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Vice President JD Vance thinks that Americans are too worried about the “little things” ahead of midterms—like gas prices, debt, Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings, and war. 

“This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things.… I think every single person who voted for us in 2024 could find something where they wish maybe congressional Republicans had gone further,” Vance told Fox News on Thursday. “The challenge here is between Democrats who want to destroy the country, who want to permanently disempower you … and Republicans who fundamentally are trying to solve the problems that Democrats under Joe Biden created.” 

Vance: This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people pic.twitter.com/lhGetkOvkt

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

Vance was promptly lambasted online for the out-of-touch comment, something that’s become a bit of a trend for Republicans as they struggle to sell their platform to dissatisfied Americans as midterms approach. 

“So worrying about grocery prices, gas increases and no jobs is ‘griping??’” one liberal account posited. 

“By every metric Trump, Vance and the GOP took what the Biden administration left them and made it worse for the American people,” said another. “If you want to give them two more years, your momma done dropped you on your head. Twice.”

It’s clear that Republicans are grasping at straws, panicking ahead of what is widely predicted to be a brutal midterm rebuke. Just two weeks ago, Vance was begging Americans for “another chance.”  

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. Nebraska’s 1st District runs red. In 2024, President Donald Trump won it by 13 percentage points, and Republican Rep. Mike Flood was reelected by 20 points. But with diesel prices rising due to Trump’s war of choice in Iran, some Nebraskans who entrusted their…

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Donald Trump is attempting to retcon his rationale for attacking Iran.

Speaking at a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Thursday evening, the president suddenly claimed that part of his impetus for launching an all-out assault on the country seven months ago was because Iran was “doing drugs” at “drug factories.”

The add-on was introduced as Trump boasted about the special mission that preceded the war, Operation Midnight Hammer, in which Trump directed the U.S. military to destroy nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025.

​“They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really,” Trump told the crowd.

“That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. But these drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.”

Trump on Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran: They unloaded every single bomb—went right down air chutes into this uhhh drug factories, really, that's what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard pic.twitter.com/U0nY3LO315

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

It was the first time that Trump ever suggested the war in Iran was about drugs. Up until the Oklahoma rally, Trump had almost singularly blamed the conflict on Iran’s quest to develop nuclear technologies.

Before Operation Midnight Hammer took place, Tehran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation underwent years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and just weeks prior the June attack was allowing IAEA inspectors to remain in the country for continuous supervision, according to the United Nations entity.

A series of historic, nationwide protests began in Iran in December 2025, sparked by the collapse of the local currency. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ensuing crackdown killed thousands of people.

When Trump first announced the U.S.-Iran war in February, he explicitly called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government and obtain their independence.

“When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said at the time. “It will be yours to take.”

But even after Khamenei was assassinated, Trump’s charge to the Iranian people did not pan out. Instead, Americans have found themselves in yet another unpopular forever war in the Middle East. The ensuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also roiled wallets at home, as the American economy contends with rising oil and gas prices.

President Donald Trump went all the way to Texas to trash Ken Paxton in front of his own constituents.

The president offered these comments during his rally at the Peterbilt Motors factory in Denton on Thursday night.

“He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’ll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is,” Trump said of the embattled attorney general and Senate candidate. “I didn’t even know if he was here! I don’t care.”

Trump campaigns for Ken Paxton in Texas: "He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I'll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is. I didn't even know if he was here! I don't care." pic.twitter.com/AR9mNdSGEr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2026

During a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, later that night, Trump even went on to play the recently leaked audio of Paxton talking down on the president’s poorly received midterm GOP convention.

“It was leaked audio that came out yesterday from The New York Times saying Ken Paxton isn’t sure that the numbers after that midterm convention helped him and maybe hurt him. Are they still on board?” a reporter can be heard asking in the clip Trump played. A Trump supporter replied that Paxton was wrong.

Trump still encouraged people to vote for Paxton, “whether you love him or you don’t love him.”

Trump: We're going to send Ken Paxton to the Senate because he is whether you love him or don't love him, he's a little controversial, just slightly, but whether you love him or not, he's probably the best or certainly one of the best… pic.twitter.com/0vftPScZDb

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

The president pretending not to know that a Republican senatorial candidate is at his own rally is deeply unserious—especially when that candidate is locked in a contested race that has the chance to break the historic vice grip that the party has had in the state. Even if Paxton really is a pain in the ass, Trump openly admitting that isn’t necessarily a vote of confidence. And that’s something Paxton sorely needs, as his candidacy has been shrouded in controversy and a lack of enthusiasm.

On Oct. 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first Black person to serve on the court. Nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson to replace retiring Justice Tom Clark, Marshall went on to serve one day shy of 24 years on the bench. “I believe he earned that appointment; he deserves the appointment,” Johnson said. “He is best qualified by…

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Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said last year that the agency, which oversees federal mortgage regulators Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had launched a “wide crackdown on mortgage fraud.”

That was never a persuasive claim. Pulte announced his campaign after drawing criticism for urging the Justice Department to prosecute officials including Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, New York Attorney Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), over alleged inaccuracies in past mortgage applications. His targets were almost all Democrats—or, in Cook’s case, a Democratic appointee—who President Donald Trump had previously clashed with.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates.”

But Pulte’s supposed crackdown on mortgage fraud looks a lot less plausible now. On Wednesday, he announced deep cuts to the office of the Inspector General at the FHFA. That office is reportedly investigating Pulte’s own alleged misconduct. But it also includes dozens of special agents who work to “detect, investigate, and refer for prosecution mortgage fraud and other crimes” involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, FHFA Acting Principal Deputy Inspector General James Hodge told congressional oversight committee members in a letter Wednesday.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates,” Hodge wrote. He said he would have to lay off about 40 investigators who have helped the office secure more than 1,200 criminal convictions and recover nearly $75 billion since.

In a press release Thursday, Pulte explained slashing the IG’s budget by arguing that it was relatively more expensive than comparable inspector general offices at other federal agencies as a percentage of overall agency spending. 

The announcement did not mention Pulte’s purported crackdown on mortgage fraud, or how firing investigators would affect that effort. The agency’s press office did not respond Thursday to questions on the subject.

Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee demanded on Thursday that Pulte reverse the move, writing to him that the cuts would “make it impossible” for the Inspector General’s office to oversee the agency and the US mortgage market.

