Trump mocks ‘affordability’ as a made-up word
During President Donald Trump’s red-state rally tour, he decided that the best way to address one of his biggest failings was to pretend that the word “affordability” simply does not exist. “Remember they came up with the word ‘affordability.’ So from Day 1 they said, ‘Well, what about your prices?’” he said. “They always come up with these words: ‘Affordability.’ So the fake news starts…
Want to Attend an “Exclusive Dinner” With Trump? Just Buy His Meme Coin!
President Donald Trump is once again offering “exclusive” access to buyers of his meme coin—this time in the form of an invitation to a dinner with him and three secret “legends” to be named at a later date.
All you have to do is purchase—and then resist the temptation to immediately sell—a lot of $TRUMP. If, come November 12, you’re one of the top 185 holders of the coin, you’ll get to attend the special event later that month at Trump’s golf club in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The marketing is not subtle, with the coin’s official website promising access to “The Most Exclusive Dinner in the World” and an “evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump.” In smaller letters, it notes that there will also be a private meet and greet with an unnamed “legend.” Sadly, though, “No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President.”
The top 29 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin will also get to go to a special VIP reception “with your favorite President and one of the Legends.” As an added bonus, the top four holders will get a gold Trump-branded watch. Again, however, it notes that there won’t be any private time with Trump, and no gifts will be accepted. Because, you know, ethics.
The White House referred questions about whether Trump had been involved with planning the dinner or would be paid to attend it to the event’s host, who did not respond to a request for comment. The event was first reported by the Washington Sun.
This isn’t the first gathering of this sort. There have been two previous exclusive events involving the president, one at Mar-a-Lago and another at the same Virginia golf club. The coin’s backers—who have a licensing deal with Trump—have also set up contests with access to swanky hospitality suites at the World Cup and Super Bowl. Another contest currently running offers the winner tickets to the F1 grand prix in Singapore, next weekend.
Other than rewarding people for holding onto the coins, there isn’t really a point to this particular bit of blockchain boosterism. As I wrote in April, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago event:
Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion—a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.
Since that high point of $74, the value of the coin dropped drastically and, in recent months, has maintained a steady low price. As of Friday afternoon, it was priced at about $2.00.
When he returned to the White House last year, Trump declared he would be the “crypto president” and would do what he could to advance the blockchain economy. But even many crypto enthusiasts were not particularly happy when he launched the meme coin shortly before inauguration. And it has proved to be a spectacularly bad deal for many investors. According to an analysis from June, more than 1 million investors lost around $3.8 billion, combined, as the coin’s value dropped.
On the other hand, according to Trump’s latest personal financial disclosure, he appears to have earned about $635 million from the arrangement.
Book-Banning GOP Governor Wants You to Buy His Book
Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been making the rounds of national media recently promoting his new book, Off Ramp: How to be a peacemaker in an age of contempt. On Jon Stewart, CNBC, and CNN, Cox drilled down on a theme that brought him into the national spotlight last year after the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk in Utah: political depolarization. This was nothing new for Cox, who launched a “disagree better” initiative as the head of the National Governor’s Association in 2023.
While the work has earned him national plaudits and calls to run for president, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to people at home. In Utah, the two-term governor is, in fact, rather polarizing. A new poll released on Tuesday shows that his net approval rating in Utah has fallen 23 points since April.
It’s not hard to see why. He has signed laws supporting extreme Republican gerrymandering and taking fluoride out of the drinking water. This year, he officially declared June as “Fidelity Month,” instead of its more familiar name, Pride Month. He has supported data center construction over the intense objections of Utah residents of all political stripes. And in 2024, the soon-to-be author signed one of the country’s most extreme book banning laws—a decision that’s now coming back to haunt him as he tries to get people to buy his own book.
Since the law’s passage, Utah has now banned 44 books from all of its public school libraries and AP class curricula—everything from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to popular books by Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and Sarah J. Maas. (The full list can be found here.) Some local school districts have banned three times that number, most of them because of LGBTQ-related content or what the book-banners like to call “pornography.” (An example: Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 midlife crisis book Eat Pray Love was challenged in the Davis County school district because, among other things, it “refers to a penis as a banana.” It survived after another reviewer pointed out that the author writes favorably about celibacy.)
