A British political commentator who was detained by immigration authorities in the US over his pro-Palestinian advocacy said shortly after returning to the UK on Thursday that his detention was “less an attack on me and more an attack on Americans and the rights of Americans themselves”.
Sami Hamdi arrived in London on Thursday , three weeks after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at San Francisco international airport while on a speaking tour in the US. He agreed to leave the country after being guaranteed the right to apply for a new US visa, which he says he plans to do.
“What they want is to ensure that people like us don’t go to America,” he told the Guardian in an interview shortly after returning home, citing the detention earlier this year of foreign students over their political activity. “And we will defy them and we will exert our constitutional rights and speak truth against hatred.”
Hamdi, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate and frequent commentator on global political issues, said that he was denied medical care for severe abdominal pain while in detention until his wife alerted the media to his condition. A guard told him “the only way the medical team will come is if you drop down on the floor”, he recalled. But the most challenging aspect for him and his fellow detainees was not knowing how long their ordeals might last.
The Trump administration defended Hamdi’s 26 October arrest by painting him as a “terrorist sympathizer”, providing no evidence but sharing an edited montage by the pro-Israel group Memri in which Hamdi appeared to praise the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. In the clips, Hamdi calls on his audience not to “pity” the Palestinians but to “celebrate their victory”.
“Allah has shown the world that no normalization can erase the Palestinian cause,” he also says. “How many of you feel it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened? How many of you felt the euphoria?”
Hamdi said the video was edited to misconstrue his words and noted that he denounced violence during the same speaking engagement. “They knew it was out of context, they knew that it did not reflect anything that people claimed that it reflected,” he said. He also spoke of the irony of finding himself in the same position as Donald Trump, whose words were also “stitched” together in a BBC programme. “The irony of it is that Donald Trump is now suing the BBC over a stitched video,” he said. (Lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn (£759m) in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him. The BBC apologised on Thursday.)
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said in a statement on Thursday that Hamdi was “an illegal alien and terrorist sympathizer who cheered on Hamas following its October 7 terrorist attack”.
“Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country,” she added. “That’s just common sense.”
According to Hamdi’s lawyers with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), the government never accused him of any crimes nor alleged he posed a security threat, but charged him with overstaying his visa after abruptly cancelling it without notifying him shortly before his arrest. The DHS did not immediately respond to questions about Hamdi’s visa cancellation or specific charges against him.
“If the government had any credible evidence behind the insinuations it amplified on social media, Hamdi would not be walking free today under a voluntary departure,” the group wrote in a statement. Cair emphasised that Hamdi “is not being deported or removed but is instead departing on his own terms under a voluntary arrangement that does not include a bar to future entry”.
Hamdi was touring the US to talk about what he called the American government’s “Israel first” policies. Days before his detention, the rightwing activist Laura Loomer had launched a social media campaign attacking him.
While waiting to board a flight from San Francisco to Florida, he was stopped by DHS agents who told him his visa had been revoked but offered no further explanation. “I was thrown in the back of a van in a very tight, claustrophobic space, driven for five hours to a random location in the middle of nowhere, not being told where I’m going, not allowed to call my lawyer,” he said. He later learned that Laura Loomer posted about his detention at the time, writing “SCALP” in an X post.
Hamdi said the most “heartbreaking” aspect of his experience was witnessing the conditions of people held in US immigration detention. When the men he was detained with learned he was a journalist, he said, they shared harrowing stories of months-long bureaucratic ordeals that had kept them separated from their families.
One man from a Latin American country, Hamdi recalled, was a green card holder who had lived in the US for 42 years, was married to a US citizen and had US citizen children. He was detained at his regular immigration check-in and his case kept getting adjourned by months. Another man, a 23-year-old from Chechnya, had sought asylum in the US to avoid being conscripted into fighting in Ukraine, but had spent 10 months in immigration detention, falling into a deep depression. At one point, the men were watching TV when an ad came on saying that the Trump administration was “deporting criminals”.
“And you look around you and there are no criminals,” Hamdi said. “The worst part of my detention was watching all of the other inmates around me, and just how miserable they’ve become, not because they don’t deserve to be in America but simply because they’re not even being brought in front of a judge.”
“It is such a tragedy of justice; you really feel like they are forgotten people,” he added.
Hamdi warned that the increasingly draconian ways of US immigration officials would deter more people from travelling to the US. “Let’s suppose somebody waves a Palestinian flag” at the World Cup next year, he posited. “Does that mean that their visa is going to be revoked?”
He added: “They are trying to curb freedom of speech because there’s a concern among the extremist Israeli lobby that American public opinion is shifting.”
