Attorney General’s office, seen here carefully training antitrust law on five cameras instead of five corporations.
The Justice Department has decided that the real antitrust menace in America is not oil companies, tech monopolies, or health care conglomerates, but five TV networks that briefly said, "no thanks" to being unpaid camera crew for Donald Trump. NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News are now under federal investigation for a supposed "group boycott" because they temporarily suspended pool coverage after Trump kicked CNN, MS Now and Politico off the White House grounds for the crime of reporting things he didn’t like.
Having lost round one in court — where a judge told the White House it couldn’t just ban outlets and call it “FAKE NEWS!” law — the administration appears to have pivoted to a new strategy: if you can’t legally silence the press, try to scare them with the Sherman Act. DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington is pretending this is just a neutral competition case, while press freedom advocates are politely pointing out that weaponizing antitrust to punish coverage decisions is a spectacularly obvious attack on the First Amendment. The pool system that’s worked under both parties for decades is now being treated like a criminal cartel because it offended one guy’s TV habits.
And the punchline? Even during the mini-boycott, networks still covered open White House events — they just refused to play along with Trump’s attempt to exile specific outlets from the rotation. So the government isn’t protecting viewers’ access to information; it’s protecting Trump’s access to a compliant press corps. The message from the administration is crystal clear: cover us on our terms, or the Justice Department will be right over to discuss your "competition issues." Freedom of the press, meet the freedom to be investigated for not flattering the president enough.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump’s favorite theocrat from Louisiana, is suddenly workshopping his exit strategy in public, hinting he might just toddle back home if Republicans lose the House in November. Translation: the guy who helped normalize Trump’s authoritarian cosplay is now wondering if it’s worth sticking around once the gravy train and subpoena-shredding service slow down. Turns out “owning the libs” is a lot less fun when the libs might actually own the gavel again.
Republicans, meanwhile, are staring down a midterm map powered by voter rage over the economy and President Trump’s underwater approval rating, while pretending they haven’t spent years turning the House into a Fox News green room with a voting schedule. Democrats are licking their chops at the chance to reclaim the chamber, investigate everything that moves, and maybe ask why the legislative branch has been functioning like Trump’s legal defense PAC with better stationery. Johnson’s “maybe I’ll just go home” routine is less a dignified farewell and more a pre-emptive I was leaving anyway from a party that’s been using its House majority as a shield for corruption, extremism, and a long, slow assault on basic democratic norms.
If the GOP loses the House, Johnson loses the gavel, Trump loses his most obedient floor manager, and the whole “permanent MAGA majority” fantasy looks even more like what it always was: a temporary lease on power held together with gerrymanders, voter suppression, and whatever fresh outrage Trump can squeeze into a news cycle. Whether Johnson actually returns to Louisiana or just morphs into another right-wing martyr on conservative media, the message is clear: the second the House stops being a tool for Trump’s agenda, the true believers start eyeing the exits.
Katie Bailey, newly promoted congressional wrangler, preparing to sell another round of "historic achievements" to a legislature that really should know better by now.
The Trump White House has picked Katie Bailey as its new head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, because if you're going to keep shoving the same agenda through Congress, you at least need a fresh salesperson for the ongoing arson. She replaces James Braid, who Vice President J.D. Vance lovingly credited with such "achievements" as the largest tax cut ever (for the donor class), "resources" for Trump's historic immigration agenda (translation: more money to punish migrants), finishing the border wall cosplay, a "landmark" first crypto bill, and ramming through cabinet confirmations at warp speed before anyone could Google the nominees.
Bailey, already deputy director of legislative affairs and special assistant to Trump, now gets promoted just weeks before the midterms, with Republicans clinging to a slim majority in both chambers and Democrats actually within striking distance of taking the wheel back from the clown car. Her résumé includes serving Mike Braun as legislative director before he upgraded himself to governor of Indiana, presumably after proving he could reliably vote for whatever the party’s donors wanted.
So the stakes here aren’t just internal staffing drama. This is the person whose entire job is to keep Congress signing off on more tax cuts, more anti-immigrant theater, and more deregulation dressed up as "crypto innovation." If the GOP hangs onto the House and Senate, Bailey gets to turn Trump’s second-term fever dreams into law. If they lose, she becomes chief negotiator for a president who thinks compromise is what weak people do when they’re not yelling on Truth Social. Either way, Congress is about to enjoy a front-row seat to the latest episode of "What If We Broke Democracy Just a Little Bit More?"
