BREAKING: ABC CENSORS JIMMY KIMMEL TO PLEASE TRUMP, AGAIN
Last night was the second night of the Republican midterm convention Trump staged to fire up his base. Such a midterm convention is rare—the purpose of national conventions is to pick a president and write a platform—but Trump has turned the Republican Party into a vehicle for his own power and apparently thinks putting himself at the center of the midterms can overcome the headwinds the Republicans are battling.
Or perhaps, with his approval ratings hitting a new low, he just wanted to stand in front of cheering crowds again.
The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse, and according to Kara Voght of the Wall Street Journal, many who were there had received their tickets for free from state parties or right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty. But, she wrote, “everyone wanted to watch another episode of the Trump show.”
Although the crowd was small enough that it did not fill the arena, Trump got the absolute loyalty he demanded from those who had turned out. At the event, he led the crowd in an oath. “Please raise your right hand,” he shouted. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe.” The crowd chanted dutifully after him.
“That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way—I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do, they’d never, there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am gonna go out and I’m gonna get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November third or we are going to vote before that!” The crowd erupted in applause.
Once again, he promised that if the Republicans held control of the House and Senate after the midterms, he would distribute a $5,000 check to all adult U.S. citizens, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars even if it were legal for him to do so (which it is not).
But while the Trump show in Dallas was being broadcast to the president’s fans, reality was very much on the minds of those watching events in the Middle East.
There are two main shipping routes for oil and other products out of the region, and both have strategic chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz sits on the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula where the Persian Gulf empties into the Arabian Sea. The Bab el-Mandeb strait sits on the western side of the Arabian Peninsula. It pinches the outlet of the Red Sea on its way to the Arabian Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean and world markets.
When Trump struck Iran in February 2026, Iranian forces took control of the Strait of Hormuz, largely stopping traffic of oil through the outlet. And so Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s largest oil exporter and a close ally of the United States, relied on sending exports via the Red Sea route, passing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait.
It did so by moving oil across the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the East-West oil pipeline, which runs about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) across Saudi Arabia. It can move about 7 million barrels of crude oil per day and has been sending about 5 million a day since the outbreak of the war on Iran. From there, oil can be loaded onto tankers and shipped down the Red Sea, through the Bab el-Mandeb, and on to global markets.
Yesterday Iran-backed Houthi militants swept along the shoreline of the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb. They captured the seaport and city of Mocha, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the strait, from Saudi-backed Yemeni forces.
Today Yemeni government officials told Mohammed Ghobari, Eman Abouhassira, and Yasmine Ghania of Reuters that the Houthis have taken the coastal town of Dhubab, which sits on the Yemen mainland at the point of the strait. The sources said Yemeni forces had also evacuated the island of Perim, which sits about a third of the way between the mainland and the Djibouti shore to the west. Later this afternoon, sources said the Houthis had captured the island.
Although the Houthis do not control the Djiboutian side of the strait, they now threaten shipping through the passage. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline has also come under attack. Spencer Kimball of CNBC reports that the Saudi Energy Ministry announced the pipeline had been shut down as a precautionary measure after it had sustained a number of attacks. Kylie Atwood, Katie Bo Lillis, Thomas Bordeaux, and Zachary Cohen of CNN added that the attacks apparently originated in Iraq, that U.S. officials had told them that pumping stations had been hit, and satellite imagery showed smoke coming from one of them and fire damage at another.
The price of oil briefly jumped to about $110 a barrel on Friday. Diesel prices moved to $6.06 a gallon, up 60% since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran in February.
Trump and his advisors have said they plan to strangle Iran economically through their blockade of Iranian ports. Now it appears Iran is retaliating with a plan to strangle the U.S. economy by slowing the transport of oil even further.
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States.
President Donald Trump did not attend the commemoration at Ground Zero, now the National September 11 Memorial, in downtown Manhattan because, according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dana Rubinstein, and Sally Goldenberg, he wanted to deliver a speech but the event organizers don’t allow speeches, focusing on nonpartisanship and honoring the victims. Trump responded to the story with a personal attack on Haberman, calling her “Maggot.”