Top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

“Your decision is unacceptable and yet another example of this Administration’s willingness to flout the law and evade accountability. It also indicates that FHFA is uninterested in finding and eliminating mortgage fraud—an issue that you have repeatedly claimed to prioritize at FHFA,” the lawmakers wrote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and other top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

Pulte’s efforts to target Trump foes for alleged mortgage fraud has largely failed. Federal prosecutors, at his urging, did indict James, the New York Attorney General who in 2024 won a civil case requiring Trump’s companies to pay back more than $450 million in wrongly obtained funds and interest. A judge later threw out the case against James after ruling the appointment of the Trump aide who brought the case was illegal.

Pulte reportedly targeted one Republican, Attorney General Todd Blanche. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Pulte looked into Blanche’s mortgages after the former Trump lawyer, at the time the deputy attorney general, criticized Pulte’s efforts targeting Democrats.

Pulte’s efforts to use his office to advance partisan vendettas have never been subtle. The Government Accountability Office has said it is investigating whether Pulte misused his position to access mortgage information on Trump foes.

But as Pulte moves to fire the federal employees who look into actual mortgage fraud, the Trump loyalist’s motivations targeting Democratic officials are clearer than ever.

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP strategist says Trump should hide until midterms are over…

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, word leaked that the GOP Senate candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, privately said that Donald Trump’s midterm convention in Texas had hurt Republicans in the state. On Thursday, Trump was asked directly about this, and in a rambling monologue, he kept repeating that the convention had been a huge success and that he had won the state three times. Trump just cannot comprehend just how bad things have gotten for him there. And this inability to see his own standing clearly has itself become a major problem for Republicans.

So today we’re talking about Texas with Madison Andrus, a national official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who’s focused on the region. We have new internal Democratic polling to share on what’s going on there. Madison, thanks for coming on.

Madison Andrus: Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to talk about, you know, all the movement that we are seeing down in South Texas. It’s truly great to see about a month out.

Sargent: It’s pretty remarkable. So the Times reported on this event where Paxton declared privately that after Trump’s convention, “everybody’s numbers dropped.” Paxton added, “right now, yeah, not good.” Now, Paxton’s campaign reacted very vehemently to this, saying it was a fake story.

Trump’s convention in Texas was on September 9 and 10. Did you guys see anything in the tracking data or in the internal polling that kind of showed how that was playing in a sort of moment-to-moment way?

Andrus: We are definitely seeing movement in the polling post this party in Dallas. You know, our DCCC internal polling from August showed Bobby Pulido beating Monica De La Cruz 49 to 43. And then just today we got new polling from the House Majority PAC that is showing Bobby Pulido up now double digits. So all of these things compounding are really leading to great momentum, and that is playing out in the data, and we’re seeing it every day.

Sargent: Yep. In fact, the House Majority PAC on Thursday found Bobby Pulido, the Democrat, leading Monica De La Cruz, the Republican, by 54 to 41. So that’s quite a significant movement. Whether that’s entirely from the convention is a little hard to say, but that really shows that something’s happening here, doesn’t it?

Andrus: Yeah, something is very much happening in South Texas, just across the board, and we are seeing great numbers. Not just in Texas 15, but, you know, our polling in Texas 34—we polled in September right before the convention, and our internals showed Congressman Vicente Gonzalez beating Eric Flores 47 to 40. You know, these are just incredible numbers for Democrats to be putting up.

And I want to point out that these are numbers that Democrats are still putting up after Republicans tried tooth and nail to rig the game at the eleventh hour with this insane mid-decade gerrymandering.

They did this because they thought that they were going to be able to lock up, you know, five, six seats for themselves, and that they wouldn’t have to fight in these seats. And now they’re losing. They are still losing after all of that. And they’re trying to pour millions of dollars into these races, and they’re not seeing a return on their investment, because they are just that unpopular.

Sargent: I want to come back to your internal polling a bit later. But first, Trump traveled to Texas for a rally on Thursday. And by the time you all listen to this, you will have probably heard something about that rally. But for now, on Thursday, Trump was asked a question by a reporter: if Paxton is privately saying you’re hurting Republicans there, why go to Texas for another rally? Here’s Trump’s answer.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Why go to Texas? Well, I’ll tell you what, we have to win this election. That convention—you were there—that convention was a tremendous success. It went up against the NFL, and as you know, they had twenty-four, I guess—it was, I said twenty-five yesterday, it was actually—they had twenty-four million views and we had a hundred and seven million views. In other words, we beat the NFL by four times. And maybe that was so for Ken, but I could tell you, we were there for a lot. First of all, I won Texas all three times. I won the Hispanic vote. I’m going because you have to thank these states that are with you a thousand percent.

Sargent: A couple things here. Note how Trump is very deeply preoccupied with thanking Texans for supporting him. I think that’s a really key tell. And same with him talking about how big a success the convention was. I mean, by that he means his own ratings. Never mind that he’s inflating them ridiculously. What he’s focused on is how he did. It’s all about how he fares in Texas. No thought whatsoever to how this is impacting Republicans there. Your thoughts on that?

Andrus: Yeah, I actually thought that that was really remarkable as well. You know, those are the numbers that Donald Trump is focused on. He’s focused on his television ratings. What he’s not focused on is the cost of gas. He’s not focused on the six dollars and fifty cents a gallon it’s taking for truck drivers to fill up their tanks.

Donald Trump on Thursday was at a Peterbilt facility where they manufacture 18-wheelers. What he did not talk about was the fact that those same truck drivers—independent truck drivers and those truck-driving companies—are now paying nearly seven dollars a gallon for the diesel fuel to put in their trucks, that is now cutting into their margins and cutting into their ability to feed their families.

The numbers that he and House Republicans are not focused on are how much the cost of health care has gone up, because they cut Medicaid last year, or because they failed to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. So now the cost of health care is spiking.

The numbers that they are focused on are their TV ratings. They’re not focused on the numbers that Americans and South Texans are talking about at their kitchen table.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the districts that you highlighted. There was Texas’s Fifteenth District, where Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido is challenging GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz. And Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, where the incumbent Democratic congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, is being challenged by Republican Eric Flores. The reason this region, I think, is of such great interest is because these districts abut the southern border, they have a lot of Latinos in them, they have some southern Texas counties. Some of this is in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico.

And that region is where Trump made very big inroads with Latinos in 2024, which produced a lot of punditry about a supposed major multiracial working-class realignment. Can you talk a little bit about that region, the Rio Grande Valley, how much importance you guys are putting on it and why?

