Clinton; he swindled Obama; he took Biden for a ride. Now he is trying to con you on Gaza, President Trump.”

This is not the opening paragraph of this article, although it very well could be. Rather, this is the text of an ad that aired for five consecutive days on Fox & Friends, Fox News’s morning show, in Washington, D.C. The “demographic cohort” it was apparently targeting consisted of one lone viewer: the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump. Ultimately it seemed to have the desired effect. Trump, who had checked out of the Middle East over the summer, was all of the sudden reengaged, experiencing an increasingly vitriolic MAGA distaste for Netanyahu and Israel and arguably not disagreeing with the gist of it.

Within two weeks, a disillusioned, agitated and livid-with-Netanyahu’s antics Trump adopted a general framework and plan: a somewhat vague outline of how to end the war and an intricate yet nebulous roadmap of “Postwar Gaza.” He forced Benjamin Netanyahu into endorsing it publicly, realizing that a Netanyahu pledge and commitment made in a closed room has the lifespan and credibility of a mayfly.

Yet the plan begins with a clear and attainable goal, not with the intractable down-the-road obstacles: a ceasefire, even if temporary, and a hostage release. This is what dejected and traumatized Israelis want (except for one Benjamin Netanyahu); this is what desolate Palestinians are desperate for; this is what Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, Trumpworld’s business buddies, had implored him to do, and this is exactly what Trump announced ceremoniously on both Wednesday and Thursday.

The ad was aired a week after Israel’s reckless attack on Doha, without U.S. coordination or sufficient advance notice, in a bold attempt to kill three Hamas leaders directly involved in negotiations in the middle of the capital city of the chief mediator, Qatar. This was not only Netanyahu’s hubris at work, attacking a U.S. ally, but an audacious overreach that tested Trump’s notoriously flat learning curve (see Vladimir Putin). During the White House meeting where he presented his plan, and to make Netanyahu realize just how serious he was, Trump resorted to old-fashioned humiliation: He made him apologize to the Prime Minister of Qatar in a call on a phone the president was by sheer coincidence holding on his lap, with Mohammad Al Thani on the other side. 

It also came three months after the United States collaborated with Israel in June and sent B-2 bombers armed with GBU 57 massive ordnance to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. In exchange for the Americans’ assistance on that matter, Trump expected the war in Gaza, which he believed was unnecessarily protracted, without a coherent postwar political vision, to end. It didn’t.

With mediation in Ukraine-Russia at an impasse and Putin openly playing him, with his erratic and bullying tariffs policy unpopular in the world and at home, with the comical hyperboles of annexing Canada and purchasing Greenland being mocked everywhere outside the White House and the Magaverse, and with his domestic agenda increasingly meeting legal challenges and now political resistance, Trump had one place where success could be almost guaranteed: ending the war in Gaza.

How do you do that? First you decide that you’ve had enough and act on it. His predecessors vented their frustrations in expletive-filled “closed meetings,” using colorful variations of f**k and s**t, but they never converted language into policy. Then you proceed to do what neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama nor, most recently, Joe Biden ever dared do: Apply real pressure on Netanyahu and remind him that in an asymmetrical alliance, the lesser partner is expected to be attentive to the bigger power’s interests and not defy it constantly. You call his bluff, recognizing that his presumed Washington magic and dexterity are self-aggrandizing myths, those of a paper tiger.

Netanyahu outmaneuvered himself into a corner where he had only Trump (and maybe Senator Lindsey Graham) as an ally in the 202 area code. Odd that it was Trump that finally figured that out. Their perennial hesitancy, tendency to overthink political ramifications, sheer ineptness and often inhospitable geopolitical circumstances caused American presidents to defer to Israel even when they believed that U.S. and Israeli regional interests were not aligned.

But the praise that Trump warrants for the ambitious attempt—not yet the reality—of ending the Gaza war may dissipate once “phase one” of the plan, the hostage release and prisoner exchange, is completed. Then comes the hard part, and it is doubtful whether Trump will maintain the same level of personal engagement and political commitment. He loves the attention, the limelight, and the gratitude, but there will be little of that left in the next phases.

There are two ways and perspectives to look at what we are now forced to call the “Trump Plan.” The first is to determine that whatever its flaws, ambiguities, amenability to contrasting interpretations and difficult implementation chances are, this is the only plan that is currently on the table. If Trump had any respect for multilateralism, international institutions, and the international order, he would submit the plan to the U.N. Security Council and ask that it be regarded as a binding resolution. Like it or not, it is the only game in town, endorsed by the entire world and especially by the Arab Gulf states.

The second is to dissect it, deconstruct its 20 points and inevitably conclude that it is not viable. The second approach has defined Mideast diplomacy for over a hundred years. “It’ll never work” is the one line that all Israelis and all Palestinians can always agree on, blaming the entire world—and particularly the United States—for their own shortcomings and failures.

So let’s briefly look at the prospects and viability of the first perspective: adopting the plan, in spite of its deficiencies.

First there are the very practical issues: Israel needs to withdraw, Hamas is obliged to disarm. Will either of those actually happen? No. In that event, does the ceasefire hold? Not likely.

Assuming all this does happen, the plan calls for the establishment of an interim Arab force, an “International Stabilization Force.” Does it include the Palestinian Authority? “Only if it reforms,” Israel disingenuously says, knowing full well that won’t happen to Israel’s full satisfaction. So what then?

The redeeming quality of the plan is that it correctly assumes that there is no current Palestinian political entity that can govern. But it equally assumes that Israel cannot stay in Gaza or the West Bank. This means a “trusteeship” of sorts. A build-operate-transfer process that would lead eventually to a Palestinian state. But Netanyahu and his messianic theo-nationalist coalition oppose that. So essentially, the “Trump Plan” only has viability under a different Israeli government. That requires an election, and during an election, nothing happens on the ground.

So what then are the chances of the Trump plan to actually be implemented in its entirety? Very slim. Yes, everyone is entitled to the optimism of a ceasefire and hostage release, but the rest is ominously murky.

Who Gets Away With Crimes Against Humanity? - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

From Nuremberg to The Hague, the postwar order promised a universal standard of justice. In practice, it has delivered something else: a system that shields the powerful and their allies, and reserves prosecution for poorer, weaker countries. The same states that helped draft the rules have worked just as hard to ensure that those rules almost never apply to their own leaders. This selective enforcement is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The case brought last year by South Africa at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, a charge co-signed by several other countries, big and small, is only one of the most recent tests of whether the promise of impartial justice can survive geopolitical reality.

The rise of reactionary “anti-globalist” political movements has rendered the possibility of international justice ever more shaky in recent years. During his first term as president, Donald Trump displayed a hostility to the very notion of universal rights. Seeing a ruler’s power as essentially absolute, he extolled Saddam Hussein’s brutal record on counterterrorism in Iraq and celebrated the authoritarian “leadership” of Vladimir Putin. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have warned that the second Trump administration will likely further erode the rights of vulnerable people at home and abroad. The recently constructed Alligator Alcatraz in Florida—a slapdash detention center surrounded by swamps and predatory wildlife—is a brutally surreal symbol of state cruelty.

American politicians have long floated above the reach of global human rights law no matter how egregious their conduct. While U.S. leaders have escaped the scrutiny reserved for the likes of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor, and Laurent Gbagbo, they have also frequently intervened on behalf of friends accused of horrific acts. When the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, Senator Tom Cotton dismissed the ICC as a “kangaroo court” with no standing to bring charges. “If you help the ICC, we’re going to crush your economy,” Senator Lindsey Graham intoned. Earlier this year, the Trump White House sanctioned the ICC, an act U.N. experts said “strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system.”

In a postwar global order defined overwhelmingly by U.S. actors serving U.S. interests, the miracle might be that any world leader friendly with Washington has ever been held liable for their gruesome deeds in an international court of justice. Augusto Pinochet was likely comfortably assured of his impunity when he was awakened in a London hospital by Scotland Yard officials on the evening of October 16, 1998. Two detectives and an interpreter were there to place the 82-year-old retired army general under arrest for crimes committed during the ruthless dictatorship he ran in Chile for almost two decades. “I know the fucker who’s behind this,” Pinochet said. “It’s that communist Garcés, Juan Garcés.”

He was right. As a young man, Garcés had become a friend and adviser to President Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist overthrown on September 11, 1973, in a violent coup led by Pinochet with the Nixon administration’s support. “Someone has to recount what happened here, and only you can do it,” Allende told Garcés on the day he died. Garcés went on to study law in Paris and returned to his native Spain in 1975 after the death of strongman Francisco Franco. Garcés then spent years organizing the legal case against Pinochet under universal jurisdiction, a legal principle allowing prosecution for torture and crimes against humanity regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the perpetrators and victims. In coordination with human rights groups, he worked closely with a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, who ultimately issued the warrant that led British authorities to detain Pinochet.

Philippe Sands was an attorney for Human Rights Watch, one of the groups pressing for the prosecution of Pinochet at the time. In 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, he offers more than personal recollections of the case, which he calls “one of the most important international criminal cases since Nuremberg.” As he uncovers the surprising links between Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and the shadowy remnants of the Third Reich on the run, Sands weaves a chilling transnational history of twentieth-century atrocity. What emerges is a profoundly humane examination of the legal, political, and ideological networks that make impunity possible, and a study of the moral clarity needed to confront power when it shields itself behind a uniform, a border, or a flag.


For Garcés, bringing Pinochet to justice was a means of reckoning with the legacies of the Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939 between an elected republican government and a fascist military uprising led by Franco. The conflict claimed well over a hundred thousand lives and displaced millions more. As the then–U.S. ambassador to Madrid later recalled, “it was evident to any intelligent observer that the war in Spain was not a civil war.” Something larger and more ominous was afoot: “Here would be staged the dress rehearsal for the totalitarian war on liberty and democracy in Europe.” After Franco’s victory, some 15,000 Spanish Republicans were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish dictator outlived World War II, serving for decades as a beacon of reaction for authoritarian traditionalists the world over.