Republicans are getting wrecked in poll after poll, so naturally the new governing theory is: the polls are lying. Axios walks through a midterm landscape where Democrats are leading on the generic ballot, Cook is projecting Dem gains in both chambers, Trump is marinating at ~37% approval, and the best the GOP can muster is, "well, historically polls have underestimated us, so maybe math will chicken out again." Nothing says stable constitutional order like one party betting control of Congress on the mythic "shy Trump voter" riding in for a fourth straight miracle.
Pollsters, meanwhile, are out here doing statistical necromancy on a phone-based system that died in the late '90s. Republicans don’t answer surveys, so the solution is to just pump extra weight into the Trump diehards who do pick up the phone and hope they resemble the ones who are too busy screaming "fake news" at their TV to respond. Experts politely note that this can easily inflate the size of a supposed Democratic wave or, alternatively, conjure phantom Republicans out of bad data. Translation: everyone is flying blind, but only one side is currently running the country while chanting "the polls are wrong" like a governance strategy.
The result: Democrats probably have the edge, but the margins swing wildly depending on who you think will actually vote, with one YouGov model showing anywhere from a 6- to 16-point Democratic lead. Even Republican pollster Brent Buchanan admits that "hanging our hopes on, 'The polls are wrong'" is "not very strong" — which is a polite way of saying the party that controls the federal government is reduced to crossing its fingers that statistics will fail harder than Trump’s approval numbers. American democracy: now with randomized difficulty settings.
Men holding "I Am Jane Doe" signs while the Trump administration holds a giant "I Am Title IX Repeal" Sharpie somewhere in DC.
While Trump’s Education Department keeps methodically taking a chainsaw to Title IX, tens of thousands of people showed up at city halls and campuses to say: maybe the federal government shouldn’t be running cover for rapists. The rallies followed the Cornell gang rape case and LSU’s “sure he’s accused of rape but he’s good at football” approach, proving yet again that colleges will happily treat women as acceptable collateral damage for frat dues and TV contracts – especially now that Washington has their back.
Against that backdrop of institutional cowardice, six men in New York tried something radical: basic decency. They talked about calling out misogyny in group chats, backing actual legislation for consent education, teaching boys what consent is before they get to the frat basement, and refusing to pretend victim-blaming is a personality quirk. One described how police and DAs don’t take sexual assault seriously, which is a lot easier to do when the Trump administration is busy stripping away protections for survivors and LGBTQ+ students, then calling it “reform.”
So we now have this inspiring division of labor: Trump and his crew work tirelessly to dismantle safeguards "from the frat house to the White House," and regular people are left trying to rebuild a culture of consent one awkward conversation and protest sign at a time. The federal government loosens the lid on rape culture; citizens show up with a mop and a copy of the consent curriculum they’re begging the state to mandate. Freedom, apparently, now means freedom for universities, cops and prosecutors to do nothing while everyone else cleans up the mess.
TSA supervisors survey a checkpoint proudly devoid of chairs, confident that plantar fasciitis is the key to national security.
The Trump administration has finally located the real danger at America’s airports: chairs. TSA leadership quietly ordered every seat yanked from checkpoint podiums, then told workers that standing for eight hours straight "reinforces professionalism" and "hospitality"—because nothing says "welcome" like mandatory shin splints. Officers showed up mid-shift to find their chairs disappearing and being replaced with "inadequate mats," which is corporate-speak for "we bought the cheapest rectangle of suffering on Amazon."
Union leaders at AFGE say they weren’t notified, weren’t allowed to bargain, and have no idea what happened to the vanished chairs—presumably they’ve been renditioned to a black site for interrogation about their suspicious cushioning. Workers who need light-duty accommodations? Good luck. At the same time, TSA forced employees to sign a pledge promising to support "the well-being and morale of our colleagues," which is a bold demand from an agency whose current morale strategy is take away the chairs and pray nobody faints. Managers, of course, remain seated somewhere far away, bravely defending national security from behind ergonomic mesh.