Andrus: Yeah, we are investing very heavily in South Texas, especially the Rio Grande Valley, the RGV. An article came out just a few days ago about our seven-figure investment into bringing those voters back home. Because they did swing to Trump last time around. But what Republicans mistook was that these were now going to be reliable Republican voters. And that’s just not the case.

These are voters who simply want to be able to make it to the end of the week feeding their family. These are pocketbook voters, and they are extremely worried about the economy. And so when they look back and they are now worse off than they were two years ago, they are looking for alternatives.

And they are seeing in Johnny Garcia someone who talks about being able to afford Big Red and barbacoa at the end of the week. And they’re seeing our South Texas Democrats talking about making life more affordable.

I really want to mention, Vicente Gonzalez just a few days ago actually released a new ad in the district that talked about one of these big cultural issues that is shifting Hispanic voters back towards Democrats. And that is that there are restaurants now in South Texas that are taking brisket off of their menu, because it is just too expensive, because the cost of beef has gone up by that much. That this Texas staple is now being taken off of the menu.

And so Vicente has a really great ad right now that just highlights how much prices have increased, and how much that’s hurting South Texas families and also just hurting the culture.

Sargent: Beef is becoming a cultural issue. Is that what you’re saying?

Andrus: Yeah, no, it very much is. Like, these are famous South Texas restaurants taking brisket off of the menu, which would have been unheard of just a couple of years ago.

Sargent: That’s pretty remarkable. So you discussed some of the new DCCC polling on these races. You provided these numbers to me as well. Let’s just go quickly over them again.

In Texas’s Fifteenth District, Democrat Bobby Pulido, the challenger, is leading GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz by 49 to 43. And in Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, you have Democratic incumbent Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, as we discussed, leading Republican challenger Eric Flores by 47 to 40. What’s driving those shifts?

Andrus: I think a lot of it is the economy. And you know, it sounds repetitive to say it over and over again, but it really cannot be overstated how hard Republican economic policies are hitting folks down in South Texas. You know, for you or I—and talking about the grocery prices again—for you or I, where a trip to the grocery store might be, you know, ten minutes, it’s nothing.

In these rural parts of South Texas, especially in the RGV and places like that, a drive to the grocery store can be 30 minutes each way. And so when you are thinking about how much gas costs now, to just make your weekly trip to the grocery store eats up that much of your gas budget for the month.

Sargent: Well, let’s say one more thing about these districts. Trump won the Fifteenth District in South Texas by nearly 18 points in 2024. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points. So the shift toward Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and in nearby counties was really a profound thing. It was a very big event.

Now, what is the role of Latinos in all this? We reported this week in The New Republic that in both these districts, Trump’s approval on immigration among Latinos is down in the thirties. And I’m wondering if you guys are seeing something similar. I know you keep talking about the economy. What’s driving this Latino shift for you guys? Is there an immigration component as well?

Andrus: Yeah, so I kind of want to talk about two things here, because you mentioned Trump being underwater in these districts after winning them by so much. And you know, our internal polling backs that up. In Texas 15, right now, only 36 percent of folks that we surveyed approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing. It’s 35 percent in Texas 34. So these are just abysmal numbers for House Republicans to have to try to overcome.

But then also, kind of going towards the immigration angle, I think that definitely plays a part of it. And it plays a large part because of the way it impacts everyday life down in these communities. You know, folks like Vicente Gonzalez have said for years that we needed a strong and secure border and we need safe communities. He’s been right on this issue for years and years.

But what these communities don’t want is the chaotic and terroristic enforcement that we are seeing now. They aren’t going after hardened criminals. You know, they aren’t going after the worst of the worst, like they said that they were going to. They’re picking up nuns on their way to church. They’re picking up high school students and mariachi bands. You know, Monica De La Cruz touted these young mariachi players in D.C., and then she voted for the same machine that went in and detained them.

And so I think we are seeing it just play out in everyday life for folks down there. And also, I know we’re talking about the economy a lot, but this immigration enforcement is also impacting the economy down there. Homes that once took three or four months to build are now taking eleven months, because people are afraid to go to work, because they don’t know if they’re going to be able to go home that day. Because that is who they’re picking up.

They’re picking up folks outside of Home Depot, by policy. That’s it. That’s who they want to go and get. They want to get the people outside of Home Depot, not the drug traffickers and not the dangerous criminals. They’re picking up hardworking families.

Sargent: I want to try to underscore the magnitude of the shift against Trump. Again, he won the Fifteenth District by nearly 18 points, and now his approval rating is 36 percent. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points, and now his approval rating is 35 percent. Those numbers are correct, right?

Andrus: Yep, that is correct. And you know, right next door in Texas 28, which we haven’t talked about a ton just yet, his approval numbers are even worse. Only 28 percent of the people that we surveyed in Texas 28 approve of Donald Trump.

Sargent: Well, you just brought up Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District. That’s where Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar is facing a Republican challenger, and it’s a very competitive race. Guess what? Trump won that district by 10 points as well in 2024. But now you guys have his approval in the twenties, right?

Andrus: Yeah, in the twenties. Just 28 percent of people approve of the job he is doing right now, with 60 percent disapproving. It’s just truly abysmal numbers for House Republicans to try to overcome.

And Tano Tijerina, the Republican challenging Henry Cuellar, was out at that party in Dallas on stage talking about how great things are going. Things are not going great for folks in South Texas when they are struggling to pay their bills and make it to the end of the week.

Sargent: So I understand the economy is on everybody’s minds, and it’s a really, really intense thing for a lot of people, and it’s very preoccupying. It’s at the center of all these races. But I can’t help but notice that there’s just not that much discussion of the immigration stuff on the trail.

I don’t hear that much from Bobby Pulido or from the other Democrats in South Texas. Am I wrong about that? Are they advertising on immigration in any way? And if not, why not?

Andrus: No, I actually do think you hear about it a lot from Bobby Pulido. When that mariachi band was detained, it was actually Bobby Pulido who sounded the alarm about this. He is the first person to speak out when those kids got detained. The family reached out to Monica De La Cruz’s office—the family reached out, that mariachi band. And Monica De La Cruz’s office told them that there was nothing that they could do about it, until Bobby Pulido posted about it and his post went viral.

And so I think, when it comes also to the nun who was detained just a few weeks after, it was Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez who sounded the alarm about all of this happening. And so I do think our South Texas folks are talking about this issue, but they’re talking about it in ways that it directly impacts their communities.