He also pointed to the recent election of Zohran Mamdani in New York as a sign that efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian speech in the US were failing.
“As much as there is an attempt to silence pro-Palestinian activism or as much as there is an attempt to sort of control what Americans can hear or listen to … the American public has shifted,” he said. “In reality, it’s not the extremist lobby that is winning. It’s actually truth and justice that’s winning and the extremists are lashing out in a hysteria.”
In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.
Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”
Earlier this week, the administration cited the food delivery app DoorDash as an authority on dropping consumer prices; today the city of Chicago announced a settlement in a four-year lawsuit charging that DoorDash took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to list restaurants without their permission and mark up food prices. DoorDash will pay $18 million in cash and credits to restaurants, delivery drivers, and consumers.
Trump has steadfastly and falsely maintained that foreign countries pay for tariffs. But today he signed an executive order ending tariffs on beef, coffee, bananas, cocoa, and other commodities from certain countries to lower prices after voters said they are concerned about the economy. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said the administration was “putting out a fire that they started and claiming it as progress.”
Trump has seemed particularly nervous that the Supreme Court might uphold the lower courts that have declared most of his tariffs illegal, reiterating that having to pay back tariff money would be “a National Security catastrophe.” Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) reminded Really American Media that Trump has been “using tariffs to enrich himself and his family,” using them—or the threat of them—to get golf course deals in countries around the world, as well as using them to punish countries Trump believes are hurting his right-wing allies.
In contrast, Trump’s administration is rewarding his ideological allies. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Argentina’s leader Javier Milei appears to have received more financial support from the U.S. government than the $20 billion more widely reported. The U.S. withdrew $870 million from its account at the International Monetary Fund shortly before a similar sum appeared in Argentina’s IMF fund just in time for that country to pay an $840 million debt. It is, one redditor noted, “turning into a scandal.”
News broke today that the Department of Justice is in talks with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn to settle his $50 million claim against the government for damages related to the investigation into his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Trump later pardoned him. A federal judge dismissed Flynn’s lawsuit and the Biden administration fought it, but now the Trump administration appears to have engaged with Flynn over it.
Last week, Flynn suggested he might run for president in 2028 to keep the MAGA movement going.
Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported today that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, which she says is a crucial tool to stop undocumented immigration, has funneled $143 million to a company in Delaware called Safe America Media. The company lists the Virginia home of a Republican operative, Michael McElwain, as its address and was created days before contracts awarded to it were finalized.
One of the subcontractors who fulfilled a Safe America Media contract was the Strategy Group, whose chief executive officer, Ben Yoho, is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin. Noem’s top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, who introduced Noem to Yoho, has done significant work for the Strategy Group, and Noem used the Strategy Group for her 2022 campaign for South Dakota governor. Subcontractors are not listed in federal contracting databases.
The Department of Homeland Security skipped the normal competitive bidding process for its ad campaign, citing the need for “critical communications to the public” to go out quickly. Charles Tiefer, a former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and an expert on federal contract law, told Elliott, Kaplan, and Mierjeski, “It’s corrupt, is the word,” suggesting Noem was hiding her friends as subcontractors. He called for an investigation by the House Oversight Committee and the Homeland Security inspector general. That inspector general, Trump loyalist Joseph Cuffari, survived the January 2025 purge of inspectors general.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said career officials run its contracting and do it “by the book.”
William Turton and Christopher Bing of ProPublica reported today that FBI Director Kash Patel waived the standard polygraph exams required to obtain top security clearances for Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other senior FBI staff members. The exam includes questions about foreign contacts, drug use, whether someone has a criminal history, and mishandling of classified information.
Like Patel himself, former right-wing podcaster Bongino had no prior experience at the FBI. The deputy director has access to the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which includes some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Government officials told Turton and Bing that ascending to the FBI’s second-highest-ranking official without passing a standard background check is unprecedented.
A forthcoming book by reporter Olivia Nuzzi, about which the New York Times reported today, says that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a recovering heroin addict with whom she had a relationship, told her he uses psychedelics, despite claiming to have stopped using drugs decades ago.
Tonight Trump turned against those Republicans who voted in favor of the release of the Epstein files compiled by the FBI during its investigation of the sex offender. He announced he was “withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” and went after Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who introduced the discharge petition, calling him a “LOSER!”
Greene responded that Trump was “coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next weeks vote to release the Epstein files. It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level…. I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”
Tonight Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here[?]”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which was 25 years old yesterday—congratulations, Josh and the TPM folks!) wrote: “Investigate whoever he wants. Trumps drowning on every front.”
On Thursday, November 13, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl the House Ethics Committee found former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald’s to be able to pay for braces.
