Political News

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani shared his thoughts on artificial intelligence during a press conference Monday, where he announced that more than 10,000 children from low-income families would be moved off of the free child care waitlist. “You have some of the leaders of the creation of this technology saying that there’s a 10% chance that humanity could come to an end as a result of…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Trump can’t make ‘super intelligence’ happen…

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The White House continued its press ban Monday, blocking the news outlet Politico from traveling on Air Force One with President Trump.

Politico was scheduled to be the White House print pool representative, and Trump administration officials offered its spot on the plane to other news organizations who are part of the pool. In solidarity, several print organizations said no, CNN reports.

The night before, the White House’s email to the press corps offering guidance on Trump’s trip did not mention any news outlets who were traveling on Air Force One, which is not normal, and could be a sign that media organizations are trying to send a message to the president. Last month, Trump banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House, only to be rebuked by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who ordered the ban immediately lifted while the outlets’ court challenge received a full hearing.

At the time, the rest of the White House TV pool refused to cover Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House, leaving only Chinese state media to have video of Xi’s entrance September 24. At the state dinner for Xi that same night, a dumbfounded Trump asked where all of the cameras were.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Trump appeared to be confused about Kelly’s order and is still bent on punishing news outlets for coverage that he doesn’t like. The fact that other mainstream media outlets aren’t trying to take advantage of Trump’s ban to get increased access to the president is a good sign. Enabling Trump’s latest attacks on the press would result in watered-down, less critical news coverage of a president who thinks he is above any laws or checks on his power.

Rick Jackson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, is the latest MAGA candidate to delete mentions of President Donald Trump from his campaign website.

A version of Jackson’s website from June stated that he “will work with President Trump to protect Georgians from the consequences of Washington’s failures.” As of Monday, the mention had been removed, MeidasTouch reported.

This sudden deletion (read: defection) comes after Jackson spent months tirelessly tying himself to Trump. In February, his campaign aired a 30-second Super Bowl commercial comparing him to the president. “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything,” Jackson said. On the campaign trail, Jackson promised voters he’d be Trump’s “favorite governor,” and framed himself as similar to Trump, but with a “southern tone.”

All of this was done without Trump ever actually endorsing Jackson. The president reluctantly bestowed his endorsement to Jackson in July, after the businessman defeated Trump’s original pick, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, in the Republican primary runoff in June.

Jackson’s sudden switch-up is part of a wider trend of Republicans toning down their ties to the president ahead of the midterm elections. Jackson is at least the second candidate to remove Trump from his campaign website, after Florida Representative and gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. The shift appears to indicate that the Republicans’ leader has become the party’s biggest liability.

President Donald Trump will do anything to have the GOP win in the midterms, and everyone knows why: Because if Democrats retake the House and/or Senate, it’s all over. It’s going to be nothing but examining the Epstein files, subpoenaing every Trump crony that got a sweetheart corrupt deal, investigating every one of Trump’s crypto grifts, and turning off the infinite money spigot.

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You might have seen the viral campaign ad. Last month, Rep. María Elvira Salazar—a Miami Republican endorsed by Donald Trump—launched a TV commercial criticizing the president’s mass-deportation campaign. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she warned, speaking directly into the camera. “Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Salazar’s ad was one of the most public signs of the brewing anger in Florida over Trump’s draconian deportation policies. Her “district is among those with the highest percentage of Latino voters in the US,” notes Mother Jones’ Laura Morel, “and many experts view this race as a test of how far Trump’s popularity has cratered with the Latino community.”

So what’s causing the backlash in the Sunshine State? In late August, journalist Amanda Moore traveled traveled to southwest Florida—a couple hours from Salazar’s district—to report on a surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the area. What she found was less dramatic than the heavily militarized immigration operations the Trump administration has carried out in Minnesota, Illinois, and elsewhere in the country. But the consequences have been every bit as devastating.

