Meanwhile the farcical situation over the Drumcree march by Orangemen continues.
The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.
Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.
Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”
Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”
In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.
It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.
On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.
On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.
It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.
Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”
Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don’t think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”
“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.
“No,” Smith answered.
Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”
Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”
Smith said: “if this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.
Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”
Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.
“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.
Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.
After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”
So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”
Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.
“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”
As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….
“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”
Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”
“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.
“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.
“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”
In 1992, James Carville’s famous refrain — “It’s the economy, stupid” — compressed into four words what it might have taken a political scientist 400 words to explain: When family budgets feel tight, voters often go shopping for a new party to run things.
So as we approach the 2026 midterm elections, it’s hardly a unique insight for a pollster like me to say the election will hinge on the issues of our fragile economy and the high cost of living. Arguably, pocketbook issues led Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term: Poll after poll in 2024 showed the economy as the top issue and tended to show him with a significant advantage on who was more trusted to handle it.
Today, President Trump and Republicans haven’t merely lost that advantage; they’re underwater on the cost-of-living issue by an eight-point margin. And this year a second issue has been rising in my polling, ranking below the cost of living but ahead of other concerns. It’s not just the economy: “It’s the corruption,” too.
Voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and they think it’s being rigged more and more in favor of a precious few who are cozied up to our nation’s leaders. The combination of these two worries is putting Mr. Trump and Republicans in a terrible position on the eve of an election.
It’s also eating away at the winning brand that Mr. Trump cultivated over many years.
When Gallup asked Republicans back in 2016 what made Mr. Trump appealing, one in six alluded to his experience as a businessman. This was a product of his years in the public eye as a real estate mogul and as the star of “The Apprentice.” The top response? Mr. Trump was an “outsider.” A decade ago, that branding was understandable: He had never held elected office and was quite obviously not beloved by the G.O.P. establishment. His brand was so strong that in 2023, more than six years after he first took the oath of office, he was still considered an “outsider” by nearly seven in 10 Republicans.
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Some of his voters are wondering if that’s still true. Robert, one of the Trump-voting Texas swing voters in a recent Times Opinion focus group for which I was a moderator, put it this way: “You used to think that you could count on the Republicans to be able to help out with the economy.” Now, he said, it feels as if “it’s going to be the top class or the certain friends that are getting the benefit of the economy, not the general folks.”
In my own polling, nearly two-thirds of voters say “most politicians are corrupt or just looking out for their own interest.” To borrow a phrase Mr. Trump used to be particularly fond of, voters think there’s a swamp that needs a lot of draining. Republicans howled, rightly, when President Bill Clinton was alleged to have traded stays in the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions. They raised hell over Hunter Biden’s unseemly income streams during his father’s vice presidency.
For years, Mr. Trump got a lot of mileage out of his supporters thinking of him as a singular figure — a tycoon who put his glitzy life on hold in order to fix a broken Washington. Today, they see headlines about memecoin scams, inexplicable pardons and the enormous wealth that the president’s family and close associates are accumulating, and some of them are beginning to draw a different conclusion.
It would be one thing if Americans thought Mr. Trump were focused on fixing the economy and just hadn’t had enough time to deliver results. Sometimes voters give points for effort: In 2012, my research on young voters found that though they felt President Barack Obama’s economic record was lackluster, they still gave him credit for “trying.”
In January 2025, I asked voters what they hoped Mr. Trump would focus on in his second term, and they were clear that they wanted to see efforts to lower the cost of living and secure the border. By November 2025, more than seven in 10 said he had given a lot of attention to the latter, but only 43 percent said he had made reducing the cost of living one of his highest priorities. Today, that figure is down to four in 10, fewer than the number who think he has prioritized projects such as building a White House ballroom or renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Even among Republican voters, only six in 10 think he has made the cost of living a top priority.
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters grumble that he’s out chasing pet projects and feeding his ego, busy renaming buildings and bodies of water. As Pam, another of my focus-group participants, put it: “Those things to me are a waste, instead of spending time on what’s going on here in the U.S. and the fact that people are struggling.”