This is just the latest entry in Trump’s second-term "Punish the People Who Kept Working Through Your Shutdowns" tour. TSA officers already worked unpaid through two shutdowns, are staring down pay freezes and higher health insurance premiums, and watched DHS try—twice—to illegally cancel their collective bargaining agreement until a judge smacked them down for violating an injunction. Meanwhile, the administration is busily expanding TSA privatization through its Gold+ program, because if you’re going to grind workers’ joints into dust, you might as well do it with a contractor skimming a profit. The agency still requires chairs for passengers upon request, though, so at least someone is allowed to sit in this security theater—just not the people doing the actual work.
Nothing reassures a sovereign Native nation like anonymous men in tactical gear guarding drill rigs at dawn and blocking the tribe’s own police from their own land.
At 4:59 a.m., the Tohono O’odham Nation’s chairman got an email from Border Patrol: contractors were about to start soil tests for a 62‑mile border wall on tribal land. If the Nation wanted cultural monitors present, they were welcome to watch — as long as they didn’t interfere. Work began exactly one minute later, because nothing says "good faith consultation" like a timestamped middle finger.
DHS lawyers had just finished telling a federal judge they were engaging the tribe in good faith, which helped kill the Nation’s request for a preliminary injunction against what they called an historic attack on tribal sovereignty. On the ground, that "good faith" looked like a caravan of contractors flanked by Border Patrol, guarded by masked agents in tactical gear drawn from a special operations unit previously used for citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago that left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens.
While the tribe held a border prayer ceremony, ProPublica found that DHS surveilled the camp and questioned tribal members off the reservation, all while insisting that the area — where border crossings have sharply declined — is somehow "one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors." Declining crossings, militarized raids on Native land, and surveillance of a religious gathering: the administration’s border policy is less "security" and more "live‑action reenactment of every treaty violation in U.S. history."
Trump, furious that launching a war didn’t earn him a peace prize, explains that Norway has gravely offended both him and, coincidentally, civilization itself.
Donald Trump, fresh off starting a war with Iran, spent a Syracuse rally for other Republicans doing what every great peacemaker does: ranting that he deserves the Nobel peace prize and denouncing Norway for not handing it to him. According to Trump, the United States – "represented by me" (subtle) – has suffered an "indelible stain" because some Norwegians didn’t give him a medal while he’s threatening to turn a country into a smoking crater.
Not content with just whining, he announced that the Nobel peace prize is now "forever discredited" and run by "radical ideologues" who are "enemies of civilization" – because nothing screams respect for democratic institutions like branding a foreign prize committee as civilization’s enemy for insufficient flattery. He then bragged about the many "wars" he claims to have "settled" (including ones that either weren’t wars or are still ongoing) and promised to "settle or win" two more: Iran and Russia-Ukraine, assuring the crowd that Iran will be handled "very quick one way or the other: that they give us everything or they don’t exist any longer."
Trump also declared he had personally stopped Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and "saved more lives than anyone in history" – a fun little fantasy directly contradicted by US intelligence, which says Iran suspended its weapons program back in 2003. The Nobel, meanwhile, went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer who chaired the UN commission finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza – or as Trump described her, "a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of." So the guy threatening to erase a country thinks the real threat to peace is: a woman who investigates war crimes.
The Trump White House invited Mike Tyson to wander into the West Wing briefing room, where the press is allegedly supposed to hear about governing, not the undercard for Trump's next ego rally. Tyson proudly announced that the administration asked him to hop on Air Force One for Trump's Syracuse campaign stop and confidently predicted that "Trump will win" the midterms, because nothing says robust democracy like treating elections as a pay‑per‑view title fight.
Reporters got a quick dose of democracy‑as-spectacle while the White House once again used official space, staff time and the trappings of the presidency as a backdrop for pure campaign messaging. No policy, no governance, just a celebrity hype man in the taxpayer‑funded briefing room, warming up the crowd for Dear Leader’s next rally. The line between state business and campaign circus gets thinner every day, and the clowns keep getting more famous.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has decided that if you can’t beat the war-crimes charges, you should just sanction the people bringing them. The U.S. is slapping full blocking sanctions on the International Criminal Court for the grave offense of investigating alleged war crimes by Israel, American service members, and the Trump administration. When the law gets too close, this crew doesn’t hire better lawyers, it tries to financially kneecap the court.
Because reality has a sense of humor, Rubio’s tantrum arrives just as an ICC judge is being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So on the same day the rest of the world is saying, “congratulations on your work for justice,” Washington is essentially screaming, “hand over your assets and shut up about our atrocities.” Nothing says "rules-based international order" like sanctioning the referee the moment he reaches for the red card.
