On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres (4,860 square kilometers) and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles (8.6 square kilometers) of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.
The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.
The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.
The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Peshtigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.
It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when U.S. bonds were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.
Republicans, horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”
Also in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed states into five military districts and required new state constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. For the first time in history, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to those conventions.
When former Confederates preferred to live under military rule rather than share political power with their Black neighbors, Congress amended the Military Reconstruction Act to permit the military to enroll voters. In 1868, Congress passed and then states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting the right of all citizens to the equal protection of the laws. In 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting Black male voting. And then, when white reactionaries organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Black men and white Republicans from voting for the constitutions the conventions had written, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members and protect Black rights in the South.
Attacks on Black political rights on grounds of race were now unconstitutional, and the federal government seemed prepared to back that principle up with the law. So reactionary southerners took a new tack.
Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the global cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.
When South Carolina voters put into office a majority-Black legislature, white South Carolinians railed against the Black voters “plundering” taxpayers. One observer commented that “a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States.” Democrats organized a “Tax-Payers’ Convention” to protest new taxes levied by the legislature.
While Republicans were unwilling to bow to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence against their Black colleagues on racial grounds, this attack had legs, thanks, in part, to events in Europe.
For two months in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. American newspapers portrayed the Communards as a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who brought to life a chaotic world in which workers had taken over the government with a plan to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to workers.
Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the Boston Evening Transcript charged. The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”
Turning first against Black southerners, Republican newspapers began to claim that African Americans were radical levelers. They were “ignorant, superstitious, semi-barbarians” who were “extremely indolent, and will make no exertion beyond what is necessary to obtain food enough to satisfy their hunger.” To these lazy louts, Republicans had given the vote, which gave them “absolute political supremacy.” They elected to office leaders who promised to confiscate wealth through taxation and give it to Black citizens in the form of roads, schools, and hospitals. “The most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “[are] taxed and swindled by a horde of rascally foreign adventurers, and by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”
After the Paris Commune, Republicans began to sweep white workers into this equation as well, taking the lead of former Confederates. An article in the New York Daily Tribune quoted Georgia Democrat Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, who explicitly compared formerly enslaved people to the Paris Communards. He called for a property requirement for voting, without which “the lower classes…the dangerous, irresponsible element,” would control the government and “attack the interests of the landed proprietors.” According to Toombs: “Only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”
When Chicago went up in flames in October 1871, some Americans blamed the Great Fire on “communists” or “socialists” eager to take over the country. Even those unconvinced a deadly fire in a wooden city was part of a deliberate plot blamed the fire on stupid immigrant workers careless about fire. They blamed “Mrs. O’Leary and her cow,” claiming the animal had kicked over a lantern near straw, and even children knew not to put fire near straw.
The Great Chicago Fire spoke to politics as the rural Peshtigo Fire did not. It fanned the flames of fear that workers were trying to destroy America. Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace wrote, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”
And for those determined to make sure workers didn’t have a powerful voice in American society, the Great Chicago Fire could be framed as an illustration of precisely that.
Gulf state officials say they are prepared for Hurricane Isaias, but the storm could be the first major test of Fema’s ability to deploy a large surge workforce after the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts and restructuring of the agency, emergency management experts say.
The Trump administration has said it wants to eliminate, or drastically downsize, Fema, putting more burden on states. More than 4,300 employees left the agency in fiscal year 2025, about 17% of the workforce, according to a recent US government accountability office (GAO) report. The agency’s staffing reductions were not carried out systematically to ensure Fema could still meet its statutory obligations, said Chris Currie, director of homeland security and justice at the GAO.
“It’s not whether Fema is going to respond. They’re going to respond. It’s more about the depth,” Currie said.
I am eagerly awaiting Trump’s reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize ... ....
Late Wednesday afternoon, Dana Mattioli, Drew Hinshaw, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal reported on the tawdry grifting of Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. and now Trump’s ambassador to Greece. Panicked about how much money she owed on her American Express credit card, Guilfoyle reached out to Eric Deters, who wanted the administration’s help with tax and legal issues. Deters had promised Guilfoyle as much as a million dollars if she was successful in getting him the help he wanted.
