Trump held a campaign rally tonight in Mobile, Alabama, the city where, as Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times recalled, his MAGA rallies really took off in August 2015, when more than 30,000 people showed up at a football stadium to hear the television personality turned presidential candidate.
Just two months before, on June 16, 2015, Trump had announced his campaign for the presidency. In his speech at Trump Tower, he tapped into the anger of those people who had been left behind economically since the 1970s, when U.S. companies began to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and automate factories, taking manufacturing jobs with them.
The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been in the service industries. Those were dominated at the top by men—and increasing numbers of women—with business or law degrees and at the bottom by jobs coded toward women and immigrants. At the same time, cuts to education and to the social safety net pushed upward mobility out of reach for families in towns and cities whose disappearing manufacturing base took everything else with it.
By 1994, Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, warned that the U.S. was “on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.” He explained: “Once unbottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society. Replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of…that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counter-culture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”
In 2015, in rhetoric mimicking the classic blueprint of rising dictators, Trump tapped into the anger of people who felt they had been dispossessed from their rightful place of importance in the country and tapped into the country’s racism and sexism as he told them to blame immigrants and Democratic politicians for their plight. And he promised he was the only person who could restore them to their former significance.
He devoted most of his speech to how other countries—China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia—were “killing us economically.” American workers had no protection from immigrants, he said, and they were being undercut by their inferiors. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Contrasting American workers with those immigrants, he claimed people “from all over South and Latin America, and…probably from the Middle East,” were taking American jobs.
Although the actual unemployment rate was 5.6%, he claimed it was “anywhere from 18 to 20 percent”—although he then upped it to 21%—and “the worst since 1978.” “A lot of people…can’t get jobs,” he said. “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs.
He sneered at the federal government, claiming “stupid” politicians had no idea how to negotiate and were wasting so much money that the national debt was close to $24 billion, a number he called “the point of no return…. That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable.”
He claimed the ACA, dubbed “Obamacare,” must be “replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it.” He promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, to “rebuild the country’s infrastructure,” and to get rid of the “horrible and laughable deal” with Iran, finding a better way to “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
He promised to bring back jobs, bring back the military, take care of veterans, and be a cheerleader for the country. He boasted he was worth more than $8 billion, promising that he could make the country as successful as he was. He promised to “Make America Great Again,” and in August 2015, more than 30,000 Alabamians turned out to see him at the start of what would be a rise to the presidency of the United States.
As journalist McCreesh reported, Trump’s return to Mobile tonight had a wistful feel. The stadium where he spoke was nowhere near the size of the football stadium of 2015, and even so, it was not full. McCreesh noted that some of the upper sections were almost entirely empty.
Trump is planning to travel to 17 states before the midterms to rally MAGA voters who might otherwise not turn out. “Can everybody just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot?” Trump asked the audience in Mobile.
That is no longer a selling point, even for many of those who embrace the administration’s racism and sexism.
An AP/NORC poll from September 24 showed that only 31% of Americans give Trump good marks for how he is handling the presidency. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that in September, rising prices turned a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents against Trump’s handling of the economy. The rising price of diesel has hit rural America particularly hard, and it was in rural America where Trump found his strongest support.
Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. added just 29,000 jobs last month, unemployment has risen to 4.2%, and wage growth has slowed. The bureau revised the job numbers for August and July downward, showing that July actually saw a loss of 10,000 jobs.
Trump is aware enough of his falling popularity that, according to Maggie Haberman, Hamed Aleaziz, Shane Goldmacher, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, he personally ordered Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought to come up with $20 million to run the new television ads praising him. The journalists report that Vought took the money from funding Congress had appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.
The Republican Senate Leadership Fund today stopped spending money to elect Michael Whatley to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina. The former chair of both the Republican Party of North Carolina and the Republican National Committee, placed in that role by Trump for the months that covered the 2024 election, Whatley is down by double digits in the polls against former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper.
They are shifting that money to Kansas, to shore up Republican senator Roger Marshall, recently mired in the revelations that his aggressive debt collection from 700 of his obstetric patients led to the arrests of 81 of them. Polls show Marshall’s Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a pastor who used to be a Republican, pulling ahead.