This isn’t foreign policy, it’s mobster cosplay. The Trump-Rubio State Department is broadcasting that U.S. power means never having to answer for what you do to civilians, prisoners, or occupied populations. Accountability is for smaller countries; America, under this crowd, just weaponizes the Treasury Department against anyone who tries to enforce the laws we pretend to support at international conferences. The message to other authoritarian leaders is loud and clear: if your generals end up in The Hague’s crosshairs, don’t reform — just start drafting your sanctions list.
Cook Political Report just shifted 18 House races toward Democrats, which is what happens when your party spends years torching institutions, mismanaging a war, and driving fuel prices up while insisting everything is going perfectly. The new projection has Democrats picking up 9 to 19 seats, putting them in majority territory, because apparently voters have some limit to how much chaos and corruption they’re willing to call “owning the libs.”
President Trump is hustling around the country trying to save GOP candidates, which is adorable given that the midterms are effectively a referendum on his White House dumpster fire. Republicans are suddenly discovering the ancient political art of pretending not to know the guy they all enabled, while a Politico poll helpfully notes that about one in four 2024 Trump voters think their local Republican would do better by publicly dumping him. When even your own base is edging away like you just started talking about injecting bleach again, the vibes are not immaculate.
Underneath the spin, the math is brutal: Democrats only need to win about 20% of the toss-up races to secure a majority, while Republicans are watching previously safe seats slide from comfy red to "Lean R" and "Likely R" like a slow-motion bank run on their gerrymandered advantages. The GOP spent years rigging maps, gutting norms, and wrapping itself around Trump’s ego, and now the bill is coming due — payable in House seats, denominated in buyer’s remorse.
Trump stares at a Fed org chart wondering which box he can replace with "loyal henchman" and which ones just need a good old-fashioned show trial.
Trump has now decided that if you can't legally fire a Federal Reserve governor, you just build yourself a little homebrew inquisition and try again. He signed an order directing the attorney general and assorted loyalists to form a "committee of inquiry" into Fed Governor Lisa Cook, accusing her of making false statements on a mortgage application — the same sort of "fraud" that a ProPublica report shows has been a popular hobby across his own Cabinet. The committee’s mission: hunt for "cause" to remove her, after the Supreme Court inconveniently ruled he has to at least pretend to give her a fair shot at defending herself.
The White House memo helpfully announces that Cook "shall appear" at a hearing on November 5 — two days after the midterms, because nothing says "independent central bank" like a politically-timed show trial. Her lawyers, Abbe Lowell and Norm Eisen, note that Trump has already publicly decided to fire her regardless of facts, which is generally considered a bad sign for "due process." Meanwhile, the underlying mortgage scandal appears to be that she called a vacation home a vacation home, while various Trump officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and multiple Cabinet alumni, have juggled "primary residence" claims like they're running a shell game.
All of this originates with Bill Pulte, Trump's handpicked Federal Housing Finance Agency chief, who lobbed the initial mortgage-fraud grenade in 2025, which Trump then blasted across social media as justification to try to purge Cook from the Fed. Why the obsession? Cook has a permanent vote on interest rates, and Trump has been running a sustained pressure campaign to bully the Fed into cutting rates on his political timetable. Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls it what it is: an "illegitimate show trial" and a power grab to take over the central bank, while Trump simultaneously rants that Jerome Powell should be forced to resign or sued "at the highest level" despite an inspector general report clearing him. The administration can't win control of monetary policy the honest way, so it's testing how far it can go turning the Fed into just another branch of the Trump Organization.
Michael Cohen stands behind Trump in 2016, back when he was just a fixer and not yet the host of "Welcome to My Client’s Russian Intelligence Problem Is a Hoax."
Michael Cohen, the guy who once called Donald Trump a racist, liar, and sleazebag while testifying to Congress about Trump’s crimes, has now boomeranged straight back into the MAGA cuddle puddle. He’s hosting a pro-Trump radio show on WABC and using his podcast to assure listeners that Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin is actually just "pragmatic realism" and savvy diplomacy, not the world’s saddest audition tape for a Moscow timeshare.