And I think a big part of that is that they are not going after the hardened criminals and the worst of the worst. They’re going after those kids and, you know, people just on their way to church.

Sargent: Is there a risk of overextending here by going after some of these—I want to be clear, like, I think Democrats should compete everywhere. Like, I’m thrilled that Democrats are putting huge resources into the Rio Grande Valley and going after places that Trump won by 10, 18 points. But I do want to ask, is there some risk of overextension here? Or are the resources there for contesting all these places to the degree that they need to be contested?

Andrus: We do have the resources, and we’ve shown that we have the resources to contest in these races. That’s why our polling is doing so well, because we’ve been playing in all of these places for over a year now, and we invested early in these kinds of districts, and that investment is paying off.

Look, we are not taking any voter or any district for granted. We are going to work from now until November 3 to earn every single one of those votes. And it’s especially important in Texas, where we saw this mid-decade redistricting happen to try to subvert the will of Texas voters.

I think it is critically important that people know that we didn’t just roll over and accept that. We fought, and we’re fighting, and we’re winning in those redistricted districts.

Sargent: Can I ask, is there any risk of overextension here or not?

Andrus: No, I don’t think so. And I think, you know, when you talk to folks who do the work in, you know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and places like that, we are still laser-focused on flipping those seats, but we are also focused on expanding the battlefield and expanding the map, and delivering the largest House majority that we can come January.

Sargent: Well, you’re going to need to get those numbers up, in part because of the redistricting, which has taken a bunch off the board, really. Although maybe not, we’ll see.

Andrus: Yeah, it really hasn’t, not in the way that they thought they would. You know, Texas 35 was one of those redistricted seats, and Johnny Garcia is doing some really incredible things out there.

Sargent: Right. Just to underscore the point, Republicans redistricted Texas and they thought that they were actually creating seats that would be easier for them to pick up as well. But some of those are now in real trouble for them, right?

Andrus: No, they’re in a lot of trouble. You know, you’re seeing them having to pour millions and millions of dollars into districts that they thought that they had locked up. You know, when Republicans redrew and created this new Texas 35 district, they thought that it was a lock. What they didn’t expect was for a pissed-off sheriff like Johnny Garcia to throw his hat in the ring, because he wanted to stand up and fight for his communities. And we’re seeing that it is working. It is really resonating with people.

I mentioned that I was down in South Texas just two weeks ago with Johnny Garcia. One of the other conversations we had while we were just walking around in this neighborhood was, he went up to go talk to some guy, and he said, you know, I’ve never voted for a Democrat before in my life, but I’m going to vote for you because I remember you from the sheriff’s department. And I think that is the kind of community connections that Democrats are making in these districts all across the battlefield. And that is what is really going to deliver us these wins come November.

Sargent: OK, are you prepared to predict today that you guys are going to win Texas’s Fifteenth, Texas’s Twenty-Eighth, and Texas’s Thirty-Fourth? Again, these are districts Trump won by a lot.

Andrus: Yep. We’re going to win each and every one of them.

Sargent: Well, there you go. Madison Andrus, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you’re right.

Andrus: All right, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a great time.

Most cheating scandals in sports boil down to numbers: Barry Bonds’s 73 home runs in 2001 (or Mark McGwire’s 70 home run campaign three years earlier); Lance Armstrong’s six Tour de France titles; the World Series won by the sign-stealing Houston Astros. The scandal currently rocking the English Premier League is no different. The world’s most popular, lucrative domestic soccer league on Tuesday released a report detailing extensive financial improprieties, “sham” contracts, and outright fraud committed by its most successful contemporary club, Manchester City. The length of the report: 40 pages. The league titles City won between the fall of 2009 and 2019, when the investigation was launched: Three, plus another five domestic trophies. But the most important number might be £900 million, which is the amount the team inflated revenues and obscured costs during that period. 

City’s most dominant stretch didn’t arrive until after 2019. Under the guidance of Pep Guardola, the greatest coach in the world, the club lost the league only once between 2018 and 2024, and won the European-wide Champions League in 2023. There are compelling reasons to believe the team’s financial improprieties stretched into that era, but in some ways that is immaterial. City’s success over a period of nearly two decades, dating all the way back to 2008, when the perennially mediocre team was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, or ADUG—a consortium whose political and economic ties to the United Arab Emirates are so deep the team is state-run in all but name—resulted from what appears to be the most spectacular and brazen financial fraud in the history of professional sports. Every one of its titles is tainted. None of its success would have been possible without the extraordinary manipulations undertaken by its fabulously wealthy owners who transformed the team into a sporting juggernaut. 

Given the scale of the violations detailed by the Premier League, there can be no question that City’s success is illegitimate. They cheated for nearly two decades and got away with it. Then they got caught. Wherever the Premier League—and soccer writ large—goes next it has to start from that point. But that’s the tricky part: what comes next. City’s abuses get at the heart of all that ails the sport, most of which can be traced back on some level not just to greed and corruption, but to its increasing dependence on multinational corporations, private equity, and nation-states. Cataloging City’s fraud is simple—so easy, in fact, that it’s not at all clear why it took the Premier League more than seven years to do so. Untangling soccer from the forces that corrupt it is another matter altogether. 

This week’s explosive report released describes Manchester City’s fraud as a “disguised funding scheme” that allowed the team to evade financial regulations by inflating its income and hiding its expenses to the tune of nearly £1 billion between 2011 and 2019. It did so brazenly via fraudulent contracts with sponsors, many of which had close ties to team’s owners, who all just happened to include many of the most powerful people in the government and economy of the United Arab Emirates. When the ADUG purchased the team in 2009, its commercial revenues were a paltry £18 million; a decade later they had ballooned to £230 million—an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Commercial revenues from the league’s four biggest teams—Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea—increased an average of 213 percent over the same period. 

Nearly all of that money was laundered in some form. Its “sham” contracts included sponsorship deals for its most lucrative properties. City plays in a stadium named after Etihad Airlines, the aviation company whose name also graces the front of its uniforms. The UAE-based airline paid the team £67.5 million a year for those privileges. But, per the Premier League’s report, Etihad Airlines actually paid just  £8 million; the difference was covered via wire transfer by the holding company that actually owns the team. It’s all monopoly money, really: Both the soccer team and the airline are owned by groups with ties to the UAE that are so deep that they are, for all intents and purposes, state-owned. 