In contrast to the message in Salazar’s recent ad, Republican officials across Florida have cooperated closely with Trump’s deportation campaign. As Moore notes in a new video for Mother Jones, this cooperation has helped ICE arrest hundreds of people in Florida per day. Give it a watch.

With the help of Republican officials, ICE has quietly arrested hundreds of people in Florida per day. Video by Amanda Moore, produced by Anna Yeo

President Trump’s ill-advised, poorly executed war in Iran was foreshadowed months before.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s handling of Yemen’s Houthi militia attacking ships in the area in 2025 had Pentagon leaders raising concerns that would come to fruition during the Iran war the next year.

Specifically, Department of Defense officials Dan Caldwell and Alex Velez-Green were worried that an extended military campaign against the Houthis could deplete U.S. missile stocks, which ended up happening one year later. Last year, in March 2025, President Trump announced Operation Rough Rider, a bombing campaign in Yemen that would become infamous after the national security adviser at the time, Mike Waltz, mistakenly invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into a group chat of senior administration officials discussing the early bombings.

The campaign resulted in 1,000 targets being bombed, with Houthi commanders and ammunition stocks being targeted, but also scores of civilians being killed. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the operation a success, but others in the Pentagon, such as Caldwell and Hegseth’s first chief of staff, Joe Kasper, questioned whether the operation had clear and achievable objectives, again similar to the current Iran war.

A spokesperson for Hegseth, Kingsley Wilson, told the Post that the operation “achieved decisive success against Houthi forces,” resulting in “severely degraded radar networks, air-defense systems, ballistic-missile and drone launch sites, weapons depots, and production facilities while removing multiple mid- and senior-level commanders from the battlefield.” It also “substantially reduced immediate threats to vital international shipping lanes, compelled a clear tactical shift by the adversary, and helped create conditions for a ceasefire that strengthened freedom of navigation in the region.”

Those “successes” seem at best hollow now, as Houthi forces took over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea last month. Last year’s operation ended in May 2025 with an Oman-brokered ceasefire and Trump declaring victory, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.”

“They gave us their word that they wouldn’t be shooting at ships anymore, and we honor that,” Trump said.

In reality, the Houthis weathered the U.S. attacks. They shot down at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, and two F/A-18 fighter jets were lost at sea. Trump lost interest in Yemen shortly afterward, to the chagrin of some in U.S. Central Command. Some officials reportedly said at the time, “You ignore Yemen at your own peril.”

That seems all too apparent today, and the U.S. is stuck in a conflict with Iran and its Houthi allies with no clear end in sight. The war has stretched on and continues to hurt the U.S. and global economies, with Trump unwilling to acknowledge that the war should never been waged, was horribly executed, and now needs to end regardless of how bad he looks.

Fox News announced on Monday that it has hired former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. She left her position in August and said she intended to spend more time with her children. A handful of months later, she will now be on the payroll of the leading source of right-wing propaganda, opining on-air as a contributor. Leavitt becomes the third person who has served as Trump’s press…

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In remarks delivered before a MAHA audience at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen. 

“Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he told the room, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

Kennedy’s presence was part of the MAHA Summit, a daylong event, wherein Kennedy also reportedly told an audience that AI is “better informed” than doctors. 

His remarks at the private reception on Monday were relayed later in the week by Claire Dooley, a filmmaker who’s worked on several anti-vaccine movies, including one produced by Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy used to lead. Dooley wrote about the private reception for The MAHA Report, a Substack maintained by the nonprofit MAHA Action, Inc. While the organization is nominally independent, it has primarily served this year to cheerlead Kennedy’s sweeping changes at HHS.

