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Polling has been so good for Democrats in recent days that Republicans are desperately searching for ways to deny reality, assuring their base that everything will be okay because, they posit, polling in the Trump era always underestimates the GOP. Not only is that assertion wrong, but it also overlooks a key difference this year that makes Republicans uniquely vulnerable: President Donald…

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On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”  

A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:

At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of War, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished. 

Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.

Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture:

On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic [produced by Doug Wilson’s Canon Press] that aired shortly before Hegseth became Secretary of War, he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”

Among the funding priorities listed in the Department of War memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”

As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:

Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.

Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”

The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | GOP panics after more polls predict massive midterm losses for party…

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President Trump has been denied yet another chance to carve his name into something he didn’t make.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Institute of Peace in a Wednesday court order temporarily preventing President Trump from placing his name onto the building—something former employees of the Institute alleged was coming in an emergency injunction last month, especially given that he had already placed his name on the building’s exterior sign (in removable letters) last December.

Beyond the naming, Trump attempted a complete hostile takeover of the Institute—using Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (and private security) to fire and escort workers out of the building in March of 2025. That takeover was blocked in federal court in May, but lifted in June. This most recent blockage will be retried in November.

Trump has been moving like some middle schooler carving his name into a desk with a pocket knife on the last day of school. He’s unsuccessfully tried to place his name on the John. F. Kennedy Center and was alleged to be looking into doing the same with Ford’s Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The White House denies any plans to actually carve the President’s name into the Institute of Peace—an independent organization established more than 40 years ago. But Trump’s baseless, relentless claims to any old building justifies the sense of urgency accompanying the emergency injunction from the Institute’s employees.

President Trump has yet to publicly comment.

“She never says that she was drugged without her knowledge. She admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge. She does not allege that she was forced to engage in any acts. She does not say that she was physically helpless or unconscious or incapacitated at any point during the time at the fraternity house.”

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten didn’t directly refer to New York’s voluntary intoxication loophole in his statement confirming this week that his office is taking a fresh look at rape allegations at Cornell after declining to do so in 2024. But the controversial law—which many say requires an extraordinarily high bar for victims of rape who willingly became intoxicated to prove that they were unable to consent to sex—seems to animate nearly every turn of his remarks. Specifically, that the victim in the incident, identified as Jane Doe, “admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge,” and that she does “not say that she was physically helpless.” Take a look, and much of the same language appears in the state’s laws on rape.

If that strikes you as victim-blaming, you’re not alone; advocates of sexual assault victims and a majority of New York’s State Assembly members have long condemned the law for exactly the same. Now, amid national outrage over the allegations, questions have emerged about whether the statutes may have deterred prosecutors from pursuing the case.

I talked to Jane Manning, director of Women’s Equal Justice, about the laws’ likely role in tanking the Cornell case back in 2024, the history behind the statutes and the movement to reform them—and the person standing in the way of change.

Let’s give a brief overview of the rape laws surrounding the Cornell allegations.

There are several different rape statutes at play here. First-degree rape requires that the victim either be the victim of forcible compulsion, meaning that extreme violence took place, or that the victim be “physically helpless.” Rape in the second degree applies when a victim is involuntarily drugged, such as a drink being spiked. Rape in the third degree applies where none of the above statutes apply, but the victim gives an express verbal declaration of non-consent. Those laws also include other provisions, including age-related provisions. But these are the statutes that mainly apply in a situation like the Cornell case where a person is intoxicated.

How does the law determine “physical helplessness?“

Under New York State law, being physically helpless is defined as being unconscious or physically unable to communicate a lack of consent. That word “physically unable” is really important because what that means is that it’s not enough if the person is severely mentally disoriented or confused. They have to be physically unable to speak, and case law basically says that means unconscious. That language excludes somebody who is severely intoxicated to the point where they are falling down, or when they are so disoriented that they don’t know where they are, or when their speech is slurred. None of those things is enough to deem a person incapable of consent if they are voluntarily intoxicated.

“The [reform] bill has been blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.”

The suggestion that an accuser who became voluntarily intoxicated and engaged in sex cannot be raped feels extremely antiquated. But where does it come from? What’s the history behind this exception? 

Our rape statutes were written decades ago, at a time when women were gravely underrepresented in the legislature, and when we understood far less about rape than we understand now. Most survivors of rape were in the shadows because of a culture that silenced them, and so many of our statutes do not reflect a modern understanding or a survivor-centered understanding of the realities of rape and sexual assault. The [voluntary intoxication loophole] is a good example.

Can you give me an example of what other rape laws were like decades ago?

In the 1950s, New York law was something out of the dark ages. There were special corroboration requirements that applied only to rape and not to any other crime. It had an earnest resistance requirement, saying that if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. That no matter how the person threatened you or frightened you or overpowered you, if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. Also, marital rape was legal back then. New York didn’t have a rape shield law in the 1950s, either. So if a rape victim did, by some miracle, make it onto the witness stand, it was perfectly legal for the cross-examination to start with the question, “Were you a virgin before this happened?” and to spend hours cross-examining the victim about her unrelated sexual history. This routinely happened.

How did these laws change?

All those laws that I just mentioned to you have been reformed. But they did not reform themselves. They were reformed because of survivors and feminists who banded together and demanded changes in the law. Over the years, including recently, others have been reformed. For example, in the year 2000, New York added a no-means-no statute to the third-degree rape statute, which means that if a person explicitly expresses non-consent and the perpetrator proceeds anyway, that’s considered third-degree rape in New York. Another 21st-century reform came in 2006 when New York eliminated the statute of limitations on first-degree rape and other high-level sex crimes. In 2010, we finally made strangulation a crime.

