According to Ukrainian presidential advisor Serhiy Beskrestnov, last night, without warning, Elon Musk’s SpaceX restricted the speed limits for the Starlink terminals Ukraine’s military uses, known as Starshield, debilitating Ukraine’s drones even as Russian forces launched strikes against Ukraine’s energy and critical infrastructure—the very infrastructure Trump said must be left alone.
As Christopher Miller of the Financial Times reported, Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones against Ukraine last night and, just as the night before, Ukraine received no intelligence warning from the U.S. Last night, though, Ukrainian drone operators also found they could not control drones at speeds above 160 kph (about 100 mph). Last night’s barrage was one of the largest attacks of the war, killing at least five Ukrainians and leaving at least 600,000 people without power.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky noted that “[t]he strike was entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale—Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States.” He continued: “We ask America and EVERYONE in the world who does not turn a blind eye to reality to respond—and to respond forcefully. Russia has squandered the opportunity for de-escalation and has clearly chosen to continue its insane war of annihilation…. Peace can only come through strength, and we ask America to remember this principle of Reagan’s.”
Ukraine relies on two satellite systems related to SpaceX. One is Starlink, which handles communications, defensive drones, and coordinating ground forces. The other is Starshield, which is used for offensive purposes and is controlled by the U.S. government.
It appeared at first that Elon Musk deliberately sabotaged Ukrainian military operations while they were underway, in defiance of American national security policy. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) pointedly wrote to Musk on social media: “[P]lease tell me these overnight disruptions to Starlink terminals in Ukraine were unintended—that [SpaceX] is doing everything it can to fix a temporary glitch.”
He continued: “I’m confident this does not reflect a change in SpaceX policy because if so, intentionally degrading Ukraine’s ability to defend itself might be construed as aiding and abetting a mass murderer. Can you confirm that’s not SpaceX’s intent?”
This would have been at least the second time Musk had used his power over communications to weaken Ukraine. In 2025, Joey Roulette, Cassell Bryan-Low, and Tom Balmforth of Reuters reported that in 2022, as Ukraine was retaking land Russia had invaded, Musk ordered engineers to deactivate Starlink in crucial areas, leaving the Ukrainian military without communications and hamstringing their ability to gather intelligence or aim at targets.
One of the people who told the journalists about Musk’s 2022 order noted that Musk had been able to reshape the front lines of the battle and that he had taken “the outcome of a war into his own hands.”
SpaceX is a defense contractor for the U.S. government, currently receiving more than $16 billion through NASA, the Department of Defense, the Space Force, the National Reconnaissance office, and the Space Development Agency, with as much as almost $30 billion forthcoming if it exercises all its options. SpaceX operates the U.S. military’s primary satellite communications—the same system limited last night in Ukraine—and launches most of the classified intelligence satellites for the U.S.
Musk has spent about $366 million so far to swing the midterm elections toward Republicans, and SpaceX’s undermining of Ukraine supports Trump’s effort to help Russia’s president Vladimir Putin fund his ongoing attacks. That support for Russia flies in the face of traditional U.S. alliances with the democratic nations of Europe, instead isolating the U.S. alongside autocratic Russia.
But after a furious outcry today about the failing communications service that left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk called out the difference between Starlink and Starshield to blame the change on Trump.
He wrote: “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately [the President of the United States].” Then he added: “Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”
Barak Ravid of Axios reported that both systems—Starshield and Starlink—were restricted.
Ravid also reported that, while Musk blamed Trump for the service slowdown, the White House claimed it had no control over SpaceX, thereby putting the blame for the deadly slowdown on Musk.
The fact that this was the only response of the White House to the profound betrayal of U.S. ally Ukraine tells its own story. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted today that: “The Pentagon is…required to notify Congress if it pauses or downgrades intelligence sharing with Ukraine. If that happens, [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth] must provide that immediately.”
Foreign affairs journalist Laura Rozen noted that Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the committee has received no such notification and is trying to find out more information.
While Musk and Trump blamed each other for the technological shift that benefited Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in London, conferring with Prime Minister Andy Burnham and King Charles III. At 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister, a gathered crowd greeted him with enthusiastic applause.