On its own, an economy that feels like it is leaving people behind would be a political problem for any incumbent. But add to it the gold leaf and vanity projects, and you wind up with a politically perilous one-two punch.
Some of the people who’ve believed in Mr. Trump over the past decade seem to be coming to the conclusion that the outsider businessman they voted for is just another typical politician. And while there are surely plenty of disillusioned Trump voters who wouldn’t dare cast a ballot for a Democrat, there’s no guarantee that they’ll bother to turn out on Election Day if they feel their own side is behaving poorly. Come November, that’s a slice of their coalition that Republicans can’t afford to lose.
You're welcome to the Orangemen, please take them, they're a bunch of arseholes.
A Washington Post headline today read: “U.S. withdraws forces in Iraq as balance of power shifts to Iran.”
Journalists Mustafa Salim and Alex Horton explained: After more than two decades, the deaths of more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 U.S. troops, the wounding of more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel, and the cost of more than $2.8 trillion, the last of the U.S. military forces in Iraq today pulled out of Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq.
In December 2021 the military announced it was ending U.S. combat in Iraq, leaving about 2,500 troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces. In 2023 the Iraqi government called for complete U.S. withdrawal, and former President Joe Biden and former Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani agreed to a withdrawal plan in 2024, but Iraq allowed a small contingent of advisors to remain after that deadline when the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria led to concerns that the confusion in Syria would allow militant Islamic groups to regain a foothold there.
At the time Biden agreed to withdraw from Iraq, Iran appeared to be on the ropes, with its regime isolated from neighboring countries and laboring under sanctions and increasing public unrest. Now, as Salim and Horton note, Trump’s impulsive war on Iran has strengthened Iran’s hand in the region.
The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years before, although Iraq was not involved in that attack.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of foreign policy hawks known as “neocons” were frustrated that Democratic President Bill Clinton was not pushing American ideology overseas as hard as they thought he should. In 1997, political commentator William Kristol brought together Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neocons to insist that the United States should significantly increase defense spending and lead the world.
Believing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was destabilizing the Middle East, they saw removing him from power as key to their “Project for the New American Century.” Iraq had allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and neocons believed the U.S. must “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.”
Saddam was out of reach until September 11, 2001, when neocons saw al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. as an opportunity to “hit” Saddam Hussein, although he had not been involved in the attack. The terrorists—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—were operating out of Afghanistan, where the ruling extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, permitted al-Qaeda to have a foothold.
Although Saddam was not affiliated with the 9/11 attackers, officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed so hard on the idea that the terrorists were affiliated with Iraq that many Americans—especially those who watched the Fox News Channel, which pushed the connection—came to believe, incorrectly, that the 9/11 terrorists either were Iraqi or were
working with Saddam Hussein.
Bush launched attacks on the Taliban government, successfully overthrowing it before the end of 2001. And then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America’s image. In 2002 it announced the Bush Doctrine, arguing that the new conditions of terrorism required the government to act preemptively to forestall hostile acts rather than wait for an attack.
It embraced the idea that there was “right and wrong” in foreign affairs and demanded that America wage “a war of ideas” by spreading pro-American economic and cultural policies. It warned that there were few greater threats to America than a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), meaning nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
To convince recalcitrant foreign policy realists that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, Bush administration officials warned that the dictator was amassing WMDs, including nuclear devices. In a television interview, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and insisted that Saddam was working to obtain a nuclear weapon.
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke passionately before the United Nations, providing what he insisted was evidence that Saddam had chemical WMDs and had obtained the resources to create nuclear weapons. He hinted that the Iraqi leader had worked with al-Qaeda in 2001 or that he might in the future.
Powell was well known and trusted; if he said Iraq was deadly dangerous, people thought it must be true. It later turned out that Powell had not personally vetted the “evidence” he presented and that it was almost entirely either discredited or made up of rumor.