“They certainly played a role in [Van Houten’s] decision, but they do not let him off the hook.”

Bit by bit, survivors and feminists have fought for reform of New York State’s laws from a place of extreme bias against survivors to a place where, little by little, we are chipping away at that bias. However, the work is not done, and the voluntary intoxication exclusion is an example of a very victim-blaming, biased law in New York that advocates and survivors have been calling out for years to reform, and our legislature has not yet done it.

What are some of the arguments by those who oppose reforming the voluntary intoxication exclusion?

There are the arguments that are made explicitly, and then there’s the belief system that is subtext to these arguments. There are small numbers of people who believe that nobody should go to jail for anything, those who oppose any effort to strengthen our criminal law, even for rape survivors. I think that viewpoint fails to take into account the perspectives of women and other groups that are disproportionately targeted for violent crime. For me, that philosophy fails to be intersectional because it fails to take into account the reality of women who are targeted and preyed on deliberately by those who would deprive us of our rights.

That’s the subtext. Now, what are the explicit arguments? It’s a good question because there are valid concerns that we want to make sure we address when we redraft a law. One concern is that we don’t want to criminalize drunk sex—and my answer to that is that’s absolutely right. We do not want to do that. The bill we are supporting does not criminalize drunk sex and has two important requirements. The first is that the victim is incapable of appraising or controlling their own conduct. Not just that they fail, not just that they didn’t appraise or control their own conduct, but that they’re incapable of controlling their conduct. That’s how we define the victim’s condition. The second requirement applies to how we define the perpetrator’s state of mind and that the victim’s condition was known or reasonably should have been known to a person in the actor’s situation. The reason that language is there is that we want to make sure that a person is only held criminally responsible when it was obvious that they were victimizing someone. Because there are situations when two people are very far gone and have sex, but nobody’s preying on someone; it’s just drunk sex that somebody may regret the next day. That is very much not what we are looking to criminalize. We are looking to criminalize predation, not a mistake.

One more important thing to keep in mind about this is that the prosecution will have the burden of proof on both of those elements. And if the prosecution can’t prove either element beyond a reasonable doubt, they can’t prove their case. So, for instance, if you have a scenario where two people have blurry memories, that’s a grey area; that’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Where does the bill stand now?

For two years running, this bill has passed unanimously in New York’s Senate. And both times, it has had a supermajority of support in the Assembly. But the bill is being blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. [On Wednesday, Heastie announced that the Assembly is forming a “working group” to review the law.] He has not allowed this bill to get to the floor for a vote. He didn’t allow it in 2025. He didn’t allow it in 2026, when we had 60 percent of the State Assembly signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. He still wouldn’t allow it to go to a vote. He has not provided us with an explanation. He has not met with advocates or survivors. He has not provided any public statement about why he will not allow a vote on this bill that a supermajority of his own house supports.

So, Gov. Kathy Hochul really has the opportunity to lead here by calling on Speaker Heastie to pass this bill or by sponsoring it herself by including it in her budget bill.

The allegations in the civil complaint in Cornell have prompted widespread outrage. Can you describe your reaction upon hearing about the case?

This young woman was failed by many people. She was clearly failed by people who took advantage of her state of incapacitation. She clearly was failed by the district attorney, and she was failed by the law of New York State. This district attorney saw an allegation of a gang rape and didn’t even bother to interview the victim. He looked at a summary of the allegations and came to the conclusion that there was no provable crime, and didn’t bother to conduct an investigation. That is outrageous. The young woman who survived this incident was interviewed by campus security officers who are not trained in trauma-informed interviewing and are not trained in investigating complex and serious sex crime cases. She was let down by the person responsible for enforcing the law, and she was let down by the law itself because even if the district attorney had done a good job, we don’t know if he would have found a prosecutable crime because of the voluntary intoxication exclusion.

That’s actually my next question. Do you see these laws as having had a role in the DA’s decision not to prosecute the Cornell case?

They certainly played a role in his decision, but they do not let him off the hook. What I see far too often in my work as an advocate for rape survivors is district attorneys who don’t place a high priority on rape. They just don’t take the trouble to do a thorough investigation because they don’t see the need to treat this as a serious crime. That’s the truth.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

President Donald Trump is edgy with all kinds of media these days.

In an interview with Time magazine, published Thursday morning, Trump snapped at reporter Eric Cortellessa after he was asked a question about the health situation of Senator Mitch McConnell, who went missing from the Senate all summer. Trump went off on a tangent about President Joe Biden and lost it at Cortellessa, dropping an expletive.

“It was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that’s just—well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I’m not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe’s allowed to give them? This ain’t gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative,” Trump said.

In the same stream of thought, Trump complained that Cortellessa hadn’t asked him about Venezuela, even though he had, at length, earlier in the interview.

“Do you notice you haven’t asked me a question about Venezuela?” Trump asked, to which Cortellessa said, “We did earlier.” Trump replied, “No, no, I brought it up, and then you said—”

“You beat us to it. But yeah,” Cortellessa said.

Among other gems in the interview is that Trump regrets all of his Supreme Court picks, failing to remember they saved him from prosecution.

“Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too,” Trump said.