Instead, Trump went to the Pentagon, where he delivered a speech tying his war on Iran to the attacks of 9/11, saying: “We salute every member of the United States military who served in the ‘war on terror’. And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added: “We’re still sending terrorists where they belong—to hell. And tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong, and we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day.”
All four living ex-presidents and first ladies—Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Laura Bush, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and Jill Biden—attended the Ground Zero commemoration in Manhattan. There the victims’ names were read, and the ceremony for the first time included a moment of silence for those who died of illnesses related to conditions in the aftermath of the buildings’ collapse.
Fifteen years ago, a wonderful student introduced me to the issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 2, number 36, published on November 14, 2001. Famously, the cover of the issue is entirely black. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, the story takes on the impossible question: How, in a city that hundreds of superheroes call home, were those superheroes powerless to stop the 9/11 attacks?
“The sane world will always be vulnerable to madmen,” Spider-Man answers when a devastated couple fleeing from the devastation challenges him, “because we cannot go where they go to conceive of such things. We could not see it coming. We could not be here before it happened. We could not stop it. But we are here now. You cannot see us for the dust, but we are here. You cannot hear us for the cries, but we are here.”
But the superheroes Spider-Man identified in the chaos did not wear capes. They wore hats that said “FDNY” and “FEMA” and “POLICE.” The “true heroes,” Spider-Man said, were those ordinary people who ran back into the buildings to rescue others waiting in the dark, who joined together to storm the cockpit of a hijacked airplane and bring it down to the ground before it could hit the Capitol or White House, and who helped each other to safety or to face the terror.
They were ordinary men and women “made extraordinary by acts of compassion, and courage, and terrible sacrifice,” and who rejected “the self-serving proclamations of holy warriors of every stripe.”
I still can't believe you Americans elected this gobshite not once but twice.
On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”
Luttig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America’s democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Luttig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.
Luttig focuses on the ability of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to prevent the recognition of duly-elected Democratic representatives on January 3. Johnson has the power, Luttig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.
In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it’s possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats. That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court.
But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country “helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question: “Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?”
As if to illustrate Luttig’s warning, House speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump’s convention in Dallas on Thursday: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”
Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlew of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the USPS rejected mailed ballots from Leon County, in Florida, because the words “return service requested” were only 0.236 inches from the election office’s return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter-inch apart. So, the delivery of those mail in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 0.014 of an inch.
“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Berlew. But, as Saksa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the postal service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.
On Thursday, September 10, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least thirty top election officials in the states, warning that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are subject to “ongoing litigation,” and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corasaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and won none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries but has never produced any proof of his claims.
In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any noncitizens cast a ballot in their state (although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote), and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not put Trump’s election changes into effect.
Election officials already follow the laws about retaining documents, so the letters seem to be about threatening them. Nevada secretary of state Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told Corasaniti: “It’s the constant ‘flood the zone’ of harassment and intimidation and threats of legal action hoping we’d fold at some point.” But, he added, “We’re going to continue to follow the law and do what’s in the best interest of our voters.”
And what of the MAGA Republicans Trump would like to see in Congress?
Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported yesterday that 25-year-old Stephen Woytek, a top campaign staffer for Senator Jon Husted (R-OH), has recently cultivated a public playlist of songs celebrating the former country of Rhodesia, in which a white minority ruled over a Black majority, captioning it “homesick for a place that no longer exists.” Rhodesia is a rallying cry for white supremacists who deplore the change that created Zimbabwe. Woytek also appears to be a historical reenactor who appears to have both worn Nazi uniforms and used a photo of Nazi soldiers as his Facebook profile picture.
Ohio governor Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the Senate to replace J.D. Vance after Vance was elected to the vice presidency, and Husted is now locked in a battle for that seat with former senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat known for his defense of labor. A statement for Husted said that while Woytek “denies negative intent,” the campaign was parting ways with him.
As Goodwin notes, growing numbers of younger Republicans have been expressing support for white nationalism and the Nazis.
Indeed, in his warning, Luttig did not single out Democrats to protect democracy; as he noted in a piece on his Substack in August, plenty of people are already fighting. He called out Republicans.
“There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election,” Luttig wrote. But now, “in a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.”
He urged Republicans “to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump,” and to make it clear to Trump and Johnson that they will not participate in any unconstitutional plan to deny Democrats seats in the new Congress.