But his speech did the trick. Enough countries to call it a “coalition of the willing”—although the only major power that participated was the United Kingdom—backed an invasion of Iraq. On March 20, 2003, American troops invaded Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government. The operation would be a “cakewalk,” the administration thought; desperate Iraqis who hated their leader would welcome coalition forces with open arms. Like cowboy heroes—and often portrayed as cowboys—American soldiers would bring democracy and capitalism to the benighted Iraqis.
Saddam’s forces crumbled in little over a month. By May the United States had set up a transitional government in Iraq overseen by former ambassador and State Department official L. Paul Bremer.
On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a fixed-wing aircraft on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a flight suit, he posed for photographs with the vessel’s crew, which had just returned from the Persian Gulf. Bush then gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Festooning the aircraft carrier was a giant banner emblazoned “Mission Accomplished.”
But, of course, it wasn’t.
Today on social media, Trump took credit to himself for ending the U.S. engagement in Iraq—although he confused the names of two different Iraqi operations—complaining that it was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.”
And yet the United States is entering its eighth month of a war on Iran that Trump apparently began with the same cowboy mentality Bush carried into the war in Iraq.
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He announced he had transformed the military by enforcing the idea of “[n]o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”
John Hudson of the Washington Post reported this evening that the Trump administration is openly defying Congress, taking $52 million in military assistance lawmakers appropriated for European and Middle Eastern countries hurt by Russia’s war on Ukraine and diverting it to right-wing governments in Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.
When the State Department notified Congress last month that it intended to make the switch, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) put a hold on the funds. Late yesterday, the administration told Congress it is defying the hold and moving ahead. Shaheen and Meeks objected, warning the White House that Congress had provided the money for a specific purpose and that “[t]he Executive Branch does not have unlimited discretion to redirect these funds toward unrelated Administration policy priorities or countries.”
The State Department told Hudson that Trump is prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and that the money would be better spent in Latin America than where Congress wanted it.
The U.S. Constitution is clear that only Congress can appropriate money and that the president must execute the laws as Congress passes them, but the Trump administration has been aggressive about its intention to take control of the power of the purse from Congress. Yesterday Tarini Parti, Marianne LeVine, and Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration appears to have taken $20 million from the funds Congress appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security to pay for the ads boosting Trump before the midterms.
That destruction of the fundamental separation of powers at the heart of our government has gotten very little pushback from Republican lawmakers. And senators left Washington, D.C., today for a recess until after the midterms; the House is already in recess.
The White House has made very little secret of its determination to abandon the international order the U.S. helped to put into place after World War II. In its place, Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appear to embrace the idea that major powers should exercise influence over the countries around them, as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, believes.
Yesterday Paul McLeary, Stefanie Bolzen, and Jack Detsch of Politico reported that the Trump administration had not invited the United Kingdom, France, the Baltic countries, or other U.S. allies to a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members next month in Poland. The meeting is being directed by Defense Department policy chief Elbridge Colby and is designed to discuss NATO’s future. The exclusion of traditional U.S. allies has raised concerns that the U.S. is continuing to try to splinter NATO according to those Trump considers loyal and those whose actions he dislikes.
Earlier this week, Putin warned NATO that he might use nuclear weapons against NATO countries. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said Putin’s threats are a sign of his “desperation” over the Ukraine invasion and that Europe expects Russia to launch “severe” hybrid attacks: sabotage, cyberattacks, and destabilizing disinformation. Should such attacks come, Merz said, “we would respond quickly and very clearly.”
The fact that the United States Constitution and foreign affairs appear to be at the mercy of one man and the loyalists he has around him undermines the principles at the heart of our democracy. The fact that that one man’s mental acuity has collapsed is an immediate calamity.
Time magazine today released a “lightly edited” transcript of an interview their senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs conducted with Trump at the White House on September 28.
The interview reveals a man unable to answer questions coherently, obsessed with his architectural projects, consumed by his own fantasy of himself, and angry at the media that he feels mistreats him. He does not appear to be a well man.