City continues to insist not just on its innocence, but that it has “irrefutable evidence” proving it; Etihad Airlines is reportedly considering legal action against the Premier League. Yet the allegations are so extensive, clear, and damning that there can be no doubt that its present dominance was built on, and is inseparable from, fraud on a historic scale. 

The report and the public statements that accompanied it also suggest that the Premier League means business. And yet, it’s not at all clear that the league is prepared to make the punishment fit the crime. City is in deep trouble, there’s no question. Whether or not that trouble is commensurate with the offenses committed is another matter altogether. In many ways, this is a problem of the league’s own making. City was far more successful during the seven years it took to produce the report than it was during the nearly decade-long period covered by that report. Invalidating that success would arguably also be existential, threatening to invalidate the Premier League itself. What should we now make of many of its most iconic moments: Sergio Aguero’s 2012 title-winning goal; the rivalry between Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp between 2016 and 2024; Kevin de Bruyne’s lobbed passes and whipped crosses, Rodri’s imperious command of possession, Erling Haaland’s impeccable finishing?

All of that is already tarnished, whatever punishment the Premier League chooses to hand down. But its problem is also—sorry—epistemological. Those moments not only defined the league, they defined many lives, my own very much included. We watched them and felt them. Invalidating them is one thing. But what would it mean if the world’s biggest sports league essentially declared that many of its most defining moments of the last two decades weren’t real? 

There are other less abstract problems, too. One is simply that, thanks to all the cheating, Manchester City is now one of the biggest teams in the most powerful league in the world. Guardiola and Rodri are gone as of the summer; de Bruyne left a year earlier. But Haaland, fresh off a breakout World Cup campaign that elevated his already superstardom to another plane, is still there, as are a host of other stars. A forced relegation, either via points deduction or other means, whether to the second division or out of the top four English leagues altogether—a punishment that has been floated—is more than fair given the extent of City’s crimes. But kicking the team out of the Premier League would not just necessitate a historic sell-off—and likely lead to some stars, including Haaland, leaving England altogether—it would diminish the Premier League itself. 

The Premier League’s emergence as a juggernaut—both in a financial sense and a sporting one—coincided, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the rise of Manchester City. The league has, over the past decade, become by far the sport’s most profitable league and it has done so while most superstars—Haaland being a key exception—have played elsewhere. It is rare for all six of the league’s so-called Big Six—City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—to be firing on all cylinders simultaneously (and a strong case should be made for excising Tottenham from the club altogether) but fielding several big-spending, if not always competitive, teams does matter. Spain has two (Barcelona and Madrid, though Atletico Madrid is hovering somewhere outside that duopoly and the sea of mediocrity below it); France and Germany have one; Italian teams are presently so broke they don’t even rate on this scale. Manchester City is undoubtedly a key pillar of the Premier League’s growing economic might and stature. Does that mean that it’s too big to fail? To put it another way, keeping City in the competition would diminish the prestige of the Premier League but so would kicking them out. 

That’s a thorny problem, but it’s the league’s problem, not ours. It’s one that will ultimately be solved by the lawyers and public relations executives who have been raking in billable hours for seven years. I have little faith that it will be solved in a way that feels just and even less that it will solve the underlying issues that created it. The Premier League may solve its City problem or it may not. But it won’t lay a glove on the real problem. City’s importance to the Premier League both as a brand and as a business is the real scandal here. 

That scandal can be found in the numbers too. The £900 million in fraudulent accounting matters. So do the eight Premier League titles and 22 trophies that the team has won since being taken over by the UAE. But the really important number is the 18 years that have elapsed since that takeover. The fraud is historic, both in a financial sense and in terms of how much success it bought. But it was brazen from the very beginning. It not only required, but demanded, willful ignorance on an almost comical scale. City’s rise may have been meteoric, but the simple—publicly available—evidence always pointed to massive fraud. The team was owned by the UAE. Its stadium and jerseys were sponsored by a UAE-based airline. It rocketed from obscurity to being a brand and business ostensibly on par with Manchester United and Liverpool in a few short years. 

It was always a farce. The report released by the Premier League earlier this week details the specifics of its massive accounting sham. But the sham itself was always apparent for anyone with eyes to see. Manchester City’s rise was not inexorable, nor was it the result of a sophisticated, hidden conspiracy that required nearly a decade to unravel. Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because they were allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances—let alone about its ownership—were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world. 

Here, too, the numbers tell a story. The 2024/25 campaign was not a particularly good one for City, which finished in third place, 13 points behind champions Liverpool. But it was an excellent one for the Premier League, which not only raked in £6.8 billion in revenue, but easily outpaced its European competitors: The Bundesliga and La Liga, the other two top leagues, both brought in about £4 billion. Compare that to the 2008/09 campaign, the season the ADUG bought Manchester City: Back then, the Premier League brought in a respectable  £1.9 billion, while the Bundesliga and La Liga brought in $1.6 and $1.5 billion, respectively. The growth of the Premier League’s edge over its rivals from $300 million to almost $3 billion is perhaps the biggest story in global soccer over that period. It’s also a story that can’t be told without the biggest fraud in the history of the sport. 

President Donald Trump picked an odd political moment to remove guardrails from the private equity industry. A July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that a 65 percent majority agreed with the statement, “We need guard rails for Wall Street firms like private equity because otherwise they maximize short term profits for themselves, cut jobs, and reduce the quality of products and services.” There was surprisingly little partisan difference on this point. A 59 percent majority of Republicans agreed with a 78 percent majority of Democrats.

The public hates private equity so much that the once-arcane phrase “private equity” (in the 1980s we called it the leveraged buyout racket) is a political hot button in this year’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that nearly three times as many congressional candidates in competitive races pilloried the industry by name as compared to congressional candidates in the previous five election cycles (when the preferred term of derision was ‘big banks”). 

Yet Trump keeps removing restrictions on private equity! 

In August 2025 Trump issued an executive order to free defined-contribution pension funds such as 401(k)s to invest in private equity, and this past March the Labor Department issued a proposed regulation to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed through on Wednesday by approving a proposed rule allowing retirement-fund managers to charge a larger universe of clients the sort of high-performance fees associated with private equity (typically 20 percent above a certain benchmark). Currently such fees may be levelled only on “qualified” (i.e., rich) clients, defined either as any whose net worth is $2.7 million or more (excluding their primary residence) or as any for whom the retirement fund in question totals $1.7 million or more. Under the SEC proposal, which has not been made public (summary here), average Joes would pay these higher fees while investing their retirement funds in risky private equity. What could possibly go wrong?