As historian Kirsten Weld has shown, crucial figures in the Chilean dictatorship understood themselves to be following in Franco’s footsteps. The Pinochet regime, like Franco’s, sought to impose a conservative, nationalist order that rejected liberal democracy and leftist movements of any kind, justifying brutal measures—including disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings—as necessary to preserve order and civilization. Three years after the coup, Pinochet himself told U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that events in his country represented “a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War.” (Kissinger, for his part, considered Pinochet “a victim of all left‑wing groups around the world.”)

It was in Spain, too, however, that legal activists began the battle to prosecute the Chilean dictator for his crimes. Central to this effort was the case of Antonio Llido, a Spanish priest arrested in Santiago in 1974. Witnesses asserted Llido was badly tortured before he disappeared forever, one of thousands murdered by the state. With the return of democracy in Chile in the 1990s, Chilean and Spanish human rights groups filed complaints on behalf of Llido and other victims, triggering investigations in Spain that culminated in Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. The ex-dictator claimed immunity from arrest as a former head of state. But in a highly publicized ruling, the House of Lords—at the time, the United Kingdom’s highest court of appeals—found that former heads of state could not claim immunity for torture charges after 1988, the year that conspiracy to torture outside the United Kingdom became a crime in English law. On other points, however, the decision was mixed, allowing the pro- and anti-immunity sides to claim partial victory. The lords left Pinochet’s fate up to Home Secretary Jack Straw. For a moment, it seemed entirely plausible that Pinochet would be extradited to Spain, where Chilean survivors were preparing to testify against him.

Yet Pinochet never stood trial. Behind the scenes, the ex-dictator’s powerful allies weighed in on his behalf. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher had reportedly given him her word that he could seek medical care in Britain as needed in exchange for support against Argentina during the Falklands War. “During his annual trips to London, Pinochet says, he always sends Thatcher flowers and a box of chocolates, and whenever possible they meet for tea,” journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote in 1998, just days before Pinochet’s arrest. In the aftermath, Thatcher wrote Prime Minister Tony Blair to lobby for her friend’s release. The Vatican also quietly yet forcefully pleaded for a “humanitarian gesture” from British authorities. For its part, the Chilean government under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle—hardly a Pinochet defender—demanded the former strongman’s release in the name of national sovereignty and political reconciliation at home. They all got their way. After 16 months under house arrest in Britain, Pinochet was sent home in March 2000 by Straw. The Spanish case met a dead end.

What makes Sands’s account of this legal drama so compelling is the way he weaves it into both the story of democratic reconstruction in post-dictatorial South America and the broader trajectory of his long-running investigations into atrocity and impunity. Indeed, one way of understanding 38 Londres Street is as the final piece of a Sands trilogy on atrocity and impunity that includes East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (2016) and The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive (2020). Research for both of those works led him to the other major character in this latest book: former SS commander Walther Rauff.


Rauff was born in 1906 in Köthen, a town roughly a hundred miles from Berlin. In 1924, the year Adolf Hitler was imprisoned for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, Rauff joined the German navy. He soon visited South America for the first time, landing in the Chilean port of Valparaíso in late 1925. “Making his way to the Naval Academy,” Sands writes, “Rauff passed the San Rafael Seminary, where one of the pupils was ten-year-old Augusto Pinochet.” This was not the last time the two would be so close.

A dutiful Rauff excelled in the armed forces until he began an extramarital affair that culminated in a nasty divorce and military court proceedings against him in 1937. That same year, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1938, the year of the Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht, Rauff joined the SS, the elite Nazi paramilitary organization led by Heinrich Himmler. Decades later, Rauff’s Chilean grandson would tell Sands he liked to imagine him as a reluctant collaborator. Sands’s careful research shows, however, that Rauff was a true believer. He stood out for his technical prowess and would prove to be an innovator in atrocity. He closely oversaw the design and implementation of mobile gas vans used to murder Jews, Roma, and Soviet civilians in the occupied Eastern territories. “The main issue for me was that the shootings were a considerable burden for the men who were in charge thereof, and this burden was removed through the use of the gas vans,” Rauff later remarked.

In late 1942, Rauff led a special unit in Tunis that persecuted and killed Jews. By September 1943, he was transferred to Italy, where he would meet Mussolini—but not before participating with Karl Wolff, Germany’s military governor of northern Italy, in secret talks with Allied forces, who had landed in Sicily that summer. “In return for peace, he and Wolff hoped to avoid prosecution.” In Switzerland in early 1945, Rauff met Allen Dulles—the powerful local representative of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence body that would become the CIA (both the State Department and the CIA have made available troves of documents pertaining to Rauff).

Held in a POW camp after the end of the war, Rauff escaped in December 1946 and spent over a year hiding in an Italian monastery. Like many Nazi fugitives, he fled across the Atlantic. In a letter uncovered by Sands, Rauff advised a former high-ranking SS officer and Nazi official: “Accept the current situation and you can achieve a lot and climb back up the ladder … The main thing is to get out of Europe … and focus on the ‘reassembling of good forces for a later operation.’” Rauff suggested South America.

In early 1950, Rauff and his family arrived in Ecuador, where they set about creating a new life. Rauff engaged in various business dealings and, as was revealed decades later, did some spying for West Germany. His sons took military paths, with support and letters of recommendation from friendly Chilean officials stationed in Quito—including Pinochet, then in his early forties. The future strongman had joined the army in the 1930s, a time when Chile’s military was considered one of the most modern and professional in South America. Pinochet rose steadily through the ranks, holding command positions in various army units. In 1956, he was invited for a teaching stint at Ecuador’s War Academy. “Pinochet and Rauff, and their wives, became socially close, bonded by a virulent anti-communist sentiment, respect of matters German and a mutual interest in Nazidom,” Sands explains, undercutting Pinochet’s later claim of never having met the escaped SS officer with a direct hand in the murder of thousands. The two men saw each other as allies in a shared epic struggle bigger than themselves.

In the late 1950s, Rauff settled in Chile. He joined a large German expatriate community and made an ostensible living as manager of a crab cannery near the country’s southern tip while continuing to write reports for West German intelligence. Accountability eventually came for certain high-profile Nazis in hiding. Adolf Eichmann, who managed many of the logistics of the Holocaust, also fled to South America after the war. He was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960; taken to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people; and executed by hanging in June 1962. Rauff himself was apprehended in 1962 in what Sands sees as a parallel with Pinochet: “two men arrested at 11 p.m., on charges of mass murder, with a request for extradition from one country to another.” Rauff assured his family that he was safe, that the high-profile connections he had established in Chile would shield him from Eichmann’s fate. He was right.


Pinochet’s rise to power no doubt set Rauff’s mind at ease. The dictatorship repeatedly rebuffed fresh extradition requests from West Germany and Israel, even as Nazi hunters like Beate Klarsfeld and Simon Wiesenthal located war criminals. For Pinochet, harboring Rauff was neither accident nor oversight. As Sands makes clear, Pinochet’s regime was ideologically aligned with the arch-traditionalism of Francoist Spain and the repressive anti-communist order that Nazi veterans represented. Rauff, an unrepentant party man who celebrated the Führer’s birthday every year, embodied both the continuity of far-right authoritarianism from the 1930s to the Cold War and the conviction that leftist politics were an existential threat to be eradicated.

Sands examines these overlapping life histories and political narratives with sensitivity and clear eyes. He is not inflammatory or accusatory. Rather, through meticulous archival research, interviews, and vivid reporting in several countries, he allows readers to trace surprising—and damning—connections across time and place. Sands himself is often the vessel for these discoveries. He recounts walks in recent years through unassuming Santiago neighborhoods, retracing with torture survivors the footsteps of political detainees and observing the architecture of state violence, unchanged in a Chile that is otherwise vastly different. He visits the site of the former Socialist Party headquarters, turned after the coup into a notorious center of interrogation and torture, at the titular 38 Londres Street. The book includes photos that reflect Sands’s personal, memoiristic style: snapshots of rooms, buildings, and people, evidently taken by the author himself. The effect is to heighten the reader’s sense of accompanying Sands on a chilling journey into a human rights heart of darkness.

When Rauff died peacefully in Santiago in 1984, surrounded by his sons and grandchildren, the Pinochet government had shielded him for more than a decade. His funeral drew open displays of Nazi salutes, a final reminder that the ideological underpinnings of his crimes were far from extinct. In this light, Pinochet’s own confidence in his untouchability seems less like personal hubris and more like the logical conclusion of a system in which those who serve the right cause, in the eyes of powerful patrons, are protected no matter the enormity of their crimes. Just as Rauff eluded the hands of justice, so, too, did Pinochet hope to evade the authority of any court. That he was wrong, even briefly, is why his arrest in London still resonates: It was proof, however fleeting, that the walls built to shelter the powerful can be breached. Pinochet was eventually sent home to Chile rather than Spain, where he would have stood trial. Claiming concerns for his health, he left London in a wheelchair that he abandoned on the tarmac in Santiago. He died in 2006 at the age of 91.

Sands insists that the spectacle of the dictator’s arrest was not for naught. It helped lay the legal groundwork for the successful domestic prosecution of other members of the regime. Unlike Brazil, for example, which never held any agents of its Cold War–era dictatorship criminally liable for human rights violations, Chile made significant legal strides. Over the past two decades, hundreds of military officers have been indicted and dozens convicted for their involvement in forced disappearances and assassinations of dissidents in Chile and beyond.

Chile’s protection of Rauff was of a piece with the regime’s use of former Nazis and fascists as advisers, trainers, and symbols of a militant anti-communist international. It was also a vivid demonstration of the formal and informal mechanisms that sustain impunity—convenient legal loopholes and mutually beneficial alliances binding together fundamentally anti-democratic actors across continents and decades. Our attention to these networks should serve more than historical understanding. Sands, who last year argued against the legality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine at the International Court of Justice, understands this implicitly. In a moment defined by a lack of accountability, the Pinochet precedent reminds us that impunity is not inevitable. It is a political choice that can be—and has sometimes been—reversed.