I was in Utah when Cox’s book came out and thought I’d try to go see him talk about it while I was there. But the governor wasn’t doing any book events in his own state. I eventually saw him in DC, where he spoke last week at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Since I couldn’t find the governor in Utah, I went to see the legendary Salt Lake City bookstore owner Ken Sanders, proudly displays a sandwich board outside his store announcing, “We Buy Banned Books.” Born in Utah, Sanders has been selling books in the state since 1975, and he’s lived through various waves of state-sponsored censorship. I showed him a copy of Cox’s new book. When he saw the book jacket highlighting Cox’s “dedication to depolarization and a commitment to peacemaking,” he exclaimed, “Oof. That ain’t you, babe.”
“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all, or how would he title his book like that?”
“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all,” Sanders said. “Or how would he title his book like that?”
Sanders isn’t the only Utah resident to notice the contradiction between the subject of Cox’s book and his support for the book banning law. In late April, The King’s English, a venerable independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, announced a promotion of the governor’s book, similar to those it does with other prominent authors. Customers who pre-ordered his book would receive a signed copy as soon as it came out. But the store was forced to cancel the offer in the face of furious outrage from its customers. “The book banner is partnering with a bookstore?” wrote one of hundreds of posters on the Salt Lake City sub-Reddit upset about Cox’s book promotion. “Gross and ill-advised.”
Cal Crosby, co-owner of The King’s English, says that the backlash was worse than when a bomb threat in 2023 forced them to cancel drag queen story time. The bomb threat turned out to have come from somewhere overseas, but the attacks over Cox’s book came from close to home. “It was very personal,” he said, noting that many of the most aggressive critics were among the store’s longtime customers or business connections.
Utah’s book banning law, according to critics, has a sweeping mandate. Here’s how it works: If three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, ban a book because they decide it meets the state definition of obscenity or “sensitive materials,” the book is automatically removed from every school in the state. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis in May found that almost all of the statewide book bans originated in only two of the state’s 41 school districts.
Of those nine, most of the bans initially originated from just one district: Davis County, a conservative area north of Salt Lake City, where fringe conservatives have taken over the local Republican party. In 2021, after a two-year investigation, the US Department of Justice forced the Davis school district to address widespread racial harassment against Black and Asian-American students. Shortly afterward, a 10-year-old Black girl with autism died by suicide after allegedly suffering from intense bullying in a Davis County school.
Yet Davis County activists are leveraging the book-banning law to dictate what every school in the state is allowed to teach or stock in its library. And once the state bans a book, it can’t be assigned, even for AP classes. And schools must destroy all their copies lest the offending materials make their way into a Little Library or the hands of an unsuspecting youth.
Cox signed the first version of a book banning law in 2022 that allowed individual school districts to ban books. After it passed, a small but motivated army of people aligned with the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty marched into local schools to scan the bookshelves for books they deemed smutty. The law required school districts have committees to review book challenges, and people without children in the district schools were ineligible to challenge reading materials.
But state records showed that those rules have been routinely ignored, according to an investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project. In Washington County in Southern Utah, for instance, most book challenges were made almost entirely by a woman who homeschooled her kids.
In 2024, when the state legislature expanded the law to make it easier to ban books statewide, Utah education advocates and civil liberties groups called on Cox to veto the bill. If enacted, they argued, the law “would encourage individuals to stifle the voices of diverse authors and perspectives, casting a chilling shadow over the sanctity of our First Amendment rights.”
Cox signed it anyway.
“I think calling on people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do,” says Jessica Horton, co-founder of Let Davis Read, an advocacy group fighting book bans in Davis County. “But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’ And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”
“Calling people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do. But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’ And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”
When I reached out to Cox’s publisher for a comment on his support for the book banning law, a spokesperson said in an email that the governor had no role in removing books from schools. The spokesperson disputed the idea that Utah was banning books, saying that local leaders and librarians have always chosen age-appropriate books for their schools. “We’re not going to agree on every policy, including which books should be available to children in public schools,” they said. “And refusing to engage with people we disagree with is a big part of how we got to our current political environment.”
Authors whose work has been banned, the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several students have sued the state over the law. Represented by the ACLU, they have argued that, among other things, it is depriving young people of constitutionally protected literature and personally harming the authors. On September 15, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue and the case is moving forward.
Meanwhile, Cox has been promoting his book, and a state literacy effort, as if none of this ever happened. “Civilization cannot continue if we can’t read,” he said at an event in August. He even retweeted a recent Atlantic story heralding the death of literacy, calling it “sobering.”
The Atlantic’s story this week on America becoming a post-literate society is sobering. The statistics are dark. But they are also reversible. I know because I’ve done it. After deleting social media from my phone, I unlocked my focus and started reading recreationally again. https://t.co/YeF57vVujt
— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) July 10, 2026“With one hand, he is saying, ‘I want children to learn to read.’ With the other hand, he is taking away the books that teens actually want to read,” such as Stephen King novels, notes Susan Heiner, an organizer of Let Utah Read, which has been fighting the book bans. “You get kids and teenagers to read by giving them things that they are interested in.”