The lure for these average Joes is that private equity, like most investment schemes in which the buyer assumes greater-than-normal risk, can deliver greater-than-normal returns. The key word here is “can.” According to the private equity firm KKR, over the past 25 years private equity netted, on an annualized basis, a four to five percent higher return than “public equities” (i.e., stocks). But lately private equity returns have lagged the AI-torqued stock market. According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog group, during the past three years the median return on the fifteen largest “evergreen” private-equity funds—i.e., those funds in which assets don’t get locked up, and therefore private equity’s likeliest retirement vehicle—was half the median return for the S&P 500. More traditional (and more numerous) private equity funds in which investors lock up their assets for 10 or more years have fared even worse than the evergreens. 

It’s gotten so bad that in April, the analyst Henrique Schneider of the forecasting firm GIS, wrote an obituary for the private equity industry:

The pressure to deploy vast sums of capital—a staggering $2.18 trillion in global “dry powder,” the committed but uninvested capital held by private equity, as of March 2025 —has led to a chase for deals at any price…. The industry is now sitting on a bloated inventory of an estimated 31,000 companies, collectively valued at a staggering $3.7 trillion, with a persistent and widening gap between on-paper valuations and what a rational buyer is willing to pay in the real world.

This desperation helps explain why private equity in recent years has moved into various government-subsidized sectors that a more sensibly regulated nation than ours would never allow. These include retirement homes and hospice care. The results have been just as damaging to the quality of care as you’d expect. Private equity has also invested heavily in single-family homes. Private equity’s intrusion here has inflated prices for single-family housing to such an extent that Trump told the Treasury department last January to put some brakes on it. We have, after all, a housing shortage. Congress followed through in July with a housing bill that banned for-profit entities that owned more than 350 single-family homes from purchasing any more. Private equity’s infuriating role in bumping up housing prices is the main reason the industry gets pilloried so much these days by political candidates.

Even here, though, Trump can’t resist siding with private equity. In an August 31 letter to Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director (and sometime intelligence chief) Bill Pulte, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who co-sponsored the housing bill, complained that these agencies cancelled a 30-day purchasing period that formerly gave owner-occupiers an advantage over private equity in acquiring foreclosed homes. The Trumpies just can’t help themselves.

Private equity’s desperation for new markets is why it pushed Trump (largely, it appears, through Blackstone chief executive Steve Schwartzman, who gave Republicans $40 million in 2024) to give ordinary investors greater access to private equity in the name of “democratizing” it. But there’s some question whether these ordinary investors even want it. When The Wall Street Journal surveyed investors last fall via a Harris poll, only 10 percent said they were dissatisfied with their current retirement-fund options. But the same survey found that these ordinary investors were persuadable; informed that most companies with revenue exceeding $100 million were privately held, 59 percent said sure, okay, they’d like to invest in these behemoths. Who’s going to tell them they only got invited in because the party was already over?

You’ve probably heard the term “lemon socialism” to describe government investment in a failing enterprise that, in the event of recovery, gets to keep the profits. (Many of us used that term during the 2008 financial crisis to describe the Bush administration’s bank bailout.) The Trump administration’s attempted rescue of the private equity industry is a related phenomenon, lemon deregulation. (I believe I am the first person to use this term.) Lemon deregulation works like this: Take a failing industry. Throw it a lifeline by removing prohibitions that prevent it from operating in a manner that endangers the public. Then do the best you can to ignore the damage.

Can lemon deregulation revive private equity? That’s an open question. But even if it does, the cost will be unacceptably high to people who can’t afford to risk big losses to their nest egg.  And quite apart from the substance, Trump is throwing his arms around an industry that even many Republican candidates right now are turning into a political bogeyman. Politically, he can’t afford that. Maybe this last part should be our little secret.

The biggest news during last week’s Climate Week NYC came not from the United States but from Germany, where the government of the world’s third-largest economy committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. It was the first time Germany has explicitly made such a promise, Fiona Harvey noted in The Guardian. Germany’s previous pledges, Harvey added, “were only for ‘carbon neutrality,’” an important distinction. Carbon neutrality allows continued fossil fuel use if the emissions are offset—for example, by additional clean energy or tree planting. But only a complete phaseout of fossil fuels can halt global temperature rise.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine out of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who’s widely expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.”

An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP.

Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 United Nations climate summit, after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account.

France and The Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian.

As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented … across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol.

A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the U.S. midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change?

“We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

For the first time since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976, a death-row prisoner has survived an execution. The state of Tennessee administered two lethal injections to Christa Pike on Wednesday night. She is still “alive right now”—as of Thursday afternoon, she is at a local hospital in critical condition, one of her lawyers told reporters. He did not give a prognosis for her long-term fate.

Pike’s failed execution is the worst of its kind in roughly a decade. At least two other inmates over the last 20 years have had their executions botched and failed, but in both cases it was because prison officials had either failed to properly find a vein or set an IV line. The failure was mechanical. This time, it was pharmaceutical.

Pike’s fate is the inevitable byproduct of the Supreme Court’s turn on the death penalty over the last decade or so. The high court has created a system where states are free to more or less experiment on prisoners while they’re killing them. Prisoners have virtually no legal recourse to challenge what can appear to be indistinguishable from torture. The justices not only rubber-stamp the states’ decisions but refuse to allow lower courts to second-guess them as well.

The death penalty remains legal in more than half of the states, but it is only really practiced in a few of them. Sixteen states have executed prisoners over the past 10 years. Most of them have only executed only a few people. Just five states—Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas—account for roughly three-quarters of the 170 executions since 2020. The federal government also briefly revived capital punishment under Trump during his first term, executing 13 people between July 2020 and January 2021.

When the Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in 1972, one argument by the justices was that the system before Furman v. Georgia was too haphazard and random to pass constitutional muster. Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in his concurring opinion in Furman that the old, arbitrary system of death sentences was “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” That randomness persists today by geography rather than procedure: Some states are merely more enthusiastic for executions than others.

Christa Pike’s case illustrates that arbitrariness in other ways. A Tennessee jury convicted her in 1996 of the murder of Colleen Slemmer, an acquaintance of hers, on the campus of the University of Tennessee. It was a gruesome killing, one where Pike’s then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp carved a pentagram in Slemmer’s chest. Since Shipp was 17 years old at the time of the murder, he could only be sentenced to life imprisonent. Pike received a death sentence.