Trump also defended his barring of Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from the White House grounds, but he seemed unclear about U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order blocking the ban.

“Well, the court actually said that, if you look at the judge’s decision, he’s been a very anti-Trump judge, which is very interesting. But if you look at his decision, he really said process. He talked about—come back to us with process,” Trump said, to which Cortellessa noted that Kelly was a Trump appointee.

“Yeah, he was. He was. It’s one of those things,” Trump said. Cortellessa asked if Trump thought he was ignoring Kelly’s order, to which Trump claimed he wasn’t.

“I’m not ignoring his order. I’m just saying that when I don’t have to go out of my way, these people write only bad stories. When they say orders, what order? I’m not even aware,” Trump said. White House communications director Stephen Cheung interjected to note that “the judge basically ordered them to renew their access back to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One.”

“He actually said to the premises of the White House?” Trump replied, dumbfounded.

The entire interview showcased Trump’s narcissism and clear cognitive decline, with him going on tangents, lashing out unprompted at critics, and complaining about the “fake news” going after him constantly. Trump loves the attention, but it’s been clear for a long time that he is unable to handle the duties and scrutiny that comes with being president.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers has surrounded himself with people tied to the Living Word Church sex abuse scandal, but he’s not willing to publicly address the matter.

The former FBI agent dodged one such question while collecting a local endorsement in Saginaw on Wednesday, where a reporter asked why two pastors from the Living Word Church were on Rogers’s Faith Leadership Coalition, months after three elders at the church’s Midland chapter were sent to prison for sexually abusing children.

The dubious personnel inclusions involved Brian Ford of Living Word Church in Ludington as well as Tim Cross, the founding pastor of Living Word Church in Muskegon. Ford defended former pastor James Randolph at trial, before he was sentenced to at least 25 years for first degree criminal sexual conduct.

But when asked why Ford remained on his team, Rogers was suddenly much more interested in discussing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and the commentator’s connection to Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (El-Sayed has worked to distance himself from Piker in recent months.)

“This is a guy that came to our students and preaching that we deserved 9/11, that’s a story,” Rogers said, according to ABC News 12. Rogers did not confirm or deny if Ford was still a member of his Faith Leadership Coalition.

He did, however, briefly address his prior connection to Cross, who resigned from Rogers’s team earlier this year after he admitted he initially did not believe the sex abuse victims.

“Our volunteers, the people that volunteer for us, one of those folks have stepped away from his volunteer work, someone is still in the faith volunteer work, we think the most important part here is about who is stepping up and who is surrogates,” Rogers told reporters.

Rogers was in Saginaw to collect an endorsement from Democratic Sheriff William Federspiel, though the local Democrats immediately rebuked Federspiel’s support. Saginaw County’s Democratic Party Chair, Brandell Adams, told ABC News 12 that Federspiel was simply a “Democrat in name” who was furthering his “track record of endorsing losing candidates.”

President Donald Trump really wants the United States Postal Service to be some sort of all-purpose tool he can deploy to screw with whatever his fevered brain has decided needs screwing with. First, it was mail-in ballots, where somehow the USPS was going to run elections nationwide—or, more accurately, run elections into the ground. The Supreme Court, thankfully…

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Democratic dreams of midterm victory are alive in Mississippi and Kansas—two states that have been conservative strongholds for decades.

Republican Senator Tim Scott admitted as much while speaking with Semafor about the Kansas Senate race between Republican Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton on Wednesday.

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

President Trump won Kansas by about a 16 percent margin in 2024. Kansas Democrats haven’t sent someone to the Senate in more than 90 years. Scott speaking about their once in a lifetime moment of weakness in the state speaks to both Marshall’s weaknesses as a candidate and the larger, widely unpopular Trump administration record that he and every other GOP candidate is being forced to defend.

Scott’s comment comes as Senate candidate and former district attorney Scott Colom’s campaign begins to pick up steam in Mississippi, further reaffirming that even traditionally deep blue states and districts may not be as safe as they seem.

“The wave doesn’t have to be humongous for us to capture Mississippi,” Colom said to The Washington Post. He’s met with Senate leaders Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Ralph Warnock. “If we try, we win these voters.… They’ve been written off, not just by Cindy Hyde-Smith but also by other people in the Democratic Party. And I’m just not going to write them off.”

While Colom and Hamilton both have uphill battles in spending and messaging, it’s clear that the tide is turning against this current iteration of the GOP. Only time will tell if the Democrats can successfully take advantage.

The family of Renee Good, the mother of three who was shot and killed earlier this year by a federal immigration agent Minneapolis, has filed two lawsuits against the United States government and several immigration officials alleging wrongful death and other violations of federal law.

The lawsuits were filed Thursday by Renee Good’s partner Becca Good, who was targeted by the Department of Justice after she filmed the fatal shooting, and Brent Ganger, Renee Good’s brother who testified about her death in front of Congress.

The first lawsuit was filed against “the United States of America,” and alleges the wrongful death of Renee Good under Minnesota law that is “predicated on the battery, assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence that caused Renee’s death.”

The second lawsuit alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, and was filed against Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Good in her car, as well as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, her adviser and alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski, border czar Tom Homan, former ICE Director Todd Lyons, former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and 10 unnamed federal agents.

Video footage of the January incident showed Good, who was blocking traffic, wave at the federal agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, Ross shot her in the head at least three times.