With her confirmation hearing for the ambassador post coming up, Guilfoyle begged Deters to pay $100,000 to American Express. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on the secure messaging app Signal, the Wall Street Journal reporters explained. “Please.” She reiterated over text: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” “Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work,” Deters wrote. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce.”
In their months of correspondence, Guilfoyle often complained that he was not being careful enough. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” She wrote: “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.” And later: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”
Looking back today at stories of corruption involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and so on, Chris Hayes of MS NOW explained that Trump’s inner circle “works a lot like a crime family…. [E]veryone gets their fiefdoms. They can get their beaks wet. But they’ve always got to make sure they’re giving the boss his due.”
On Tuesday, Samantha Subin of CNBC reported that just days after Palmer Luckey joined the Pentagon’s new Project Meridian, set up to report on the military’s future needs, the company Luckey co-founded—Anduril—landed a $2.9 billion contract with the U.S. Navy. And today, Reuters reported that Kalshi is investigating suspicious trades having to do with Trump’s selection of Katie Zacharia as the new White House press secretary.
Americans don’t like corruption, and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans, Trump has launched an all-out offensive to solidify his base. That offensive includes spinning the Iran War, calling for a public execution, attacking immigrants both rhetorically and in real life, and shifting the United States against the defense of international law and allying with authoritarian governments.
On Wednesday, October 7, Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz hit the highest level since the war on Iran began. Shortly after noon yesterday, October 8, Trump tried to spin the situation there to make it sound like he was in control. He posted that “Iran is in a very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily,” that the U.S. blockade is still in effect, that oil is flowing “in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait,” and that the administration is having “productive discussions” with Iran. He added: “[W]e will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd. IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”
In an interview with far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appealed to the MAGA religious base with a promise that the execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass shooter who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be public. An active Army officer when he committed the murders, Hasan was court-martialed and sentenced to death.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted that a livestream of the execution would be a rallying cry for terrorists.
The backlash against Hegseth’s plan has been swift and bipartisan.
Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), who served as a paratrooper and Army Ranger and is now on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, said: “Pete Hegseth has taken our military’s tradition of selfless service and flipped it on its head. With this public execution, he is degrading the culture of our military and turning a culture of service into one of vengeance and spectacle, performed for cameras and attention on social media. The Fort Hood shooter’s actions were horrific. Responding to it by livestreaming a violent execution is not an answer. A public execution only gives our adversaries fodder for anti-American propaganda that makes us less safe. Pete Hegseth’s self-absorbed hunger for power, attention, and violence is disgusting and beneath the office he holds. He is not fit to lead.”
The idea was “beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) wrote. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Trump then tried to rile up his supporters by turning them against an invented “enemy,” a tactic that is Authoritarianism 101. On Wednesday the FBI said it had prevented an attack on Minnesota’s Mall of America by a teenaged American-born U.S. citizen of Somalian descent whom they had been monitoring since December 2024 and to whom an FBI agent sold the assault rifle and ammunition for the attack.
At 4:30 on the afternoon of October 8, Trump wrote: “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue. Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help—and leave the rest to us!”
Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly referred to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complained that Democrats were not “rounding them up and putting them in jail.”
On Thursday, October 8, Priscilla Alvarez and Michael Williams of CNN reported that on Tuesday, the leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) verbally told agents across the country to ramp up their arrests by another 1,000 people a day, bringing arrests back to 3,000 daily.
On Thursday afternoon, as ICE agents in New York City surrounded a Dominican man and his five-year-old son in a car, one of the agents fired several shots. It is not clear how badly injured Oscar Belgal is; he was shot in the neck, treated at a hospital, and then moved to an ICE facility outside of New York. His son was not hit by a bullet. New Yorkers immediately began to protest, calling for an end to ICE. New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, both Democrats, have demanded ICE stop operations in the state. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused. “No, we’re not putting a pause on enforcement,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’re not. In fact, I’m not sorry.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South-African-born jurist and former chief of human rights at the United Nations. There she led a U.N. commission that concluded Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians. She is currently a judge at the International Court of Justice. The committee’s message with their choice seemed pointed: Pillay has promoted peace through her protection of international law, they said, and the committee chair said the award was “a message to those who are attacking” international law. The committee said Pillay was “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted that the “Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” calling Pillay “a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”
Hours after the prize announcement, Humeyra Pamuk, Steve Holland, and Anthony Deutsch of Reuters reported that Trump’s administration was imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on judges and prosecutors before; now it is sanctioning companies that provide services to the court itself.