Like many death-row prisoners, Pike had a deeply troubled childhood that included stints in foster care. She mentioned that a neighbor had raped her when she was 11 years old while writing a suicide note as a teenager. When she was 15 years old, social workers removed Pike from her home after multiple reports of physical and sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend at the time.

Sentencing Pike to die also marked a historical milestone for Tennessee. The state had not executed a woman in more than 200 years. Between 1807 and 1819, Tennessee hanged three Black women for separate murders. Only one of them, Molly Holcomb, had a name that survived the mists of history. In her final appeals, Pike also requested to be hanged instead of receiving a lethal injection because of the likelihood of a painful and potentially botched execution.

Those fears were well-founded. A man executed last year by Tennessee with pentobarbital developed pulmonary edema in his lungs, according to an autopsy, which would have given an excruciating sensation of drowning. When the state executed a prisoner in 2019 with a modified version of the old three-drug cocktail, witnesses recalled how he had been “gasping, choking, and gurgling” after the final drug was injected.

Like many other states, it once used a three-drug cocktail that included a sedative, a paralytic, and potassium chloride to stop the prisoner’s heart. That method became unviable in the 2010s after the European Union imposed an embargo on lethal-injection drugs. U.S. drugmakers also generally refuse to distribute compounds for executions to state governments as well.

Some states simply stopped conducting executions. Others tried to get around this obstacle by sourcing drugs from under-regulated markets like India or by relying on compound pharmacies in the U.S. to procure drugs. A few tried less familiar combinations of drugs to try to achieve the same outcome. In multiple cases, this led to botched executions in the 2010s.

An Arizona prisoner gasped for air for almost 90 minutes before dying, long enough for his lawyer to confer by phone with a federal judge and the state’s lawyers about their options. Witnesses reported multiple executions in the mid-2010s where the prisoner appeared to writhe in agony as they died. Clayton Lockett, who was injected with the sedative midazolam by Oklahoma officials, groaned and convulsed for almost 45 minutes before dying.

Those botched executions prompted the Supreme Court to take up a case on Eighth Amendment challenges to execution methods. In the end, the court set a nearly insurmountable bar for death-row prisoners to challenge their methods of execution. The high court had never previously struck down a method of execution as unconstitutional. States instead abandoned old methods and introduced new ones in response to public pressure.

On the Supreme Court, another turning point came when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the high court in 2018. Kennedy had been the decisive vote in constraining capital punishment over the preceding two decades. Backed by his vote, the court abolished the death penalty for minors and people with intellectual disabilities and forbade states from executing people for non-homicide crimes. His replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has no apparent interest in following in his mentor’s footsteps.

Today, the court reflexively disposes of last-minute capital appeals without any reasoning or commentary. (Until they began wielding it for political reasons in 2016, the Supreme Court’s eleventh-hour execution docket was the most notable part of its administrative “shadow docket.”) The justices appear hostile towards death-row lawyers and anti-death penalty activists. Justice Samuel Alito even denounced “what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty” during oral arguments in the midazolam case.

In the American constitutional order, people have rights and the government has powers. Not so when it comes to the death penalty. The Supreme Court has flipped it around for the past eight years: The government effectively has the right to execute prisoners, while those prisoners’ constitutional concerns must fall on deaf judicial ears. In a 2019 case involving a last-minute appeal, Justice Clarence Thomas fumed that the court should not reward what he described as “gamesmanship” by prisoners’ lawyers.

“[The prisoner’s] strategy is no secret, for it is the same strategy adopted by many death-row inmates with an impending execution: bring last-minute claims that will delay the execution, no matter how groundless,” he wrote, joined by Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch. “The proper response to this maneuvering is to deny meritless requests expeditiously.” Even if some death-row prisoners do file meritless last-minute appeals, the court’s practice has given the impression that they consider all of them meritless by default.

Most egregiously, the high court has also prevented lower courts from imposing their own stays of execution while they consider legal challenges. The justices faced bipartisan backlash when they allowed Alabama to execute a prisoner with only a Protestant minister available instead of the clergy of his faith—one of the clearest Establishment Clause violations of the last ten years. A lower court had suspended that execution, but the Supreme Court reinstated the original execution time while effectively lying about the prisoner’s timeline to appeal.

In Pike’s case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a temporary stay of execution on Wednesday. Pike had argued that the state’s execution method, which involved strapping her to a table while surrounded by male guards would trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder from the abuse she suffered as a child. She asked that the state instead conduct the execution with women officials to avoid Eighth Amendment problems. The state of Tennessee described her lawsuit as an “abusive, tactical delay.” The Supreme Court rejected it without comment or lengthy consideration.

If Pike survives, Tennessee will have to decide whether it will try to kill her again. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1947 that second attempts do not violate the Eighth Amendment.) It has no real alternative: Unlike other death-row prisoners in other botched executions, the state cannot simply wait for natural causes to do the job for them when a 50-year-old woman is involved. In the meantime, the states’ maladventures with lethal injection will likely continue in other states, and public opinion will continue to turn against capital punishment. No “guerrilla war” against the death penalty is necessary when the state keeps shooting itself in the foot.

This week, GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton privately admitted that Donald Trump’s midterm convention in Texas was a serious problem for the state’s Republican candidates. Asked about this, Trump unleashed a long, tortured monologue, and it was revealing. He kept returning to the number of viewers that he got at the convention, and kept repeating that he won Texas multiple times. He can only see this in terms of how he fared there, with no regard for GOP candidates. We think that Trump’s inability to clearly perceive his own standing with voters is a genuinely serious, far-reaching problem for Republicans. So we talked to Madison Andrus, an official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who’s focused on the region. She shares new internal polling showing Democrats leading in key South Texas races, explains the shift away from Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and why it’s important, and discusses how broad the national map has gotten for Democrats. Listen to this episode here.

The math is quite simple. In a 50-50 country, it doesn’t take a massive political realignment to produce a decisive majority. If just 1 in 10 Republican voters switches sides, Democrats gain 5 percentage points and Republicans lose 5 points, turning a 50-50 electorate into a comfortable 55-45 Democratic lead. Now, no one should pretend that the GOP’s electoral troubles this cycle are…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | GOP senator’s gotcha question blows up in his face…

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The Trump administration has been insisting to the courts—and everyone else—that the only way the Kennedy Center can stay open is if President Donald Trump’s name can be slapped on it, because those people who raced to donate because Trump’s name was on it would take their money back if Trump’s name isn’t on it. It turns out that pretty much the opposite is true. Basically…

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Collective action spared two men in Oswego, New York Wednesday following a multi-hour stand-off with federal immigration agents.