The Trump administration was quick to argue that Good had deserved to die, but her killing sparked widespread backlash against the government’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

In the nearly 10 months since her death, absolutely nothing has come of the investigation into her killing. Federal law enforcement shut police and other Minnesota authorities out of the initial investigation. Later, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ Civil Rights Division, made clear that she had no intention of conducting a civil rights investigation.

This story has been updated.

7 minutes agoWalter EinenkelSarah Huckabee Sanders calls outrage towards her manufacturedHuckabee Sanders made the mistake of casting a white person as the cartoonishly lazy welfare recipient in one of her ads against government assistance, and members of her own base responded with racist criticism.Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 17 minutes agoWalter EinenkelJon Ossoff on…

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Did President Trump just lie about a massive investment from South Korea?

Trump announced Wednesday that South Korea had agreed to invest $200 billion in energy infrastructure, including a $54 billion investment in the long-discussed liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska—but South Korea claims they never committed to funding that project.

“What the Korean government agreed with the U.S. is that the Alaska project will proceed only if it is commercially viable,” said Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry and resources, according to Bloomberg.

“What was reported today went beyond what had been agreed,” he said, and expressed Seoul’s regrets to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration was aware that the commitment wasn’t set in stone, or if it believed it could manifest the funds by simply announcing them, or if—in true Trumpian fashion—it doesn’t care whether they’re real or not and this was all for show.

But I’ll tell you one person who definitely should care: Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, the vulnerable incumbent in Alaska’s Senate race.

“This is the project that is gonna keep our kids and grandkids in Alaska with a great bright future. This is the project that our state has been working on to try to get done for almost a half century,” Sullivan said Wednesday during a press conference in the Oval Office, adding that the project would create more than 10,000 jobs and provide low cost energy to Alaskans for 50 to 100 years. (The project has faced legal challenges from environmental groups concerned it will increase fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the climate crisis.)

Whether or not South Korea’s commitment is the real deal could potentially make or break Sullivan’s reelection campaign: Recent polls showed that Democratic challenger Mary Peltola has a slight lead on Sullivan.

This wouldn’t be the first time the president has lied about the amount of investment pouring in from foreign countries, The New York Times reported. Over the course of 2025, Trump claimed to have received up to $21 trillion in foreign investments—nearly twice the amount that the White House’s own tracking website states for foreign and domestic investments combined.

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. Maine’s political races are in the spotlight this year. If it wasn’t Gov. Janet Mills pulling out from a run for Senate, it was her Democratic opponent Graham Platner’s lightning-like rise and equally stunning fall making headlines. Matt Dunlap…

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President Donald Trump blocked CNN from the White House press pool Thursday morning, continuing his feud with the network despite a court order allowing them on the White House grounds.

Trump removed CNN journalists from his upcoming trip to Texas and Oklahoma after they were scheduled to fly on Air Force One in order to report on his visit to a truck manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas, and a speech in Durant, Oklahoma. CNN was also barred from traveling with the president last weekend when he went to Tennessee.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order last week preventing Trump from blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW was limited to media access on the White House premises, the president’s actions Thursday are still “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process,” said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing the media outlets, in a statement.

“The White House is persisting in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing the President’s unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as a designated television network pooler—to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public,” Boutrous’s statement said.

All three media outlets had asked a federal court Monday to continue preventing Trump from blocking their access, warning that “the White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico if allowed the opportunity.”

That was apparent last week, when Trump continued to bar media outlets from covering the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and an official state dinner later in the day. It seems that Trump will continue to thumb his nose at the First Amendment as long as he can get away with it.

Congressional staffers were planning to take a luxury trip to Europe, complete with stops in Milan, the Champagne region of France, and a Ferrari factory in Bologna, Italy, just weeks before the midterms, organized by a top aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Then, NBC News obtained the draft itinerary for the trip, which included both Republicans and Democrats, and asked Johnson’s office about it. The trip was immediately canceled.

“Senior congressional staff of both parties routinely lead staff delegations to allied countries and trading partners for parliamentary and private sector engagements to strengthen the working relationships between our countries and their key industries,” said Johnson’s office in a statement.

According to a staff memo, the reason for the trip was “to engage European and U.S. government and industry officials related to the impact of U.S. tariffs and taxes.” Such trips are not uncommon, as congressional staffers and delegations often take fact-finding trips to learn about policy issues. But this trip has some apparent warning signs, an ethics watchdog told NBC News.

“In theory, you want members of Congress and their staff to be going into the field and learning something and maybe investigating something, getting some up-close and personal understanding of the issue that they’re supposed to be legislating on. That’s probably a good use of time in a lot of cases,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, said to the news outlet.

“But what they end up being, or at least what they look like, is just a taxpayer-funded vacation to exotic locations. You’ve got the Ferrari racetrack that you get to play around on, or the Louis Vuitton gift bag you might be getting in Milan. I’m sure those are enjoyable inducements to the whole enterprise.”

According to Johnson’s office, the trip was canceled due to a schedule conflict. But Democratic and Republican staffers traveling together when there are stark, seemingly unsolvable legislative conflicts between the two parties raises eyebrows. And such a trip, when the House is out of session until the midterms, doesn’t look good at a time when Americans are struggling with the expensive cost of groceries and sky-high gas prices, and can’t afford vacations to Europe.

