Trump should fear the BBC. Instead he’s picked a fight – and he seems to be losing
Emma Brockes
The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script
Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.
The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.
Whitaker told the Fox News Channel yesterday: “They are a private company. Obviously they have terms of use that are applied to all of their customers, including the Ukrainians, and I think it’s more of a dispute along those lines…than anybody in this administration trying to change the way that Starshield or Starlink is used.”
Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”
But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy.
This afternoon, asked about the call, Trump told reporters: “It was a very interesting situation. So I don’t want to comment one way or the other, but, uh, my re—, my relationship with Elon is a very good one.” He reiterated: “I don’t want to comment on it. You know, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference. I guess the bottom line, he put it back.”
It remains unclear if the Ukrainians do, in fact, have full use of the networks again. Siobhán O’Grady, Carlotta Gall, and Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported yesterday that a senior Ukrainian commander told them he had lost more than a million dollars worth of drones when Starshield went fuzzy from the slowdown. For the next three days, he had to stop almost all operations, endangering his troops by hampering their ability to stop Russian advances by striking Russian command posts and fuel hubs.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported today that officials from Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, say sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes that are pushing deeper and deeper into Russia threaten the company’s survival. Profits for the company, which produces about a third of Russia’s oil, are falling and its debt is rising as the strikes cause fuel shortages.
Ukrainians are repeatedly hitting the refineries, one as far as 2,500 kilometers (about 1,553 miles) from the border, first damaging the structures and then destroying repairs after workers have rebuilt the structures, forcing the company to take on more and more debt as it shovels money into repairs that don’t survive. Even when it can find the money, sanctions limit its ability to replace equipment. The officials say even a few more months of war could destroy Rosneft.
The crisis explains why Putin and Trump are so desperate to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refineries and to lift sanctions on Russia. Rosneft’s loans from the Credit Bank of Moscow are becoming problematic, straining the bank.
In a sign this year’s writers are straining to make things as obvious as possible, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post broke the story today that in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently decided he wanted to display in his office one of the two floor globes General Dwight D. Eisenhower used during World War II.
Eisenhower was the erudite five-star general who oversaw the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily before directing the Allied invasion of France and Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is widely credited with defeating the Nazis.
After the war, Eisenhower went on to the presidency of Columbia University, where he devoted his energies to founding the American Assembly, a think tank to gather the world’s greatest minds to bring the understanding of history, foreign affairs, and philosophy to address the problems of the post–World War II world.
In 1952, when the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination vowed to cut U.S. support for the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower ran for president to protect the new postwar institutions that he believed were vital to global security in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. He won the Republican nomination and then the presidency with almost 55% of the vote, retaking the White House from Democrats for the first time since 1933.
During the war, Eisenhower had visited Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, a week after soldiers liberated it. He was shocked to the core. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote to his wife. Determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again, he urged reporters and congressmen to visit the camp to ensure there were witnesses, pictures, and films to contradict anyone who might, in the future, try to deny the horrors that had taken place.
After the war, Eisenhower embraced the work of San Francisco philosopher Eric Hoffer, who explained in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that economically or culturally dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated to back a demagogue who promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such a leader was dangerous enough during the Nazi era, Eisenhower thought, but with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, such a strongman could destroy humanity.
Eisenhower believed that it was crucial for the U.S. to build alliances and to help increase standards of living around the globe in order to prevent such a scenario. He built NATO and began the Food for Peace initiative, a program that later was absorbed into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the same agency that Musk and Trump shredded in 2025.
In their story about Eisenhower’s globe, Horton and Lamothe reported that Hegseth was so eager to get the historic object in place that rather than waiting for trained curators to move it, as is expected for any such priceless historic artifact, Hegseth’s staff decided to retrieve it on their own.
They dropped it.
The artifact smashed into its base, and the stand impaled it, ripping a gash through the fragile globe.
It never did end up in Hegseth’s office.
It is currently undergoing repairs.
Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.
Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”
U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.
Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.
Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.
It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.
On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.
A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.
In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.
The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.
The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”
Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.
Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men.
At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.
Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either.
And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power.
In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.
With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists.
Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value.
Those excited by the scene dismissed skeptics who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”
October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors.
The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.
When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.
Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.
By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
But the problem was not lazy workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.
Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.
Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.
They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.
Attributing recent unrest in France to immigration, Trump said he would welcome immigrants from some countries but not from Norway "because I didn't get the Nobel Prize ... So I don't want anybody from Norway."
There was no indication that the Trump administration was adopting new official policy on Norwegian immigrants.
"Norway has become a **** house country, actually," Trump said, using a term that he has previously applied to Haiti, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.
As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.
Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.
He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”
Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a race for the U.S. Senate, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”
On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.
At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”
But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”
Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.
Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.
Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.
Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.
After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”
“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.
After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.
Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against Rogers in Michigan.
That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.
El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.
Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.
And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.
Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.
American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.
Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.
Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”
After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”
The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.
“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.
Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for [Donald Trump].”
It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.
In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”
An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”
In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election.
Quote:Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.
Gernot Döllner criticised for in-person announcement of major investment in US days before midterm elections
The head of the luxury carmaker Audi is under fire in Germany for appearing at a rally with Donald Trump just days before the US midterm elections, to announce billions of dollars of investment in battleground state Georgia.
Gernot Döllner joined Trump on stage after the US president gave a speech criticised by the head of an elected body of employees at Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen, as being full of “racism, sexism, transphobia [and] contempt for democracy”.