The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Netanyahu, as well as Russian officials including Vladimir Putin. Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.”
Sanctioning the ICC sets the U.S. against its allies in Europe, who are increasingly worried about hybrid attacks from Russia, attacks that avoid direct war while destabilizing another country, methods like cyberwarfare or disinformation. Today, after ten years of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, Trump openly allied the United States with Russia against Ukraine.
Three weeks ago, by large bipartisan votes, Congress passed new sanctions against Russia and countries that were continuing to use Russian oil and gas and gave Trump sweeping powers to expand those sanctions. At the time, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said: “This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. It will ensure America’s adversaries, not only Russia, but also China and Iran, suffer for their coordinated campaign of aggression.”
But today, Trump used the law for the opposite of what Congress apparently intended: “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”
The Treasury Department promptly announced it was issuing a temporary license to permit Russian diesel to sell on the global market. The sales will likely do little for U.S. oil prices, but they will funnel money to Russia for its war on Ukraine.
Trump’s smash-and-grab suggests concern he will lose the midterms. The latest poll from the Pew Research Center shows that 68% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency. Cook Political Report has moved 18 more House ratings toward the Democrats. Myah Ward of Politico reported that 26% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 think the Republican Party should break with Trump in order to win in November. In Kansas on Wednesday, more than 100 prominent Republicans launched a coalition called “Republicans for Hamilton” to back Democrat Adam Hamilton for the U.S. Senate. Their announcement referred to “a growing network of everyday Republican voters…who are ready for change.”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who conducts focus groups with voters, says Trump’s campaign ads boosting himself have backfired: people hate them. They object to using taxpayer money for them by a margin of 86 to 9. Furthermore, Longwell finds that Trump 2024 voters in Florida whom Trump needs to energize for this election, really hate them—the word Longwell used is “revulsion.” One said: “We need to get rid of all these people. Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next ten years, it’s probably best to wash these people out, you know, so you can get cleaned—clean slate.”
So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Asked today by a reporter about concerns that his dropping of sanctions against Russian oil yesterday would funnel money to Putin’s war on Ukraine, Trump blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for prolonging the war:
“Zelensky could have settled this war many times. Many, many times,” Trump said, “And he chooses not to.” Trump blamed Zelensky for the high cost of diesel because Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries, although since Russian oil was sanctioned, the actual chokepoint for diesel prices is the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed because of Trump’s war on Iran.
Trump accused Zelensky of wanting “to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Ukrainians have hit Russian oil refineries to stop the flow of money into Russia as it evades sanctions and sells oil through its so-called shadow fleet. Russia, in contrast, has been striking civilian targets in violation of the laws of war.
Trump continued with a warning to Zelensky, saying “he’d better damn well stop.”
Ukraine continues to fight against Russia because Russia has invaded Ukraine and is trying to occupy Ukraine’s eastern industrial area in violation of the United Nations charter that vows no country will use threats or force against another’s territorial integrity. Until Trump took office, the United States was the key guarantor of this principle.
The U.S. has stood against Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine not only because of the principle of territorial sovereignty, but also because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.
Then Russian leader Vladimir Putin worked to bring Ukraine under the sway of the Russian oligarchs who rose to replace the region’s communist leaders, monopolizing formerly publicly held industries as those industries were privatized. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered in 2004 after calling attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In that same year, a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to be elected president of Ukraine. But the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on an American political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. Then, in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. He fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the United States and in its territories. These sanctions hurt Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs, including Putin.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin, especially Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort was happy to step in to help. He did not take a salary. He began as an advisor in March 2016 and became the campaign chairman in late June, after meeting on June 9 with Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian operatives.
