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On July 3, the “Wings of Freedom” demonstrations over the National Mall featured three hours’ worth of aerial entertainment cooked up by the Trump administration as part of the America 250 celebration. There were parachute teams, the Air Force Thunderbirds, fighter jets, helicopters, and a “tri-bomber” formation that included a B-2 stealth bomber. On Independence Day, military aircraft flew over DC every 18 minutes for nine straight hours. For some people watching the show, it was a glorious display of American military power and aviation prowess. For many who live here, though, it was a form of “noise terrorism,” according to one TikToker, who likened the celebration to living in a war zone.

During these nonstop military flyovers, locals shared stories online of pets hiding under the couch, night workers losing sleep, and the roar of low-flying aircraft setting off car alarms. Some complained that the jets recalled the terror of 9/11 after the plane hit the Pentagon. “Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC?” posted New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro during the July 3 display. “Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.”

Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC? Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.

— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) July 3, 2026

Enduring the occasional jet flyover comes with living in the Nation’s Capital. But none of those regular episodes compares with the martial air traffic Trump has inflicted on the city since taking office last year. “We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery,” says former local traffic reporter Dave Statler who tracks aviation activity on his website. “But the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

“We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, but the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

In previous administrations, the military flyover “was treated as an exception rather than the rule,” says Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress from California who served as both Defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”

Trump, who escaped the Vietnam War draft by claiming to be hobbled by bone spurs, has long shown a fascination with military hardware. He began deploying it for his own entertainment almost as soon as he took office in his first term. Trump was the first president since Harry Truman in 1949 to have a military flyover for his inauguration. (President George W. Bush had a flyover two days before his actual inauguration.)

The new president had hoped to have a Red Square-style parade, complete with tanks and missile launchers, to celebrate his unexpected electoral victory in 2016. After much opposition including from inside the military, he had to settle for a flyover that included all five branches of the military: Air Force F-35, F-16, F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, Navy F/A-18 combat jets, Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Marine V-22 Ospreys and four MH-65 rescue helicopters. Trump had planned a repeat performance last year, but frigid weather brought his second inauguration indoors.

On one of his early foreign trips in 2017, Trump attended a military parade in Paris on Bastille Day, which seems to have inspired many of his ideas for using the military at home. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump said of the parade. The Pentagon objected to involving the armed forces in a political event that would have cost nearly $100 million.

But in 2019, Trump finally got his military parade in DC, and flyovers were a highlight.

Then came the pandemic in March 2020. Six days after he went on TV to suggest that Americans might inject a disinfectant to kill the virus, Trump organized several military flyovers in the Washington area and elsewhere as a “tribute” to struggling health care workers who were on the front lines without sufficient protective gear.

If Trump’s first term was marked with an excess of military displays unheard of in the US, his second term has vastly surpassed it. “I don’t think there’s much question that this president is very interested in symbolic displays of military power,” Panetta says. “The flyover is obviously one of those symbols that has in particular attracted him.”

Indeed, Trump loves showing off American war hardware, especially to foreign leaders. During his August 2025 meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-35 fighter jets flew overhead as they stood on the tarmac. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was implicated in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was honored with a ceremonial formation of F-35s and F-16 fighter jets during his White House visit in November last year. (Bin Salman has repeatedly denied any role in the killing.)

NOW – Trump welcomes Saudi crown prince to the White House, with a military flyover, to close F-35 arms deal. pic.twitter.com/z1HnhNwatQ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 18, 2025

In September 2025, Trump feted the president of Poland with a White House flyover that just happened to disrupt a press conference underway nearby at the US Capitol by the victims of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. This year, both King Charles and Chinese President Xi Jinping got the full flyby during their White House visits. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the middle of a press conference at the old RFK Stadium site when she was interrupted by the flyover for Xi, which was so loud even Trump winced from the noise.

“Only in DC.” @MayorBowser has to briefly stop her remarks during a press conference announcing RFK Stadium Redevelopment Master Plan for a military flyover including a stealth bomber flanked by jets. pic.twitter.com/ophDGFYD0i

— Eric Flack (@EricFlackTV) September 24, 2026

While it certainly seems like DC has suffered a lot more air space disturbance since Trump took office last year, I wondered if the actual numbers would bear it out. In August, I asked the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency for a list of all the public advisories it issued about a scheduled military aircraft event, going back to the beginning of 2023.

The list shows that during the last two years of the Biden administration, almost all of the DC flyovers were either for veterans’ funerals—63 of them—or a sporting event, including four over Nationals park, the city’s Major League Baseball stadium. None went over the White House or were tied to state visits by foreign leaders, aside from two over the National Mall during a NATO summit.

During the Biden years, planned military flights over DC outside of veterans’ funerals were rare enough that in 2022, when the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team jumped out over Nats Park, it triggered a threat alert and the US Capitol was evacuated.

It’s hard to even quantify the exponential growth in flyovers over DC in 2026. Historically when DC sends out a public flyover alert, it indicates the specific time and date of the event. But this year, the agency alerts have warned of flyovers happening over multiple days at a time.