He warned them that should Republicans go along with such machinations and the Supreme Court overrule them, the Republican Party “would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.”
“The writing is already on the wall, Republicans,” the conservative jurist wrote. “The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.”
Today, in Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open at his golf club in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters: “We had a rigged election. As you know, it was totally rigged. Because I won three times. I didn’t win twice. I won three times.”
Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his controversial pledge to give US adults a $5,000 “dividend” if his Republican party keeps control of Congress after November’s midterm elections.
The plan has been greeted with expressions of incredulity across the US political spectrum as well as outraged accusations of seeing to bribe voters. The plan – which would cost more than a trillion dollars – also comes amid huge concern over the US national debt, which topped $40tn for the first time in August.
“I don’t know but it’s easy if the Republicans win. $5,000 to all adults in the country and we can easily handle that because we’re taking in so much money,” Trump told reporters in Ireland where he is on a visit to a golf course.
Trump had been asked if Congress would need to approve the $5,000 pledge and continued: “The Democrats can’t make that pledge because it would all go to hell right away, we’d go into a depression … I made that pledge, I always keep my pledge.”
President Donald Trump took his demand for loyalty one step further on the second night of the GOP midterm convention.
Trump, who spoke during both nights of the two-day event, closed his remarks by asking GOP audience members to raise their right hand and repeat after him. He had his followers swear an oath to him, promising that they will do whatever it takes to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, even if it means cheating.
"Please raise your right hand!"
"I pledge, to the greatest president in the history of the United States, [who] loves us so much he can't even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends; I will do it any way, I will try to cheat like they do. I don't care! We are going to vote on November 3, or we are going to vote before that!"
"So help me, God!"
Trump repeated his plea to Republicans in attendance at the convention to go and vote in the midterm elections, telling them they will “go to hell” if they do not vote. He also called on them to “defeat the communists,” referring to the Democratic Party.
The shocking oath led Trump’s critics to label him as a leader of a “cult,” with some saying it was reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Prominent Democrats were quick to denounce Trump’s actions, arguing that Americans should pledge allegiance to their country, not the president.
“It’s a cult,” liberal media outlet MeidasTouch posted on X.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, posted: “Authoritarian cult of personality watch.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) argued that Trump’s oath is a reason to vote against the Republican Party.
“Donald Trump just replaced the Pledge of Allegiance with a pledge of allegiance to himself. This November, the choice is yours on the ballot: America or Trump,” he wrote on X.
Former Rep. Barbara Comstock described the convention attendees as a “cult of sheep led by a deranged wannabe authoritarian.”
“If he had brought the poisoned Kool Aid they would drink it,” Comstock wrote.
On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
In his essay, Amodei called for AI companies to commit to giving embedded third-party evaluators access to their work, rather like the regulatory supervisors in banking. He called for AI companies in democratic countries to establish safety standards and limit their rate of progress. And he called for “[t]he US and other democratic governments [to] attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”
Today on Face the Nation, Amodei explained to host Jo Ling Kent: “My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable. Government didn’t build this technology. This company, this technology came from the private sector, and we—Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.
“I think the government and the public need to have a stake. And this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do.”
Asked if he would be willing to give the technology itself to the government, Amodei answered that he might be willing to give it to the right combination of governments. “I want to be very clear about this,” he said. “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments—I don’t know about hand over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”
As Mike Isaac of the New York Times noted, Amodei’s call came days after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, posting on social media that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was “acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” They are, he said, building “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said. He claimed that people at OpenAI might not yet realize what they’re constructing, while those at Anthropic do understand but believe “they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.”
Critics are skeptical, suggesting that AI leaders are hyping their product to make it appear more valuable than it really is. There is widespread concern that the massive spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips might not deliver the revenue and profits that would justify such spending. In June, Kate Brennan, associate director of independent research institute AI Now, told Aimee Picchi of CBS News: “The returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made, in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers, are not netting out.”
Others wonder if Amodei’s public concerns aren’t designed to get the government to regulate AI in such a way that it creates a framework that would make it hard for smaller companies to break into the market.