It turned out that Russia was looking for a way to grab the Ukrainian land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the exact opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Kilimnik further suggested that Manafort “could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals,” and that “once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Trump could not make it happen during his first term, although his operatives spent a great deal of time messing around in Ukraine and trying to smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden from there, and after Biden took office, Putin invaded Ukraine again in 2022.
As Jim Rutenberg wrote in his coverage of the Mariupol Plan in the New York Times Magazine, once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
Biden pulled together countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), along with other allies and partners, to stop Russia’s attack and to support Ukraine’s heroic efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Russia’s troops, meanwhile, have committed atrocities and are attacking civilians. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted several Russian officials and commanders, including Putin himself, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But once Trump was back in office in 2025, he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants.
After the ICC indictment, Trump welcomed Putin to American soil in Alaska in August 2025, ordering U.S. soldiers to roll out a red carpet for him, and he has invited Putin to a gathering of the Group of 20 nations with advanced economies at Mar-a-Lago in December. Yesterday, the U.S. announced sanctions on the ICC itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to take the organization apart “brick by brick.”
Meanwhile, Putin has behaved like someone who has a strong hand over Trump. In August 2025, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up at the Alaska meeting wearing a sweatshirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” which translates to USSR, suggesting that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.
On Friday, despite the fact that Russia is backing Iran, whose military is killing U.S. soldiers, Trump proudly announced he was removing sanctions to let Russia sell its oil on global markets. Ukrainian attacks have curtailed Russian production, so the amount it has available to help the diesel squeeze in the U.S. is negligible, but the ability to rake in cash as the world’s current oil shortage has driven up prices is invaluable to Putin for his desperate war effort.
Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.
As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.
But at this point, how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?
A candidate for police chief in a small Louisiana town candidate is on course to be elected unopposed despite two charges of child rape pending against him, leaving his community to weigh whether to convert the position into an appointed office rather than one determined at the ballot box.
Christopher Paul, a Republican who on 6 August signed up to run for chief of police in the south-western Louisiana village of Elizabeth, was arrested on 8 September on allegations that he raped two girls in 2005 and 2006.
child rape
a Republican
Billionaire Elon Musk has already funneled at least $366 million into the midterms to try to make sure voters elect Republicans. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk has put more than $276 million of that money into groups and political action committees just since July. More than $76 million has gone into his own super PAC, which is focused on seven Senate seats in battleground states, and more than thirty House races.
Schleifer notes that this is just the money that law requires must be disclosed; sources told Schleifer that in both this election and in 2024, Musk has made seven-figure donations to candidates through so-called “dark money” groups: ones that aren’t required to disclose their donors.
Adam Wren, Meredith Lee Hill, and Will Steakin of Politico report that Trump’s super PAC, “MAGA Inc.,” is coordinating with other super PACs to try to salvage the Republicans’ control of the Senate. The Republican Senate Leadership Fund has poured close to $100 million into Ohio alone to defeat former senator Sherrod Brown and is expecting to dump close to $200 million into Texas to defeat James Talarico. It’s also throwing money at Iowa to defeat Josh Turek, at Alaska to defeat Mary Peltola, at Michigan to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, and even at Kansas, to defeat Adam Hamilton.
Among other projects, Musk’s money is producing literature accusing Democrats of being radicals.
And yet the real radicalism in American politics today comes from those like Musk, those on the right who are consolidating the power of the government and the money of the American people into their own hands: Musk’s businesses depend on government contracts, after all, contracts a Democratic-run Congress would likely revisit.
That right-wing radicalism was on full display this morning, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security conducted a predawn raid on the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN). According to the Fox News Channel, which appears to have been read into the raid ahead of time, the Justice Department claimed that the search “stems from a criminal fraud investigation” over immigration paperwork filled out by her late father in the 1990s when Omar was a child.
Not only is it unlikely that evidence of a potential crime committed when the congresswoman was a child would be in her Washington, D.C., residence decades later, but also, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted: “To state what’s obvious to prosecutors here, we are within the period before an election where [the Department of Justice] doesn’t take overt steps in an investigation that might influence its outcome. Another hard norm out the window.” More to the point was the comment by Mark Jacob of Stop the Presses, who noted: “This search was conducted by the Homeland Security Department, where lying and harassment are routine.”