Faced with the very real prospect of major Republican losses in the upcoming midterms, the White House is now lying about Democrats getting a push from Iranian extremists. The charge was led by White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who has often served as the Trump administration’s top attack dog and smear agent. On Tuesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps…

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Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned that his attempt to trap former special counsel Jack Smith might be baseless—before he humiliated himself on the Senate floor anyway.

Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Schmitt that the text messages he was planning to use to accuse Smith of holding secret meetings in Atlanta were “unvetted,” MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Schmitt accused Jack Smith during a hearing Tuesday of sneaking to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade, after they revealed their affair in February 2024. The Missouri Republican claimed to possess text messages proving that Smith had plans to attend an Atlanta Hawks game, but unfortunately for Schmitt, the texts were actually about Smith’s plans to attend a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

The Department of Justice shared materials with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee ahead of the meeting, sources told MS NOW. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s team compiled most of the important information into a memo, but did not include the supposedly damning texts in their assessment, one source told the outlet.

Grassley did not share the texts with Democratic senators ahead of the hearing, deepening the suspicion that Schmitt’s failed “gotcha” moment was secretly engineered by the Trump administration, one source told MS NOW.

Democrats aren’t the only ones suspicious of the source of Schmitt’s viral face plant.

A senior Republican senator also believes the Trump administration was working to nail the president’s long-time foe. “I’m pretty sure the White House asked him to do it,” they told RawStory. “And, probably, the White House provided the material.”

Schmitt’s blunder would probably be another blip in the news cycle, except that it came just hours after Axios reported that the Missouri Republican was gaining “buzz” as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028. Clearly, somebody thought Schmitt was about to make waves, but he only made himself a laughingstock.

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On April 3, four weeks after Donald Trump claimed the Iran War would be over in four to five weeks, and with his approval ratings in reputable polls dipping below 40 percent, the president made a wildly audacious ask: Congress, he said, should approve a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion.

Such a number was unheard of. Congress gave the military an official budget of nearly $1.1 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year—more than the next five runners up (China, Russia, Germany, India, and the UK) combined. Now, counting supplemental funding for the War in Iran, which is entering its eighth month, Trump wants US taxpayers to shell out just under $1.6 trillion ($1,570,000,000,000) to a “Department of War” that’s so un-auditable it probably doesn’t know where it left the car keys.

That’s an increase of almost 50 percent for things that go boom.

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” and the extent of the undercounting “is likely to stun most Americans.” 

As much as we Americans may value our military readiness, 65 percent of US adults polled by the Washington Post in late April opposed Trump’s unprecedented funding request, and two-thirds disapproved of his “little excursion” in Iran. (They still do.) The disapproval numbers would be higher still, no doubt, if those people were aware of a dirty little secret: We’re already spending more—way more—than what the Pentagon reports, and most media outlets dutifully parrot.

A recent report I helped coauthor for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) estimates that, properly accounted for, US military expenditures last year were at least $1.5 trillion, and possibly a lot more. If Congress grants Trump’s requests, we’ll be spending $2 trillion to $3 trillion on the military and its wars.

This isn’t just about Trump, but rather the DC establishment. For decades, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon have been obfuscating military spending by means of arcane bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. And yet most journalists and experts quote the official numbers, which are profoundly incomplete.

Consider, for example, that the Treasury Department covers about $100 billion of the annual cost of supporting retired military personnel. And that the $7.3 billion the State Department shelled out for “global health programs” in fiscal 2025, according to data from USASpending.gov, is actually controlled by the Pentagon. (The money, as I point out in my book Base Nation, is used for military intelligence gathering and gaining strategic access to locations around the world.) Sometimes it’s smaller sums, like the $385 million the Justice Department shelled out that fiscal year to settle old Vietnam War claims and compensate people harmed by radiation from nuclear weapons testing.

If the routine concealment of hundreds of billions in military spending doesn’t feel scandalous to you, imagine the uproar were the Wall Street Journal to suddenly reveal that federal officials were secretly spending almost a half-trillion beyond what Congress budgeted for Medicaid, affordable housing, education, childcare, climate programs, or food assistance. This fuzzy accounting “is not a new phenomenon. It has been a bipartisan effort spanning years,” Air Force veteran and former military budget analyst Christian Sorensen told me in an email. “When the sheer size of the figures revealed in [the] accounting sinks into public consciousness, the body politic will be even more furious.”

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” concurs Heidi Peltier, an economist and budget expert with Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This overlooked spending raises the total, she says, by “50 percent to 130 percent higher than is usually reported, a figure likely to stun most Americans.” 

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon.”

Quantifying miliary expenditures should be a relatively easy task for journalists and researchers. It is not. “The non-obvious costs” of what budget expert Stephen Semler, a fellow at the progressive Center for International Policy, calls “status quo” military spending are “so vast that it’s difficult to take [their] measure,” he told me.

The POGO report details how military expenditures are spread across a host of federal departments beyond the Pentagon. And how, taken together, those amounts may exceed the total of what those agencies receive for nonmilitary purposes. This is not the result of some single diabolical plan, but rather the product of obscure bureaucratic processes wherein the Pentagon, over time, has taken control of money Congress appropriates to other agencies, as a Senate Budget Committee staffer told me on condition of anonymity. While lawmakers’ actions and motivations in some cases may demand further investigation, their collective complacency has allowed the military to claim a significantly larger share of the federal budget than the public is aware of.