Still, Kate Conger of the New York Times noted last week that in July, more than 1,300 employees from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google’s DeepMind—all leading AI companies—signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to regulate AI to slow down its development. Conger also notes that in August, more than 100 tech companies offered their models to hospitals and infrastructure systems to enable them to guard against cyberattacks powered by AI.
After Amodei’s essay appeared, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who has been increasing spending on AI through his SpaceX rocket company; and Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements.
On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of “responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration” and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly.
Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump’s order “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” called for reviewing “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” under Biden’s order and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. “[W]e must,” the order said, “develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”
But the American people disagree. A YouGov poll from late August showed that only 24% of Americans think the construction of data centers is a good thing, while twice that number, 47%, say it’s bad. A majority of Americans, 61%, don’t want one in their town. In response to their growing unpopularity, the administration is seeking to exempt data centers from having to notify the public about how much air pollution they will release.
As Cat Zakrzewski, Violet Jira, and Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post reported, when asked today about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them, saying that the U.S. needed to stay ahead of China. He brushed off the warnings calling for the slower pace coming from the industry’s leaders.
“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” Trump told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
David Sacks, the venture capitalist who heads the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, accused the AI leaders of trying to avoid “massive product-liablity exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”
A Wall Street Journal article today by Richard Rubin and Justin Lahart offered a different perspective on the fight over regulating AI. In a piece about the growing U.S. debt, they note that the Trump administration insists it can overcome the rising deficits it’s mounting and the debt that has recently hit 100% of the nation’s gross domestic product and topped $40 trillion through growth.
The idea that the U.S. could sustain high spending with low taxes by growing its way out of debt has been a driving force in the Republican Party since the 1980s, but as Rubin and Lahart note, the U.S. has not had the sustained 3% growth such a scenario requires since the 1990s, when companies were adopting computers and baby boomers were at their peak employment. During those years, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. wiped out its deficit.
But then President George W. Bush pushed through another big tax cut and launched two unfunded wars, and both deficits and debt climbed again. By this century, the authors note, the conditions of the 1990s were reversed: baby boomers are retiring and productivity is slowing.
And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University last week that he expects to see 3% growth again after the end of the war on Iran. “[T]he underlying economy is very, very strong,” he said, “and I think reaccelerating.” This expected growth seems to be what’s behind the administration’s faith that it can continue to cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending on the military and the Department of Homeland security.
Last week, Rubin and Lahart note, Trump told the Fox News Channel: “We’re gonna take care of the 40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before.” While the U.S. is not, in fact, growing at a record pace—growth during Trump’s second term has sat at 1.9%—it appears the administration may be looking at a giant boost in productivity led by AI as its Hail Mary pass.
James Talarico is beating the GOP on their home turf.
Here’s some recent polling, as summarized by the New York Times, on the Senate race between James Talarico, the Democrat, and Ken Paxton, the Republican, in Texas.
A couple weeks ago, Talarico was coming up in surveys as being up by six points, or maybe just breaking even. Then, in early September, we saw Talarico up by five, then up by four. Just last week, another survey dropped that showed Talarico up by two. This is a Senate race in Texas. It’s pretty remarkable to see these kinds of numbers in a place that has historically been a Republican stronghold.
And if you were watching the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas last week — I don’t particularly recommend watching very much of it, but if you did — you might have noticed just how obsessed the entire party is with Talarico. His opponent, Ken Paxton, brought him up at the convention.
So did Texas Baptist pastor and evangelical Trump advisor Robert Jeffress.
So did Donald Trump himself.
The FCC Fight
At the same time all this was happening in Texas, there was another fight going on involving the FCC. I won’t get into all the details, because they’re actually kind of stupid, but basically the FCC intervened to prevent Jimmy Kimmel from broadcasting an interview with Talarico. This isn’t the first time this has happened — something similar happened a little while ago when Stephen Colbert tried to interview him. They really don’t seem to want James Talarico on late-night broadcast television.
So instead, Kimmel did the interview anyway — just posted the whole thing on YouTube.
The view count on that video, as of this recording, is over 8 million. By most standards, that’s beyond the audience you’d reach with a broadcast interview. It seems like this is backfiring on the FCC and on Brendan Carr, the FCC chair who’s trying to block this stuff on Trump’s behalf.