Trump ICE Raids Take Unnerving Turn as Dem Gov Drops Bombshell Warning - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

In this episode, we talk to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who shares striking new details about President Trump’s occupation of Chicago. What’s happening there has gone off the rails: ICE launching hypermilitarized raids of apartment buildings. Children getting pulled out into the streets. A priest shot in the head by a pepper ball. This has led Pritzker to take a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power—and in warning that our slide into authoritarianism could end in catastrophe. In our interview, Pritzker tells us what he’d like to see from Democrats, discusses how Illinois law enforcement is protecting local residents from ICE, and debunks Stephen Miller’s lies about what’s happening on the ground. Pritzker also discusses his inability to even get Trump officials on the phone amid this worsening crisis—making this all look dramatically more dangerous—and warns that Trump’s mental state is worsening fast. (After we recorded, a judge temporary blocked National Guard deployments in Illinois.) Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Transcript: Dems Will Stay Weak Until They Stop Obsessing Over Polls - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this episode here.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now by The New Republic. I’m joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s a political strategist. She works for progressive groups both here and abroad. You’ve probably seen her on MSNBC or seen her or heard her podcast. She’s all over these last four or five years, particularly. She’s been all over the place. She’s a very eloquent and has a lot of interesting thoughts about politics and policy. So, Anat, welcome.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So let me start—and I try to avoid long preambles, but I’m going to violate that today—which is that there was an interesting discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein in The New York Times podcast about 10 days ago.

And the sort of narrative throughout that was Ezra Klein was essentially saying the Democrats need to move to the right or move to the middle to win elections. And Coates basically saying ... I’m a writer. I’m not here to like, I want to talk about policy and my values. That’s what I do. And then Coates saying, yes, but we talk about elections. And sorry, Klein saying, yes, we need to talk about how Democrats win. And Coates saying, no, I don’t do politics.

But it left me with a challenge, which is that it seemed to me that Klein was sort of saying, Democrats, move to the right. Coates was saying, I don’t want to engage in that, which left the implication in some ways that Coates might agree with Klein that the political move, the electoral move, to move to the right, is correct. But he didn’t necessarily want to condone that or lay it out himself.

So I’m happy to have you here because you’re a progressive person, I think, on some politics issues. But you also—you do work in elections. You do work in winning. You do get into these issues of politics. I want to talk to you about that.

And I want to start from the premise, which I think is a lot of the sort of popularist or poll-ist—we’ll get into what we should call them in a second. I think their argument, at the core of it, is: If every Democrat who ran for the House, the Senate, and the presidency ran on Joe Manchin’s platform—and we can talk about why that might be morally wrong, which is where I might be and where Coates might be—let’s say that were somehow possible. I think that’s the advice they’re giving, is if every Democrat, the whole party in unison, said these things that polled well and were bland and didn’t offend anyone—Democrats would win more seats.

I think you might disagree with that electorally. Is that correct?

Shenker-Osorio: Just a little.

Bacon: Okay. We’ll talk about why then. If we all move to the right, if collectively the party moves to the right, why wouldn’t that work?

Shenker-Osorio: So that premise, which I call in my piece polling-ism—it’s known, as you said, by the name popularism, but I actually think that’s a misnomer—it is built out of a set of assumptions that, on the face of them, seem very logical. And I think that that’s why they’re so easily adopted.

Premise number one is, you ask people their issue preferences, they tell them to you, and then you repeat those back. Right? That seems logical.

Premise two—and I’m not going to go through all of them—you then formulate ads, which you concentrate at the end of the cycle, because truth, most people are low-information voters, they’re paying no attention. If they tune in, it’s sort of at some point in October, you hope. And so you kind of blow your cash on end-of-cycle ads that are about that popular issue or those popular issues, which you’ve tested through randomized control trials and found out that this ad moved vote choice, which is the metric you use.

Again, seems logical. The name of the game in an election is to net more votes. So shouldn’t you test things on the basis of a dependent variable that says, yep, this ad in the test says more people wanted to vote for my candidate? So it all feels very logical.

Bacon: It feels kind of Moneyball-ish to go back, maybe to date myself a little bit like we have data. The data shows this. And you and I agree that polls can show you something, right?

Shenker-Osorio: This is the irony of this piece is that I co-founded an organization called the Research Collaborative. I probably do as much research as all of these people. I’m in focus groups every week. We’re in surveys every two weeks. I do RCTs. It’s not like I have a beef with research. What I have a beef with is using a thermometer to try to change a tire.

So basically, the reason why those seemingly logical assumptions don’t actually stack up in the real world is a few things. Number one, if you want to persuade people—and hopefully what I’m about to say is absolutely, utterly uncontroversial so I can get to controversial later—they have to hear what you’re saying.

A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them. That feels like everyone should sort of be able to agree. If people don’t hear what you’re saying, then you don’t move them.

And we live, as I think everybody on this live knows, in an extraordinarily saturated environment in which information, messages, propaganda, lies, you know, sports, reality TV, your children, the homework, et cetera, is all happening.


Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask something. Okay, so you’re saying a message nobody hears, it doesn’t work. But we agree that TV, like if you spend a billion dollars in TV ads, people probably literally heard the message. You mean they don’t remember the message or you mean they literally didn’t hear it? Because Kamala Harris had a lot of ads running. Surely most Americans heard what Kamala Harris said, right?

Shenker-Osorio: At a literal level, largely no, because a lot of people, even if you’re paying top dollar for non-skippable things, people are still multitasking. People are still sort of halfway paying attention. Most people actually don’t watch linear TV, and they’re finding ways to sort of not watch it. And then even if they did sort of catch half of it, then they also caught 50 ads saying the opposite thing.

So the next thing is, so a message nobody hears doesn’t convince them. The next is a message nobody believes also doesn’t convince them. So let’s say you’re Kamala Harris, and you find out that, or you believe through surveying that you have this debility on the border—we’re just gonna cut straight to the heart of it—and so you decide, or your super PAC that we need to put out a bunch of ads, or at least a few, where you are the tough person, right? And you say—and there was a literal ad, I’m not making this up—a 30-second ad in which she said “the border” five times, and the words the border appeared on the screen six times in 30 seconds. So in essence: I’m going to get tough on the border. Also the border. Also, I was a prosecutor and the border, and I’m from a border state and the border. Did I mention the border? Have I made you think about the border—for the people who actually catch this?

So the idea is, you know, you have a perceived weakness on this, so you’re going to come back by essentially presenting what I would call a Republican-light version of the same message. Because people are concerned about this, and so you need to also sort of offer them the thing that you believe that they are wanting.

Donald Trump then—not only makes ads, but also does Truth Social posts and also goes on podcasts and also gets his red-hat-wearing army to all make ads and posts and videos and talk—and this is the most important part—to their friends and family constantly about how she’s full of it. She doesn’t mean it. She’s going to turn the border into a sieve and lure newcomers here with fat checks on real Americans’ dimes. So now you’ve raised the saliency of the border, if people indeed heard that.

You’ve credited the opposition’s argument. And you actually didn’t succeed in characterizing yourself as also tough because politics isn’t a soliloquy. It’s a shouting match.

So that’s the next reason. You can’t just expect that the claims that you’re making are what people hear. They’re also hearing the unrelenting din. And then the third reason—if I’m on three; I might be on 12, I don’t know. 

Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask one question. So you gave a very specific example of Kamala Harris and immigration. So Kamala Harris lost—so we sort of assumed that—but let me put my popularist hat fully on now. I think they would make two arguments. One is, maybe Kamala Harris would have lost by even more, except that she moved to the right on the border. And then two, because I said Joe Manchin at the beginning here—so imagine if Kamala Harris had not run for president and said all these lefty things in 2019. Maybe she would have been more credible with her border message then. So address the 2019, and address the she-would-have-lost-by-more arguments.

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. Basically, if you want to win an election, you have to make it about a thing that you can win on. Okay? If you want to win a debate, you have to make the debate be about a topic that favors you. Because people are extraordinarily low information, for the most part. Not the people listening right now, so it’s hard to internalize. But if you were to watch focus groups, I can’t tell you the degree to which people, like, have no clue what’s happening in politics. Really, truly, deeply.

And so, basically, that Joe Manchin strategy, let’s call it. Joe Manchin is running as Joe Manchin, let’s say, nationally, or whatever his figure, his archetype. And there’s still, let’s say, a Donald Trump running who, regardless of what Joe Manchin is actually saying, is saying that Joe Manchin is a socialist, is saying that Joe Manchin is handing out abortions—and would you like fries with that? Is saying that Joe Manchin personally went to the border to, like, be a coyote to bring people over.

Because of course—I mean, I can prove this with an example—Chuck Schumer is a socialist, right? The senator from MasterCard, a.k.a. Joe Biden, before he became vice president and president, is a socialist. They’re not confined by a reality-based view of the world.

So even if you’ve maintained your Manchin-ism, that doesn’t actually mean that that’s what people hear about you. Because again, a lot of this polling-ism is credited—it’s run on the fiction that what people believe about Democrats is made out of what Democrats say. And it’s not. It’s made out of what is said about them.

And then the next thing is that it’s credited on the fiction that what people believe about a politician is what that politician or their super PAC paid for by to say. When in fact, most of people’s judgments come filtered through their identity or what their friends and family say.

And so if you’re a political person who isn’t tuning in much and you live, let’s call it, in rural Pennsylvania or in the middle of Ohio or in the Central Valley of my state, California, and it’s coming close to election time, you haven’t thought about it at all, and you wander around and your bowling buddies are wearing red MAGA hats, and no one is wearing any other kind of hat, and you’re kind of like, oh, I don’t really know about that, what is that, back in the day? And then you conclude, understandably, that this is what people like me think. People do the thing they think people like them do.


Bacon: So you said something back a few minutes ago along the lines of like, okay, so Democrats cannot control ... Okay, so you need to say things that people remember, that are believable, as I think what you said in the so ...

Shenker-Osorio: You need to make them believable. 

Bacon: Okay, so is the argument that Kamala Harris should not run immigration ads or is the comment essentially that Kamala Harris should make sure the election is about—Kamala Harris cannot win an election on immigration policy or getting tough on the border. She can win an election on other issues. So the key is to make the election about other issues. Is that the idea here? Kamala Harris cannot win an election on who’s tougher on the border against Donald Trump. So she needs to make the election about something different. And she is that what the sort of sub-argument here is, or one of the arguments is here.