The official readout of their meeting revealed their agreement that “Russia had no interest in peace” and noted “Russia’s blatant indiscriminate attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure since President Trump called for an energy ceasefire.”
This evening, Henry Foy, Paola Tamma, Christopher Miller, and Amy Mackinnon of the Financial Times reported that last week, Trump asked European countries to thaw Russian assets that were frozen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to transfer those assets to a vehicle controlled by the United States in order to revive peace talks. European officials declined, but the very idea added to questions about U.S. intentions.
At home, Trump is taking authoritarianism out for a spin.
John McCormick, Michelle Hackman, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported this evening that the goal of administration officials in investigating the citizenship paperwork of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), filled out by her father when she was a child in the 1990s after the family arrived in the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya, is to find a way to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and deport her. In their search on Monday, federal agents took Omar’s cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport.
Omar is running for reelection with Election Day less than a month away. Department of Justice rules caution prosecutors against taking any action that could affect an election, or even create the perception that they are trying to do so.
At a rally today in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump doubled down on culture war tropes when he told attendees that they must vote for MAGA Republican Andy Biggs because Democrats want to “raise your taxes,…annihilate your very secure borders, decimate Arizona jobs, mutilate your children. They want to mutilate, cut your children. It’s unbelievable what they do…. Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in three days as Janet. And they don’t even ask you.” He urged them to “defeat the Democrat communists and vote for more money in your pockets, bigger paychecks for your families, lower taxes, less crime, a booming Arizona economy…. All you have to do is vote Republican and you’re going to have all that and more.”
But new numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today showed inflation up again last month, reaching 3.7%, up from 3.4% in August. Politics and national security scholar Nicholas Grossman noted: “In the supposedly horrific year of 2024, monthly inflation averaged 2.9% and was trending down rather than up.”
Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner explained today how Trump and a couple dozen insiders have made almost $2 billion on Trump’s meme coin, while about 2 million Americans lost $4.3 billion. “It’s like buying a pet rock just to lose a lot of money,” he observed.
Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine May, and Steve Reilly of CBS News reported today that more than half of the people competing for seats at Trump’s next coin dinner use cryptocurrency exchanges that bar U.S. customers, meaning they likely belong to people outside the U.S. The November 22nd dinner will include the top 185 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin.
Zach Everson, a researcher for the progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, told the CBS News reporters: “Foreign actors used to need a back door to try to influence a president.” Now, though, “Trump is holding the front door open and inviting them in for a steak dinner.”
U.S. District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled yesterday that Trump had banned more than 70 journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room because he wanted more favorable coverage. That ban violated both free speech and due process, Kelly ruled, and he said Trump could not ban the organizations from the White House, although he did not address whether the administration could bar reporters from Air Force One or the Oval Office.
Kelly noted that both free speech and due process are protected by the Bill of Rights, as the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution are known. The Justice Department says it will appeal. David Folkenflik of NPR noted that after the five major television networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC—rallied together when Trump banned CNN, the Department of Justice announced it is investigating the networks for breaking antitrust laws.
Yesterday Trump posted two videos of people being mauled by lions and tigers. Last night, just before midnight, in the style of strongmen trying to prove they are supermen, he posted an AI video of himself warning a tiger off, then chasing the tiger, tackling it, dominating it, and finally playing with the now docile animal.
There is an old saying about rats and sinking ships. There’s also an old saying about how a democratic system taken over by a single party quickly becomes corrupt because the ruling party lacks oversight. Then, as corruption becomes the party’s driving force, the only people willing to work for it are either corrupt themselves or so unqualified they support the corrupt leadership to gain power, knowing that in a merit-based system it would be entirely out of their reach.
OK, that second old saying is shared mostly among political scientists, but it’s accurate, and it’s right up there with the rats and the ships to describe what’s happening in Trump’s orbit now.
The saga of Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was recently forced to resign from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, continues to expand. Guilfoyle left her post after news broke that she had tried to get a donor, Eric Deters, to pay down her credit card debt. She and her lawyers countered the story by claiming Deters was withholding money she had earned, and said the text messages he shared with news outlets were false.