What’s also fascinating is that Kimmel called Talarico “one of the most interesting people in politics today.” I want to sit with that observation, because I think it’s accurate — but the reason isn’t obvious. Objectively, Talarico is a fairly unaccomplished, rather vanilla, boyishly handsome White man. We have a lot of those in our politics. He’s not the guy with the most fascinating background: he taught for Teach for America for a while as a sixth-grade English teacher, he’s been a Texas state representative since 2018, and he studied at a Presbyterian Church (USA) seminary — though as far as I can tell he hasn’t actually been ordained; he finished a two-year master’s in theology rather than the full master of divinity. That’s not exactly the typical résumé for a Senate candidate, who’s usually a former governor, a sitting U.S. representative, or someone who’s served in a presidential cabinet. Talarico is coming out of nowhere.
Christian Nationalism’s Home Field
So why is he interesting? I think it has everything to do with Christian nationalism, and how he’s taking the fight to the GOP’s home field.
There’s a very old distinction in American politics between the religious right and the religious left — both real forces historically, but with very different styles of appeal reaching very different constituencies. The religious right’s constituency has been fairly stable over the last twenty years or so; there have been declines in conservative Christians, evangelicals, and Catholics, but nothing like the collapse on the other side. The religious left has been declining much more rapidly, as mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism have both shrunk demographically. The American left in general has become far more secular in its identity and self-presentation — with one very notable exception: Black churches and Black leaders. The Black church has historically aligned much more with the religious left while continuing to make strong appeals to religious identity and to the Bible. That’s been the carve-out within an otherwise increasingly secular left coalition.
The left tends to be more multi-faith and interfaith — more pluralistic, less willing to land on one tradition, because there are so many different faith interests to hold together. A lot of people on the left identify as “nones”, people who, asked what religious tradition they belong to, say “none of the above.” There are a lot of atheists, secularists, and humanists in that coalition. So over the last few decades — again with the important exception of the Black church and figures like Senator and pastor Raphael Warnock — the left has tended to drop a lot of the talk about Jesus or specific Christian morality in favor of a more watered-down, generic language. Even references to God have tended to move to the back burner.
Talarico is showing there’s still some juice left in that religious-left squeeze. He’s finding traction and resonating with people who relish the religious contrast with this conservative style of Christian nationalism. He’s resurrecting an older style of mainline Protestant involvement in American politics. His self-presentation is liberal and progressive, but it avoids some of the more outlying edges of that world — it’s trying for a more mainstream mainline Protestant appeal. It’s confident. It’s confrontational.
One thing Talarico is doing that older politicians in this religious-left tradition used to do, but which has fallen out of fashion, is what’s called the “red-letter Christians” move. If you know the history of Christian publishing, some English Bibles print the words of Jesus in red, in contrast to the rest of the text in black. So when people talk about being a “red-letter Christian,” or about “red-letter passages,” they mean the exact words of Jesus. Politicians and activists on the religious left will often appeal directly to those words, in contrast to more obscure Bible citations, as a way of still speaking religiously — speaking Christianly — but from a different vein of Christian morality.
What’s interesting is that Talarico is drawing more religious talk out of other people too — celebrities, supporters. Listen to the longer exchange he has with Jimmy Kimmel: you can hear Kimmel, who has a Catholic background, speaking from that background himself.
That’s not the kind of conversation you hear every night on late-night television, or really anywhere on the American left these days. It’s something different.
Paxton’s Problem
Add to this picture that Ken Paxton, Talarico’s opponent, is a buffoonish caricature of evangelicalism’s hypocrisy. He identifies as evangelical, though it’s not clear he attends church very often. He’s advocated for putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms — a classic Christian-nationalist emphasis — even as he carries on extramarital affairs quite publicly. Paxton also carries an almost unbelievable level of political corruption: accusations, with a lot of supporting evidence including material submitted by his own former staff, of bribery, misuse of public resources, and obstruction of justice as Texas Attorney General.
So what we’re watching is Talarico kicking Christian nationalism’s ass on its own turf. He’s talking about Jesus in public. He’s speaking theologically in public, drawing on an older register of mainline Protestantism. And the polling — and the view count on that Kimmel interview — show he’s running circles around Paxton.