Indeed, this latest attack on Omar follows Trump’s social media post of last Thursday, when he urged “[t]he people of Minnesota” to “fight back!” against Minnesotans of Somali heritage. Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly echoed Trump, referring to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complaining that Democrats were not “rounding them up [and] putting them in jail.”
This new attack on a Democratic representative is the second attempt of the administration to cow Democratic representatives. It has an ongoing case against New Jersey representative LaMonica McIver, whom it accuses of assaulting immigration agents in a skirmish outside of Delaney Hall detention center, in which no one was hurt. If McIver is convicted, she faces up to 17 years in prison. Both Omar and McIver are women of color. The attempt of the president to arrest and imprison his political opponents in the legislative branch is a direct assault on our democracy.
Indeed, the administration is trying to make their opponents live in fear. The latest target of their ire is Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s first-term chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson was working in the White House in the weeks when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and she testified before Congress about Trump’s behavior during that time. Federal prosecutors are trying to get a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict her for perjury.
As the attack on Omar shows, in their attempt to grasp complete control of the country, Trump and his loyalists are working hard to divide the American people along the old culture war lines that worked in the past. But Americans are concerned primarily about the economy as the war on Iran drives prices upward, so Republicans are becoming more and more extreme in their actions and their ads.
As Morgan Trau of WEWS wrote in a piece reprinted by the Ohio Capital Journal, an ad paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund featuring a woman who accuses Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown of “pushing transgender surgeries on minors ‘like her,’” and who, in another ad, claims she had “surgery without my parents’ consent” as “a kid,” actually shows a woman from Texas who had gender-affirming surgery in that state as an adult. She has no connection to Ohio, where such surgery on minors is illegal.
Brown’s statement on healthcare was that he believes families and their doctors, not politicians, should make healthcare decisions.
An even more extreme meltdown took place over the weekend as MAGA tried to insist that Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico had suffered a mental breakdown and had been admitted to a treatment facility in Ohio. As Will Sommer and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark explained yesterday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher claimed they had proof that Talarico had been at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio. They claimed they had a tape of a Lindner employee telling them over the phone that Talarico had just been released.
With Musk pushing it, Sortor’s social media post alleging that “proof” garnered millions of views in hours.
But, predictably, the story fell apart fast. Neither the logic (why would Talarico go to Ohio for medical treatment rather than stay in Texas?) nor the timeline (Tararico was out in public in Texas during the time Sortor suggested he was in treatment) made sense. Then Sommer and Egger got access to the full recording of the alleged “proof.” It showed Amacher lying to the Lindner employee to get her to expose private health information. It also showed her repeatedly denying that anyone named James Talarico was in the system.
On Sunday night, the Lindner Center publicly announced that Talarico had never been treated there. Talarico himself posted a laughing emoji beside the information that he has never even been to Ohio. To a reporter, he added his own assessment of his opponent’s health, “I’ve heard credible reports that Ken Paxton has a serious medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice,” and noted that Paxton has refused to debate Talarico about actual issues.
Sommer and Egger note that while HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, says medical providers can’t disclose patients’ information, it also penalizes individuals who try to get that information improperly, imposing heavier penalties for those who commit that offense “under false pretenses.” Those who access that information “for commercial advantage, personal gain, or malicious harm” can be fined up to $250,000 and be imprisoned for up to ten years.
Amacher later told Jesse Singal that he did not do “any after-the-fact fact-checking work and pointed to the fact that he’s a political advocate, not a journalist, and is therefore held to different standards.”
Trump’s choice of Katie Zacharia on Friday to become the new White House press secretary illustrates that the administration is fully committed to pushing its dominance through disinformation. As Judd Legum explained yesterday in Popular Information, Zacharia is a conspiracy theorist who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, the lie popular in 2016 that leading Democrats and Hollywood figures were sexually trafficking children and engaging in cannibalism in an organization run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
As Legum notes, Zacharia was relatively obscure before Trump tapped her. Her major qualification is that she posts a lot on Trump’s social media site and has worked as a senior communications advisor for the site.