Guilfoyle dated Don Jr. from 2018 to 2024 and was engaged to him the last four years of that time. Now there are rumors that during her time inside the family as a trusted loyalist, she kept a “burn book” about the family.
While that may or may not be true, the fact that there’s such a threat out there reflects the cracking loyalties of Trump insiders. More to the point might be the video released today by Deters himself, saying that he had launched a lawsuit against Guilfoyle for defamation and that he would depose her and Don Jr. and demand subpoenas to clear his name. He also vowed to play a 16-minute phone conversation tomorrow that he claims has information which “might just bring down the entire Trump administration, an administration which I have supported from Day One.”
Note that the story of Guilfoyle’s alleged shakedown is breaking now, although it happened more than a year ago.
Also in the category of old stories coming to the surface is one reported yesterday by Marc Caputo of Axios. He wrote that Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba is saying that another one of Trump’s advisors, Ric Grenell, did not deposit her billionaire husband’s $5.6 million donation to the Kennedy Center. According to Habba, Grenell asked that the donation be routed through a $17.6 million payment for a business deal, an accusation Grenell called “absurd.”
Trump appointed Grenell to be U.S. ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during his first term. After retaking office, he named Grenell as a special envoy to Venezuela before putting him in charge of the Kennedy Center.
A fight that has been going on for more than a year in the administration broke into the open this morning in a Politico story by Daniel Lippman. He explained that Trump named Italian Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania Trump at a party in New York City, as a special envoy at the State Department with a portfolio of cultural diplomacy. But Zampolli apparently ignored that assignment and struck out on his own on a wide range of issues, infuriating Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.
“My number-one boss is the president of America,” Zampolli told James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times in April. “I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War…anything to advance the America First agenda.” More than 16 administration officials have been included in the angry email chains Zampolli and Landau have exchanged, which at one point led to communications about the fight with a top-level foreign official.
At one point Zampolli accused Landau of leaking to reporters what appeared to be the story that Zampolli had tried to get custody of his son by asking Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to deport Amanda Ungaro, the boy’s mother. That story created its own scandal when Ungaro, a former model, threatened to expose information about the president and first lady. Landau responded to Zampolli’s accusation, which he sent to more than a dozen other officials, saying: “Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email.”
An administration official told Lippman that the State Department was “generally squeaky clean and professional and above it all.” In contrast, these exchanges were “cartoonish and embarrassing.”
By this afternoon, Lippman had a follow-up story: Zampolli had been fired.
It is not just the current associates of the president who are problematic. Today, news broke that two women have named former Republican representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), along with his friend former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg and others, in a civil lawsuit, alleging that from 2017 through January 2019, “Gaetz and Greenberg coordinated recruitment, payments, drugs, and travel to obtain commercial sexual acts….”
In 2024, the House Ethics Committee reported that Gaetz “regularly” paid women, as well as a 17-year-old girl, for sex, and bought and used illicit drugs while a member of Congress. Those accusations helped to sink Trump’s nomination of Gaetz for U.S. attorney general in 2025.
Gaetz’s response was hardly a denial: “I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” he wrote. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee Report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”
One has to wonder why anyone would want to be part of such a mess, but Trump’s new White House press secretary provides an answer: in a normal administration she would never make it through the door. Trump has described Katie Zacharia as an “attorney,” and she has identified herself as a “general counsel” and seemed to claim she worked as an attorney in China.
But after Judd Legum of Popular Information noted there was no sign she had ever passed the bar exam or been admitted to a state bar, Philip Wegmann and Alexandra Bruell of the Wall Street Journal reported today that, in fact, she failed the California bar exam when she took it. That, itself, is not unusual—the California bar exam is notoriously difficult—but it does mean she is not qualified to call herself an attorney.
Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan team defending democracy led by attorney Norm Eisen, has asked the State Bar of California and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Zacharia practiced law without a license in California, where doing so is a crime.
Tonight, on his show, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity seemed to undercut Zacharia, asking her why she had chosen to describe herself as an attorney when she could just have said she “went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that Hannity’s stance likely reflected that Trump is turning on her.