Here’s how much you’re paying the government not to work
Right now, every week, you’re paying $1.6 million to Voice of America employees, which probably sounds totally good and fine, because we should pay federal employees and pay them well, right? The problem is that you’re paying them to not work, and you’ve been paying that for months now. This is all happening because President Donald Trump wanted to shutter Voice of America on account of…
The boy who cried socialism
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Socialist or MAGA Republican? America has a preference.
ICE Protesters Just Sued One of Trump’s Biggest Cheerleaders
Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson branded a group of brutalized ICE protesters as “left-wing terrorists.” Now, they’re suing him for defamation.
On October 3, 2025, Johnson accompanied top Homeland Security officials to an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, where a crowd had gathered in a designated “free speech” zone. Johnson filmed as ICE agents broke up the peaceful protest, shoving and striking attendees until they fell to the ground.
He then posted the videos to his various social media channels on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Rumble. The content featured clips of the protesters being lined up against a concrete wall, while Johnson narrated the scene, framing the civilians as “left-wing terrorists” who were “arrested for attacking police officers and ICE officers.”
But that was far from the truth and, almost a year later, two of those protesters—Harvard University data scientist Kyle Frankovich and contracted court reporter Maureen Foody—are ready to recoup damages from the reported inaccuracy.
On Friday, Frankovich and Foody filed a joint lawsuit against Johnson, claiming that Johnson knew his portrayals were false, but that he “did not care.”
The duo “sang songs, participated in prayers, held signs, and recorded official activity,” according to the complaint. Neither were charged with a crime, though they were detained for roughly eight hours and eventually released a half-mile from the jail.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s content from that day has collectively accumulated millions of views and interactions, granting the former BuzzFeed writer another pathway to rake in cash on a false narrative. (Johnson was fired from the digital outlet in 2014 for plagiarizing multiple blog posts.) One post, in which Johnson claimed he saw “dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement” and further purported that “every activist” attending “attacked ICE agents in broad daylight” was viewed 1.7 million times.
Frankovich told MS NOW that he was “shaken” when he saw Johnson’s posts and the comments made by his followers that likened him to an antifa leader and attempted to dox his identity. Some comments included calls to torture, shoot, and kill the arrested protesters, according to the network.
The data scientist also scorned a DHS post that turned an image of his tattooed arms and zip-tied hands into a recruitment poster, framing Frankovich as a criminal.
“You shouldn’t get to lie about me,” Frankovich told MS NOW.
Trump’s Meddling in Brazil’s Elections May Backfire
The Trump administration has ratcheted up their election interference efforts in Brazil, using sanctions, tariffs, and narratives to give Flávio Bolsonaro—son of right-wing hardliner and convicted traitor Jair Bolsonaro—any possible edge over incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It may very well backfire.
This has been brewing for some time. The Trump administration has threatened military action against Brazil, started classifying criminal groups there as terrorist organizations, and even sent State Department officials there to delegitimize their election system. The The U.S. Consulate in São Paulo even hosted pro-Bolsonaro social media influencers for a private roundtable. Bolsonaro’s other son, Eduardo, even floated the idea that the Trump administration might reject the outcome of the election if Lula wins. Yet all these things and more have potentially turned Brazilian voters away.
“Brazil did not want the U.S. imposition of this category on these criminal organizations because it opened the door for many ways in which the Trump administration could interfere in Brazilian internal politics,” Brown University Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies James Green told Responsible Statecraft. “Even though they haven’t overtly said, ‘Oh, Flávio is my candidate,’ they sent all these signals to indicate that that’s who the United States wants to see elected.”
While Lula’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent—much higher than Trump’s has been at any point in his second term—the election margin is expected to be close regardless. Voting begins on Sunday.
“Cheat Like Hell”: Can Trump Actually Rig the 2026 Midterms?
He tried really, really hard in 2020. With his souring presidency on the line, he’s intensifying his efforts again. You know what we’re talking about: Trump’s election meddling.
“After 2020, I think one of the lessons that some of us learned—but unfortunately not everybody—is that our democracy is fragile,” says Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn in the very first episode of our new podcast, Stress Test, a white-knuckle guide to the midterm elections. “Trump came pretty close, even with all the guardrails.”
And Trump isn’t the only one meddling—to which David can personally attest. Shortly after the release of his new book, How Russia Won, the very Russian disinformation operators he wrote about started circling deepfake videos of him, claiming he’d written a very different book: one detailing 300 crimes committed by Democratic candidates.