On Saturday, Trump told a crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee: “There’s such love. Like, I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like—the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me.” He claimed that, in fact, what he does say is “things of common sense” and called for renaming the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean either “‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas.’”
Media figures are increasingly showing that Trump’s promises are false. Although Trump suggested after public outcry about $20 million in tax dollars going to his ads promoting himself that he would pay for them, the ads were apparently paid for with money Republicans in Congress allocated to the Department of Homeland Security. When asked on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday about a reimbursement for taxpayers, Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin answered: “Any time we can do a public service announcement and brag about America, I’m all about it.... I think 99% of the coverage from President Trump is negative…. I commend the opportunity of President Trump to give us the opportunity to brag about America.” “So, no reimbursement,” host Margaret Brennan concluded.
Last night, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon ordered the administration to immediately stop running the ads, which have been running on national media for two weeks, saying they likely “exceed the purposes authorized by Congress and violate restrictions on publicity and propaganda.” Kyle Cheney of Politico explained that the administration tried to avoid a ruling on the legality of the ad campaign by saying it was going to stop it after Sunday.
Scott Nover, Aaron Schaffer, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post reported that the administration ignored the order and continued to run the ads today.
The administration also appears to have ignored the law on Saturday, when it felled more than 400 trees on the East Potomac Golf Links course that Trump wants to turn into another of his projects.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes had previously warned the administration not to make any irreversible changes to the landscape, but she did not forbid it from doing maintenance work. The administration maintains the Saturday cutting was routine maintenance. Reyes was furious, telling the administration’s lawyers she didn’t know how she could have made it any clearer that she was trying to stop it from doing precisely what it did. She warned that the government had lost all credibility with her. The administration’s lawyer said they still planned to cut several hundred more trees.
Trump’s announcement on Sunday that both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” has also been exposed as a devastating lie. At the time, Ukraine said it had heard nothing about any such plan until it appeared on social media, and Russia promptly attacked Ukrainian power plants.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote today in The Atlantic that Trump’s dropping of sanctions against Russian oil looks like “an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit.”
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attacked Saudi Arabia’s main airport, killing at least 20 people, including a U.S. national. Oil prices are rising again, and Trump is said to be considering joining the Saudi fight against the Houthis.
On Friday evening, before the long weekend, the Pentagon quietly raised the number of U.S. service members killed in the Iran war from 18 to 21, and the number of wounded from 767 to 865, updating the numbers that had been on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website since August.
As John Ismay of the New York Times noted, when the Washington Post reported in September that the Pentagon was hiding the true numbers of those killed in the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE.”
On Wednesday, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that the U.S. military is drawing up plans for another round of major combat operations in Iran.
Hegseth has named Elon Musk, who is pouring money into the midterms, to Project Meridian, a group charged with plotting out the future of the American military.
Identifying where the actual radicalism in American politics lies at this moment is important.
This afternoon, the President of the United States posted two videos of lions and tigers attacking humans.
Either he has entirely lost it, or he is desperate for a distraction, or both.
It turns out the attacks on Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico were probably an attempt to get ahead of yet another damaging story about Trump’s hand-picked Republican Texas Senate candidate, Ken Paxton. Yesterday Elizabeth Findell, Mark Maremont, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton spent New Year’s Eve in 2024 in Dubai, partying with a woman who was not his wife, along with two fugitives from U.S. justice.
Although Vice President J.D. Vance and other members of the administration have vowed to remove more than 760,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act, citing widespread fraud, the fugitives with whom Paxton was hanging out were wanted on federal healthcare fraud charges. They allegedly embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital, and one of them was charged with receiving at least $195 million from the U.S. government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests.
One of the men donated $190,000 to Paxton, $25,000 of it after he was indicted.
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews posted: “JD Vance running around the country saying he’s fighting health care fraud while his nominee for the senate in TX who he completely supports is partying in Dubai with a guy [who] stole over $300 million in health care fraud and gave Paxton $190,000. This is the Republican Party.”