Rhein Amacher, the man who started a right-wing media frenzy when he claimed to have proof that Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had sought mental health treatment in Ohio, backed away from that claim today…sort of. Amid suggestions that he might well have run afoul of HIPAA penalties for trying to obtain health information duplicitously, he posted that “this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” and wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed.” Later, in response to a post saying he had lied, he added: “Never lied, I just doubled down on wrong information.”
A blockbuster story by Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post today explained that the administration has been able to keep donations for Trump’s ballroom largely secret by using a nonprofit to collect the donations and then channeling that money “into a White House account the president directly controls.”
The reporters gained access to a list of the 57 donors who have committed to giving $100,000 or more to the project. They found that “the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.” Large technology companies Nvidia and Apple committed $25 million each. Microsoft, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin pledged $10 million each.
Individuals on the list who are associated with Trump include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son Brandon, chair of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, who contributed stock worth more than $2.5 million, and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Republican donor Joseph Popolo Jr., and his wife, who gave $1 million. Missing from the list is Trump himself, who claimed he would be helping to pay for the project.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark was right when she called the ballroom being constructed where the East Wing of the White House used to be “a monument to corruption” built by “a corrupt American president.”
On Tuesday, Charles Gorrivan, Lydia Beyoud, and Nicola M. White of Bloomberg reported that on March 23, a few traders placed billions of dollars of contracts predicting that the price of oil would fall just 15 minutes before Trump posted on his social media platform that he had changed his mind about striking Iranian power plants. The deals were worth billions, and analysts from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) flagged the traders and the deals and sent a referral to the Division of Enforcement to decide whether to open an investigation into insider trading. But in a virtually unheard-of move, the administration asked the CFTC to withdraw the referral.
The journalists note both that there have been many trades apparently tied to Trump’s announcements and that between a 20% cut to CFTC staff during Trump’s second term and the agency chair’s vow to curb “over-zealous regulation,” enforcement actions have dropped dramatically from the numbers during the Biden administration.
Steven Portnoy and Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported today that the White House is claiming that all Trump’s conversations about plans to renovate the Kennedy Center are covered by executive privilege and therefore can be kept secret. This is a dramatic expansion of the concept of executive privilege, which enables the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny, extending it to consider virtually all conversations private.
Apparently in anticipation of Democratic investigations, Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo as soon as he took office, claiming presidents can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”
A new Fox News poll released today showed that voters’ top concern is “corruption in government,” with 88% worried about it compared to 12% who are not. Corruption tops even “inflation and high prices,” which comes in at 85%, and “gas prices,” which concern 83% of voters.
In a conversation with Rob Finnerty of Newsmax, aired tonight, Trump suggested he would pardon everyone in the administration, including himself, to make sure none of the people around him have to “go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
It is no wonder that Republicans eager to stop Trump are backing Democratic candidates for the midterms. Today 58 Republicans and Independents in New Hampshire declared their support for the Democratic Senate candidate, Representative Chris Pappas, over Republican candidate John Sununu. Those supporters include Don Bolduc, who was Trump’s pick for the Senate in 2022 but who lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan by 9 points after he embraced Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election.
One of the Republicans supporting Pappas told Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader: “Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into something I no longer recognize.”
Trump’s new pick for White House press secretary lasted less than five days. Katie Zacharia resigned today after a series of disastrous performances and news that she had misrepresented her legal credentials. Trump said he would let her decide if she wanted to stay but added that if he were in her shoes, he would “reconsider.”
Wags noted that the time unit of a Scaramucci—named for the White House communications director who lasted only 11 days during Trump’s first term and used to identify an official whose stay in public office has been exceedingly brief—has been replaced by the Zacharia.
Yesterday morning, Trump posted on social media that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009, will not be livestreamed. As Amy B. Wang and Alauna Safarpour of the Washington Post reported yesterday, 80% of Americans opposed livestreaming the execution to the public.
A poll by the Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos showed that the only demographic polled in which a majority wanted a livestream of the execution was MAGA Republican men, of whom 57% wanted the event livestreamed and 42% were opposed. Veterans, Democrats, non-MAGA Republicans, Independents, and MAGA Republican women all opposed the livestream by overwhelming amounts.