Shenker-Osorio: The argument is that you need to make the election about something you can win on, which is not an argument to say, don’t talk about immigration. Because again, as I said before—I mean, that would be hypocritical of me—politics is a shouting match, not a soliloquy. You don’t get to pick that immigration is just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that trans kids are just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that, you know, “inner city crime,” which is just a dog whistle for race, isn’t going to be a topic—because the topic is defined by what’s in the discourse, which the opposition is very much interested in setting.

And so, at a practical level, what that means is that rather than running yourself as Republican-light and crediting this idea that immigration equals border—that that is the only thing to know about that topic—what you say instead, and newsflash, we tested it, because I do actually believe in testing, and we tested it in combat testing after exposing voters to a real-world Donald Trump ad, not a make-believe kind of message that we invented ourselves.

And an ad that says—they watch a Donald Trump ad, then they watch a “the border, the border, the border” ad, and basically there isn’t movement. They watch a Donald Trump ad, and they watch an ad that says some version of, most of us would move heaven and earth for our families. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. And we know that moving is one of the hardest things a person can do. Today, Republicans peddle hate and take away what all of our families need, hoping we’ll point our finger in the wrong direction. Let’s trade Republican hate peddling for Democratic problem solving.

You basically say, hey, here’s the shared value behind immigration. Then you say, hey, here’s the actual villain. Then you say, hey, they’re trying to get you to point your finger in the wrong direction. You essentially narrate the dog whistle, and then you close with some sort of vision or something desirable.

And that structure, which has a name—we call it the race–class narrative or the race–class–gender narrative—we’ve used over and over and over again. And at risk of taking us too far afield (you can pull me back), an incredible example of it happening right now is Zack Polanski, who is just absolutely killing it in the U.K. as a leader of the Green Party.

Another way of putting this is that you level with people and you say: Yeah, you’re right, someone did take your job. You’re right, someone did take your healthcare. You’re right, someone did take your ability to have a single income and be able to go to Disneyland once a year with your kids. If you’d like to know who took your money—it’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell. But if they can get you to point your finger at the Black guy or the Brown guy or the trans kid, then we actually will not be able to confront the people who’ve screwed us all over.

And that’s it. That’s it.


Bacon: So my top-level question was if the entire party sounded like Joe Manchin, would it be better? And I think part of your argument is people would not, Americans would not hear that or they wouldn’t notice it or they wouldn’t respond to it.

Shenker-Osorio: Well, first of all, stalwart Democratic voters wouldn’t act as required to repeat the refrain. They would not, whatever the blue hat thing would be that the Joe Manchin would produce, the like, what do we want? Incremental change. When do we want it? Let’s get around to it. Like, they’re not going to wear that on a hat because they believe in fundamental—or whatever the Joe Manchinism is. Right.

Bacon: And why is it important? I think these guys would actually say, we want indivisible. They wouldn’t say quite directly. We want the activists to move the party to the left. We don’t want them anyway. Oh, good. The choir is not saying liberal things. Great. I think they might be for that, right? So in some ways, why is the choir speaking important? Because the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin. Most of the choir, a lot of the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin over Donald Trump, even if they don’t enjoy the song, so to speak.

Shenker-Osorio: First of all, no, they won’t. They’ll stay home. 

Bacon: Well, that’s an assumption we gotta talk through, but OK.

Shenker-Osorio: Ok. We win or lose by 1%. So some of them is meaningful, even when it’s teeny tiny. 

Bacon: Yes, I agree.

Shenker-Osorio: So some of them staying home is a big deal. So that’s first. They’ll head to the couch.

And then second ... those are the folks who actually spread your message. So the reason why this is meaningful—I mean, if you look at the Obama era, in the Obama era and in the Mamdani era right now—these are human beings who, in their own very different ways (and there are other people in this category), have perfectly hacked the idea of brand advocates. That’s what this is known as in marketing, right? The people who are so excited about and loyal to your product—not that humans are products, but in marketing—that they will bake the chocolate cake with Miracle Whip, you know, serve it at the family reunion. The family eats it and says, this cake is moist and delicious. What’s in it? Would you believe Miracle Whip?

And suddenly people are entertaining Miracle Whip that never, ever, ever would—and especially wouldn’t if Kraft Foods sent them an ad. Because when Kraft Foods sends you an ad saying Miracle Whip is delicious, you’re like, I don’t believe you. That’s your job. You sent me this ad because that’s your job. But if your friend gives you a piece of cake, hmm, you might entertain it.

So translate that into politics. These are the folks who, first of all, at a practical level, literally go door to door for you and register voters and get them to the polls and drive them and remind them when the election is and actually ensure that the voting happens. So that’s just a practical thing. And if they’re not excited about the candidate, then they’re not going to do it. And that’s a sort of volunteer base that you really, really need.

And then short of people who are that dedicated—which obviously is not most people—they are the ones who are spreading the gospel and who are saying to you, you know, you need to do this. This is what I’m excited about. This is why you should be excited about this. And telling person after person after person, because a message is like a baton. It has to be passed from person to person. And if it gets dropped along the way, it doesn’t get heard.


Bacon: Let me ask. So a lot of the advice the Democratic Party is getting is sort of rooted in this 1992, 1996, if you move to the right. So was Bill Clinton’s message, did he have a message that was beyond? A lot of it has become convinced to us that Bill Clinton’s message was black people have too many ... we should have more policing, and we should move to the right, and so on. But is your argument essentially that Bill Clinton, that that’s outdated? Or that Bill Clinton had a message that did spread that is not the sort of negative move-to-the-right one, or that that, or that that kind of polling-ism can work, but there are alternatives to it.

Shenker-Osorio: I have two different arguments. So the first is that right now, we are relying on tools that, in their moment, were innovative and arguably matched reality. So when you lived in a reality in which people watched linear TV, and there were many, many, many fewer sort of sources of entertainment or news or, you know, what passes as news, then if you’re doing a randomized control trial—and, okay, we’re getting deep nerd—in a randomized control trial and in a survey, by definition, you have a captive audience.

You have recruited people to pay attention either by giving them a financial incentive or because of the way a test is configured. You literally, like, can’t leave the platform. It’ll cancel you out of the test. It knows when you’ve sort of wandered off into another tab. It can tell. So you make people listen to your 100-word thing or you make people watch your 30-second ad inside of the test. And they know they’re being studied. Like, they know they’re in a survey. They know they’re in an RCT.

And then you measure vote choice. Does it make you more, you know, want to vote for Bill Clinton or more want to vote for Bush or whatever, right, is going on? Then you say, okay, this is the ad that did that the most relative to the control, which got no ad or got a placebo about something apolitical. And then you think that’s going to translate out in the real world. Maybe once upon a time, where people were more like a captive audience—for the younger folks, you’re just going to have to believe me—you used to just have to watch commercials. If someone in the chat can back me up.

Bacon: Yes, yes. You had to. 

Shenker-Osorio: This used to happen. Then you could more closely credit that the kinds of responses you were getting matched the kinds of responses that actually occur in the world, because there was a little bit more continuity between those two situations. And this whole, “if your message doesn’t get people to stop scrolling in the first place, then it doesn’t work” was less of an issue.

And then the second answer is that you can very much win the battle to lose the war. And Bill Clinton presided, as you know, over the great shellacking that the incumbent party has taken in a midterm. And of course, the incumbent party always suffers in a midterm election. I understand that that is a vibe because of differential turnout, and the out-of-power people want to go vote and the in-power people are lethargic and apathetic—speaking of the couch as another option.

But it was unprecedented, at least in modern history, how bad it was. So basically, Bill Clinton, and “welfare as we know it”-Bill Clinton, went in in an argument vilifying government, went in in an argument and a policy platform of NAFTA, actually sort of stepping away from the historic support that the Democratic Party had given to the working class—way back machine FDR times. FDR times, when being a Democrat wasn’t just something a working-class person voted, it was something a working-class person was. It was core to their identity, and it was an era of Democratic ascendancy we’ve never seen since.

So he wins the battle in terms of winning the presidency—obviously undeniable—and he ushers in an era of Democratic losses down the ballot across the country, which is then recreated under Obama. And he overall, I would argue, moves the country, the discourse, the belief system to the right—crediting the opposition’s argument that what you should look for in a public servant, what you should look for in a politician, is someone who says the government is bad. And again, that’s the Republican brand advantage. That’s not the Democratic brand advantage.

And so here we are now, and this is an argument that I’m having, obviously, live. If we believe that our job right now—and I believe it is—is to blunt the authoritarian assault that we live within, then we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that electing Democrats in 2018, in 2020—a trifecta, remember 2020?—and to the extent that we did in 2020, did not stop Trump. Electing Democrats in those instances—I’m speaking facts—that did not stop Trump. It did not stop the abductions. It did not stop the military into our cities. It did not stop all of the things that I don’t need to detail to you.

And so the question really is, for me, the purpose of politics is to enact an agenda. It’s to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives. It isn’t merely to get Democrats elected for the sake of doing so. And yes, I understand that that process requires electing Democrats. But which Democrats we elect, and critically, how we get them elected, matters.


Bacon: Let’s talk about, for the rest of this, we have about 10 minutes left, talk about what you called “magnetism.” Describe that, because you said there’s a ... We’ve talked mostly about polling-ism, which I would argue is ... Everyone here knows what polling-ism is on some level, because when you watch Hakeem Jeffries say, “The police sent to Chicago is a distraction from my health care talking points.” That’s poling-ism. I think we all know what that is. We know where it’s coming from. We’ve lived it, we’ve experienced it. Magnetism, I struggled with a little bit more. I wasn’t as familiar with what you were getting at. So talk to the audience about that a little bit.

Shenker-Osorio: So magnetism is, unfortunately, what MAGA has run on. And what’s ironic is that in all of these sort of Democrats need to be more moderated, Democrats need to sort of eschew the base and even like crap upon the base. In all of that, what folks are never asked is, how come Republicans do the exact opposite and they win with it? Like that’s never asked, right? Why is it that that’s enough?

Bacon: I think the claim is that they have the geographic advantage based on the election. I think that’s usually the it’s usually you get this. 