Two of the four living Republican governors of Kansas have endorsed Hamilton. Today, former governor Mike Hayden said he is backing Hamilton because “[g]overning should always center around the best interests of the people.” By supporting Trump’s tariffs and the war on Iran, which are destroying markets and driving prices so high that Kansas farmers are at risk of losing their farms, he said, Marshall “is failing to live up to that standard.”
And therein lies the crux of the crisis that is driving a seismic political change: it has become crystal clear that Trump never intended to address the real problems he identified. His tariffs, deep tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, extraordinary corruption, multiple vanity projects, and war on Iran are benefiting him, his family, and his cronies. At the same time, the Republicans are, at his direction, slashing the social welfare programs, medical funding, education, infrastructure, and healthcare that used to serve the American people.
Trump has taken to claiming that the country’s economy is booming, but that he and the Republicans have done a bad job of telling people. “All over the country, they’re building factories, plants—manufacturing’s coming back,” he told a crowd at a truck facility in Texas. “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.”
But as Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported today, people aren’t buying it. One three-time Trump voter in Ohio, who was one of 1,400 just laid off from a truck factory just days before Trump held a rally nearby, is now knocking on doors for Democrats. “Something has to change politically in this country,” he told Boak. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”
The old MAGA rhetoric isn’t working any more, and Democrats are taking over the space that Trump exploited.
On Thursday, campaigning in South Florida, Vice President J.D. Vance called Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Angie Nixon a “self-described socialist,” and said the right response was to tell her to “get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America.”
In response, journalist Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami suggested that people were “somewhat surprised that the vice president would actually say that based on your political views, you should get out of America if you’re not happy here.”
Nixon herself responded: “It’s very disrespectful. It’s really disheartening, especially knowing that I come from folks who helped build this country, and my grandparents were sharecroppers in southern Georgia. And all I want for people is to have access to quality healthcare, to have access to fully funded public schools, for people to have homes to live in, and not have to worry about living on the streets.
“There’s absolutely nothing radical or extreme about that,” she continued. “And I don’t consider myself a socialist. I consider myself a lifelong Democrat who puts people over party, people over politics, and people over profit.”
On Saturday, October 3, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.
The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.
The festival featured a “Freedom Village” where attendees could find ways to get involved in government, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and social impact organizations. Festival organizers donated a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to VoteRiders, a nonpartisan organization that works to overcome barriers to voting and make sure everyone who is eligible can vote.
Both in person and in the live stream of the concert, artists urged Americans to remember that they have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation.
The artists at the event pointedly demonstrated their right to free speech. They were explicit and thorough in their spoken descriptions of their anger at the Trump administration and billionaires who have taken over the country, and they chose songs that needled Trump—John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” for example—or excoriated his policies: Baez and Rateliff sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Springsteen sang “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the Dropkick Murphys’ sang “Don’t Call Me a F*cking Terrorist,” the last two both written in the wake of the Minneapolis shootings by ICE agents.
They emphasized their freedom to express themselves by singing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
The ten-hour concert ended with the performers singing Guthrie’s famous anthem “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940 as the Great Depression dragged on. Guthrie wrote it to reclaim the United States of America for its working people. “This land is your land,” he wrote, “this land is my land/From California to the New York islands/From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me.”
Tonight Morello sang a verse often left out of the anthem: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple/By the relief office, I saw my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”
Famously, Guthrie painted on his guitars the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan he took from the World War II machinists and workers who put stickers saying “This Machine Kills Fascists” on their heavy equipment to express their support for the war effort. Guthrie believed that music could fight the hatred, ignorance, and greed that built fascism just as powerfully as a gun.
Tonight Morello reminded the audience: “Every act of art is an act of resistance.”
Curiously, today’s concert took place on the anniversary of the day that Woody Guthrie died in 1967. And eighty-six years after he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” his work continues to echo.
“This is still America,” Springsteen told the audience of the administration’s tyranny, “and this will not stand.”
On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”
Congress established the Medicare Improvement Fund in 2008 to enable improvements to the program and periodically adjust payments to healthcare providers. A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.
Trump continued: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”
The fact that he is openly using taxpayer money to buy votes in the election suggests just how worried Trump is about Democrats winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.