And so, the chaos of Trump’s MAGA administration continues.
Chaos continues as well in Trump’s approach to Ukraine, and it has a deadly pattern.
After SpaceX debilitated Ukraine’s military defenses on October 14, in the midst of one of the heaviest Russian bombardments of the war, by slowing down the speed of Ukraine’s Starlink terminals and the Starshield system that Ukraine’s military uses, Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, and Trump, who controls Starshield, each blamed the other for the slowdown.
Yesterday, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led a bipartisan group of nine senators demanding answers from Platte Moring, the inspector general of the Department of Defense.
Noting that the slowdown meant that “U.S. diplomatic, military, and security personnel were unable to reach designated bunkers during Russian air raids,” they asked “[w]hether any Department of Defense or other U.S. government officials directed, authorized, approved, or had advance knowledge of changes to intelligence-sharing arrangements, warning capabilities, or Starlink and Starshield services affecting Ukraine.”
They also asked if the slowdown was a policy decision or a contractor action, whether U.S. personnel received adequate warning, and whether “any restrictions on Starlink or Starshield services were directed, authorized, or implemented by SpaceX, the Department of Defense, or other U.S. government entities.” They also wanted to hear exactly what “immediate corrective measures are being implemented” to make sure such a crisis doesn’t happen again.
Today Trump told reporters that neither he nor Musk had caused the shortage. “I didn’t do that. No, we didn’t do that at all. In fact, I don’t even think it was slowed down, from what I understood. Because I just checked this morning.” He continued: “I heard about it from the news, the media. And we didn’t slow it down at all. And I think it’s probably functioning, from what I understand.” When a reporter asked if Musk had had anything to do with the slowdown, Trump said: “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon, and from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been.”
Joe Barnes of The Telegraph reported today that according to four sources familiar with the discussions over the issue, as well as “[a] high-ranking European official and two “well-placed Ukrainian sources,” it was Musk who approached Trump with the idea of slowing down the Starlink systems in Ukraine, and Trump agreed. But, according to Barnes, the outcry over Russia’s destructive attacks that night made Musk worry that European customers might turn against him, as indeed they warned him on social media.
A source told Barnes: “He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it.”
Meanwhile, Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk donated $158 million in September alone to a super PAC that immediately sent $158 million to back Ken Paxton’s campaign to become the next U.S. senator from Texas instead of Democratic candidate James Talarico. Musk donated an additional $10 million to a different pro-Paxton super PAC, as well.
Musk’s huge donations have kept the unpopular Paxton financially competitive with Talarico. Paxton is currently the Texas attorney general, responsible for the few state regulations concerning SpaceX and Musk’s more than 90 other companies and other legal entities in Texas.
Trump has clearly decided his own personal interests require bringing the United States to the rescue of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Just a week ago, he announced he was waiving sanctions to allow Russia to sell diesel on the global market, funneling money to Putin to continue his war on Ukraine.
Tonight, in a late Friday night news dump, Trump signed an executive order waiving yet more sanctions on Russia that would have gone into effect in two days under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The president wrote that waiving those sanctions is “in the national interests of the United States,” although he did not specify why.
Congress passed the Graham Act just weeks ago, making clear that it expected stronger measures against Russia. Trump signed the law but is doing the opposite of Congress’s intent. Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) posted: “Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.”
Like Putin, Trump has been determined to sow confusion and fear over the midterm elections, likely hoping to depress voter turnout and destroy faith in the outcome. Central to that is Trump’s insistence that noncitizens are swinging elections against him, even though experts across the political spectrum agree that voting by noncitizens is both illegal and exceedingly rare.
Jacob Bogage and Andrew Goudsward of Reuters reported on October 13 that after losing 26 of its lawsuits designed to get access to state voter rolls and winning none, the Department of Justice gave California officials just two days to review a list of 20,000 people it suspects are not citizens but may have received mail-in ballots for the midterm election. The DOJ sent along a thumb drive that it said identified those voters.