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. So magnetism is the idea that if you want people to come to your cause, you need to be attractive. So number one, that requires having a cause. That requires actually having an agenda that you desire to enact. Second of all, it requires understanding that the people who have previously voted for you— which the polling-ists eschew as “your base,” because they think only in demographic categories. When I say the people who have voted for you, I literally mean those human beings, not their demographic features. I mean those people. And yes, they have demographic features because people have demographic features. But I actually mean those human beings. First of all, you actually need those people to be carrying your tune. If you think back to the first six weeks of the Kamala Harris campaign, you know, the coconut tree and the meme and the cake hive and if you want people to come to your party, throw a better party and everyone and voter registrations going through the roof suddenly and people being excited and people wanting to affiliate and so on. So that’s the first premise is have a clause—

Bacon: I think it’s an important thing to say, to note ... I remember the first few weeks of the Harris campaign had people doing these Black women or white men for Harris. These phone calls, they’d be on a boring Zoom call. People were going to events. And then ... And she was getting criticized, though, for parts of the party for not being centrist enough. And then she started moving. I want the most lethal military in the world. And then we get Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait and so on saying she’s running the greatest campaign of all time, look how brilliant it is.  And then her numbers started stalling the moment she started doing the thing that they asked for. That is a note. Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, yeah. So the “Freedom” ad, which, if you ask people, is the only ad that they remember from the Harris campaign. And I’m very biased because I ran an entire “Protect Our Freedoms” campaign in 2022 and “Our Freedoms, Our Families, Our Futures” in 2024, so, biased. But when there was excitement, that was magnetism. So you have a cause. And on the economic side, let’s remember, in those first six weeks, she was running on ending price gouging, which Donald Trump called communism and price controls. In the “let’s give them something to talk” about theory of messaging, which I espouse, when your opposition is attacking you because you’re going to implement price controls, that is quite different than attacking you on you’re going to turn the border into a sieve and “illegals”—pardon my use of the opposition language—are going to come and, like, destroy all of life as we know it. So she was making, like Mamdani, super concrete economic promises. She talked about raising the minimum wage. She talked about, you know, slashing childhood poverty. She talked about an extensive hike to the capital gains tax.

So it wasn’t just that she was being coconut meme, freedom, happy, throw a better party. She also had super concrete economic policies. Fast forward six weeks, the folks come in, tell, you know, the grownups come into the room, say, stop having your nice time. Yeah. And we veer from those concrete promises, which are important, to an opportunity economy, a walk back of the capital gains tax, no more talk about price gouging, and these sort of vague things plus Liz Cheney.

So magnetism is also an understanding that, like any magnet, you have a polarity. And what that means is, yes, you attract people to your cause, but you also repel. So let me give a super concrete example. You repel the portion of people that cannot, shall not, will not ever vote for you. Like, you will never have those people. Like me and Trump, like there is nothing he could ever do. He could say he could produce, he could provide. I’m never going to vote for him. Right. And he relishes in repelling people like me. And I’m speaking in the singular because I don’t want to speak for anybody else.

You understand that the job of politics is actually to agenda set, both because you want to make people’s lives better with public policy and also discursively you want to agenda set because you want people to be talking about your thing, including coming at you for daring to take on price gouging. Like, imagine if that’s what she were being attacked for rather than, you know, the border or trans kids. That’s an argument that you want to be having. So that’s what the right does over and over again. They figure out this is what we need people talking about.

So back in the day, not so long ago, it was critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey in history in which the majority of American voters were asked, what is your top issue, your most pressing issue? Critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey where the majority was like, my most pressing issue is trans girls playing volleyball or my most pressing issue is DEI? That’s never happened. Their most pressing issue is money. It’s always going to be money. So the right sees those issue surveys and they’re like, great. Nobody cares about this. Nobody knows what this is. We can use it as a vessel to populate it with our own disgusting meaning and then make an astroturf group like Moms for Liberty to be our choir and make believe this is a big issue. Or with DEI, we call university presidents into Congress. And have at them. So they don’t just issue talking points, right? They don’t just do a social media post. They do a 360-degree surround-sound strategy around issues that are not popular.

Bacon: So you’re saying in New York ... New York, I hadn’t thought of it this way, but saying, “I’m for free buses, I’m for free childcare,” and so on, and getting people to say, no ... Because I thought of him as being, he’s charismatic, he smiles a lot, he has good ideas, people like him, but you’re saying he is magnetic, Mamdani. I mean, he is magnetic to people who agree with him, but he’s also getting the right, he’s also drawing the right opposition in a certain way.

Shenker-Osorio: He is drawing the right opposition, he’s forcing—I don’t know if folks have seen that brilliant, brilliant dramatic reading of the piece from The New York Times about the people in the Hamptons who are crying themselves into their whatever, and I mean that is a perfect encapsulation of magnetism. He is  reveling in repelling the billionaire class that’s very upset about him. He’s not making believe—don’t worry, a rising tide lifts all boats, it’s fine, Everyone’s going to do better, I’m not going to ... He’s like, “No.” I’m not sure if I’m allowed to swear here. This is the longest I’ve gone without swearing. “No, jerk face.” That’s my PG. “No, jerk face. I’m going to tax you. I’m not going to pretend I’m not going to. And when that pisses you off, I’m not going to be concerned about that. I’m going to call it magically delicious.”

Bacon: I think part of the issue is here, I guess people probably listening to this call and myself even, the paragon of our politics is a man who sort of famously said, there are no red states or blue states, which he probably knew was inaccurate at the time, and has become really much so. I don’t think Obama, I don’t think most of the time was trying to get everyone to like him and antagonize no one. So I’m struck by this. You need magnetism means not just being appealing, but also picking the right enemy, so to speak, or picking the right ... And I think it’s an interesting insight that I’ve got to think some more about.

Shenker-Osorio: I mean Obama, because—I’m going to provide you some information you didn’t know, Perry—because America has a slight problem with Black men, because there’s a little bit of racism in our country, which I’m happy to, I’m glad to explain to you. Because you don’t know never heard of it

Bacon: Yeah, never heard of it.

Shenker-Osorio: Boy I hope people can hear sarcasm. He was magnetic in the attractive-repulsive by his very being. 

Bacon: Okay, that’s fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Shenker-Osorio: As is Kamala Harris. And I hope it’s clear—that’s not a him thing.

Bacon: I agree, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: My younger son says to me, that’s an ish you, not an ish me. So that was an ish you for America, not an ish me. That’s just the reality of who he was, who he is, of course. But, and I talk about this in the piece, one of his most famous ads, which actually was only released on the web, they never spent any TV money on it at all, was a group of celebrities singing from the concession speech that he gave when he lost in his first primary or second, I don’t know, I think it was Iowa, was him saying, yes, we can, and speaking about enslavement.

Bacon: I’ll go back and look at that. 

Shenker-Osorio: That is an example of magnetism.

Bacon: All right. Well, let’s, I think this has been a good, we’re going to come back and come back and talk to you again to get into this more. We can talk about this for two hours, but I’m going to stop here. Anything else with the piece or anything else about what you really about polling-ism and magnetism that you want to tell the audience that I didn’t ask about?

Shenker-Osorio: What I would say is that the siren song of authoritarians everywhere, both in contemporary time and in history, is to foment a counter-revolution against a revolution that never occurred. It is to say, would you like to know why you’re struggling? Would you like to know why you’re having a hard time? Would you like to know why you feel out of place? Would you like to know why you have more month than check and the world is making no sense to you? It’s because of those people. And those people could be welfare queens back in the day who are not working, who are living high off the hog in the system. Those people could be, forgive the terminology, illegals. Those people in other times and places are Roma in Hungary, or they’re Syrian refugees there as well, or they’re Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, or they’re Muslims in the case of India with Modi. But this is what authoritarians do, right? There’s no quicker route to an “us” than construction of a “them.”

And if we don’t deeply understand that and that that is the argument that they are providing to their base, they are providing an origin story for people’s pain. It’s a lie. But they are telling people, these are the heroes. These are the villains. This is why your life is hard. And this is how we’re going to fix it for you. And when we are making believe that that isn’t going on and we are either actually crediting their argument by saying, you know what? You’re right. We did lose because of immigrants and trans people.

Bacon: Education is too woke. You know, yeah, yeah. All the things that they say.

Shenker-Osorio: Right. You’re saying that your opposition is correct. In some way, right? And you are feeding their origin story, their lie, and you are failing to give a correct origin story. But the only way that the correct origin story can work is if you actually mean it—if you actually mean that you are going to govern with, for, and by working people.

And that means that you can’t talk about, you know, the rules are rigged and we have to actually make things right for you and vote for, you know, crypto corruption. You can’t do that. And you can’t, you know, not full-throatedly support and endorse and force a hike of the minimum wage. You know, you have to full-throatedly support unions.

When FDR said about the billionaires—you want to talk about magnetism—“I welcome their hatred. I welcome their ire,” right? Because he knew there are sides, and the sides are the working people of America across races, places, genders, whatever, and the owning class that is taking the wealth our work creates.

And when you try to replace that and have no villains because you just want neoliberalism and a rising tide lifts all boats and we’re all going to do better and we don’t need to actually have and support unions and raise wages and all the rest of it, then you render people susceptible to this siren song of the right. Neoliberalism is the handmaiden to authoritarianism everywhere. That’s what I would say.

Bacon: And that’s a great note to end on, Anat. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to the audience who tuned in to watch. And we’ll be back next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.

The Dems Will Stay Weak Until They Stop Obsessing Over Polls - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following us on YouTube or Substack. Read the transcript of this episode here.

Democratic politicians are overly reliant on polls and don’t use them correctly, says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist who works with progressive candidates and groups both in the United States and abroad. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Shenker-Osorio argues that politicians taking positions based on what people say they support in surveys isn’t effective because such polls can’t capture what messages and policies will be memorable and viral and ultimately inspire people to vote and get engaged in campaigns. Kamala Harris’s hawkish immigration stands in 2024 might have polled well but didn’t help her much because that rhetoric did not excite liberals and was unconvincing to moderates and liberals, according to Shenker-Osorio. Alternatively, she argues that President Trump and Zohran Mamdani, while having opposing policy views, both smartly identified messages that galvanized their bases and created conflicts with their opponents on the candidates’ preferred terms. The conversation is based on a recent piece in which she encourages Democrats to embrace “magnetism” and reject “pollingism.”