In this episode, David and co-host Garrison Hayes are joined by voting rights correspondent Ari Berman to pull apart the biggest stress test facing the midterms: whether the vote will proceed smoothly, or whether Trump will meddle even more. After all, Trump and his gang are already claiming the election will be “rigged,” pushing false voter-fraud claims, trying to disrupt mail voting, and demanding voter-roll data that could be used to challenge or purge voters. Then there are the redistricting wars that have shaped so much of 2026, and the Supreme Court’s role in diluting Black political power. At last month’s Republican midterm convention, Trump even went so far as to lead the crowd in a performatively jokey pledge to “cheat like hell.” (“It’s kind of hard to believe when someone says it so explicitly,” says a dumbfounded Garrison.)
The episode presents a blend of hope and fear. Many of Trump’s efforts have flopped so far: The Justice Department, Ari notes, is 0-25 in federal court in its bid to force states to hand over their voter rolls. His advice: “Don’t give Trump any more power than he actually has.”
But the Supreme Court has left plenty of room for a more orderly kind of rigging, like gerrymandering. “So you can’t steal,” as David puts it, “but you can tilt.” And Ari argues that what happens before the vote may not be what matters most. “What we saw in 2020 is all hell broke loose after voting ended. And so that’s why I don’t want to sit here and say, like, ‘Everyone’s fine, no need to stress, we’re all good.’ Because we don’t know what’s going to happen in those next phases where people vote, where votes are counted, and where elections are certified.”
New episodes of Stress Test drop every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe at youtube.com/motherjones.
Trump’s South Korea ‘deal’ blows up in his face
President Donald Trump tried throwing Alaska’s incumbent GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan a bone Wednesday—but it quickly backfired. During a White House event, Trump claimed that South Korea agreed to invest $54 billion to export natural gas from Alaska. “I want to thank, in particular, Dan Sullivan for getting this deal done,” Trump said before explicitly calling on voters to support Sullivan in…
The presidential fitness test is back—thanks to WWE and your money
Continuing the tradition of the Trump administration spending whatever money it wants on whatever stupid stuff it wants, say goodbye to $10 million of your tax dollars to fund the Presidential Fitness School Innovation Challenge. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad. It’s probably good to have a pot of money for K-12 schools to help kids stay healthy and fit.”…
Eric Schmitt’s a Joke. The Assaults on Jack Smith Are Anything But.
We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.
First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.
It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!
But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.
What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made its bones fighting Covid-era mask and vaccine mandates).
The suit argues that when Smith, while probing the January 6 insurrection, subpoenaed phone companies for some GOP lawmakers’ call logs (but not the content of the calls), he was in violation of that clause. It’s an argument Republicans have been making for a while, and it’s nonsense. The speech and debate clause is a protection against being arrested and prosecuted for legislative activity.
Smith wasn’t looking for people to arrest; he was looking for witnesses to a coup d’état (like Senator Darline Graham’s late brother, Lindsey, as Smith explained to her Tuesday in yet another planned gotcha moment that flopped). In any case, the clause has generally been understood to protect only legislative activity. Admittedly, the law here isn’t settled, and these days you never know when a case like this might land in the lap of some Federalist Society servant. But there’s a reason federal judges have been in the habit of tossing MAGA suits like this.
Smith’s pursuit of these call logs is the basis of the claim by some House members, notably Jim Jordan, that Smith perjured himself before the House last January. It’s a little complicated, but: At two hearings last December, House Republicans asked Smith: “Did the toll records that you requested from the senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?” Smith replied no. It was truthful as far as it went, but it wasn’t quite the whole story because Smith and his team did see the contents of some congressional text messages from 44 legislators—but it wasn’t as a result of records requested from the senators. It was as a result of a separate subpoena, to the National Archives and Records Administration. Republicans never asked about that subpoena.
Like every good lawyer, Smith learned in law school: Answer the question you were asked, and only the question you were asked. Jordan contends that Smith was engaging in half-truths, and so he issued a criminal referral against Smith to the Justice Department in July. Jamie Raskin counters that “wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution.” Smith’s lawyers said at the time that “the questions and answers preceding and following these exchanges also make clear that the focus of the question was on the toll records subpoenas. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith’s answers.”
Raskin said that if the referral were ever brought before a judge, it would “get laughed out of court.” That it probably will—although again, it depends on whose court it lands in. But in between here and there, Republicans can make Smith’s life very difficult indeed. The week before Jordan issued his referral, Attorney General Todd Blanche sat before the same Senate Judiciary Committee that became America’s laughingstock this week for his confirmation hearing. Missouri (really, Missouri again?) Senator Josh Hawley, surveying Smith’s supposed transgressions, asked Blanche if he had “thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Blanche’s answer: “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes.”