As Dooley wrote, Kennedy used the occasion to praise the room and the broader MAHA movement, telling them, “We’re about to have our day in the sunshine.” MAHA Action proudly circulated a video clip of Kennedy’s remarks boasting that HHS has been permanently changed: 

The changes Kennedy was was referring to at HHS have been, by most people’s metrics, devastating. According to a June New York Times report, Kennedy has shown “minimal engagement” with most of what HHS—the federal government’s largest department—actually does, and instead focused on promoting an inverted food pyramid heavy on animal fats and trying to overhaul federal vaccine policy to fit his anti-vaccine views. The CDC has reportedly lost nearly a third of its staff and is struggling to fulfill its basic mission. Several important bodies including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the US Preventive Services Task Force are in limbo after Kennedy’s efforts to gut them and replace them with his ideological fellow travelers have been met by controversy and court challenges. The Preventative Services Task Force, which helps decide which preventative tests will be covered by insurance, has not met in more than a year. ACIP, which helps develop federal vaccine recommendations, is also in legal limbo, leaving other non-governmental health organizations to advise physicians on this year’s COVID shots, among other things. 

Kennedy’s boasts last week are part of a recent victory lap; last month he was also the keynote speaker at Children’s Health Defense’s DC conference. There, he told the room that the anti-vaccine movement has “a friend at the White House.”

Kennedy’s drive to damage U.S. vaccine infrastructure is broadly unpopular. Recent polling shows that six in 10 voters disapprove of his work as HHS secretary. Outside of parties with his friends, Kennedy has sought to downplay his vaccine agenda; as The New York Times disclosed earlier this year, in the lead-up to the midterms, he planned to deemphasize vaccines and spend more time talking about healthy eating. Since that reporting, in a rather queasy irony, the nation has been struck with a wave of serious food-borne illness—with part of the blame going to decreased FDA inspections under RFK Jr.

Suddenly, gas prices have absolutely nothing to do with the Iran war, according to the U.S. president.

After spending months denying and downplaying the fact that gas and diesel prices have become more expensive, Donald Trump finally conceded Monday. The only catch to his admission: The rising price tag is definitely not his fault.

“What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz, because Record Numbers of Barrels are coming out now on an almost daily basis,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday.

Instead, Trump blamed the sky-high prices on Ukraine, claiming that its recent attacks on Russian oil refineries had aggrieved the global oil market. (It’s worth noting that Ukraine would likely stop attacking Russian infrastructure if Trump’s buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin stopped invading Ukraine.) Trump also wagged a finger at “Blue States like California” that are trying to veer away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources.

Provisional ship-tracking data obtained by Reuters revealed that, in the last month of September, oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz had roughly returned to prewar levels. Millions of barrels of oil from European reserves are also expected to help lower prices in the near future, following an urgent plea from Trump to G7 leaders last week.

But American wallets are still hurting. The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.36 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.68 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.32 a gallon.

Collectively, Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and oil since the war began seven months ago, according to an analysis by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University published last month.

Consumers have spent roughly $59 billion more on gas and $48.6 billion more on diesel, according to the university’s tracker. That breaks down to an increased price tag of approximately $822.20 per U.S. household.

Vice President JD Vance claimed Monday that Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded propaganda videos are actually “not partisan.”

The Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections—even though it’s illegal to use government funds for campaign purposes.

Speaking to the press ahead of his trip to Alaska, Vance tried to downplay the administration’s blatant law-breaking by claiming the television spots did not endorse any particular candidate or party.

“I’m sure that some people don’t like it, but if you look at the message of those advertisements, they’re not partisan, they’re not—you know, it’s not like we’re advocating for a particular candidate,” Vance said. “We’re trying to tell a story, I think, about how great the United States of America is.”

The vice president compared the advertisements to videos that the Obama administration produced about the Affordable Care Act. “You have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance continued. “It’s part of actually, I think, living in the constitutional republic.”

In 2010, the Department of Health and Human services paid to produce short 30-second ads explaining the changes that the Affordable Care Act made to Medicare, including free check-ups, cancer screenings, and lower prescription drug costs. Not only did these videos have a clear public service function, but they were also not self-aggrandizing or partisan.