RFK Jr. Links Autism to Circumcision in Truly Deranged Rant - 2025-10-09T21:06:50Z

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. added to his repertoire of controversial, unsubstantiated claims about causes of autism at a Thursday Cabinet meeting, where the health secretary linked circumcision to autism.

President Donald Trump was repeating his administration’s hotly contested claim that Tylenol during pregnancy increases the risk of autism when Kennedy cut in to offer an example of “confirmation studies” to that effect.

“There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism,” he said. “It’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol. So, you know, none of this is dispositive, but all of it is stuff that we should be paying attention to.”

Kennedy did not specify the research he was citing, but one high-profile study that matches his description is a heavily criticized 2015 study that found, in a subgroup of a larger cohort of Danish children, “risk of infantile autism in circumcised boys was twice that of intact boys.” Notably, experts have warned against drawing sweeping conclusions from that study, which was “observational,” not “causal,” and did not account for myriad possible “confounding variables,” such as “cultural or social factors affecting the likelihood of an (early) autism diagnosis.”

It also did not investigate the use of acetaminophen.

Kennedy’s remark came just after he flipped the scientific method on its head by announcing his effort to “make the proof” for the administration’s unproven Tylenol-autism connection.

Judge Orders ICE to Stop Injuring Journalists Reporting on Them - 2025-10-09T21:02:37Z

A federal judge in Illinois has ordered the Trump administration to stop beating, shooting at, and generally using violence against journalists and peaceful protesters.

The Thursday ruling comes as ICE and the National Guard tear through the streets of Chicago, shooting at and arresting journalists, protesters, and immigrants alike.

Judge Sara Ellis, the Obama appointee overseeing this case, has suspended federal agents from “using riot control weapons,” “firing [tear gas] canisters,” “using force, such as pulling or shoving a person to the ground, tackling, or body slamming an individual,” “striking any person with a vehicle,” and more abuses of power. The order applies to all agents from the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol.

Federal agents have done all of that in recent weeks. In September, an ICE agent shot a pepper ball inside CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s car completely unprompted, in just one of many recent attacks on journalists. Also last month, ICE shot Reverend David Black in the head with a pepper ball while he was praying outside of an ICE facility in Broadview. In yet another incident caught on camera, a CBP agent shot a woman five times, and then arrested her.

“Federal agents have responded with a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians. Dressed in full combat gear, often masked, carrying weapons, bearing flash grenades and tear gas canisters, and marching in formation, federal agents have repeatedly advanced upon those present at the scene who posed no imminent threat to law enforcement. Snipers with guns loaded with pepper balls, paintballs, and rubber bullets are stationed on the roof of the Broadview ICE facility with their weapons trained on the press and civilians,” read the original complaint, made on behalf of the Chicago Headline Club, Block Club Chicago, and Chicago Newspaper Guild Local 34071, among other local media organizations.

Judge Ellis also noted that federal agents “must have visible identification (for which a unique recognizable alphanumeric identifier sequence will suffice) affixed to their uniforms or helmets and prominently displayed, including when wearing riot gear,” although she did not say they couldn’t still wear masks.

The Temporary Restraining Order will last for 14 days, after which the case will move forward.

IRS Suddenly Says It’s Following Trump’s Plan for Shutdown Back Pay - 2025-10-09T20:53:48Z

The IRS is walking back an earlier promise to provide its furloughed workers back pay.

The tax agency had notified its employees on Wednesday that they would be “compensated on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends” in accordance with the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019. But that was apparently an overstep: The IRS corrected itself the following day, stating that it would defer to the direction of Russel Vought’s Office of Management and Budget.

“An earlier memo circulated on furlough guidance incorrectly stated the nature of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 as it relates to compensation for non-pay and non-duty status,” the IRS posted on its X account Thursday. “OMB will provide further guidance on this issue, you will be updated accordingly.”

An IRS employee that spoke with Federal News Network said that the initial email was automatically deleted from staff email inboxes by Thursday.

Back pay for furloughed workers has been a point of contention throughout the eight-day government shutdown, despite the fact that it’s legally mandated. Donald Trump himself signed the bipartisan-supported law after the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days from 2018 into 2019.

On Tuesday, OMB tested the waters with potentially flouting the law, circulating a draft legal opinion indicating that furloughed federal workers would no longer be guaranteed back pay. Instead, the agency announced that members of Congress would need to specifically address the back pay provisions in a stopgap spending bill.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who voted in favor of the 2019 law, told reporters Wednesday that it was his “understanding that the law is that they would be paid.”

“There is some other legal analysis that’s floating around. I haven’t yet had time to dig into and read that. But it has always been the case—that is, tradition and I think statutory law—that federal employees be paid,” Johnson said in a news conference.  “And that’s my position. I think they should be. They should not be subjected to harm and financial dire straits.”

White House’s Chicago “Chaos” Video Is Really From a Red State - 2025-10-09T20:45:31Z

The White House is using footage from Florida to make propaganda about the supposed “chaos” in Chicago, Illinois.

As the National Guard troops have entered Chicago to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the Trump administration posted a video on X Wednesday to hype up its federal law enforcement operations in Chicago. “An incompetent Mayor. A delusional Governor. Chicago is in chaos, and the American people are paying the price,” the post read. “Chicago doesn’t need political spin—it needs HELP.”

But spin was all that the White House had to offer—because the video contained some footage that had nothing to do with Chicago at all.

The promotional video devolved into an onslaught of chaotic arrest footage, showing officers clad in tactical gear moving through the night to kick down doors and drag people out of their cars as Chicago Pastor Corey Brooks’s voice urged the city to welcome Trump’s advances.

But The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that some of the footage was actually from Operation Tidal Wave, a state-wide operation in Florida that led to the arrests of 1,120 people, only 63 percent of whom had a criminal record.

In fact, one shot that was used twice in the video about Chicago could be spotted in footage the DHS published in May of their work in the Sunshine State. Palm trees were visible in some of the shots included in the new video, clearly demonstrating that the footage was not all from the Windy City.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s spokesperson slammed the White House for their fake video. “We are proud that Chicago was just ranked the best big city in the United States. We are proud of its beautiful beaches, booming businesses, and decent people. However, we cannot claim credit for many palm trees here,” spokesperson Matt Hill told the Beast.

“We know the lies don’t just come out of their mouth. So it’s not surprising that the Trump team spends more time producing videos purporting images of Florida as Illinois—rather than spending any time to lower prices or protect healthcare for hardworking Americans,” Hill added.

The video also included footage of the Chicago skyline and streets from above, and images of Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Earlier this week, Trump claimed the two Democratic officials ought to be imprisoned.

Clearly, Trump’s attempt to wage war on American cities requires a subsequent disinformation campaign. Earlier this week, the Oregon Republican Party shared a graphic about dangerous riots in Portland—but the images weren’t from that city either.

The Trump administration has also used its excessive federal law enforcement response to make content that pushes the narrative that the United States has descended into chaos at the hands of Democratic leaders. Earlier this month, DHS used footage from a horrific raid on a Chicago apartment building where ICE officers dragged young children from their homes in zip-ties to make another promotional video.

Trump Gets One Step Closer to Taking Revenge on Letitia James - 2025-10-09T20:34:47Z

New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted Thursday for alleged mortgage fraud, following President Donald Trump’s months-long campaign to remove his outspoken critic from office.
Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan for the Eastern District of Virginia reportedly personally presented the government’s flimsy case alleging that James committed mortgage fraud. Halligan, who was previously Trump’s personal attorney before becoming special assistant to the president, recently replaced Eric Siebert, who Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment against James.
James was indicted on one count of bank fraud, according to MSNBC.
Multiple sources told ABC News last month that investigators had yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, have staked their claim that James committed mortgage fraud on a single document claiming that the home she purchased in 2023 would be her primary residence.
But investigators haven’t been able to prove she knowingly lied, or that the document was even considered by loan officers. Lawyers that drafted the document said the error was the result of a template that wasn’t corrected, sources told ABC News. Every other document submitted for James’s mortgage accurately stated she would not reside at the home.
Pulte and Martin reportedly urged Siebert to seek an indictment against James at Trump’s direction. When Siebert declined, Pulte reportedly encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone else.
In a bizarre post on Truth Social last month, which was revealed to be an errant DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump wrote: “Lindsey is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot.” He later reposted this rant, clarifying that he was writing about Halligan, and Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney suggested that Trump hoped to replace Siebert with Halligan to pursue his supposedly “GREAT case” against James.
This story has been updated.

Norway Is Scared of What Trump Will Do If He Loses Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-09T19:40:42Z

Norway is bracing for Donald Trump’s reaction should he not be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Norway simply hosts the prestigious award ceremony—its government has no involvement in deciding who wins. But with hours on the clock before the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is named, Norway’s politicians are sweating that Trump may not know the difference.

Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, told The Guardian that Oslo must be “prepared for anything.”

“Donald Trump is taking the U.S. in an extreme direction, attacking freedom of speech, having masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight and cracking down on institutions and the courts. When the president is this volatile and authoritarian, of course we have to be prepared for anything,” Bergstø told the international newspaper.

“The Nobel Committee is an independent body and the Norwegian government has no involvement in determining the prizes,” she continued. “But I’m not sure Trump knows that. We have to be prepared for anything from him.”

The Nobel Prize Committee announced Thursday that it had decided the prize winner at the beginning of the week, before the Trump administration brokered a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Gaza. Timeframe considered, “most Nobel experts and Norwegian observers believe it is highly unlikely that Trump will be awarded the prize,” The Guardian reported.

It’s no secret that Trump has pined for the international honor: The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that Trump’s supposed political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.

“They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country,” Trump said, during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb Thursday. “My election was much more important.”

Trump’s obsession with obtaining the prize has led to some odd boasts over the last several months, including that he has resolved eight wars around the globe in his second term alone. Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Israel and Iran, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and for “doing the Abraham Accords,” all while complaining about a lack of recognition by the Norway-based judges’ panel.

As Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out last month, all of Trump’s war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the listed examples were never even at war.

“Nobody in history has solved eight wars in a period of nine months. And I’ve stopped eight wars, so that’s never happened before. But they’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that, I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday while answering a barrage of questions about the prize. “But nobody’s done eight wars.”

Trump Refuses to Answer One Key Question on Palestinians in Gaza - 2025-10-09T19:14:32Z

President Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal seems to be more geared toward preparing the region to be his “Riviera of the Middle East” than offering self-determination to Palestinians.  

“Can you promise Palestinians they will be able to stay?” a reporter asked Trump at his Thursday Cabinet meeting, just a day after he announced the ceasefire deal. 

“Well, they know exactly what we’re doing. We’re gonna create something where people can live, you can’t live right now in Gaza,” Trump replied. “It’s a horrible situation, nobody has ever seen anything like it. So yeah, we’re gonna create better conditions for people.” 

A deal that forces Palestinians out of their homes and puts redevelopment into the hands of the U.S., Israel, and Tony Blair isn’t a deal—it’s ethnic cleansing. This deal is also contingent upon Israel lifting the aid blockade and ending its genocidal attacks once the hostages are returned, but even that is not a guarantee. 

“Looking ahead, what guarantees Hamas disarms, and that Israel doesn’t resume bombing once the hostages are released?” another reporter asked. 

“Well the first thing we’re doing is getting our hostages back, OK? And that’s what people wanted more than anything else, they wanted these hostages back that have lived in hell like nobody has ever even dreamt possible,” Trump said. “After that, we’ll see. But they’ve agreed to things, and I think it’s gonna move along pretty well.” 

Israel “agreed to things” in the short-lived ceasefire of November 2023, which it broke on the very first day when the IDF opened fire on Gazans returning to their homes. When asked how this time would be any different, all the president could say was, “We’ll see.” 

RFK Jr. Admits He’ll “Make” Proof for His Bogus Tylenol Conspiracy - 2025-10-09T19:00:08Z

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has drawn widespread criticism for manipulating science to fit his agenda, admitted that he is working to “make the proof” to support his controversial claim that the use of acetaminophen, or Tylenol, during pregnancy causes autism.

Kennedy mentioned Tylenol at a Thursday Cabinet meeting because, he said, he’d been disturbed by a social media video: “Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at eight months pregnant—she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School—and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta,” he recalled. It is not immediately clear what video he was referring to, and babies are not in the placenta, but attached to it, in pregnancy.

The health secretary went on to cite a number of studies that allegedly support his Tylenol suspicions. Then he made an eyebrow-raising statement about the existing evidence: “It is not proof,” Kennedy said. “We’re doing the studies to make the proof.”

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, it is safe for women to use acetaminophen occasionally “as directed for fever and pain relief during pregnancy,” and patients should talk with their obstetrician about pain relief, as with all medications, during pregnancy.

RFK Jr.’s stated plan to invent evidence to back up his controversial claim to the contrary has already drawn ridicule online. “Ah yes,” wrote Dr. Michelle Au, a physician, public health advocate, and Democratic state legislator in Georgia, “the scientific method famously instructs us to predetermine a conclusion and then do studies to ‘make the proof.’”

But “make the proof” is a fitting credo for a man reshaping the public health system as Kennedy is now. The health secretary in June dismissed the CDC’s entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; installed his own hand-picked members, including vaccine skeptics; and fired Susan Monarez, the former director of the CDC, for refusing to “commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation, regardless of the scientific evidence,” as Monarez testified last month.

The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now - 2025-10-09T17:45:40Z

Men: What’s their deal? It’s an inescapable question nowadays. Men! They’re failing at school and at work. They have lost the ability to work with their hands, like the men from Way Back When who were carpenters and made nails and screws out of wood, with their hands. Men today don’t do any of that. They podcast. They livestream. They gamble—not just on sports, which is virtuous and noble, but on all kinds of crazy shit, like the results of Belgian regional elections and the timing of the next Doritos flavor drop. Today’s men are covered in Dubai chocolate. They’re watching someone livestream about another stream.

Over the past two years, every magazine in this country—all seven of them—has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to the ever-present and all-important subject of men and why they are failing. They have provided dozens of possible explanations: the decline of manufacturing, unions, and the American middle class; the feminization of American culture; the rise of wokeness; the existence of women; fluoride.

But are men actually losing? Look past the smears of Dubai chocolate, and you’ll notice that men have spent the past 11 months notching some serious wins. They delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. They made Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another the number one movie in the world. They have produced literally millions of hours of podcasts—more hours of podcasts than the total number of wooden nails and screws produced by their ancestors. And now, at long last, they have their own Nobel laureate: Hungarian novelist, screenwriter, and all-around dark wizard of ennui, László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. That’s right—for the first time in history, a man has won the Nobel Prize. That sound you hear? It’s a graduate student sobbing with joy. Big, manly sobs.

Krasznahorkai’s victory should hardly come as a shock. He is, by the meager standards of contemporary literary fiction, a global superstar. Serious young men, it seems, are everywhere, and, while their cumulative student debt varies from country to country, they are pretty much the same (glasses, a Letterboxd account, an almost staggering inability to talk to women) whether you’re in New York, Budapest, or Seoul. To the extent that it’s surprising, it’s only because there was a general expectation that the Academy would first reward Péter Nádas, Hungary’s other author of challenging, exportable fiction, because he is older. But it turns out that every copy of Parallel Stories in Sweden is being used to stabilize wobbly Ikea tables. And Krasznahorkai’s eventual victory has been treated as all but assured for years. Why wait?

Krasznahorkai is, after all, a consummate laureate, a writer of novels people not unreasonably like to describe as challenging, difficult, elusive—and other words that could also describe the possibility of social democracy in the United States. Krasznahorkai has famously collaborated with the challenging, difficult, elusive filmmaker Béla Tarr and probably has a superlative collection of György Kurtág records. In the Swedish Academy’s phrasing, his is a “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Fair enough. Krasznahorkai described it better when he said his work was “reality described to the point of madness.”

So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer.


Not that long ago, the Nobel was fun. It was a topic of metaphorical watercooler conversations (metaphorical because the watercooler industry cratered after the rise of “alternative seltzers” and also because nearly everyone who cared about it was unemployed) and metaphorical drawing-room chatter (metaphorical because the only people who can afford drawing rooms are venture capitalists who have lost the ability to communicate verbally). In a given year, the prize could be won by an oral historian whose work was necessarily given over to the voices of other people; a writer whose perspective on Serbian culpability in the 1990s was more avant-garde than his boundary-shifting prose; and a self-described “song and dance man” whose first and third-eldest sons produced arguably more deserving work (How High and “One Headlight,” respectively).

This was the Nobel Prize’s weird era, and it was exciting. It was easy to project all kinds of political and cultural arguments onto the Swedish Academy’s decision-making (high art vs. popular art, inclusiveness vs. whatever it is Peter Handke represents, Eurocentrism vs. internationalism, poets vs. normal writers)—because the Swedish Academy itself was a site of insane contestation.

The Nobel’s weird era was also a reflection of the absurdity of the prize itself. The prize bills itself as the definitive literary award, one that ensures canonization—and who hasn’t had the experience recently of seeing someone reading a novel by a past laureate like Henrik Pontoppidan or Dario Fo on the subway?—but is decided by a group of obscure Scandinavian eggheads. Their status comes not from merit or authority but from tradition: 125 years ago, Alfred Nobel put some of his dynamite money toward a literary prize and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.

That the Swedish Academy was routinely beset with scandal, infighting, and controversy only drove the point home: What business does a group of people from a country whose lone contribution to global culture over the past century is ABBA Gold have deciding the global literary canon? (To be fair, that is also the greatest contribution to global culture over the past century.) Sure, the winners were usually pretty solid, but it was hard not to feel that they were less interesting than the processes, decisions, and controversies that got them the, uh, gold.

One upside of the Nobel’s weird era was that it was easy for, say, a couple of guys to write about in, say, The New Republic. Easy to make jokes about Philip Roth sitting around waiting for the phone call that never arrived; easy to make jokes about Mircea Cărtărescu’s rabid, virginal fan base; easy to make jokes about deciding that writing a novel about a goalie who kills someone is as important as speaking at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral. Maybe even more important. (We are committed to making jokes about the Handke thing until the final death of American civil society.) As cultural politics got amped up in the first Trump era, extrapolating from the Nobel Prize’s shenanigans felt totally effortless—and any time it got a little harder, the Swedish Academy itself would do something nutty to move things along. All prizes are dumb, but literary prizes are especially stupid. And the Nobel Prize was the most ridiculous of all.

Sadly, a close or even distant reading of the past few winners suggests that the Nobel’s weird era is over. After the batshit run of Alexievich, Dylan, Ishiguro, Tokarczuk, and Handke (the latter two awarded in a single year because of a #MeToo/gambling controversy that embroiled the Academy in 2018—a combination of factors that in retrospect stands in for much of what ails the world today), things have been normal, solid, and respectable. No gripes with Glück and Gurnah, no errors with the choice of Ernaux, no fault with Fosse, all kredit to Kang and, now, Krasznahorkai. How respectable! How solid! But—crucially—what are two unprofessional Nobel commentators to do?

Making it all worse is the fact that members of the old guard of deserving and mockable candidates have, annoyingly, been dying. Their passing has been a loss for literature, sure, but mostly it’s a loss for your humble Nobel speculators. Those guys (obviously, they were all guys) were so easy and fun to pick on. (Roth was desperate … and horny! McCarthy was pretentious … and horny! Amis was self-important … and horny! Marias … well, Marias was just horny.) It’s true that we still have Michel Houellebecq and Gerald Murnane to kick around (the former is currently chain-smoking, hard at work on a novel called Caliphate: An Epiphany; the latter is eight beers deep at the Men’s Shed in rural Australia). But let’s be real: It’s just not the same.