Meanwhile, although the administration has boasted that it is cracking down on fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by cutting benefits, ProPublica reported today that the real fraud comes from criminal syndicates, often from Romania, who last year walked away with $470 million stolen electronically from more than 990,000 households. The theft could be stopped with digital microchips, but Congress has refused to add them to the benefit cards. Now the Trump administration has stripped funds allocated to address the theft.
Diesel prices jumped today as traders appeared to doubt Trump’s abandonment of Russian sanctions will do much for prices in the U.S. Steve Kopack of NBC News noted that U.S. diesel futures were up about 5% by midday. Generally, a jump in futures prices means higher consumer prices are forthcoming. The price of diesel is up 70% since the war on Iran began on February 28.
Gulf Oil adviser Tom Kloza posted: “Absolutely stunning price spikes in wholesale diesel today…. Market clearly not believing that Russian oil is on the way.” He added: “US retail diesel price record of $6.53/gal could be topped by the midterms.”
As Barbara Sprunt reported at NPR, a bipartisan group of senators is pushing back on Trump’s lifting of sanctions, calling it a “betrayal of the people of Ukraine.” Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal (CT), Chris Coons (DE), Dick Durbin (IL), Jack Reed (RI), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) joined Republicans Alan Armstrong (OK), Susan Collins (ME), John Cornyn (TX), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Thom Tillis (NC) in asking Trump to rescind the deal.
“The deal you struck with President Vladimir Putin on October 9th will not achieve just ends, nor will it benefit Americans,” they wrote. It “only provides Putin with more fuel to finance his war machine and enables Russia to continue its brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Granting Moscow the ability to sell Russian diesel freely in global markets damages American security interests and is a betrayal of the people of Ukraine, who continue to defend themselves from Putin’s murderous, illegal war. This deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded.”
The senators emphasized that with last month’s Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, Congress had tasked Trump with applying economic pressure on Russia, not with easing that pressure.
When asked about the letter, Trump told reporters: “Nobody’s telling me anything. That’s a diesel deal. Not for us. That’s being released into the world. That’s not being released to us. That’s a diesel deal that’s going to be released into the world for the world market, because the world market suffered with high prices.”
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine got no warning from its Western partners about Russia’s overnight strikes on the capital, raising concerns that Trump is making good on his threat to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine unless it stops striking Russian oil refineries. Trump today told reporters that the U.S. is still sharing intelligence.
Trump’s new White House press secretary held her first press conference today. Observers called it “brutally bad” and compared it to a Saturday Night Live cold open. Katie Zacharia revealed that she is fiercely loyal to Trump, and that she is neither a competent reader nor comfortable answering questions. News broke today that Trump overrode his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to give the position to Zacharia, a leak that Jen Rubin of The Contrarian speculated had come from either Wiles or an ally “to prove she was right! OUCH”
Judd Legum of Popular Information, who uncovered Zacharia’s history of pushing conspiracy theories, today noted that while Trump calls her “an attorney” and she describes herself that way, there is no record that she ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state. When reporters asked her about where she had passed the bar exam, she answered: “I moved to China.”
Zacharia did say in today’s press conference that “we have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign.” Kimberly Guilfoyle has been embroiled in a story about shaking down a donor to pay off $100,000 of her credit card debt, and she did, in fact, resign her post as the U.S. ambassador to Greece today. In a social media post, she defended her tenure in Greece and promised to “vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity.”
“While my time as Ambassador may be coming to an end, my commitment to President Trump, the America First movement, and the country I love will never end,” she posted. Trump later told reporters that Guilfoyle, who dated his son Don Jr. for six years and was engaged to him for four, “wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”
A new poll conducted by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that almost six in ten Americans say they believe Trump is either illegally profiting from the presidency or doing something unethical but not illegal.
Jordain Carney and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that Republicans are worried not only about how much work Congress needs to get through after the midterms, but also about whether Republicans will even bother to come back to vote after the election. “Attendance is an issue right now,” Representative Austin Scott (R-GA) told Carney and McCarthy.
The family of a man killed by a tiger at a wildlife park in the UK have spoken about their “severe distress” at the circulation of online media after Donald Trump reposted a video of the incident.