In sum: We should all be steeling ourselves for the day that Blanche files an indictment against Smith. It would be another textbook example of Republicans doing exactly what they accuse the liberal deep state of doing: using the machinery of the government to engage in political witch hunts. There’s no actual evidence that Smith was engaged in any kind of witch hunt. Republicans say his investigations were unprecedented. Well, yes, they were—but that’s because we’ve never had a president who orchestrated a coup against the United States and who carted away boxfuls of classified documents and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Florida and have a look.
Any prosecution of Smith should go about as far as Trump’s other failed revenge cases. But make no mistake: It could be assigned to an Aileen Cannon–type judge. And MAGA could claim a scalp and persuade uninformed Americans that there is no such thing as a rule of law, that there is only power, which is their point.
And finally, let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.
It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.
That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.
Donald Trump, Poet Extraordinaire
Editor’s note: Commentators are expressing concern about a Time cover story by Eric Cortellessa in which our commander in chief’s mind appears to wander. Maybe, they’re saying, the old bird is losing his marbles.
But we’ve been through this before. What Trump Derangement Syndrome–addled philistines fail to grasp is that our president is a poet. As Trump explained two years ago, he applies a rhetorical technique called “the weave,” about which “friends of mine that are, like English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
In October 2024, we published a digital chapbook of these Trump weavings as found verse, drawing from the campaign trail. Here we publish a sequel, drawing this time from the Time transcript.
MSDNCI do respect the free press
But I don’t respect fake news.
I’ll give you an example.
CNN and MSDNC—
Which is MS NOW—
They changed the name because it does so poorly.
But I won the election. I won it handily
By massive numbers.
I won the popular vote.
I won all seven swing states.
They said if you won three swing states,
I won all seven.
I won the counties.
It’s very important,
86 percent popular vote.
Everything, and very conclusively,
I haven’t had a good story
On CNN
For years.
So at a certain point
You say,:
“What’s the purpose of like this crazy Kaitlan Collins?”
She’s a very average person.
She’s the most unhappy young person
I’ve ever seen.
I’ve done a lot for
Saudi Arabia.
I protect
Saudi Arabia.
If I weren’t president
Saudi Arabia
Wouldn’t be here right now.
Neither would Israel.
They’d be wiped off the face of the planet.
I do a lot for
Saudi Arabia.
My relationship with them
Is very good.
I like the crown prince.
My relationship
Is very good.
But remember:
If I weren’t here,
There wouldn’t be a
Saudi Arabia.
There wouldn’t be an
Israel.
There wouldn’t be
Various other countries also.
I have the highest.
I’m fine, and I understand that stuff.
You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years,
And you know, I’m a—
I believe in genetics, frankly
And I understand.
I understand it much more than I think
Any president would, because I do have
An ability
On this.
I have an ability
On those things
That were the new frontiers.
What I’ve done is
I’ve created
For instance, these massive plants have no—
We have no electricity in our grid. A Disgusting Mess I see the Secret Service looking
And I say:
“What are you guys looking at?”
“Sir, we think the Oval Office should be taken down
And we’ll build a new one, sir.”
I said: “My ass,
You can’t build
A new one.
This is a special place.”
The cabinet room too, which I also think—
Show them the cabinet room when they go out, okay.
The cabinet room’s gorgeous.
That was a mess.
It was a disgusting
Mess.
This whole place was
A disgusting mess
And now
It’s perfect.
Joe didn’t do it.
Republicans abandon North Carolina Senate race to try to save Kansas
It’s now October, the final stretch of the midterm campaign cycle when political parties are forced to look at the data and make choices of where their time and resources are best spent. And the moves being made by Republicans confirm that they are seeing in their private data what all of us are seeing in the public numbers: The GOP is in serious trouble. On Friday, the news outlet Semafor…
New Fox Poll—a Disaster for Trump—Rattles Fox Anchors: “Wake Up!”
“If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas,” Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt lamented on Friday, adding: “How is that possible?” The “he” is Democrat James Talarico, who leads Republican Ken Paxton in Fox’s striking new poll of Texas. This shocker prompted Earhardt’s guest to warn: “Texans have to wake up!”
In truth, both Fox figures are slightly overstating matters. The poll does show Talarico up by seven points among registered voters, 53–46. But it shows his lead is much tighter among likely voters, 51–49. The latter might matter more.