On his show, Cohen invites journalist David Corn on to talk about Corn’s book on how Russia has been running an influence war that benefits Trump. Corn calmly notes that Rudy Giuliani literally colluded with a Russian intelligence agent to smear Joe Biden, that US intelligence warned Trump Giuliani was being targeted, and that Trump then happily blasted that Russian disinfo out on Twitter. Cohen’s defense? Giuliani is "not Donald Trump" and maybe Trump was just "trying to support Rudy"—you know, by amplifying a foreign intel op against his own democracy like a very stable patriot.
Cohen then completes his loyalty oath by declaring the Trump–Russia scandal a "hoax," even while calling Corn a "very prestigious journalist" who “knows a lot.” This is the MAGA media model in its purest form: acknowledge the facts, then stuff them into a woodchipper and broadcast the mulch. The onetime fixer who helped cover up Trump’s sleaze is now helping cover up Trump’s entanglement with Russian operations, all from the comfort of a pro-Trump radio lineup. The grift is eternal; the storyline—"Russia, if you’re listening"—apparently is too.
Senators stand in front of flags and "affordability" signs, bravely announcing their plan to save the planet by making it easier to rubber-stamp the projects causing the problem.
The Senate’s latest brainwave is a "Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act" that promises to "flood the grid" with clean energy by doing what Washington always does in a crisis: make it easier for big projects to bulldoze their way through environmental review. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich are selling it as a once-in-a-generation chance to unclog clean energy from interconnection purgatory, while Republican co-authors Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee are grinning like people who know exactly how many pipelines can fit through a streamlined permitting loophole.
Environmental groups are politely tearing each other’s faces off over it. Evergreen Action is
very excited about the parts that help power lines and renewables, and "still reviewing" the rest — which is DC-speak for "we see the fossil-fuel escape hatches, thanks." On the other side, folks like Rep. Jared Huffman are pointing out the tiny detail that states, tribes, impacted communities, and endangered species might be getting tossed under the bipartisan bus so data centers and utilities can get their candy faster. But don’t worry, Capito swears the bill "protects land, water and wildlife" while gutting the processes created to, you know, protect land, water and wildlife.
All this is being punted to a lame-duck session — that magical time when members who just lost their elections finally feel free to legislate like the donors are watching instead of the voters. Historically, lame ducks have produced big environmental laws; now we get to see if 2026’s contribution to history is a "climate" bill that quietly locks in more fossil infrastructure under the banner of clean energy. Call it bipartisan progress: both parties agreeing the solution to decades of corporate-friendly deregulation is faster corporate-friendly deregulation, just with some solar panels taped to the side.
Silicon Valley’s finest doom enthusiasts are quietly running "day after" simulations for when unsafe AI finally takes down the banking system, the internet, or, you know, power and water. The scenario isn’t if something catastrophic happens, but when — and how fast the public will turn on Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and President Trump, who’s been bravely protecting these poor fragile tech monopolists from the horrors of actual regulation.
While OpenAI brags about "preparedness exercises" and Anthropic just stares at the floor, the plan isn’t to prevent disaster so much as to manage the optics once it hits. The companies assume Democrats, newly ascendant after the midterms, will scramble to slam the brakes on AI while trying not to crash the already wobbly economy that’s now duct-taped to AI infrastructure. Meanwhile, an aging, tech-illiterate Congress will be handed emergency crash courses by the very people who helped create the mess, because nothing says responsible governance like letting the arsonists write the fire code.
We’ve already got a preview: a Chinese hacker allegedly used a mix of China-built models and Anthropic’s Claude Code to raid South Korean banks and then asked the AI where to sell the stolen data. Industry insiders are now openly betting on a major event in the next 6–12 months, while lobbying to shape the "after the explosion" rules they refused to accept beforehand. Some lawmakers are talking about bans on "superintelligence" or mandatory kill switches, which experts say may not work — a comforting thought when the people in charge consider mass disruption a scheduling detail.
But don’t worry, Axios assures us that in a real crisis, Washington can rise above partisanship — just like in COVID and the 2008 crash, when politicians heroically protected markets first and people somewhere after that. The Trump White House’s contribution to this looming AI trainwreck is simple: stall regulation, keep donors happy, and hope that when the lights go out, voters blame the circuit breaker and not the guy who refused to install one.