Using five methodologies and data from three government sources, we calculated how much money the government really spent on the military. For fiscal 2025, depending on the methodology used and how one defines military spending, that number ranged from $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion. For example, most of the $33.5 billion in nuclear weapons spending tracked by USASpending.gov was tucked into the Department of Energy budget. And most of the $393.3 billion cost of military pensions, veterans’ benefits, and related retirement expenditures were found on the ledger of the Department of Veterans Affairs, thus relieving the Pentagon of a substantial long-term expense. The USASpending.gov data allowed us to identify billions more in the budgets of at least 15 other agencies, expenses that don’t make it into commonly reported military spending totals.

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from San Diego, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of military personnel, said in a statement. And without the accounting to prove the money is properly spent, she added, “we shouldn’t keep footing a bill that gets bigger every year.”

The chart below is based on one of the methodologies described in POGO report. These figures reflect actual dollars spent that fiscal year, including funds Congress appropriated in prior years for multiyear programs.

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Even our estimates are likely undercounts, thanks to spotty federal budget transparency, classified funding, and Pentagon accounting failures. Indeed, the Department of Defense remains the only federal agency, as Jacobs’ statemente noted, that has never passed a financial audit.

We taxpayers don’t get to choose everything our money is used for, and that’s part of the grand bargain. Progressives would rather not see their tax dollars supporting Trump’s deportation machine. And plenty of conservatives would repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow if they could. But even as we bicker over priorities, whatever our politics, an accurate accounting of where our money goes is indispensable to an honest debate.

“Federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late.”

That’s where Congress comes in. Lawmakers could stop putting military spending in budgets beyond that of the “Department of War.” They could also, for example, order the Congressional Research Service to compile an annual “total military” roundup that details everything in one place. Until that time, journalists and analysts might want to include a large asterisk whenever they cite the Pentagon’s official numbers.

The concealment of our true military budget, wittingly or unwittingly—as many members of Congress may not even realize this subterfuge is happening—shows just how out of control Pentagon spending has become, and how wildly disproportionate it is to the military threats we face. Because the reality is, we’re not merely spending more on our military than the five runners-up, but likely more than every other nation on Earth combined.

Why does this matter? Several reasons. Trump and his “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth have purged military leaders who put the Constitution first and stacked the Pentagon with loyalists. The president has dispatched National Guard troops to US cities and hasn’t ruled out ordering them to the polls during the elections, which would be in clear defiance of the Constitution. For people around the world, US military spending is a life and death matter, given the debacle in Iran—which Trump recently threatened to annihilate—and the president’s periodic threats to wage war on Cuba, Greenland, and Colombia, despite campaign promises that he would be the president who didn’t get the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts.

Put bluntly, a larger military budget means more war. It also means a bigger deficit, which pressures Congress to further slash funding for health care, Social Security, climate resilience, food safety, and all manner of domestic programs people depend upon. If Congress gave Trump what he asked for, our military spending would gobble up some 75 percent of discretionary federal funds.

In this light, his budget request should be treated as the sick joke that it is—an opportunity for the people and their representatives to insist on a different path.

Democrats and even some Republicans who claim to be concerned about our $40 trillion-plus national debt, have so far resisted Trump’s request for a Pentagon bump. In early September, the president signed a bill that extends current military funding levels into December. Both chambers of Congress are now in recess until after the midterms, so the matter may not even be resolved until after new members are seated in January 2027.

In the meantime, “federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late,” Sorensen said.

That would mean reining in runaway military spending before laying a finger on the domestic programs that already help accomplish what should be the US military’s most fundamental purpose: keeping Americans alive and well.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 1 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 brings two related developments. Donald Trump just hit another record low in the polls, and Donald Trump is using taxpayer money to fund propaganda ads in the midterms that are all about himself. He doesn’t seem to see the disconnect with that. The ad scheme is corrupt and probably illegal, and an official just leaked something damning: the corruption of the scheme is in part the point, because it draws media attention to the ads, which amplifies them. We think that says a lot about how Trumpian and autocratic propaganda really work.

So we’re talking to David Corn, who has a good piece for The New Republic exploring how Trumpian disinformation really functions. He’s author of How Russia Won, a book about Trump, Russia, and America. David, good to have you on.

David Corn: Great to be on The Blast.

Sargent: Let’s start with the polling. Quinnipiac has a new survey finding that Trump’s approval is down at 34 percent, and he’s down to 31 percent on the economy, which is an all-time low for both terms in Quinnipiac polling. Democrats are leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 51 to 39. That’s 12 points.

David, I don’t think it’s that high, but we’re getting there. Nate Silver’s average has it at nearly 10 points now, the generic ballot average. All indications are, one, Trump continues to drop, and two, the Dem lead continues to expand. Is that too optimistic? Your thoughts?

Corn: Well, I mean, he’s at lower numbers than Jimmy Carter, right? And they keep dropping. Yeah, it’s showing us kind of where his floor or basement is. And I always thought it was around 30 points. One or two outlying polls have him down as low as 29, but the average is still low-to-mid thirties.

So I think there’s still a little bit further for him to drop. About 30 percent of people look at him as an information source and thus believe what he says. And he’s basically losing almost everybody up to that, because people can see what’s happening.

In my book, and in the piece I have in The New Republic, I write about how he won the messaging war on Russia by saying over and over again it was a hoax, it was a witch hunt, it was a deep state conspiracy, Russia, Russia, Russia—and the Democrats, a lot of the media, gave up. That’s a big part of my book.