Still, Talarico’s lead among both groups is remarkable in a state where no Democrat has won statewide in decades. What’s more, the poll’s internals help shed light on Trump’s role in bringing about Talarico’s lead. Here the news for Trump is very bad, and it captures something essential about the winding-down Trump era.
Let’s start with Trump’s approval among Texans. The Fox poll finds Trump badly upside down at 44–55—remarkable in a state he carried by 14 points in 2024. Drill down, and it’s worse: Trump’s approval is underwater with non-college voters (47–53), meaning he’s losing the working class, and Latinos (38–61). He won the latter by 55–45 two years ago.
And here’s a surprise: Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, or “non-MAGA Republicans,” at 46–53. Why does that matter? The Fox poll sheds light here too: Only 50 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election, which lags behind Texas likely voters overall (62 percent), and even further behind Democrats (67 percent).
It’s a big deal if non-MAGA Republicans are less enthusiastic about the election due to disapproval of Trump. Though MAGA Republicans are enthusiastic, a nontrivial number of GOP voters, alienated by Trump, may peel away and stay home.
Critically, this dovetails with the Talarico campaign’s theory of the case. Talarico is winning around 10 percent of Republican voters in the Fox poll, versus only 1 percent of Democrats going to Paxton (not a typo). This is driven by Talarico getting 22 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.
Talarico constantly says siphoning off Republicans is essential to winning. He recently described them as “disillusioned” under Trump, adding: “We have a real opportunity to build a big coalition of Democrats, independents, and Republicans.”
This opportunity really is there. In addition to getting more than one-fifth of non-MAGA Republicans, Fox finds Talarico winning nearly one-fifth of conservatives, almost exactly at parity with Paxton among non-college voters—Talarico is getting half the working class!—and edging into the requisite mid-60s with Latinos. His 79 percent of Black voters probably needs improvement, but a big tent appears to be forming.
Indeed, Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Talarico campaign, makes a critical point about these non-MAGA Republicans: Many are exactly the voters who would have supported Senator John Cornyn, and didn’t understand why Trump ordered them to vote for corrupt adulterous dirtbag Paxton in the primary. Talarico’s ads, Rocha notes, often echo attacks on Paxton from Cornyn’s primary ads.
“These non-MAGA Republican voters are the folks who liked Cornyn,” Rocha tells me. “They’re not just going to fall in line in the general when you see Talarico using the exact same issues against Paxton that Cornyn did.”
Exacerbating that dynamic is the economy: G. Elliott Morris’s new national poll finds that for the first time, a majority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents disapprove of Trump on the cost of living. MAGA Republicans won’t let that dilute their support for Trump-endorsed candidates; non-MAGA ones, however, might.
Let’s be clear: None of this means a Talarico victory is remotely assured. This is absolutely on a knife’s edge. Talarico has led in most polls, and some quality surveys have found his lead significantly larger than Fox’s two-point likely-voter lead. Yet the averages have the race within three points. That’s very, very close. We’re talking about Texas here.
But for now, at least, what’s happening seems to confirm some basic insights about the slowly expiring Trump era. The Trump coalition is fracturing due to his peculiarly terrible misrule. Inflation, tariffs, and war are alienating working-class voters. His subjugation of the GOP into his own personal cult is alienating non-MAGA Republicans. His violent ethnic purges are driving away Latinos. The Latino shift to Trump—which was never the durable realignment observers discerned—has come undone: He’s bleeding their support even in that supposed realignment’s ground zero, the Rio Grande Valley. His corruption and dictator-megalomania are badly alienating independents.
All of which might be creating the conditions for a large anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition to come together, a coalition perhaps broad enough to swamp Trump-GOP rigging efforts. Crucially, Democrats are now outperforming in Texas in ways that could overwhelm the GOP gerrymander there. It all hints—let’s hope—at the very broad anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian coalition that ousted Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year.
If Democrats can win the House and/or the Senate with such a coalition, it will have the party’s back in constraining Trump as the era of Late Stage Trumpism sputters out during his final two years. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First—and again, it’s all on a knife’s edge—that coalition has to really show up, and candidates like Talarico have to put this election away already.
Trump boasts ‘phenomenal job’ as unemployment surges
Just hours after President Donald Trump praised himself for supposedly doing a near-perfect job with the economy, the monthly jobs report was released—showing an increase in unemployment and fewer jobs than analysts had expected. The Labor Department revealed Friday that the unemployment rate has risen to 4.2% and that only 29,000 jobs were added in September—a far cry from the 90,000…
Modern times
A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump can’t make ‘super intelligence’ happen…
How Worried Should Dems Be About the GOP’s Huge Cash Advantage?