He has reason to be worried. If Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress, they will not necessarily be able to pass legislation, since Trump will still be able to veto it. But they will be able to start investigations immediately, and they have made it so clear they intend to do so that the administration is already taking steps to trip them up.
In April the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president doesn’t have to comply with the Presidential Records Act, enacted to make sure presidents after Richard M. Nixon could not destroy their records; in May a federal judge said they did, in fact, have to follow the law. In August the Department of Justice issued a memo saying that the executive privilege that enables a president to protect his conversations with government advisors also covers any civilian to whom the president speaks “so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”
As Trump’s time in office stretches out, more and more stories of corruption are surfacing. As Aaron Parnas reported in Meidas News, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote a letter on September 30 to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel demanding they immediately release a document they are “illegally” concealing, and any others like it.
Wyden has been doggedly following the money trail connected to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, noting that his operations, including human trafficking and sexual abuse, depended on the banks whose officers looked the other way as Epstein’s finances repeatedly indicated he was engaged in criminal activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to give the Senate Finance Committee access to Treasury materials about those finances, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). When Wyden tried to get Congress to pass a law forcing the release of those files, Senate Republicans blocked it.
Now Wyden’s investigators have discovered that the FBI conducted an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, but the bureau did not release the transcript of the interview, known as a “302 report,” as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI “are withholding key documents from Congress and the public.”
“Furthermore,” he added, “the existence of this 302 indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” as they should have been under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.
Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.
While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.
According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.
Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.
Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.
If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.
Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.
It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.
The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.
In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”
According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.
One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.
Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”
Last night, on October 4, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the Caribbean, killing another four people it called “narco-terrorists.” This brings the number of strikes to more than 70, and the number of people killed in the strikes that began a year ago to more than 230 people.
The administration’s justification for the strikes has not been made public. It has claimed—without evidence—that the men on the boats were trafficking drugs, but such a charge would normally be handled by the legal system. The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice produced an opinion providing legal cover for the strikes, and some of the members of Congress who have seen it are alarmed.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) saw the memo in November and said: “If that opinion were to be adopted, it would not constrain any use of force anywhere in the world. I mean, it is broad enough to authorize just about anything.” In December the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued to gain access to the memo after the government denied their requests to see it under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
On September 21 a report from the United Nations concluded that the extrajudicial killings broke international law and may be crimes against humanity.
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice to show him the memo and let him know who else has seen it, in order to evaluate whether to release it to the public.
On October 1, John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has taken $52 million Congress appropriated for countries impacted by Russia’s war on Ukraine and rerouted it to right-wing governments in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru.
On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the U.S. could move U.S. military personnel from Europe to the Western Hemisphere, saying: “Well, we’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners, and because of the bold move the president made in Venezuela,” referring to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid in early January. “We have a whole new suite of options economically and militarily with partnerships.”
While the administration is billing its intervention in Latin America as a battle against drugs, the comparison to Venezuela, where Trump has claimed control over the country’s oil fields and says he has taken billions of dollars out, although there is no public acknowledgement of where that money has gone, is instructive.
On Sunday, Jan Crawford of CBS News published an interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which Alito said one of his first thoughts after he learned that a draft of his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had been leaked was that “this would endanger” the people on the court.
Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.
“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”
In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.
“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.”
These are the same story: the deliberate destruction of the post–World War II order those who had lived through the horrors of World Wars I and II put in place to prevent another world war.
Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries must not invade each other.
In April 1945, 850 delegates and their staff and advisors met in San Francisco, California, where they wrote, and adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
Trump and his loyalists reject this framework in favor of one favored by those like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, one that looks much like the world did before 193 nations signed onto the United Nations charter. In their worldview, strong nations exercise spheres of influence, taking political and economic control of neighboring nations.
Part of the post–World War II attempt to prevent future wars was an insistence that all human beings had certain rights and must be treated equally before the law. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provided a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, led the commission that wrote the UDHR, figuring out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.” They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to participate in government, either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
Under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. has abandoned the U.N. prohibition on violating the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as well as the human rights of the people in the small boats, not to mention migrants. As Alito’s statement that the right of women to have control over their healthcare was simply an abstract idea that didn’t have to be protected suggested, undermining the post–World War II order has been a long-term project.