The Math
Think about who Donald Trump’s Christian base actually is. Survey after survey suggests about a third of the country is very sympathetic to Christian nationalism, and about a third is very devoted to Trump and to MAGA. It’s easy to conclude from that, that Trump has the Christian vote locked down. I don’t think that’s true. For people committed to Christian nationalism — the type who’d tune in to the RNC convention — Talarico probably isn’t going to persuade very many of them.
But the country overall is 62 percent Christian. That leaves a big gap — almost another third of the country that is also Christian but isn’t especially interested in, or dedicated to, Christian nationalism. That’s the audience Talarico is appealing to.
Closing Thought
Texas is very hard territory for Democrats running in Senate races. It’s part of the Bible Belt — the heartland of the evangelical megachurch movement. Democrats have had plenty of past disappointments there. But what if the key to Democrats taking Texas is that they learn how to find their faith gear again? That, to me, is the underlying question of the Talarico campaign. And I think we’ll get an answer to it in just a couple of months.
President Trump will host Xi Jinping for a state visit on September 24, once again putting his claimed bonhomie with the Chinese leader at the center of the relations between the two superpowers. But Trump’s insistence on the importance of this personal rapport shows just how little he understands his adversary.
I have been studying Xi ever since he became China’s heir apparent, and I became an analyst at the CIA in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. I spent years deciphering Xi for U.S. presidents as the intelligence community’s top expert on Xi. And I spent two years as the director for China at the National Security Council, where I staffed all of President Biden’s interactions with Xi and coordinated diplomacy with China across the U.S. government.
For a decade now, Trump has oscillated between courting and skirmishing with Xi. After his first term, Trump called Xi a friend and described him as someone he knew well. His experience with Xi seems to have led him to believe that he has unique, firsthand insights into China’s leader that his staff and advisers lack; in the past year, he has excluded even his close confidants, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, from intensive diplomacy with China, and has acted practically as his own China desk officer.
Trump’s go-to stratagem for gaining leverage with Xi has been to be unpredictable, or at least to try to be. Yet in Trump’s second term, Xi has surprised Trump more often than Trump has surprised him. That is because Xi’s modus operandi, at home and abroad, is that of a jack-in-the-box: He winds up patiently over years, sometimes decades, and then pops at the propitious moment. The result is always startling.
Xi rose to become China’s leader in large part by presenting himself as having the steady hands needed to restart stalled economic reforms without upsetting the comfortable gentlemen’s agreements that kept the Communist Party’s factional rivalries in check. But once Xi secured power, he launched a blistering campaign against the very party elites who had pulled him up.
Xi’s steeliness has caught Trump off guard, just as it did his Chinese colleagues. At the time of Trump’s first term, Xi was accustomed to playing politics as a quiet, intense poker match, in which the Chinese leader read the opposing players and considered his own cards with characteristic subtlety. Trump, meanwhile, approached politics and policy making more like a gambler on a hot streak at one of the casinos he owned. During his first encounter with Trump, at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, Xi learned about U.S. air strikes on Syria over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. He spent the years in between Trump’s first and second terms winding up to deal with a president whose M.O. he now understood—and preparing to pop up when the moment was right.
That moment came early in Trump’s second term. In April 2025, the U.S. president rolled out his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included some that amounted to a de facto embargo on China. Xi surprised Trump by being the only world leader to retaliate rather than conciliate. Trump was ultimately forced to fold.
In the run-up to the two leaders’ summit in Seoul last fall, Xi again surprised Trump’s team—this time by unfurling an expansive set of export controls on rare earth elements, which ultimately prompted the U.S. to roll back its own export controls on China. Beijing’s willingness to escalate was a remarkable departure from a previous pattern of downplaying differences ahead of such summits, and it underscored that Xi was more interested in curtailing Washington’s ability to target China than in striking a deal.
Accordingly, the meeting in Seoul, and Trump’s subsequent visit to Beijing in May, produced little beyond relatively minor commercial agreements affecting specific firms and sectors. The Trump administration, undoubtedly disappointed by the lack of any meaningful deal to emerge from these summits, chose to emphasize Trump’s efforts to deepen his rapport with Xi. The president evidently believes this personal relationship will allow him to secure deals that advance American interests.