He complained bitterly that the three Supreme Court justices he appointed “voted against me too often,” and suggested he expects “loyalty” from them. Asked about the national debt, which just passed $40 trillion, he blamed Biden for it, although Trump by himself has added $11 trillion to the debt in his time in office. He insisted he will change the name of artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” Once again, he claimed that the economic growth created by AI will pay off the debt.
Trump refused to rule out using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, demolishing the Kennedy Center, or “annihilating” Iran. He talked about designating the Oval Office a national landmark so no one can alter the changes he’s made to it, covering it in gold frippery.
Despite having hit new lows in his job approval ratings, he claimed: “I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.”
“I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”
“Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one f*cking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recommended “people read this to get a sense of the president’s grave cognitive impairment.”
Trump’s inability to tell the difference between his fantasies and reality was on display Wednesday when, as Timothy W. Martin and Gavin Bade of the Wall Street Journal explained, Trump announced that the South Korean government had agreed to invest $50 billion in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline in Alaska. With him was Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK), whose seat is in danger from Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. “This one is huge for Alaska,” Sullivan said, and his office later celebrated the “historic $54 billion Korean investment” into Alaska’s LNG pipeline.
In fact, the Commerce Department and South Korea’s Industry Ministry had simply agreed to “commence working” on such a project. The South Korean government disagreed with Trump’s statement. “Putting out figures, or using definitive language, goes far beyond what was agreed,” South Korea’s industry minister, Kim Jung-kwan said. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, took to social media to emphasize that the plan will proceed only if it turns out to be financially viable and meets legal requirements in South Korea.
Trump on Monday announced a deal to build a $15 billion steel plant in Lee County, Iowa. As Stephanie Kaloi of Mediaite reported, at the announcement, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told him the plant came from “your 232 tariffs, the steel tariffs at work.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the plant is the “Trump reindustrialization of America hitting the ground at a series scale.” Lutnick said: “I think this deal is done. This deal is done. They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal. You guys know that already.” To that, Trump added: “They’ve already started building.”
But when Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, Iowa, went to look, he found no major property purchases tied to the project this year. “Company officials say they don’t have details about its plans, and no permits have been filed. The financial side isn’t settled, either,” he said. “The Iowa legislature will meet Friday in a special session to debate incentives for the company to build in Iowa. Meanwhile, Trump and lawmakers still haven’t disclosed exactly where in Lee County the plant would go. For residents here, that’s left more questions than answers about a project the White House is calling ‘a sure thing.’”
This afternoon, as he set off for Denton, Texas, before a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Trump told reporters about Iran: “Now I have to make a decision. They’ll either sign a very fair deal, or they won’t exist any longer.” In Texas he told the crowd the U.S. would “win very easily…right after the election.”
Although the outrageous chaos of the Trump years has numbed us, it is not acceptable for the president of the United States to threaten another nation with annihilation.
Lara Seligman and Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the United States will send a third aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt will join the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington, adding 9,000–10,000 troops to the more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.
The Roosevelt left San Diego on Sunday, while a group of three amphibious ships and Marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit left Monday. They will arrive at their destination by the end of November.
Meanwhile, here at home, Judge Todd E. Edelman today dismissed the government’s case against David Hearn with prejudice, meaning it cannot be resurrected. Hearn is the Olympian the government accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, although the contractors themselves acknowledged they were responsible for its torn lining. After the government acknowledged that there was no merit in its prosecution of Hearn, Trump continued to insist Hearn should be prosecuted.
“Because the government’s legitimate interest in maintaining the possibility of a future prosecution seems so marginal, and because of the extraordinary possibility that Mr. Hearn will nonetheless face a meritless, politically motivated prosecution,” the judge said, the court must protect him from uncertainty “and from what, objectively, would be harassment” from his own government.
Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss the most pressing issue of the 2026 campaign: transgender athletes. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.
With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”
Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”
But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.
The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.”