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Inside Washington
How worried should Dems be about the GOP’s huge cash advantage?
Late Wednesday night, the Senate adjourned until after the midterms, officially kicking off the final sprint of the campaign season. Republican candidates are heading home to constituents who are concerned about President Trump’s war in Iran and the high price of essentials. Democratic candidates are meanwhile heading into November with a massive cash disadvantage. The question remains: Will floods of money be enough to overcome the anger American voters are feeling?
The Democratic National Committee had $16 million in cash on hand at the end of July, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $130 million on hand. That staggering cash gap is only compounded when you factor in the DNC’s nearly $18 million in debts owed, putting them firmly in the red.
What’s more, a Supreme Court decision in June means the Republican Party cash advantage goes further than ever before; the justices lifted the cap on coordinated donations between political parties and candidates.
Republicans’ money advantage is particularly stark in the frontline Senate races like Texas, where party money, outside PAC spending, and individual donations are fueling unprecedentedly expensive contests. By the end of September, the race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton had seen almost $259 million in total ad spending for the general election, which was already higher than the $202 million spent in 2024, when Democrat Colin Allred faced off against Senator Ted Cruz. In September alone, GOP spending groups pumped $122 million into the state to counter Talarico’s increasingly high polling numbers.
In the first three weeks of September, Republicans outspent Democrats by more than $100 million in the seven Senate races rated as a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report. In total, AdImpact estimates that a staggering $11.6 billion will be spent during the 2026 cycle, which is more than both the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential cycle.
But it’s less clear what that spending will actually buy. “Money is important, but it’s not everything,” said Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. “Public angst, deep public concern, can offset the type of money advantage—or at least mitigate some of the money advantage—that you’re seeing today.”
Some Democratic candidates are using the GOP’s cash advantage to ring alarm bells among supporters, hoping to pull in cash from small-dollar donors. “The GOP outspending us 3-to-1 is working, and now this race is within their reach,” a fundraising email from Chris Pappas’s campaign on Thursday read. Pappas is running for Senate in New Hampshire against Republican John Sununu. The race is surprisingly tight, experts told The New Republic in early September, and new forecasting confirms it: The Cook Political Report shifted the race toward Republicans—from “lean D” to “toss-up”—on September 15.
Senate hopefuls aren’t the only ones facing high levels of spending. A handful of House races have racked up massive price tags too. All in all, the GOP has spent or booked $454 million on House races to Democrats’ $381 million. In swing districts, that spending disparity is heightened. In New York’s 17th congressional district, GOP Representative Mike Lawler has benefited from $20 million in spending since the start of August, compared to a meager $3.8 million for Cait Conley, his Democratic opponent.
The real impact of Republicans’ cash advantage will only be clear when polls close on November 3. But until then, we have one clear indicator that money might not be everything in 2026: the generic ballot. And signs point to a potential tsunami for Democrats. In August, Democrats had an eight-point lead on Emerson College Polling’s generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters might vote for, regardless of the specific candidates. Come September, that lead widened to a whopping 11 points.
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
A new poll shows Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in a dead heat with her Republican challenger, John Braun, in Washington’s swingy 3rd congressional district. Interestingly, 11 percent of likely voters still appeared to be undecided in the survey, commissioned by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Gluesenkamp Perez has broken with Democrats on more than one occasion recently to advance a GOP agenda that would have otherwise failed—a move that embarrassed and angered other Dems but was widely seen as reflecting her challenging reelection position. A lot of her home-district Democratic voters, however, are also frustrated with Gluesenkamp Perez: 16.7 percent of them voted for progressive challenger Brent Hennrich in the August primary.
On the other hand, The Washington Post reviews the prospects of Scott Colom, running for Senate in Mississippi against Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. It’s a “long shot” in a state Trump won by 23 points, write Dan Merica and Gregory S. Schneider, but “top Democratic officials and donors [are] increasingly hopeful that he could pull off the inconceivable,” given “this year’s poor political environment for Republicans.”