This expectation has no observable foundation in Xi’s 14-year rule. Even by the standards of authoritarian rulers, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Xi has shown himself to be unsentimental about personal relationships—including those with members of his own inner circle, to say nothing of the leader of China’s principal geopolitical rival. Xi is very different from Putin in this regard. Whereas Putin takes extravagant risks on the international stage but is loath to hold his associates accountable for incompetence, Xi is just the opposite. He is calculating and measured in international politics but pitiless in jettisoning even longtime associates for perceived malfeasance.
In January, Xi dismissed his military’s top officer, General Zhang Youxia. The relationship between Xi and Zhang went back decades, extending not just to their childhoods but all the way back to their fathers, who were comrades in arms in China’s ferocious civil war. Four years ago, Xi deferred Zhang’s retirement, keeping him on board to help manage the world’s largest and second-most-capable military. We do not know what motivated Xi to oust Zhang, but given the history between the two men, the act was as brutal and unexpected as anything in a season finale of Game of Thrones.
Xi’s approach to Washington has been similarly dispassionate. During Trump’s visit to Beijing, the American president lavished praise on Xi, only for the Chinese leader to respond with stoic indifference.
Trump’s desire to parlay personal charisma into deals may be one of his least idiosyncratic qualities. In fact, there is something about the impulse that is quintessentially American. Even—perhaps especially—for a Beltway outsider, ascending the American political ladder requires a tremendous amount of glad-handing and personal magnetism, if not charm. Those who reach its pinnacle often assume that the same qualities will serve them on the international stage. Joe Biden rose through the Senate, which required cordiality and the ability to strike deals with rivals. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were known for their affability. Overbearing friendliness might even be described as our national affect.
By contrast, Xi grew up in a system that punished openness and personal dynamism. His father’s boss and mentor, the reformer Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 sparked the protests in Tiananmen Square, was known for his outspokenness, which played a crucial role in his political demise. Hu’s ouster extinguished freewheeling politicking from the ranks of China’s leadership ever after.
Going into his next encounter with Xi, Trump seems to genuinely believe that he has the upper hand. Yet an unsettling split screen has accompanied every summit of his second term. In Seoul, Xi walked into the meeting having just outlined the five-year plan for China’s development through 2030. By contrast, Trump was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In May, Xi hosted Trump for a meeting that Trump had earlier postponed because of the war in Iran, which was going badly. Xi now plans to follow his state visit to Washington with a major party meeting to lay the groundwork for his fourth five-year term, which will start next year. Trump, meanwhile, will be at best a lame-duck president within weeks of the summit—or worse, if the Democrats are able to take back the House or the Senate.
The contrast evident at these meetings with Trump has surely reinforced Xi’s view of the United States as a declining but dangerous power, and of China as an ascendant one. Xi believes that time is on his side, so he does not need a deal. He’s happy to perpetuate an uneasy stalemate through a pantomime of rapport with Trump. In the meantime, Xi is winding up for the fifth U.S presidential administration of his tenure, whatever it may bring.
This morning, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica broke the news that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson in May. Kremlev attended the wedding along with a large group of Russians whose presence, the journalists note, puzzled the other guests.
This news reveals an extraordinary development, the journalists note: “a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.”
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI official who worked in senior counterintelligence roles, told the reporters: “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
A spokesperson for Don Jr. told Edith Olmsted of The New Republic that Don and Kremlev met “a couple of years ago” and that Kremlev is a “personal friend,” “not someone he has a business relationship with.”
Bettina Trump posted to social media that Kremlev hadn’t actually attended their wedding but “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”
“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive,” she wrote. “Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.” The names of both Bettina Trump and Don Jr. were at the bottom of her statement.
Later in the day, news broke that the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security had released a report detailing how the now-closed detention camp in the Florida Everglades, offensively dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” violated the standards of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The report says the center failed in six categories: medical care, food service, personal hygiene, recreation, environmental health and safety, and special management units.
People were crammed into overcrowded cells they couldn’t leave as often as required, were allowed showers only three times a week, and had little access to medical care, lawyers, clean water, or safe food. Some people were locked in tiny individual metal cages with about 18 square feet of floor space for up to 2 hours, some of which were outdoors. The staff told those from the inspector general’s office that people asked to stay in the enclosures, which they called “calming areas” where detainees could “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress and practice self-directed behavior,” though the inspectors found “at least one instance” in which the cages “may have been used as a disciplinary tool.” The report says such confinement was “unprecedented” and “highly unconventional.” “Confining individuals in small metal enclosures for any reason presents significant risks to detainee health and well-being,” the inspector general wrote.