Through a “sugar dating” website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gaetz. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex, allegedly including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth.
The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gaetz. In 2022 the girl’s lawyers asked Gaetz and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn’t sue, but Dorworth sued her, sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt’s portrait of the girl.
Schmidt’s story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people—mostly but not exclusively men—from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta—who in 2018 was secretary of labor in Trump’s first administration—Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked together to combat the story. As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon’s right-wing agenda and supported Trump.
As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein’s in-box painted a picture of “a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply.”
On Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network’s members—into the vice presidency.
Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says “a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an “aristocracy”—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.” When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life.” The government should support the country’s innovators, network members say.
We have heard this ideology before.
In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class.
Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.
Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society’s money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on, to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity. It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole.
Carnegie’s ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision declaring that states could not require employers to limit workers’ hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers’ welfare or safety because “there is no danger to the employ[ee] in a first-class bakery.” The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected “freedom of contract”: the right of employers to contract with laborers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept.
In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country.
“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Mellon’s ideology gave us “Hoovervilles”—shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials—and the Great Depression.
Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.
Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. “They don’t wait in lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic,” Campo-Flores writes. “Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration’s crusade against not just undocumented immigrants but also against legal immigrants and darker-skinned Americans in general.
But using the power of the state against those outside the “aristocracy” is more widespread than attacks on Brown Americans. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported on October 29 in the New York Times that the future of Trump’s policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness” and guide homeless people “towards human thriving” through social and addiction services, according to political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state’s Homeless Services Board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people.
Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans’ deep cuts to Medicaid it’s hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently-operating housing programs.
On November 6 the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person’s biological sex at birth. As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, from 1992 to 2010 the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports; from 2010 to 2025 they could submit a certificate from a doctor saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition.
When he took office on January 20, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which it defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification” as assigned “at conception.” Transgender identity, the order said, is “false” and “corrosive” to the country. Plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr sued, and on April 18 U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobick granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief.
In Trump v. Orr the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump’s policy, writing: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don’t recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the U.S. On Friday the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology.
In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed “inferior” “are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” he said. “[T]hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. [This] argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
“Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
In Lincoln’s day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.
Should they have the right to become billionaires in the first place?
Musk was asked why he needed to have a trillion dollar salary. He answered it's not the wealth; it's the influence.
President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend flooding social media with posts claiming that his economic policies are working and that his 34 felony convictions and the investigations into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian operatives were illegitimate, and posting angrily about those people calling out his association with Jeffrey Epstein. He even reposted a statement from one of his own lawyers saying, “If Jeffrey Epstein had any dirt on Donald Trump, he would have had great leverage in the criminal case against him at the time he died,” which perhaps conveys a different message than he intended.
Then, after fighting furiously against the upcoming House vote over releasing the Epstein files the FBI collected as part of its investigation into the convicted sex abuser, at 9:15 p.m. last night Trump abruptly reversed course, saying that House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the files “because we have nothing to hide.” “I DON’T CARE!” he posted.”
But of course, he does care, as is evident from how deeply he fought the release of the files the FBI collected during its investigation of Epstein right up until the final signature on the House discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure to require the Justice Department to release the files. As Meredith Kile of People magazine reported, when a female Bloomberg reporter at a press gaggle aboard Air Force One November 14 asked him if there was anything “incriminating” in the Epstein files, he pointed a finger in her face and said: “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy.”
In the hours before House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) swore in Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) at 4:00 on Wednesday, Trump and his loyalists worked to pressure Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to remove her name from the discharge petition. She refused. As soon as Johnson swore her into office, Grijalva signed the petition, teeing up a vote on a bill requiring the release of the files.
On Thursday, November 13, the people behind the White House social media account seemed to be trying to combat the Epstein story by pushing the image of Trump as a happily married family man. The account posted an image of Trump and First Lady Melania Trump listening to the U.S. Marine Band and chatting, then a video of Trump behind the Oval Office desk, giving a medallion and a pen each to four small children. The caption read, “The best president,” with a heart emoji.
On Friday, November 14, the White House social media account posted an image of Trump and the First Lady embracing under the caption “I can’t help falling in love with you,” along with an emoji of musical notes and a heart. On Sunday, November 16, it posted a picture of the two of them striding toward the cameras holding hands, under the caption “America’s power couple,” with an eagle and an American flag emoji.
That Trump’s hand is weakening showed on Friday, when the leader of the Indiana Senate announced that it would not hold a meeting in December to gerrymander all nine of Indiana’s districts to favor Republicans. Currently, the Indiana delegation to the House of Representatives has seven Republicans and two Democrats. Trump and Indiana governor Mike Braun have put great pressure on the legislature to redistrict, but even though Republicans hold a supermajority in the Indiana legislature, not enough Republican senators are willing to face the anger of voters to back the plan.