Democrats are once again gathered around the national campfire to debate the timeless question: if the president openly says "I can do whatever I want" and treats the Constitution like a timeshare contract, is that bad enough to do anything about? Jamie Raskin politely notes that Trump has "already committed numerous impeachable offenses" in his second term — from usurping Congress’ war powers to slapping on illegal tariffs to engaging in corruption on a scale that requires scientific notation — but hey, that pesky two‑thirds Senate requirement means accountability might be inconvenient.
Meanwhile, the party’s cautious wing is clutching its pearls over the prospect of another impeachment "food fight," bravely proposing stern investigations and strongly worded letters as Trump openly brags he was "never even worried" about the first two impeachments and explains that the "very sacred" presidency mainly entitles him to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. His advisers admit he’d probably enjoy a third impeachment because he thrives on chaos and persecution cosplay, which is exactly what you want in a guy with nukes and a Twitter account.
Progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna are over here suggesting that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t let a president repeatedly violate the Constitution without consequence, on the radical theory that laws are supposed to mean something. They argue impeachment is about setting a standard, while the White House gleefully insists it would only prove Democrats "are all about getting Trump" and that their affordability agenda is a hoax — bold talk from an administration treating checks and balances like a Groupon.
Hovering over all this is the Senate, where Republicans are already gaming out how to toss any impeachment straight into the shredder, citing the very precedent Democrats set when they dismissed the Mayorkas impeachment. Add in Vice President JD Vance, who apparently "relishes" defending Trump and sees more "lawfare" as his path to the presidency, and you get the full picture: a president openly testing the outer limits of lawlessness, a party daring anyone to stop him, and an opposition debating whether defending the Constitution is a principle or just a midterm messaging problem. But rest easy: it’s not a fetish and it’s not a taboo. It’s just the rule of law, hanging by a thread.
Mike Collins proudly salutes the Trump second-term agenda: higher prices, endless war, and elections that only count when Republicans win.
Georgia held a Senate debate, but what actually showed up on stage was the political corpse of Trump’s second term, propped up Weekend-at-Bernie’s-style by Rep. Mike Collins. Jon Ossoff kept asking the radical, far-left question of the night — "why did you back Trump’s tariffs that jacked up prices and tanked his approval ratings?" — and Collins responded with the traditional GOP answer: stare straight ahead and repeat "Bidenomics" like it’s a spell that makes grocery bills disappear.
The star policy on trial was Trump’s "One Big Beautiful Bill" — a $1.4 trillion deficit bomb dressed up as a tip-tax cut for workers while quietly shoveling the real cash to the wealthy. Collins bragged about that and Trump’s tariffs, which he assured everyone are "fair" and great for Georgia’s ports, though he couldn’t name a single way they’ve helped. On foreign policy, he dutifully defended Trump’s wildly unpopular Iran war and the February bombing raids with Israel, because nothing says fiscal conservatism like endless war layered on top of a trillion-dollar tax giveaway.
Democracy, such as it is, also made a cameo. Ossoff hammered Collins for still clinging to Trump’s baseless fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen, while Collins tried to launder that lie into "election security" by pushing the Trump-backed SAVE Act — a voter suppression package dressed up as a citizenship check. At the same time, Ossoff went after Collins for having neo-Nazi propaganda pumped out of his own household via his son-in-law’s white nationalist content, prompting Collins to bravely declare he’s personally against racism, he just apparently doesn’t mind it being syndicated from his living room.
Meanwhile, Republicans are watching Georgia slip away and shifting money to other states, even as Collins stays loyally handcuffed to Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s war, and Trump’s election delusions. The party built an entire apparatus on grift, racism-adjacent politics, and election denial, and now they’re shocked to discover that running a full MAGA restoration tour in a swing state might not be the electoral slam dunk Fox promised.
Cassidy Hutchinson, apparently learning the hard way that in the Trump era the only protected class is "people who helped with the coup".
The Trump Justice Department’s civil rights division — you know, the one that’s supposed to defend people from government abuse — is reportedly trying to charge former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson with lying to Congress, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like prosecuting one of the most important January 6 witnesses. Hutchinson testified that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his SUV to join the mob at the Capitol, so naturally the priority now is not "why was the president trying to ride shotgun in a coup?" but "how fast can we put the witness on trial".