California officials did not do as the DOJ demanded, saying the scheme had no legal basis. Sarah N. Lynch of CBS News reported that Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder/county clerk of Los Angeles County, said his office would not open the thumb drive “because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.” He added: “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established—and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”
Yesterday Alanna Durkin Richer, Sophie Austin, and Safiyah Riddle of the Associated Press reported that the administration is escalating its threats, suing election officials in California and asking a judge to stop the state from counting mail-in ballots from people the administration claims aren’t citizens until their citizenship has been verified.
Today Juhi Doshi, Alexander Mallin, Luke Barr, and Lucien Bruggeman of ABC News reported that the administration is now threatening criminal prosecution for election workers who knowingly count ballots filled out by noncitizens. Trump added on social media: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
According to the ABC News journalists, “Experts overwhelmingly agree the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed. But they fear the consequences of publicly calling election outcomes into question could damage confidence in democracy.”
That concern is behind the No Kings events taking place across the country on Saturday, October 17. While earlier No Kings events emphasized protest and solidarity, tomorrow’s will be about “nonpartisan voter participation, being in community with each other, and making sure every eligible voter has a plan, knows their options, and is ready to make their voice count.”
The organizers remind Americans: “Our democracy depends on every eligible voter having the freedom to participate without intimidation, interference, or barriers.”
Around the United States of America and the world, people gathered today at more than 3,000 No Kings: Vote Early events to encourage Americans to vote in the November 3 midterm elections. The events were designed to encourage people to vote early to ensure their votes are counted in an election where the president and his party have made it clear they intend to silence their opponents.
Since Trump launched the Big Lie that he had been cheated of victory in the 2020 presidential election by voter fraud, Republican-dominated state legislatures have restricted access to the vote. Although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and such votes are vanishingly rare, Trump and his allies are insisting that states must restrict the vote to prevent voter fraud. According to the Brennan Center, which works to protect voting rights, in 2021 at least 19 states passed 32 laws to make voting more difficult. Since the 2024 election, 22 states have passed 47 laws that restrict the vote.
As Bob Ortega of CNN reported yesterday, states have closed polling places in Black and Latino districts, required new paperwork to vote, reduced early voting, and restricted the use of student IDs for voter identification. Celina Stewart, the chief executive officer of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization that works to expand access to the vote, told Ortega: “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.”
No Kings organizer Ezra Levin said the way to judge the effectiveness of this No Kings Day was to answer the question: “Did we drive the biggest early vote in the history of the Republic?” He added: “I think we’re gonna do it.”
But just at the height of the pro-voting events, Meta took down the main No Kings organizing page on Instagram for about four hours. According to Levin, Meta didn’t respond to the No Kings team, “even as the account was offline at the peak of our national day of action and livestream.” Once the account was viewable again, “Meta told us in their response email that they made a bad call.”
Still, though, No Kings administrators had no access to the account, blocking their ability “to post about an ongoing day of mass action for early voting.” Levin noted: “This is part of a much bigger concern: activists and movements around the world are increasingly vulnerable to decisions made by powerful technology platforms that can determine who gets heard and who gets silenced.”
The League of Women Voters wrote that the timing of the blackout mattered. “When people are gathering, organizing, and seeking information about civic participation, cutting off a movement’s primary communication channel—even temporarily—is deeply troubling. This is about more than one account. It raises serious questions about transparency, accountability, and the power private technology platforms wield over public communication.”
Meta later claimed the issue was technical, saying, “When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”
The timing of the error was unfortunate. Just yesterday, Reuters reported on a story out of Brazil claiming that in internal communications, Meta employees acknowledged that the company had restricted the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the country’s recent election. The story says the employees’ messages also recommended accounts related to his challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing ex-president who tried to overthrow Lula’s government. Senator Bolsonaro did much better than expected in the election, and the two face a runoff.
It was not until close to 6:00 Eastern time that the No Kings account could be used again. “WE ARE BACK IN! We can post again,” Levin wrote. “This was utter bullsh*t on the biggest early vote effort in history. But it will not stop what we’re building.”
“No Kings means no kings in the White House,” he wrote, “or in Silicon Valley.”
Meta apologized on Saturday and blamed the account’s temporary suspension on an automated action that’s triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies”.
“Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, wrote on X. “Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”
Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.
The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.
A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.
After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.
In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.
Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”
Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”
In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”
Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”
The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”
Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.
The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.
And yet, here we are.
But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.
People have been scouring the strait of Hormuz for spilt cargo after Iran attacked at least 15 container ships passing through the crucial waterway in the past 10 days.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson joked on a livestream that Musk was “fucked” if Democrats won the White House. Musk had trollishly asked on Twitter why, despite two Trump assassination attempts, no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That, he and Carlson mused, was enough for the Democrats to throw him in prison. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” Musk said. “Will I see my children, I don’t know.”
That comment was an example of the deeply personal and sometimes apocalyptic terms with which many Republicans and Silicon Valley titans approached the last presidential election, equating Democrats’ moderate regulatory regimes and gentle, federal antiracism programs with the decline of western civilization.
Now, however, Musk actually does have something on the line in the midterms, into which he has, by latest tally, poured $366 million.
Congressional Democrats, Politico reports, have ranked the billionaire high on their list of oversight targets for a few reasons: his many government contracts, his role in squeezing Ukraine as Trump scapegoats Volodymyr Zelenskyy for high fuel prices. But above all else, the Politico report indicates, Democratic committees want to delve into the disaster that was DOGE, including its access to Americans’ data and the decimation of USAID.
“He helped orchestrate the systematic destruction of government programs and services over the last nearly two years,” Zoe Lofgren, who heads the committee that oversees NASA, told Politico. “The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding.”
The report on Democrats’ Musk-related oversight plans come as Texas Democrats campaign on their opponents’ ties to him. Much of Musk’s midterms money has been spent in the state, and Democrats are assuming that the billionaire’s Trump-like levels of unpopularity work in their favor. Gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinajosa is suing to obtain her opponent, Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R), emails with Musk, while Senate candidate James Talarico has cast Musk as trying to buy up the state’s natural resources and Attorney General Ken Paxton himself.
“The world’s first trillionaire may think he’s entitled to our land, to our water, to his own personal U.S. senator, but he’s not,” Talarico said yesterday.
A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.
The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.
According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “[W]e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”
After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.
Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.
Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.
A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.
Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “[p]eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”
Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.
Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.
Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”
These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.
And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.
Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”
But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.
Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.
Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”
Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.
“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.
“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.
“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.
“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “[W]e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.”
Everything feels out of whack in the United States.
First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.
And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. “I looked at his a‑‑, and then I looked at his legs, and my—I said, ‘His a‑‑ is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, ‘This guy’s a monster.’”
Today he snarled at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.”
In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.
Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”
Meanwhile, Trump claims he had nothing to do with the slowing of Starlink over Ukraine, telling a reporter: “I wasn’t involved.” When asked if Elon Musk ordered it, Trump responded: “I don’t know who did it, but I was not involved.”
Congress members, including Republicans, have vowed to hold whoever was responsible for the cuts accountable. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said on Monday that those limiting Starshield “will be fully investigated and will be held fully accountable.” He said Congress would investigate and mete out “immediate harsh and punitive budget cuts to any responsible agency or agency head.”
Musk is not taking that threat calmly. In response to a report by Calen Razor in Politico that Democrats intend to investigate Musk’s role in cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink communications networks, leaving Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk posted on social media: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”
His was a shocking threat against members of Congress, but the move of Europeans and Canadians to develop their own satellite communications systems given the dangers of relying on Starlink seems to be worrying Musk. If Congress also moves the United States away from his contracts, he could be in real trouble. As Douglas P. McCormick noted in Fortune last June, Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is not real. Almost all of his net worth is unrealized equity in companies he runs. His wealth is simply the market’s estimate of the worth of his promises to deliver in the future, and those promises depend on government contracts.
Americans are beginning to see the costs of Trumpism more generally.
As Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter this morning, twelve million Americans have lost healthcare coverage under Trump, and those who still have it have seen the cost of their premiums rise sharply. The situation will get worse in the future, since when they wrote their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans put the worst of their cuts off until after the midterms.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fell by more than 5 million people, or nearly 13%, between July 2025, when the Republicans enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and June 2026. Nearly half of those no longer receiving benefits are children. Starting this month, more of the costs of SNAP will fall to states. The amount of their payment will be based on their error rates, causing them to err on the side of denying benefits and cut costs, leading even more to lose benefits in the future. Some states may have to withdraw from SNAP altogether.