Then, over the weekend, rumors spread that as many as 100 House Republicans would vote in favor of the measure. Their constituents are eager for the release of the files, which Trump promised on the campaign trail, and the material already released from the Epstein estate has been damaging enough that representatives have reason to worry whether the material in the FBI files is even worse, leaving them in the position of having defended that behavior if they continue to cover it up. On Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Jonathan Karl of ABC News’s This Week that he was hoping to get a veto-proof majority in favor of the release.
The signs were clear: Trump had lost control of the House Republicans.
This is a big deal. The public outrage over ABC’s suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September demonstrated in a much more public way than court losses had that the administration was not all-powerful. That outcry forced first ABC’s parent company, Disney, and then broadcast station owners Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group to backtrack and to reinstate Kimmel’s show.
While individual Republican lawmakers have groused about one or another of the administration’s actions, only a few have broken with Trump. He has generally been able to command loyalty by threatening to sic his supporters on those who step out of line and by warning that he will support primary challengers against them. Notably, over the weekend he hammered at one of those lawmakers, his former loyalist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), calling her a traitor, “wacky,” and a “ranting Lunatic.” He said he was withdrawing his endorsement of her and would support another Republican to replace her.
His usual threats didn’t work; dozens of House Republicans still said they were going to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files. So to get back in front of the party, Trump suddenly called for lawmakers to pass the measure, later telling reporters he would sign it if it came to his desk. Lawmakers who just hours before had maintained they would vote no suddenly switched to yes, indicating that Trump still commands many of them.
But his change in direction makes it far more likely senators, too, will vote to pass the bill. Tonight Trump loyalist Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said he would vote for the measure, likely realizing a vote against it will hurt him in his upcoming campaign for governor, which is quite something considering Alabama’s previously strong support for Trump.
Don’t hold your breath for the release of the files, though: Trump’s post saying he didn’t care about the release included the qualification that “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to,” suggesting he will continue his stonewalling with the help of the Department of Justice. Remember: all the congressional machinations are only to force the release of the files. He could release them himself any time he wanted to.
On Sunday, Trump posted angrily about the Indiana Republicans’ failure to do his bidding, calling those Republican opponents of redistricting “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, and accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL!” He went on: “It’s weak ‘Republicans’ that cause our Country such problems—It’s why we have crazy Policies and Ideas that are so bad for America.” He blamed Braun for “not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes,” and said “Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED.” He singled out two senators—one of whom had not publicly said he opposed the bill—saying if they didn’t “DO THEIR JOB, AND DO IT NOW!..., let’s get them out of office, ASAP.”
Hours later, one of the senators was the victim of a “swatting” incident, in which the police department received an email falsely saying someone in the home had been harmed, a malicious action designed to prompt police to launch a massive response to a potentially dangerous situation, thus putting the victims in danger.
Trump seems to be losing his iron grip on the Republican Party. Although Steve Peoples of the Associated Press reported yesterday that White House officials and other Washington, D.C., leaders say there is no affordability problem in the country, Trump is popular, and the way to win in 2026 is to stick with him, not everyone is so sure, especially after the party’s big losses earlier this month in elections across the country.
On Monday, November 11, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham pushed Trump on issues that have cost him support. Although consumers have expressed concern over rising prices, Trump insisted prices are “way down.” Ingraham asked: “Are you saying voters are misperceiving how they feel?” She took on the administration’s recent call to address housing costs by issuing 50-year mortgages, noting that the proposal “has enraged your MAGA friends,” who recognize that such a mortgage would benefit banks over buyers and nearly double the time it would take for Americans to own a home.
“Don’t forget, MAGA was my idea,” Trump defended himself. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”
Yesterday Trump defended right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has been under fire for his interview platforming white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes traffics in racism and sexism and has openly admired Hitler, insisting that many of the Republicans currently in office are too moderate. When the head of the Heritage Foundation, once thought of as the intellectual heart of the modern Republican Party, supported Carlson, at least six people resigned from the foundation, expressing dismay at the direction it was taking.
Today Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) announced that a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping the union rights from federal workers now has enough votes on a discharge petition to bring it before the House. Golden and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced the bill in April, but Johnson refused to bring it up. In June, Golden launched a discharge petition to force it to the floor.
Democrats and three Republicans signed the petition, but it was still two votes short of adoption. Today, Republican lawmakers Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York signed it, bringing the number of signatures on the petition to 218. Enough Republican members have joined with the Democrats to override Johnson and challenge Trump’s executive order.