Gillian Brockell of The American Prospect suggested that the inspector general’s report “is likely part of a cover-up.” She noted that eight months ago, Amnesty International reported that the outdoor cages were too small for someone to stand up, that they had no awning, and that people were chained to them. The Amnesty International report also said time in the cages could be longer than two hours.
Then Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz reported in the New York Times on another whistleblower, this one alleging that in their zeal to find noncitizens on voter rolls, inspectors under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders may have broken state laws. The Department of Homeland Security launched the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” last month, deploying hundreds of agents to look through voter rolls to try to find evidence of voter fraud.
The whistleblower says inspectors have about twelve minutes per case to determine a voter’s citizenship status and voting history, and it appears they have been posing as those individual voters by using birth dates or partial Social Security numbers they gleaned from both internal and external sources to find wrongdoing. Some states require users to declare they are the individual voters whose records they are seeking.
Corasaniti and Aleaziz note that the office of the chief counsel at DHS defended the use of state databases in such a way, but also said that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”
Once the agents began reviewing individuals’ information, they created records of those they claimed were “unlawful voters,” despite the fact that officers were concerned about the quality of the databases they were using to make such a determination. DHS itself noted that the data was flawed, and warned that “there will be U.S. citizens in this population,” and has been opaque about how they compiled the database.
According to a letter written by Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Rules and Administration, and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate minority leader, to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph B. Edlow, the department’s training video says the database was compiled with “supplemental magic.”
Taken together, the administration’s continued flirtation with Vladimir Putin and his associates, its use of our tax dollars to imprison immigrants in substandard conditions, and its determination to rig the 2026 election add up to an attempt to establish an authoritarian government.
Aside from the public outrage over the day’s stories, there are other signs that the administration’s position is weakening. After the weekend’s warnings about AI, stocks in AI companies and companies that produce chips fell today. Not only are members of the Trump family heavily invested in AI-related industries, but also it seems administration officials are counting on extraordinary AI-fueled economic growth to address the growing U.S. deficit and debt that Trump has run up.
So Trump posted frantically on social media today. He began just after the stock market opened with a post pushing back on the warnings of AI leaders that AI development needs government regulation. “The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He complained: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
In a later post, he insisted that “The only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”
A third post said that the warnings about AI are all “a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2—and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.” AI and data centers, he wrote, will be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History—Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!”
He continued in a fourth post: “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.“
Today the Environmental Protection Agency said that to “unleash” American energy, it is getting rid of rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that use coal and natural gas. It also intends to prevent future administrations from making any such regulations.
With oil executives warning that the United States—and the world—is in a fuel crisis, energy is clearly on Trump’s mind. He tried to blame the spike in diesel prices not on his war on Iran, which has led to the closing of the two main arteries for tankers carrying oil out of the Middle East, but on Ukraine, which has been hitting Russian oil infrastructure to hobble the sale of oil that is enabling Russia to continue its invasion. “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran,” Trump posted.
Minutes later, he wrote that the “failing Nation of Iran wants to make a deal, quickly and badly. I will determine whether or not the U.S.A. will choose to engage—The concept of which we are open to.” Then he posted that he had “just received a Report that the United States is producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History. They are being delivered on a daily basis to our Forces in the Middle East, and beyond.”
And then, minutes later, he claimed that “Oil is flowing through the Hormuz Strait. The Countries of the World, which have been no help to us whatsoever, should, and will, reimburse the United States of America when this SCAM Confligration [sic] is all over. We are doing it much more for others, than we are for ourselves, and we have been for Generations!”
Then he posted: “I hope everyone realizes that price increases throughout America were caused by Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, not by ‘TRUMP.’”
Then, once again, he promised to give every American adult $5,000.
Tonight, over public dissents from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court refused to allow Trump to put into place his new orders for the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots. This means Trump’s attempt to stop the transmission of mail-in ballots will not be in effect for the 2026 midterm elections.