In The Atlantic today, David Frum wrote that the bill for Trumpism is coming due. Although Trump promised in his first term to eliminate the national debt and in his second to balance the budget, maybe even financing a $2,000 check for every American taxpayer, the budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 clocked in at about $2 trillion, about $160 billion more than it was during former president Biden’s last year as president. Next year’s deficit will likely be even greater.
How we got to this point, Frum reminds us, is that the Republicans’ 2025 extension of their 2017 tax cuts will reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. Their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. That leaves a growing deficit that climbs to more than $4 trillion as the cost of servicing the debt grows.
Economist Justin Wolfers explained: “Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don’t, and borrow the difference from people who aren’t old enough to vote.”
Those numbers, Frum notes, don’t include the cost of Trump’s war on Iran. The administration acknowledges that fuel and munitions for that war have cost about $45 billion, but the real costs run far higher with the destruction, for example, of U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Department of Defense has asked for an additional $200 billion for the war, and Trump has asked for $1.5 trillion to fund the military in 2027, which Frum notes is up 44% from before the war on Iran.
In order to stay in power, Republicans are peddling what Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel recently called “fear porn.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters quoted Watters’s explanation: to engage non-MAGA voters, he said: “You have to say, these people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes, and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous, you know what we’re all about. And that’s really a choice.”
In September, Watters warned that “the Democrat party and its communist base are running against America” and “want to shatter the pillars of Western civilization.” He continued his dark fantasy: “They want to abolish the Senate, police, ICE, and of course the border. Some of them are even calling for reparations and rent control. Others have a little bit of a problem with whites, and a majority of Democrats don’t prefer capitalism. It’s like we’re fighting the Cold War here in our own country.”
Host Sean Hannity told viewers: “We can vote to build on the successes of President Trump, his first two years in office, or you can shred your Constitution, allow our country to be taken hostage by this new radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement and their far-left extremist candidates.” He called Democrats “completely insane.”
A company formed last month in Wyoming has been circulating in Texas phony leaflets and text messages pretending to be from a trans rights group. Addressed to the “student” of the household, the flyers claim to be a resource guide for transgender and LGBTQ+ youth. The flyers are deliberately inflammatory, purporting to give a roadmap to children for how to separate from their parents and replace them with other adults or organizations.
Right-wing groups are sharing the mailers and linking them to Democrats. A Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives called them “disgusting and evil” on social media and posted further: “The radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children and unravel the basic framework of our society.”
In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “the most vile political ad in Ohio history.” It features the biological mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, saying Acton is a liar for saying she lived in a tent as a child. In the ad, the woman tells Ohioans not to “let her become your governor.”
Acton, 60, has not seen her biological mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from the woman’s home after a grand jury indicted the woman’s second husband for raping Acton. The woman helped her husband escape custody and avoid trial until he died. Charles Hilu of the National Review reported that court records confirm Acton’s history, and noted that the impoverished family did, in fact, spend a winter living in a tent.
Acton’s brother replied to the ad, saying both of them had been abused, but she had received the worst of it as she tried to protect him. “Shame on Vivek,” he said.
While Vice President J.D. Vance defended Ramaswamy’s ad, others were appalled at his attempt to use her childhood trauma against her.
The Columbus Dispatch endorsed Amy Acton and called the ad “revolting.” MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, donated $500,000 to Acton, saying: “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight.”
New Jersey’s Republican former governor Chris Christie told Karen Tumulty and Dan Merica of the Washington Post: “The question for all Republicans is whether this type of attitude is what we want leading our party going forward. For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center. Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure.”
Today Ariana Baio of the Guardian reported that Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, has voted for Democrat James Talarico rather than Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to be the next U.S. senator from Texas. Bush explained: “I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles. But character matters more than party affiliation. Our democracy depends on leaders who respect our institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability, and seek to unite rather than divide.”