By comparison, Trump’s television spots are wildly partisan. One spot, called “King of the Jungle,” features images of Democrats targeted by the Trump administration edited alongside videos of lions hunting in the wild. Another, called “God Made Trump,” presents the president as a messianic figure. One ad called “Resilience” shows multiple moments in Trump’s life before he became president. And in another, the president begs voters to “Love Me.”

In order to make the videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

We all know that President Donald Trump has been inserting himself into your television by running partisan campaign ads, and we even know he appears to have stolen $20 million in taxpayer dollars to pay for them. Reportedly, he insisted that taxpayer dollars be used because, look, this man is never going to spend a dime of his own money now, is he? But as the steady drip of revelations…

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After a historic setback in 2024, the Democratic rebrand appears to be working out.

No, seriously—the rebrand is that they’re all filming themselves working out. In late September, Manny Rutinel, a Democrat challenging Rep. Gabe Evans in Colorado, posted a video of himself doing bicep curls while blaring “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The week before that, a very energized Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed was in Washington, DC, challenging JD Vance to a squat-off. Before that, it was Indiana secretary of state candidate Birch Evans Bayh IV—please, call him Beau—airing an ad in which he racked weights and bench-pressed while lamenting that “most politicians are weak.”

Video by Peter Berger

You could keep going back, if you wanted—to Cait Conley, running against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s Hudson Valley, flipping over a tire while shouting “let’s fucking go”; to the former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner, swinging a kettlebell in his backyard; to former Rep. Colin Allred, recording his denunciation of James Talarico before the Texas Senate primary with steam coming off his head after a garage workout; to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, talking to TMZ about the workout video he posted after a visit to the US Naval Academy.

Some of these antics are just a reflection of these candidates’ personalities. Allred, for instance, is a former NFL linebacker. Pumping iron is a thing El-Sayed likes to do (and do and do), and he’s worked it into his campaign as a way to connect with people and reach new audiences. There is often an explicit contrast to bad conservative messaging in this glut of videos—Rutinel, like fellow Coloradan Rep. Jason Crow before him, was making light of Pete Hegseth’s poor form and transparent insecurity, just as Gavin Newsom—who has not posted a workout video—was making light of RFK Jr.’s shirtless workout with Kid Rock in a TikTok of his own.

But if you’ll excuse me for overexamining things for a minute, I think there’s also something more subtle (well, not that subtle) at work here. After the 2024 election, a common shorthand for what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party was that people perceived Democrats as—in the words of one focus group and many, many talk-show interviews—“weak and woke.” (There were infinite corollaries to this, including Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s suggestion that the party lacked “alpha energy,” Sen. Ruben Gallego’s assertion that voters thought they were “wussy,” and Newsom’s belief that “we’ve appeared weak and meek.”)

The “woke” part has probably consumed the most oxygen and engendered the most debate within the party. It has also been addressed, in a variety of ways, in a frenzy of TV ads and ill-advised Reels. But the “weak” part is straightforward: The solution is to not be weak. It’s to be strong, to stand up for yourself, to speak plainly, and when possible—and this really gets to the root of where things went wrong—not to be an octogenarian who walks at a shuffle and speaks at a whisper while voters go mad over inflation. There are many ways of doing that, but as a practical matter, if you want to show you have energy and can do real-person things and dispel misconceptions about Democrats Like You, well, you can always just try picking up something really heavy.

Political messaging can be alarmingly reductive sometimes. Candidates and consultants are borrowing things they’ve seen or used before. Why did candidates start filming themselves driving through their hometowns, eyes curiously off the road, talking about the values that forged them and the neighbors who were left behind? Who was the first elected official to stand in front of a bunch of televisions blaring attack ads and say, very solemnly, “you’ve seen the ads”?