In its place, Trump and his allies propose a dictatorship. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was jailed in the U.S. for money laundering but pardoned by Trump, worked with the Trump family to establish the crypto start-up World Liberty Financial, which put $799 million in Trump’s pocket last year. Zhao now lives in the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent interview with David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times, Zhao explained: “Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient. If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient. There’s very little debate going on. You don’t waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff.” It’s a model for which Trump repeatedly has expressed admiration.
In March 1941, eight months before the U.S. joined World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that “Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent—including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.”
“[T]hese men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order,” FDR said, but “it is not new and it is not order.” “[T]he rallying cry of the dictators, their boasting about a master-race, will prove to be pure stuff and nonsense,” he said. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”
“The world has no use for any Nation which, because of size or because of military might, asserts the right to goosestep to world power over the bodies of other Nations or other races,” he said. “We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood” and that “the men and women of such Nations, no matter what size, can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man’s security; improve the standards of healthful living; provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every Nation can increase its happiness, banish the terrors of war, and abandon man’s inhumanity to man.”
“Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worthwhile,” he concluded. “May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children’s children rise up and call us blessed.”
I can grumble all I like: it was the will of the voters.
Same problem in the USA. And in Brazil. And probably in France later this year.
Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.
Shortly after noon yesterday, he posted that it was “no longer the Strait of Hormuz” driving up gasoline prices, but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s refineries. In fact, some oil tankers have indeed been passing through the strait but, as Spencer Kimball of CNBC explains, “only due to a major U.S. military commitment and at a high cost to the lives of tanker crews.” That policy was already too expensive to sustain, and now increased strikes from Iran are threatening it altogether.
Then, clearly incensed at reports that people are not turning out for his rallies, he posted pictures to prove the arenas were full, but those pictures were carefully cropped to avoid the empty upper decks shown in news photographs. “I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!” he posted. “The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.” He added: “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”
Then he accused the New York Times of doctoring a picture of his Miami club, Trump National Doral, where he has announced he will hold this year’s Group of 20 (G20) summit of leaders from the world’s major advanced and emerging economies this December. His attempt to hold the G7 there in 2019 created an uproar even from Republicans about the blatant self-dealing.
There is less uproar now, leaving Trump free to complain that the New York Times “is a CROOKED outfit that caters to Lunatics who want to see our Country fail” and to warn that “Some day in the not too distant future The Times will be forced to close its dirty doors, and that will be a Great Day for America!” Next to the New York Times image that showed a dirty, yellowed building looking out at the elbows, Trump posted one showing it gleaming white with immaculate gardens.
A New York Times spokesperson told Alice Gibbs of Newsweek that the 2020 photo was not doctored. Gibbs noted that multiple photos from 2023 to 2026 show the same weathering shown in the New York Times photo. The founder of the Photography Ethics Center, Savannah Dodd, told Gibbs that the image Trump shared appeared to be a promotional photograph, and “[c]ommercial photography has different standards for accuracy, which are less stringent than journalistic standards.”
Then Trump posted a wild attack on Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, in an effort to boost his hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. Begging people to vote for her, he wrote: “For years my dear friend Lindsey would say that, ‘Darline is the finest, most reliable, and one of the smartest people I have ever known.’ He would then always add, ‘Also, the most loyal!’ Oftentimes I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”
Why is Trump suddenly interested in South Carolina? As William Kristol noted in The Bulwark today, new polls show that Andrews, a doctor who has refused to respond to what Kristol calls Trump’s revolting bigotry, is competitive against Graham, whose major qualification for the seat is that she is Graham’s sister.
Kristol notes that in response to Trump’s post, Andrews wrote: “As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina. And I’m going to work with anyone to put South Carolina first, because lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together. If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you.”
Then, once again, Trump promised: “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000.”
Then he acknowledged the bipartisan outcry over his using $20 million of taxpayer money to run ads boosting himself, writing: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money. This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
(This afternoon, Trump walked that back, telling reporters that “many presidents before” him had produced ads like the ones he’s been running that boosted himself, so “we’ll decide” if he should reimburse the American public for the cost of the ones he’s run. Tonight, the White House said he would not reimburse the American people, and his promise would only apply “moving forward.”)