But people are seeing the gas prices every day. They see the war is not over. They see what the trade policy did in terms of the economy. They see innocent, law-abiding residents being brutally apprehended. They see fellow Americans being shot. So in the face of all this, Trump’s propaganda—which is endemic to all authoritarians—is not getting traction. And that’s a key point.

Sargent: It really is. And Trump is now using taxpayer money to fund the propaganda. He’s now run three ads that claim to be funded by the U.S. government, in the ads themselves. One shows Trump saying he’s waging a final battle against the Marxists and the globalists. A second shows something similar, with Trump vowing that America will never go communist. A third shows Trump’s July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore.

David, where are these running? And can you explain why this is so corrupt?

Corn: Well, they’re running a lot on football games. You know, they’re trying to reach football watchers, which tells you that they think they’re losing middle America. I have a friend who works for us at Mother Jones, a colleague, who was rained in this last weekend and watched, like, 12 hours of football. And he said the ads were up again and again. College games, pro games, different channels. They’re just pouring millions of dollars.

And I think it’s, you know—while things look good for the Democrats, you have to remember that the Republicans have, at this point, a $222 million cash advantage in terms of what they’re putting out in ads over the Democrats. They’re going to spend close to a billion dollars. Democrats spending a lot, Republicans spending a lot more.

But to use taxpayer money to finance an ad like this is blatantly illegal and criminal. You can put up public service ads. Kids, stay away from drugs. Don’t drive after drinking. We’ve seen this all the time, U.S. government agencies putting up public service announcements. And that’s what they’re calling these ads.

But these ads are political and partisan ads. It’s Trump rallying in a demagogic, authoritarian, autocratic way against his opponents. And so you can’t do that. But we know his Justice Department is not going to do anything about it.

Sargent: It’s worth pointing out as well that the ads, though they don’t mention the midterms, they actually do amplify the Trump and GOP message, which is that if you elect Democrats, the country will slide into leftist pandemonium. I mean, that is their message in essence, and that is what Trump is saying.

There’s an autocratic quality to these ads as well. They really have the feeling of totalitarian propaganda. You know this topic well. Can you talk about that dimension of it?

Corn: Yeah, I mean, they basically are part of the cult of personality. They’re very Stalinistic. If you—I’m not advising you to watch these ads, but if you see them, they show Trump grimacing, in black and white, looking, you know, trying to look fierce and strong. But it’s all about him.

And this is where this may indeed backfire on him. Because, as we started talking about, his numbers are incredibly low. His actions are making Republicans incredibly unpopular. He’s dragging down the ticket. Yet you have the chairman of the RNC, Joe Gruters, saying a couple of days ago, we are going to put Trump front and center in this campaign. To which Democrats can only say, thank you very much.

Almost any other president in the midterms tries to find a way to help the party. Now, sometimes that means not campaigning with certain candidates in certain states and certain districts, but it’s also like, what bill can I sign? What executive order can I put out? Where can I campaign? How can I give you money so you can use it the best way possible for your campaign? Trump is doing none of that.

Sargent: So Axios reports, meanwhile, that Trump is planning to ramp up these ads, and one administration official leaked something remarkable. The official told Axios that they like the media attention to the ads because it amplifies them for free. This official said this: “When CNN takes a segment on it, they play the entire thing and it’s great.”

David, I don’t think we should gloss over what that really means. This official is admitting straight out that the corruption is part of the point here, right? CNN does a segment on these ads because they’re so corrupt. And they like that, because it gets them free airtime for the ads. The level of contempt they have for, I guess you and me, like, we the people, is just incredible, isn’t it?

Corn: Or for the rule of law. I mean, there’s no question that these ads are illegal. They know that, but they also know no one’s going to come after Trump for this. And the Supreme Court has given him immunity on criminal activity that is pursuant to his job. So he can argue that this is pursuant to his official responsibilities.

The thing that’s kind of bizarre here is that I think they’re in a drink-the-Kool-Aid mode—I’m talking about Trump and his inner circle. As his numbers are falling, as we just talked about, you don’t want to make him center stage.

Yes, when you do propaganda and you do disinformation—as I describe a lot about what Russia’s doing in the book, or whether it’s, you know, Americans—one principle is you want people to write about it. You want people to get upset about it online and write about it. You want media to cover it and to show it.

This is not a new piece of the playbook. Campaigns for decades have done what they consider to be outrageous ads, because they’re going to get what they call free media, media they don’t have to pay for. People amplify it, we’ll talk about it and play the ad, show the ad.

But again, showing more Donald Trump does not seem to be helping. People are pissed off at Donald Trump. Independents are against him. I don’t know, the last poll I saw was, like, close to 70-30. He’s bottoming out.

Sargent: In fact, David, it’s even worse with independents. The Quinnipiac poll has Donald Trump at 25 percent approval with independents and 69 percent disapprove. And get this: on the economy, independents, 23 percent approve. I want to go back to something you said in this context, about the RNC chair who said we’re going to put Trump front and center, et cetera, et cetera.

At this point, their best hope is that they can generate very big turnout among his core supporters. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a bunch of reasons, but they seem to think that that’s their best hope. And so when the RNC chair says, look, we’re going to put you out everywhere, that’s what they’re talking about. When they run ads to football audiences, that’s what they’re trying to do. But the problem for them is the 25 percent approval with independents. The more they show him, the more they lose the middle. It’s a real—they’re in a very serious trap here.

Corn: They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And you know, you know this, Greg: getting turnout in midterm elections is always hard.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s just—people for the president’s party.