The ad exists because Republicans believe that its message will boost turnout among the base—just like it did in 2024—and help Ken Paxton beat Talarico in Texas. “We’ve done the polling to measure the voting impact that these issues have on voters, and they’re still at a good level,” Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a social-conservative advocacy group, told me. Sure, the economy should be a stronger issue for the GOP, he said. But voters “despise the Democrats’ culture-war agenda. Period.” (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)
The president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”
Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. As a state legislator, Talarico was outspoken about transgender rights and inclusion; he voted against a bill banning certain gender-reassignment procedures for children and another banning transgender girls from K–12 girls’ sports. He once declared that parents who deny their child’s gender identity are “abusive.” Now, though, the seminarian turned Senate candidate sounds different. Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.” Talarico has dismissed some of his previous comments on the subject as “cringey.”
Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. That was once the customary advice from Democratic-consultant types, who believed that ignoring anti-trans attacks was safer than calling more attention to them. This is no longer best practice, Erickson, from Third Way, told me. The last election proved that “silence is deadly,” she said, noting that her group’s research shows that, unanswered, anti-trans attacks can seriously damage a Democratic candidate.
In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.
Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids. One of Erickson’s favorite responses comes from Lindsay James, an Iowa Democratic House candidate, who in 2022 voted against a bill banning biological boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. “We need to protect kids, and we need common-sense rules to keep sports fair for boys and for girls,” James, who is running in a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024, says in a new ad. “Parents know what’s best for our kids. Washington needs to stay out of it.”
The problem with Talarico’s and James’s answers is that they’re not very specific. Any journalist or curious voter would have plenty of follow-ups: When, for example, might an activity risk “safety or fairness”? What would fairness look like, and who would make the rules? Perhaps this is why other Democratic candidates are choosing to go off-script. Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.
The desire to be straightforward has some Democrats sounding, well, a lot more like the Republicans in Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton, who is running for governor, told the Toledo-based newspaper The Blade, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Rob Sand, running for governor in Iowa, has repeatedly said that “girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys.”
Some Democrats have praised these candidates for their candor. Sand “has taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left Searchlight Institute, told me in August. But their answers are not without political risk. Erickson, from Third Way, does not see Sand’s or Acton’s rhetoric on this issue as particularly helpful, mainly because calling transgender girls “boys” is misgendering them. “That is going to piss people off,” she said. She’s right.
After Acton’s comments to The Blade, LGBTQ advocates in Ohio set up a virtual meeting with her campaign, hoping to communicate their concerns. The Democrat’s comments about “boys playing in girls’ sports” were functionally “misgendering every single trans person in the state of Ohio,” and they amounted to “trans erasure,” Arienne Childrey, a state-House candidate and the vice chair of the Ohio Democratic Party’s Pride Caucus, told me.
But when the advocates logged on to the virtual call, they learned that Acton wouldn’t be joining and had instead sent campaign staff in her place. Things got worse. Childrey said that she was denied entry into the meeting, despite her role on the Pride Caucus, and when another activist pressed to get Childrey included, that person was ejected from the Zoom call. The discussion that followed was one-sided, another attendee told me. Acton’s campaign staff did not respond to any of their questions, this person said, and offered no reassurances for trans Ohioans on behalf of their boss. (The Acton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
A few weeks later, another Ohio Democrat, Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose race for reelection will be one of the most competitive in the country, confirmed Childrey’s fears by sounding, well, a little bit MAGA in a new campaign ad. “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports,” Kaptur said.
Activists view the whole situation as an alarming shift among Democrats—one that portends worse to come. “Targeting trans people isn’t the winning strategy some people think it is,” Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ-advocacy group, told me in a statement. Childrey said that “the triangulation thought process is that we have to throw trans rights under the bus” to win elections: “We’re leaning in a direction that loses the heart and soul of what it means to be a Democrat.” In an online interview with a transgender political commentator last week, Childrey implied that she wouldn’t be voting for Acton in November, saying that activists need to show Democrats nationwide “that transphobia will not be a successful selling point.” The big risk, she explained, is that in 2028, “you’re going to have the choice between a transphobic Republican and a transphobic Democrat for president.”
Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.