Not only that, the Nobel Prize has become almost predictable. There are still surprises, sure—no one saw Han Kang coming—but on the whole you can presume that if a writer’s book is wrapped in a dust jacket with the word “visionary” somewhere on the flap and a silver medal on the front cover (a lesser prize, like the Man Booker), you’re dealing with a future laureate.

Jens Liljestrand, Nobel watcher, novelist, and longtime friend of this column, had this to say about Krasznahorkai: “Very expected. Very popular name among critics. Also very typical Academy choice: serious, epic, dark-but-humanistic narrator of the apocalyptic European 20th century.” Not only that, but Liljestrand already knows who next year’s winner will be: The new Swedish Academy has reliably rotated between awarding men and women, which means we can get started on next year’s column right now, a piece in celebration of 2026 Nobel Prize–winner Joyce Carol Oates. (The 2026 prize will be specifically awarded for Oates’s tweets about ISIS and dinosaur hunting and “wan little husks,” masterpieces of deadpan humor that were, like all great art, misunderstood upon first appearance. There will be no mention of any of her 157 books—or the fact that she is the greatest boxing writer ever.)

After that it will be another man. Call it the Liljestrand Theory: a woman and then a man. Usually a European man. “Every other year or so it has to be old, male, European and laundry-list,” Liljestrand said—referring to the rapidly diminishing list of canonical writers the Academy regularly plucks from. In this sense, the Academy is honoring tradition: The Nobel Prize “continues to be basically be a European prize, with varying degrees of curiosity regarding the rest of the planet.”

But if the Nobel is no longer fun, at least there’s still a fan base to pick on. The New Republic’s statisticians are indisposed (they’re still crunching the numbers—Kamala Harris can still win Pennsylvania!), but we’ve done our own calculations and they’re definitive: No readers have been made fun of in these pages as much as the fans and champions of László Krasznahorkai. They are self-serious, self-important, and very online; the line for the men’s bathroom when he makes his biannual appearance at a New York bookstore is longer than it is at a Steely Dan concert.

Before you freaks start posting about us on Reddit, however, we will be pedantically clear: We are you. We love Krasznahorkai and his hypnotic gloom. He has far more range than he’s given credit for (by us). He’s funny. The Béla Tarr alliance was an extraordinary moment in culture. OK? Happy? Now we can address more important subjects, like how you live in a basement and spend more time watching pornography than reading books. The basement is owned by your parents, who are worried about you. They’re not thrilled about the OnlyFans bills, either. And, ugh, what’s that all over your copy of Seiobo There Below? Is it mold? We hope it’s mold ...


In an age of rising fascism and tyranny-via-Medbed-meme, the truth is that fun is probably too much to ask for. Today’s literary culture is obviously more imperiled than it was when The New Republic first became a Nobel analysis outfit a decade ago. Subtle and blunt-force censorship is on the rise everywhere, and more people are spending more money than ever on technologies that claim to make art, definitely don’t make art, harvest art’s raw materials, and are ultimately invested in the project of destroying art altogether. They won’t win, but they’re damaging and extremely tiresome. Which is all to say that as much as we’d prefer to make jokes about @krasznahorguy1954, we have to acknowledge that, in the age of ChatGPT, there is almost something heroic about never shutting the fuck up about The Melancholy of Resistance. The Nobel Prize got it right, and literary life is far better for having the Nobel be a part of it, as esoteric, imperfect, and eerily Swedish as it might be.

If you asked ChatGPT nicely, it could write a single sentence that stretched on forever. But it couldn’t produce the disorienting effects that Krasznahorkai’s winding, restless sentences generate with total consistency. This the right moment for “reality examined to the point of madness.” It’s hard not to feel immensely grateful for Krasznahorkai’s ceaseless examination, and hard not to feel grateful to the Nobel for endowing it with visibility and credibility. It is, first and foremost, a victory for men: No one can say we don’t read books again! But—and it certainly doesn’t work out this way most of the time—it is a victory for all serious readers as well.

This is how bad life in the early days of the ChatGPT Era is: Even we have to admit that the Nobel Prize is good for something.

ICE Barbie Says an Entire State’s Worth of Officials Are “Lying” - 2025-10-09T17:31:38Z

Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem accused local leaders in Portland, Oregon, of “lying” because they wouldn’t back up her baseless claims that the streets were overrun with terrorists.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Noem excoriated Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Portland Police Chief Bob Day, after her surprise visit to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the South Portland neighborhood earlier this week.

“I … met with the governor, met with the mayor, met with the chief of police, and the superintendent of the highway patrol. They’re all lying, and disingenuous, and dishonest people,” she said. “Because as soon as you leave the room, then they make the exact opposite response.

“So, we’re looking at new facilities to purchase there in Portland too. And we’re gonna double down. And I told them if they didn’t meet our demands for safety and security on the streets then we’re going to bring in more federal law enforcement,” she added.

But Noem’s trip Tuesday revealed that Portland isn’t the war zone the president claims.

Local officials have continued to undermine the Trump administration’s outlandish claims about Portland. Kotek, who got wind of Noem’s visit, reportedly met her at the airport, where the governor said she “reiterated again that there is no insurrection in Oregon.”

Outside the facility Noem visited, there were no hardened terrorists, only a handful of reporters and a guy in a chicken costume. By midday, there were about two dozen protesters, but they were still outnumbered by reporters, according to Oregon Live. And across the city, organizers threw a puppy parade to tell ICE to get its paws off Portland. Still, appearing on Fox News later, Noem called local leaders “a bunch of pansies” and said she wanted even more security at the ICE facility.

Wilson said that the quiet day Noem witnessed was proof that “Portland continues to manage public safety professionally and responsibly, irrespective of the claims of out-of-state social media influencers.”

It seems that Noem now hopes to punish Portland officials for their repeated assertions that they were doing a fine job of managing public safety on their own.

On Wednesday, during a roundtable of right-wing influencers talking about anti-fascist resistance to the president, Noem accused Wilson and Kotek of “covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Noem also claimed that Portland police officers were “cheering” on protesters that were saying slogans such as “kill ICE agents” and “Molotov cocktails melt ICE.”

Day told KGW8 that Noem’s claim was an “abhorrent allegation.”

“Since the secretary had several people documenting her movements, we urge her to provide video evidence to support this claim,” he said. “Such inflammatory rhetoric undermines trust and distracts from our goal to ensure safety in the South Waterfront area. Our officers remain professional, dedicated, and committed to serving the people of Portland with integrity.”

Trump Proudly Announces His Shutdown Revenge on Democrats - 2025-10-09T17:05:48Z

Donald Trump could not be more plain: He is planning to use the government shutdown to take revenge against Democrats.

During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, the president announced that the White House would be cutting congressionally approved programs during the government closure—but only those supported by America’s liberal party.

“We’ll be making cuts that will be permanent, and we’re only going to cut Democrat programs, I hate to tell you,” Trump said. “I guess that makes sense, but we’re only cutting Democrat programs.

“We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly, that’s the way it works,” he continued. “They wanted to do this, so we’ll give them a little taste of their own medicine.”

For the record, that’s not how the government is supposed to work. The Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974 for exactly this purpose: to prevent the executive branch from withholding funds in a way that would undermine Congress’s “power of the purse.” Regardless of Trump’s bravado, a government shutdown doesn’t suddenly suspend the law.

It’s not the only law that the Trump administration has decided could be flouted. So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Forty-five percent of the civilian workforce of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has insinuated that not every furloughed federal worker will be eligible for back pay, despite a bipartisan-supported 2019 law that mandates they are.

In other seismic executive oversteps, the White House has promised to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing and, last week, issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act.

DOJ in Trouble After Lawyers Reposted Trump Rant on Luigi Mangione - 2025-10-09T16:49:07Z

Justice Department lawyers reposting President Trump’s statements may have inadvertently endangered their prosecution of Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.

On September 18, Trump said in a Fox News interview that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.... He shot him right in the middle of the back — instantly dead.... This is a sickness. This really has to be studied and investigated.” All of what Trump said was only alleged. 

A clip of the interview was posted by conservative page Rapid Response 47. DOJ Public Affairs head Chad Gilmartin retweeted it, commenting that the president was “absolutely right,” violating the judge’s explicit orders that DOJ employees refrain from public comment about the  case. 

Mangione’s defense team promptly notified the court that they will be filing a motion to dismiss and a suppression motion on Friday. 

Federal prosecutors are defending Gilmartin’s actions, saying he and other department employees “operate entirely outside the scope of the prosecution team, possess no operational role in the investigative or prosecutorial functions of the Mangione matter, and are not ‘associated’ with this litigation,” according to the filing, as reported by NBC News. 

Mangione has pleaded not guilty, and already had charges of state terrorism dismissed in September. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene Slams Mike Johnson Over Epstein Delay Tactic - 2025-10-09T16:38:19Z

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia MAGA Republican, criticized Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday for delaying the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat.

Amid the ongoing government shutdown, Johnson has cancelled regular House sessions and held off on swearing in Grijalva—who was elected more than two weeks ago—during the brief pro forma sessions taking place in the meantime.

But since Johnson previously swore in GOP representatives during pro formas, Democrats are accusing the speaker of dragging his feet due to Grijalva’s stance on releasing all unclassified documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The Arizona Democrat would provide the deciding, 218th signature on a petition to force a House vote on the Epstein files’ release.

Johnson denies that the petition—currently signed by 213 Democrats, as well as Greene and three fellow Republicans—has anything to do with his reluctance vis-à-vis Grijalva.

“I can’t conclusively say if that’s why the House is not in session, but the House should be in session,” Greene told CNN on Thursday. “And the House should be in session for many reasons. We have appropriation bills that need to get passed. There is a new Democrat that’s been elected that does deserve to be sworn in. Her district elected her. We have other bills that we need to be passing.”

If Johnson is indeed just hoping to avoid the discharge petition, Greene said, “Why drag this out? That is going to have 218 signatures, and I say go ahead and do it, and get it over with.”

The Georgia Republican has proven very willing of late to defy her party’s leadership. Also during her CNN interview, for example, Greene said Johnson and the Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune “absolutely” deserve the blame for the shutdown. “We control the House, we control the Senate, we have the White House,” she added. “This doesn’t have to be a shutdown.”

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