All of these workout videos call to mind another campaign trope. One of the hottest campaign trends to emerge in the Obama years was filming yourself shooting stuff. It was a conservative-coded but not exclusively Republican genre. In fact, it may have even worked best when it was Democrats doing it—cutting against type, while demonstrating that they weren’t like all the rest. Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin famously filmed himself shooting “the cap-and-trade bill” during his first election. When he ran for a final term in 2018, he shot his opponent’s lawsuit to gut the Affordable Care Act. (Kind of the full Joe Manchin experience, to be honest.) When Seth Bodnar, the independent running for Senate in Montana, recently filmed himself shooting a Flock camera, he was following in the footsteps of former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who strapped “REAL ID cards” to clay pigeons 18 years earlier.

Even as the polls predict a big year for Democrats, the party’s national reputation is still underwater. There’s dissatisfaction with party leaders, and big fights still to come on foreign policy, on Big Tech, and on health care. Turning things around will be a heavy lift. But that might be one thing they’re getting used to.

America’s FBI directors are expected to be fiercely independent. Kash Patel is not.

Instead, Patel appears to be completely under the thumb of the White House, bending over backwards to enact the president’s retribution campaign, according to a new report by The Atlantic.

Whereas Patel’s predecessors have historically tried to create distance between themselves and the Oval Office, Patel reportedly receives numerous calls from the White House and its allies throughout the day. Some of his orders come directly from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or other executive branch officials, according to current and former officials that spoke with reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick.

“I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official said.

The White House did not deny that Miller tells Patel and his agency what to do. Instead, it seemed to reinforce Miller’s broad influence over Trump’s executive branch, confirming that Miller “interacts with all law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.”

FBI Operations Director Joe Perez told The Atlantic in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

Patel’s primary mission seems to be lending institutional credence to Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. Yet despite spending months repeating promises of supposedly imminent arrests, Patel has yet to produce actual results for Trump’s cause.

But the FBI wildcard has invariably escaped consequence from his MAGA boss, even in the wake of numerous controversies.

Over the last year, the podcaster-turned-agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayers’ dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

His alleged substance abuse issues have also caused problems. Patel ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report earlier this year about his alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

But Patel has nonetheless hung on to his credentials within the Trump administration. The windfall, according to a Republican operative that spoke to Fitzpatrick, is due to the fact Patel “is the only guy who never says no.”

“And the president likes that,” they added.

Meanwhile, Patel has been remarkably brash and cavalier while dealing with his critics. In response to three pages of detailed questions about his connections to the White House sent by Fitzpatrick, Patel responded: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

Fitzpatrick noted that she had never asked or written about a gold-plated jet ski or the English Channel, writing that she “did not understand this response.”

However, a quick Google search turned up an MS NOW report from July about Patel that included an image of a jet ski. At the time, Patel had responded to the article via X, writing: “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass.”

“Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website,” Fitzpatrick observed.

President Trump has the lowest approval rating in Kansas of any president since Herbert Hoover—who was widely blamed for causing the Great Depression. This is yet another ominous sign for Republicans ahead of what has become a midterm battleground for the Senate.

This comes in the midst of a neck-and-neck campaign between Democrat Reverend Adam Hamilton and incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, with most polls showing them locked at 45 percent. This is the closest Kansas has been to flipping blue in nearly 100 years, making Trump’s historic unpopularity there a clear cause for alarm.

"I would say Donald Trump is probably at this point in his term the least popular Republican president since Herbert Hoover" -- Enten details how Trump is down 20 points of approval in Kansas relative to his first term https://t.co/1bJkA1rlWO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

“President Trump is historically unpopular for a Republican president in the great state of Kansas.... I absolutely buy the idea that this [Senate] race is close because just take a look at these,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Monday morning. “In his first time … Donald Trump had +5 points. Look at how much less popular Donald Trump is than he was in term number one at this point. He’s way down in the basement, 15 points underwater—that’s a 20-point shift away ... 16 less points popular than any other Republican president at this point in the term.”