Daniela Cavallo, the head of the VW works council, added that anyone who heard Trump’s speech and then saw that Döllner had become an active participant in the event must “sink into the ground with shame”, according to internal company communications released to German media.
She said the investment deal and Döllner’s appearance showed VW’s management had allowed itself to be “turned into a puppet in the propaganda show of a highly dubious political figure”.
Isabel Cademartori, the transport spokesperson for Germany’s Social Democrats – part of the country’s ruling coalition – called Döllner’s actions a “disgrace”. She added this was particularly so “in view of the history of the Volkswagen Group”, in an apparent reference to VW’s founding as a showcase company under the Nazis.
Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.
At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.
Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”
Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.
Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.
Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.
The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.
Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.
On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.
On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.
Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.
At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”
And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.
Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.
So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.
The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.
On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.
As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.
California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.
On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.
It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.
But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.
Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.
This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”
On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”
Also on Sunday, right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro lost to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Despite what appears to have been the restriction by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of social media accounts that promoted Lula and its promotion of pro-Bolsonaro accounts, Lula pulled out a victory.
Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips of the Guardian reported that Lula’s victory came, in large part, from street protesters who helped different factions come together against Bolsonaro and from Lula’s supporters’ use of social media to override Meta’s restrictions and make pro-Lula content perform well on social media. Lula ally André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” that organized more than 10 million followers to push back against Bolsonaro content and boost Lula.
Three weeks ago, many observers thought Bolsonaro would win the election. Bolsonaro and his supporters had cultivated the idea they were allied with Trump in fighting off a perceived communist threat. A victory for Bolsonaro would help to spread the idea of Trump’s control over the Western Hemisphere as he helped to install right-wing leaders across Latin America. But in the end, the vote was not close. Lula supporters organized voters, explained what social media was suppressing, helped folks get to the polls, and Lula won by more than 4 million votes.
Initially, Bolsonaro said that he would not accept defeat and would ask for the result of the election to be annulled. In that refusal to accept the results of an election, Bolsonaro echoed his father, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who in 2023 launched a coup to remain in power after voters elected Lula. The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence for his role in that coup attempt.
As Megan Messerly, Daniel Desrochers, Ari Hawkins, and Phelim Kine of Politico reported, the younger Bolsonaro had the support of MAGA insiders in the U.S., who claimed the Brazilian election had been stolen. On Sunday, Trump himself told reporters that Brazil’s election “looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”
But on Monday, Trump suggested to reporters he would not intervene in the election, and as Michael Birnbaum, Marina Dias, and Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post reported, minutes later, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. A Bolsonaro advisor told the reporters: “Flávio has given up. He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week and that he may have a long prison term ahead.”
Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, to surrender his passport and stay in the country. Bolsonaro posted a video saying he would comply and that he had never thought of leaving Brazil. But today he went missing. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled his passports and began to look for him.
Bolsonaro and his family turned up this afternoon in the United States, where a senior State Department official told reporters the State Department would offer the family visas to enter the country. Bolsonaro’s allies cheered that he would lead Brazil’s right-wing opposition to Lula from the United States.
Meanwhile, concerns are circulating about a manipulation of information in the U.S. before the midterm election, similar to what happened in Brazil. As Kevin Frey of MS NOW reported today, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are demanding that Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg explain why the main Instagram account of No Kings was suspended earlier this month during the October 17 No Kings rallies around the country that were encouraging Americans to vote. The representatives wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise[s] serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”
The representatives dismissed Meta’s explanation that the outage was caused by an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.” Garcia and Raskin wrote that such an explanation strained “public credulity,” and noted that Meta appeared to have interfered in Brazil’s election.
“Technical glitches occur,” the congressmen wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.” Garcia and Raskin noted that the interests of Zuckerberg and Meta in government contracts mean they have a financial incentive to cooperate with Trump.
In addition to the suppression of information, disinformation is also a concern. As George Chidi of the Guardian reported today, disinformation, driven by AI, is running rampant on social media in the U.S. in the runup to the midterm election. Social media companies reduced their efforts to stop the flood of disinformation in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Chidi writes, and now official government sources like the Department of Homeland Security sometimes amplify the lies.
Trump and his allies have always relied on a false narrative to gain and then to keep power. They adopted a strategy developed by Russian political theorists to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Political strategists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.” They perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to distinguish what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.
Trump’s allegiance to Putin continues to be on display. Today journalists reported the administration is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s multibillion-dollar government investment fund. Anton Troianovski of the New York Times explained that the Biden administration placed sanctions on the fund immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cutting it off from the West’s financial system. Lifting those sanctions would be an economic boon to Russia in the midst of its war on Ukraine.
Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, and Eenee Purevdorj of the Financial Times reported today that Donald Trump Jr. took a hunting trip in Mongolia this August with Umar Kremlev, the man who helped to finance Don Jr.’s wedding party in May. Kremlev is a boxing promoter with a criminal record of extortion and battery, and is close to Putin. The journalists called the relationship between Trump and Kremlev “remarkable.”
On the trip, Jr. shot and killed an endangered sheep prized for its large horns. According to the Financial Times, this was at least the third Altai argali he has killed.
Tonight Angie Nixon, the Democratic state representative who is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida wrote in a social media post addressed to Meta that her campaign’s Instagram page “was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from” a “get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community.”
“This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” she wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.”
She continued: “The stakes are too high to take down pages encouraging people to vote in seven days, Meta & Instagram.”