The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, that will reportedly be supplying Microsoft with computing power may have emitted 140 tons of nitrogen oxides over the course of “nearly a year before state regulators stepped in,” Floodlight’s Evan Simon reports at The Guardian. This is a follow-up to a piece from last week in which Simon and Brad Racino revealed that the data center had been running “at least 45 gas generators” without a permit. Nitrogen oxides have been linked to respiratory problems and heart attacks in humans, and Rutgers University’s Xiaomeng Jin calculates that the data center ranks as one of “the state’s top five NOx polluters of 2025.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Ideas Factory
In case you missed it: Data for Progress released a new survey on American social activity this week, and the results are a mix of sobering and fascinating. From 1995 to 2026, the percentage of people who say they’ve entertained at home in the past year dropped from 88 percent to 67 percent, while the percentage of people who say they’ve finished reading a book in the same time period dropped from 80 percent to 62 percent. But staying late at work has dropped too, while going to a concert or an exercise class has gone up. Going out to breakfast, giving or attending a dinner party, picnics, communal worship, clubs, and a class are all way down, while internet use, unsurprisingly, has skyrocketed.
“Can a clean economy be built at the speed and scale that this moment demands?” At the Center for American Progress, Jessica Keller reviews the “lessons” from New York City’s Climate Week in late September. No real surprises here: Keller highlights the importance of “forward-looking policies that invest in emerging technology and industrial emissions reductions,” union jobs, and “clean, abundant power” that doesn’t increase households’ utility bills. But all of this, Keller writes, requires “bold, progressive leadership.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Good Week: James Talarico
Democrats have been disappointed before in Texas, but reports keep rolling in suggesting that Talarico is defying all expectations. He’s outraised Republican opponent Ken Paxton in rich Republican neighborhoods, Newsweek reported on Wednesday. New data seems to show that he has erased Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters, TNR’s Greg Sargent observes. And crucially, an Axios analysis of 2026 versus the 2018 Beto O’Rourke flameout shows 2026 looking much more favorable for Democrats in Texas on several key metrics, especially based on primary turnout.
Bad Week: Eric Schmitt
No need to belabor this one: You really don’t want the first reports that you might be on the 2028 presidential ticket to hit the internet at the same time as viral videos of you screwing up sports team names and getting owned by Amy Klobuchar in a congressional hearing.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
Political Trivia Question of the Day
The Oval Office didn’t exist when the White House was built in the 1790s. Under what president was the first Oval Office built? Hint: It coincided with the construction of the West Wing—in other words, at a time when the size of the president’s staff began to grow. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
—Michael Tomasky
Jasmine Crockett Quietly Yanks Offer of Lobbying Services From Website
Texas Representative and former Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett tried to jump-start her lobbying career before even leaving office.
Reporting from Zeteo showed that Crockett, who lost a contentious Democratic primary to state Representative James Talarico, was advertising her political consultation services on her merchandise website the “Clapback Collection.” The services available were listed as “Campaign management and strategy,” “Communications and public relations,” “Government relations and lobbying,” “Digital and social media,” and “Political risk management.” The page has since been taken down but can be accessed via the Wayback Machine at the time of this writing.
The website was taken down after Zeteo reached out to Crockett’s office.
“This website is and has always been focused on selling campaign merchandise,” a spokesperson for Crockett said. “The Congresswoman has only advertised it for merchandise and did not build it.
“She never directed anyone to add the button you are inquiring about.”
Crockett’s move has raised some eyebrows. “Not waiting until you leave congress to start lobbying is impressive,” Drop Site’s Ryan Grim wrote on X.
It’s abundantly clear that Crockett cares about herself and whatever career she might have after politics much more than she cares about the constituents of her district, or helping Democrats take Texas. Crockett has refused to simply endorse Talarico, instead sparring with people online and making a guest appearance at a Chris Brown concert.
Trump Begs Europe to Help Him Bring Down Diesel Costs He Drove Up
The Group of Seven Nations agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of oil from its stockpiles—following a desperate plea from the White House.
The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.
The global coalition consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. The barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.
In a statement, the group said that it had “agreed on decisive, coordinated measures to stabilize immediate energy supplies, shield households and businesses from price shocks, and strengthen the long-term resilience of global energy systems.”
Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”
Two diplomats that spoke with Politico suggested that the G7 declaration was little more than a reiteration of an agreement initially drawn up in March, when the International Energy Agency led an effort to release some 400 million barrels of oil. That oil sale was stalled due to the low availability of cheaper U.S. crude oil, though an EU diplomat told Politico that the oil was finally released.
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 $4.39 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.
This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.70 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.37 a gallon.
This story has been updated.
GOP’s cash blitz in Texas won’t save Ken Paxton
Three weeks ago, Republican super PACs began dumping tens of millions into Texas’ Senate contest, unleashing an ad blitz they hoped would hurt Democratic nominee James Talarico and boost Republican Ken Paxton. Yet Fox News dropped a poll Thursday evening that showed the money is not working, with Paxton trailing Talarico 49% to 51% among likely voters. Oddly, the poll found Talarico’s…