Republicans are worried that Trump’s unpopularity will spill into the race between Hamilton and Rogers.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said last week. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

Marshall isn’t really helping his case, either, as his tenure has been defined by timely waffling on ICE and controversy spurred by his past aggressive, high-interest medical debt collections during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“This to me is potentially a mathematic perfect storm,” Enten continued. “A historically unpopular Republican in Kansas and Donald Trump, and a historically popular Democratic Senate candidate in Adam Hamilton—that may be the equation that gets Kansas its first Democratic senator in 94 years.”

President Donald Trump is now making the argument that Republicans will do well in this year’s midterm elections by citing a pollster with an amazingly bad history of election predictions, Dick Morris. “The Polls have ALWAYS underestimated MAGA. They try to suppress the Vote, but I won all 7 Swing States, the Popular Vote, 86% of Counties, and 99% of Primaries this year. I AM ON THE BALLOT!”…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | The future looks scary as Trump gives prediction markets free rein…

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On her way out of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem may have gotten one of her donors a sweet deal.

President Trump fired Noem from the Cabinet in March over a series of scandals including how DHS handled contracts. But she didn’t leave the agency until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, took over on March 25. Just before she left, the department agreed to pay $108 million to Daedalus Aviation Corporation for a Boeing 737 private jet with a bar, two bedrooms, marble showers, and a table covered in manta-ray skin.

The firm had acquired the plane for less than $90 million, and it wasn’t the only plane deal DHS made to the corporation. The agency bought two more luxury jets from it for $106 million, far more than the $83 million the company paid for them. It also bought two 17-year-old 737s for $45 million each, more than their typical market value, according to The New York Times. All five of those planes were bought on Noem’s last morning at the DHS.

Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, gave $10,000 to Noem’s political action committee, American Resolve, in 2024. After she was appointed as DHS secretary, Walters’s companies got over $900 million in agency contracts. DHS hired his business Salus Worldwide Solutions to fly Noem and her aides on chartered jets, as well as to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Daedalus was given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.

When Mullin was confirmed as Noem’s successor, he looked into backing out of the deal but was worried about paying a financial penalty. Mullin spoke to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was also concerned about the penalty. She told him not to block the plane purchases, and ultimately, he didn’t.

The planes DHS bought from Daedalus were mostly unused as of August. The whole deal smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit their foreign business partners and political allies.  

In the latest installment of the most corrupt administration in history, the dynamic duo behind multiple botched peace agreements has secured a massive deal to purchase a series of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, The New York Times reported Friday. 

One private firm had already reached a tentative agreement to purchase Lukoil assets earlier this year, but that deal was stalled as a new group of investors emerged—each with direct financial ties to Kushner, Witkoff, and President Donald Trump.

The new group of investors is led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025 and another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee through Eldridge Industries, his investment firm. 

One major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi–based fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Sheikh Tahnoon previously dumped $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Witkoff and majority-owned by the Trump family. Then the U.S. president lifted export restrictions on AI chips to the UAE. Nothing to see there, certainly. 

Another major stakeholder in the sale is a Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, who have helped finance Kushner’s shady luxury hotel project in Albania.

For Kushner and Witkoff’s friends, the best thing about this part of the peace deal doesn’t actually require any peace. The Trump administration has reportedly signaled that it is open to making deals with Russia before the war actually ends, and one person familiar with the matter told the Times that included the Lukoil sale. The potential deal stands to be extremely lucrative for the American buyers as the purchase would release the assets from Russian sanctions, causing their value to instantly increase. 

Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white-collar crime and ethics adviser, told the Times that the deal was “an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements.”

“And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?” Chen said.

News of this deal comes on the heels of a report exposing Kushner’s investment firm as the largest stakeholder in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. 

And just one day before the Times report dropped, Kushner himself took to X to insist that he does not let his business dealings influence his diplomatic work.

With less than a month to go to the midterm elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Monday announced that it added six more candidates to its “Red to Blue” program, which gives financial and organizational support to top-tier Democratic nominees in Republican-held House districts. All six candidates sit in districts President Donald Trump carried by double-digit margins…

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