For seven hours, two men were trapped on the roof of a house in the central New York city as Border Patrol agents attempted to arrest them. But the agency’s efforts were upended when more than 50 people gathered in front of the house and, seemingly, rescued the men from the agents’ clutches.

The Oswego Police Department said their officers responded to the commotion after receiving complaints about a reckless driver in the area. Their investigation led them to the private residence on East Seventh Street, where Border Patrol’s Targeted Enforcement Division was attempting to apprehend multiple individuals on federal judicial warrants, according to a police statement.

The specific charges of the warrants have not yet been shared, CNYCentral reported Wednesday.

Around 5 p.m., the Oswego Fire Department arrived to provide a ladder for the pair of men to climb down. However, it quickly became clear that the men did not want to utilize the ladder, as they kicked and pushed it away from the rooftop’s edge. The fire department then decided to exit the scene, leaving the ladder behind them.

“I want to be clear that our efforts last evening were for safety first and not an effort to apprehend individuals,” said Oswego Fire Chief Paul Conzone. “Once we provided the ladder to safely assist the individuals on the roof, we cleared the scene and only returned to retrieve our ladder once the incident concluded.”

Border Patrol decided to cut their losses hours later, after which the remaining crowd decided to confront a group of broadcast journalists, throwing articles of clothing over the journalists’ camera lenses while demanding that they stop recording.

When the standoff was over, the two men had disappeared from the rooftop and escaped in waiting cars, according to CNYCentral.

“I recognize that incidents involving federal agencies can generate strong emotions,” said Oswego Mayor Robert A. Corradino in a statement Thursday. “Even so, our responsibility as a city is clear: we protect our residents, safeguard our neighborhoods, and maintain order.”

“Oswego’s strength has always been its people, and yesterday our community showed that even in challenging moments, safety and civility remain our priority,” Corradino added.

The Department of the Interior is paying more than $3 million to repair grass on the National Mall that was damaged during President Trump’s poorly-attended America 250 celebrations this summer, according to The Washington Sun. 

“TURF REPAIR FROM A250,’ reads the contract with Maryland landscaping company Custom Lawn Service Inc. The contract runs until March 2027.

The contract does not say where exactly the mall repairs will be. But Trump has been spinning tall tales about “vandals” destroying the grass  for a few months now. But that patchy, drab looking area is exactly where the main stage for his Fourth of July celebration event was. 

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote in August. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

The $3.4 million the Interior Department is now spending is likely due to increased foot, vehicle, and equipment traffic. What kind of vandals are tearing up grass and kicking up dirt and leaving? 

Trump himself has been the cause of most of the damage around the National Mall. The Justice Department found that it was indeed Trump and his hand-picked contractors who were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and shielded by chain-link fences. Those same federal contractors were also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden.

The Trump administration has once again put racist billionaire Elon Musk in a position of influence over U.S. policy, this time at the Defense Department. On Wednesday, the department announced that Musk would join defense technology company CEO Palmer Luckey—who is also a GOP megadonor—and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in leading “Project Meridian.” The department described the…

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During a sworn deposition on Monday, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) declined to answer repeated questions from one of his ex-wife’s lawyers about whether he pushed a girl down a staircase during high school.

The deposition, first reported by Mother Jones, was part of his ongoing court battle over custody of the two-year-old daughter he shares with Emily Moreno, daughter of US Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Emily Moreno has accused her ex-husband of assaulting her multiple times. He has also been accused of being violent toward two other women and was investigated by Ohio authorities for potential child abuse, though that claim was deemed “unsubstantiated.”

In July, Mother Jones published an investigation into Miller based on a trove of police and court documents. Among the records were claims that Miller tossed boiling water at Moreno, held a gun to her head while she changed their daughter’s diaper, and shoved her against a wall, resulting in bruises.

In these filings, Moreno’s lawyers also brought up an alleged incident from high school—previously reported by Politico and subsequently by Mother Jones—in which Miller was said to have pushed a woman down the stairs after she rejected his physical advances.

“With eight to 10 friends at Miller’s house, Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath,” wrote journalist Michael Kruse in 2021.

Reached by text message this summer, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

In interviews and statements, Miller has denied ever behaving violently toward women, including his ex-wife and the woman from high school.

Testifying under penalty of perjury this week, Miller was repeatedly instructed by his lawyers to remain silent on the staircase allegation:

Moreno’s lawyer: Where did you go to high school?

Miller: Shaker Heights.

Moreno’s lawyer: Isn’t it true there was an incident in high school where you pushed someone down the stairs —

Miller’s lawyer: Objection.

Moreno’s lawyer: Yes or no?

Miller’s lawyer: Don’t answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: You’re instructing him not to answer?

Miller’s lawyer: I am instructing him not to answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Miller: It predates December 18th of ’25. [The] judge made several rulings.

Miller’s lawyer: Max, I got it.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Court reporter: You are so instructed.

Miller’s lawyer: Take it up with the judge.

Moreno’s laywer: If the incident never occurred, why are you afraid of answering the question?

Moreno’s lawyers kept pushing, but Miller took his counsel’s advice. “Max,” his attorney Pamela MacAdams said. “Do not respond.”

During the deposition, Moreno’s lawyers also asked Miller about alleged testosterone use.

Moreno’s lawyer: Are you currently taking testosterone?

Miller: No.

Miller explained that he previously utilized testosterone replacement therapy after obtaining a prescription online. “It is legal,” he said, adding that he has not taken testosterone in two years.

Moreno’s lawyer: Do you understand that the side effects for testosterone replacement therapy include irritability, mood swings, or increased aggression; yes or no?

Miller: No.

Moreno’s lawyer: No one ever informed you about the side effects of taking testosterone replacement therapy?

Miller: They did, but they said where my test levels were is that this would get it back to normal so that it wouldn’t be above [the] normal baseline of testosterone. So essentially, what they were saying is this would help my overall functionality and getting a little bit [of] energy back.

Miller told Moreno’s attorney, a Marine veteran, that taking testosterone is “very normal.”

“And now, Secretary Hegseth has [advised] it for all of the men 30 and over in the military to take it,” Miller added, somewhat misconstruing Pete Hegseth’s instruction for all men in the military over 30 to have their testosterone levels tested. “As you know, Marine.”