Corn: For the president’s party, yeah. But even sometimes for the opposing party. But people just are less engaged. But the side that is more upset or engaged tends to do better, and that’s usually, in a midterm election, the opposition party. So this would be the Democrats. Democrats are highly, highly, highly motivated. They are not disappointed by Trump—they come into this being opposed to Trump. Independents a lot of who voted for him have flipped, and getting them out for the Democrats is the key to victory as well.

And so Trump is left with only trying to get record numbers of Republican voters who are still with him, you know, and hoping that the Democrats don’t do as well with independents and even their own voters as you would expect. That is an incredibly hard thing to envision happening.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the Quinnipiac poll for one second. On international conflicts, Democrats are trusted by 48 percent versus 40 percent for the Republican Party. On the economy, it’s 48 percent for Democrats, 42 percent for the Republican Party. On immigration, it’s 47 percent for the Democratic Party, 44 percent for Republicans.

So national security and foreign policy, the economy, immigration—all areas that traditionally are Republican strengths, Democrats lead on all of them. Trump did that whole thing. He absolutely fucked the Republican Party in every which way. And numbers like that are just really, really, really shocking.

Corn: Nothing that he is selling are American voters buying, except his own base. I mean, because you just went down—what are the big things he’s done? Mass deportation crusades, tariffs, you know, and starting a war in Iran, and the illegal actions in the Caribbean, attacking and killing people, and the Venezuela mini war, whatever you want to call it. Everything that is his signature accomplishment that he praises, they are not accepting.

The stuff that’s happened in the last year and a half in his second presidency is so apparent, it’s so in everybody’s face. You can’t deny it. He says we’re living in a golden age. Who believes that, other than people who are in his cult who believe everything he says? No one believes that. No one believes the war in Iran was a smart idea, or that it’s over, except his own people. So he is left with nothing to offer. And he can, you know, keep trying.

But I think all that stuff is baked in, which is why I fear—I’m not obsessive or paranoid about it—that as we get closer, he’s going to try some more extreme measures to fuck with the election in some ways. He’s an odd, psychotic person. And at some times he looks resigned, right?

Like, it’s not up to me what happens in the midterms. And other times everything is about him. And so if he feels he’s in a corner, and he’s going to lose and maybe be impeached again—who knows how he will lash out in the final weeks of this campaign, or after the election when votes still have to be counted and certified?

Sargent: There certainly is a lot to fear there. Democrats, as far as I can tell, know this and are going to be super vigilant about it. Let’s just close on some audio of Donald Trump. Here he’s talking about the midterm elections. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We have to turn this around. For some reason, presidents, Democrat or Republican—they just, they don’t win the midterms. I don’t know why. There’s a deep psychological impact when you—for some reason. But we should—I mean, our numbers are through the roof. We’ve never—the best numbers in the history of our country. We should win. So we have to get out. The main thing I think… maybe they get complacent.

Sargent: So there you have Donald Trump acknowledging the way midterm dynamics work—they usually do favor the out party—but he’s simply incapable of ascribing any blame of any kind to himself for any of it.

And you can see how he can then go out and support, or call for, the use of himself in as much propaganda as possible, and promise to be on the trail in every Republican state or district where he can possibly get to. I just—you know, it’s just so extraordinary to watch this party have to tiptoe around this madman. It’s just amazing stuff.

Corn: Yeah. Well, it’s quite clear that this is how he sees the world. If I win, it’s me. If I lose, it’s you. So here he is already trying to blame other forces. And he’s right, you’re right, this is the dynamic. It’s always an uphill climb for the president in a midterm election against the out party.

But nevertheless, you know, he seems here to be setting the groundwork to say, see, it has nothing to do with me, it’s all everybody else—while at the same time trying to make it all about him. And when he spoke at the midterm convention in Dallas, which was a week or two back, he actually told the crowd, do everything you can, even if you have to cheat. And they cheat. So he was then setting up perhaps this framework, or this narrative, that the election, if he loses, is because of cheating.

So he’s not a consistent, steady person. So he’s throwing a lot of different things out. Poor guy. He probably can’t process all this rationally and clearly. So whatever is in his head at a given moment is what he spurts out. But that’s what’s always made him dangerous. And that’s what makes the coming elections—this period and the post period—a time of potential crisis.

Sargent: Well, look, I think we’ll all feel a whole lot better if we can get past these midterms with a win, and with them being certified. And I think people should just keep their heads in this game, because it’s going to get pretty nasty. But I think we can get there, David. I really do.

Corn: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think he’s tried a lot of ways to mess with the election. You know, the courts have basically said no on the mail-in ballot stuff, which is the most consequential. I mean, he did what he could with gerrymandering, and the courts got rid of the Voting Rights Act so they could do racist gerrymandering.

So he’s done a lot to tilt the playing field in his favor. But a lot of the things he’s tried recently have not worked. And so if, you know, secretaries of state, people locally, all sort of follow the rules in general, we probably can get through this.

But 2020 showed us how fragile our democracy could be. He came very close to overturning that election and, you know, staying in power even though he lost. So that’s why vigilance, keep the head in the game, as you suggest, is important here. Because with Donald Trump, it’s not about democracy, it’s about him. And he’s a dangerous man.

Sargent: The end just might be in sight, David. Folks, David Corn’s new book is called How Russia Won. David, a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much.

Corn: Thank you, Greg.