This highly normal use of federal power is being run out of the civil rights division instead of the DC US attorney’s office, a move so weird even the New York Times noticed it. But the pattern is crystal clear: this is just the latest entry in Trump’s "Destroy My Enemies" tour. The same DOJ already indicted James Comey and Letitia James on laughable charges that were tossed after a judge ruled the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. The fix for that embarrassment? Not "stop" — never stop — but a fresh indictment of Comey for the grave federal offense of posting seashells arranged as "8647". Very stable country.
And while they’re at it, Trump’s DOJ has also gone after the Southern Poverty Law Center and Don Lemon, because if you’re going to run an authoritarian cosplay regime, you may as well go after civil rights groups and journalists too. So yes, the message is loud and clear: testify about January 6, investigate Trump, criticize the Dear Leader, and the "Justice" Department will be right there — not to protect your rights, but to make sure you regret ever opening your mouth.
Trump, surrounded by advisers, consulting the only war timeline that matters: the midterm calendar.
Donald Trump has generously announced that he will not attack Iran before the November midterms, which is quite a sentence to read about a US president and not a mob boss negotiating a ceasefire with the cops. After eight months of a war he started and still can’t finish, he hopped on Truth Social to brag that the US is having “productive discussions” with an Iran he describes as being in “very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily” — a reassuring way of saying the world’s most powerful military has spent most of a year turning one of the world’s most sensitive regions into a live-ammo demo reel.
The Strait of Hormuz — previously responsible for about a fifth of global oil and gas flows — has ping-ponged between blockade and bombardment like it’s being run by a bored 12‑year‑old with a Risk board and dad’s credit card. Trump now claims record oil traffic through the strait, somehow with “not one barrel” involving Iran, a statistic that exists only in his head and, apparently, his energy policy. Meanwhile, US forces are trading fire with Iran from Larak Island to bases in Jordan and the UAE, but don’t worry, the president swears there will be no fresh attacks until after Americans have voted. Democracy: now with scheduled airstrikes.
This is the same guy who a month ago insisted he was “not affected by the election” while his approval cratered, gas prices stayed high, and his own party started checking the lifeboats. By late September, polls had his Iran adventure supported by only about a third of Americans, Republican approval of Trump dropping nearly 10 points in a week, and Democrats up nine on the generic ballot. So now, as the Wall Street Journal reports JD Vance and Marco Rubio warning that this war could easily outlive Trump’s term, the White House strategy appears to be: keep the conflict simmering, try to hold Congress, and leave the post–November 3rd war plans as a fun surprise twist.
The president of the United States has effectively announced that whether another sovereign nation gets bombed again depends on how the midterms go — a kind of live-action focus group where the variable is "war." But sure, tell us more about how the real threat to democracy is people being mean about him on cable news.
Pictured: the moment federal disaster relief finally arrives, right after the president finishes watching himself get dragged on morning television.
After months of Menasha, Wisconsin residents picking splinters of their homes out of cornfields, Donald Trump has suddenly remembered that FEMA exists and approved nearly $18 million in disaster aid. This miraculous burst of compassion arrived one day after CBS News aired a segment showing that people in the tornado’s path were still waiting for help while holding benefit concerts to pay for what their government wouldn’t. Apparently the new FEMA protocol is: 1) get obliterated by an EF-3 tornado, 2) get ignored for weeks, 3) hope you can guilt the president via morning television.
Naturally, the White House insists there is "no politicization" of disaster relief, which is a bold claim given the analysis showing Trump approved 85% of aid requests from states he won in 2024, but only 46% from states won by Kamala Harris. States with Democratic governors also did worse, because nothing says "unifying leader" like making sure hurricanes and tornadoes know how their state voted before the paperwork goes through. Wisconsin is the perfect lab rat: a Trump 2024 state with a Democratic governor, left waiting until a Republican congressman and gubernatorial candidate personally lobbied the president and a national news segment embarrassed him.
So Menasha finally gets help, but only after filmmaker Phil Johnston and volunteers had to stage a fundraiser to cover basic needs, because the state disaster fund doesn’t give money directly to residents and the federal government was busy doing vibes-based triage. Residents say they feel "levitated" and "gobsmacked" by the news, which is a polite Midwestern way of saying "why did we have to beg on national TV to get what our taxes already paid for?" Meanwhile, Trump gets to posture as the benevolent savior who swoops in at the last minute, just as the credits roll, to sign a check he could have approved weeks earlier. Hell of a disaster-response strategy: govern by Nielsen ratings.