Then, yesterday, he posted again about the Doral photo, saying “The New York Times DOCTORED the picture of the beautiful exterior facade of Doral, in Miami, trying to make it look as bad as possible. These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!”
With media stories noting that Republican candidates do not want to be seen with Trump, this morning he posted: “My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. The Fake News knows it, but they don’t want to be truthful with their viewers. It’s all happening! The Dumocrats never counted on this. Thanks you [sic] to the great Networks that are covering the Rallies in full. They are being rewarded with BIG RATINGS. Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’”
About an hour and a half later, he posted: “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”
That post was likely in light of the outrage today over his statement about oil prices at a rally in Nebraska last night:
“And again, remember, with the war it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city, let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. [crowd cheers] That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know? They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you, they need it. But it’s gonna end very soon….”
The outcry against a president suggesting a nuclear attack on U.S. cities has been rapid and profound. California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Newsom’s press office followed up with: “Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities. This is not normal. None of this is.”
Democratic San Diego mayor Todd Gloria posted: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder warned that Trump appears to be inviting a terrorist attack. “Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.” Snyder urged Americans to vote, organize, and be prepared to defend the results of the election.
Meanwhile, the administration appears to be pulling out all the stops to get MAGA voters to turn out. Sam Ogozalek of Politico reported today that the Federal Transit Authority is now saying it wants to steer grant money for local and state infrastructure to areas with higher-than-average birthrates and marriage rates. This plan reflects the administration’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that white Americans must increase their birthrates to prevent being replaced by people of color.
In an event in May, after Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said that “one in three Americans are under-babied,” Trump called himself “the father of fertility.” Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “Tying funding for transit projects to marriage rates and how many babies a woman has is the sort of bizarre and dystopian idea you’d expect in a TV show, not actual policy put forth by the U.S. government—yet here we are.”
Transportation consultant Peter Rogoff told Ogozalek: “It’s throwing a bone to these ideologues who want to incentivize child rearing and marriage, but it’s ludicrous on its face to try to achieve that goal through an infrastructure program. Does anyone really believe that there are couples out there saying, ‘Hey, sweetheart, you and I should get married and raise a passel of kids because a dozen years from now, maybe they’ll build light rail out to our neighborhood?’”
Wes Siler points out in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the administration has also promised major changes in hunting and fishing regulations, most of which can’t possibly happen, including Trump’s promise to create a “task force” to kill sharks and seals “to reduce the economic and ecological impact of shark depredation on the recreational angling sector.” Siler notes that this would require changes to existing laws and both national and international fisheries and endangered species agreements.
“SHARK FORCE would be a lot cooler if it was actually like a team of highly trained sharks sent to remove naval mines from the Strait of Hormuz,” Siler writes. But while removing apex predators might benefit anglers in the short term, the whole reason we have all those agreements in the first place is that we know destroying the food chain breaks ocean ecosystems.
Felicia Schwartz of MS NOW reported today that the Trump administration has not invited monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from observing the U.S. midterm elections. This will be the first time since 2002 that the U.S. has not welcomed these observers. Until now, the only two countries of the fifty-seven in the organization that refused such observation were Russia and Belarus. Now the U.S. joins them.
Dan Baer, who served as U.S. ambassador to the OSCE during the Obama administration, told Schwartz: “Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections. It’s very strange for the United States, which has been historically a standard setter in free and fair elections, to refuse observers.”
On Monday, election denier Tina Peters reportedly met with Trump at the White House. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported, Peters and voter suppression lawyer Cleta Mitchell have been pushing the idea that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can seize voting machines because they use some foreign-made parts. As Cohen notes, election experts are crystal clear that no law gives Lutnick that power.
This afternoon, at a rally in Maryland, Trump called out Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, saying: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right Russ? He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.”
On October 7, 2016, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. “I don’t even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab ‘em by the p***y. You can do anything.”
On October 7, 2021, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report of its investigation into Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”
On October 7, 2026, from the Oval Office, Trump told reporters: “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama. I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me twice, and I certainly even, to this moment, I have, I can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things. You just mentioned it. It was just mentioned in the form of a question, what they did, very illegal, what they did, many illegal things, but I view the presidency as a very sacred position.”
“I can do whatever I want, if I want.”
Ten years we’ve been at this.
I’m going to take an early night tonight. Will be back at it tomorrow.