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The opening of the Great American State Fair; the 4th of July; and the DC “Grand Prix” Indy car race in August all featured multiple days of military aviation displays. But some of the most concentrated flights were scheduled around Trump’s 80th birthday celebration on June 14. The DC area suffered through multiple flyovers every day for four straight days, starting with flights over the Lincoln Memorial on June 11 and culminating on June 15 with the 12-plane formation of Thunderbirds and Blue Angels that flew over the White House just as country star Zach Brown was finishing the National Anthem at the UFC cage match.

US Air Force Thunderbirds and US Navy Blue Angels aircraft fly in a rare Super Delta formation over Washington, DC, June 14, 2026US Air Force courtesy UFC

Trump has so overwhelmed DC with air shows this year that he appears to have shut out some of the traditional “missing man” flyovers that honor veterans at Arlington Cemetery. According to DC records, by August 23, there were 27 flyovers for funerals at Arlington Cemetery in 2024, and 20 in 2023. This year, there were just 13.

The flyovers have also impacted the DC region’s normal commercial air traffic. For instance, with only two weeks’ notice, the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority announced that Reagan National airport would close for several hours on July 3rd and all flights on the 4th would be cancelled after noon, with ongoing disruptions throughout the summer due to the flyovers.

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand.”

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand,” says Statter. The day before the UFC cage match in June, for instance, his wife had an early Saturday morning flight out of DCA to Boston for a final visit to a relative in hospice. Ever the traffic reporter, he checked her flight status around 1 a.m. and discovered that it had been cancelled at two hours earlier due to a flyover practice. “She had to drive to Boston,” he told me.

Of course, Trump’s love of flyovers creates bigger problems than just terrorizing DC residents or inconveniencing air travelers. Statter says that Trump is “tempting fate with so many low-flying demos or ceremonial flights.” He explained that, during his many years as a traffic reporter, pilots told him that the lower the altitude, “the less time a pilot has to correct anything that goes wrong.”

He points to the many crashes at both military and civilian air shows. Just this May, two Navy fighter jets collided mid-air during an air show in Idaho. The four pilots ejected from the planes, which crashed into a fireball on the runway. Flying in the Navy’s Blue Angels, which have regularly featured in Trump’s displays, is so dangerous that 1 in 10 of the unit’s pilots have died in crashes. But air show crashes usually happen around airfields. “Imagine one happening over a populated area like DC,” Statter says.

It’s not a hypothetical question. In March last year, a Delta flight leaving DCA for Minneapolis nearly collided mid-air with an Air Force T-38 Talon that was part of a formation headed to Arlington Cemetery for a funeral flyover. CNN reported that one of the Delta pilots believed the military aircraft was flying just 500 feet below it when the passenger plane took off. Air traffic controllers had to issue “corrective instructions” to avert disaster.

Irv Halter is a retired Air Force Major General and fighter pilot who used to be involved with ceremonial flyovers, both flying in them and later, helping to decide which ones the Air Force should approve. He says previous presidents did not demand flyovers the way Trump has, and for good reason. They “eat up resources” by tying up ground crews during launch and recovery, he told me, and requiring assistance from cargo planes, tankers and ground control assets.

Flying just one F-35 jet for an hour can cost $40,000. That’s peanuts compared to the cost of flying the B-2 stealth bomber, which has become a regular fixture in DC skies since Trump took office. The most expensive plane in the world, the B-2 cost more than $2 billion to build and as much as $150,000 an hour to keep in the air, in part because the specialized anti-radar skin on it is so expensive to replace should it, say, hit a bird. It needs anywhere between 50 to 60 hours of maintenance for every flight hour. The Air Force has fewer than 20 of them.

In the past, the Defense Department has defended the cost of flyovers by calling them training missions. “That’s BS,” Halter says. “Yes, every hour a pilot gets in an airplane is of some value.” But with all the GPS equipment on modern war planes, he says flying straight and level over something like the National Mall is “a big yawn” for fighter pilots. “And every hour you run on them now is an hour you don’t get for real training or combat training.”

The real cost of such ceremonial flights, Halter notes, “doesn’t show up as a dollar amount but as wear and tear on people. Airplanes and crews need rest. You can’t just keep pounding them into the ground.” He says using critical aircraft for so many frivolous events seems unwise “especially in the middle of a war where we’re wearing out equipment and we’re running out of stocks.”

None of this seems to concern the current administration. “After Joe Biden broke our military, President Trump rebuilt it—and he is deeply proud of his work renewing the strength of our armed forces,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told me in an email when I asked about the consequences of so many flyovers. “The United States possesses the most powerful fighting force in the world, and beautiful aircraft inspire patriotism for all who see them fly overhead.”

The Trump administration can’t get enough of famous men with rap sheets. Russell Brand, the former actor turned Christian influencer, appeared alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz on Tuesday, moderating a Make America Healthy Again panel, and Brand looked awfully comfortable despite the fact that he heads to trial on Oct. 12. Brand has pleaded not…

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Attorney General Todd Blanche is launching an investigation against almost every federal judge in Minnesota.

In a press conference Wednesday, Blanche announced that the Department of Justice filed a misconduct complaint in federal court against all but one of the federal district judges in Minnesota, attacking them for speaking to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month about the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the North Star State.

“Seven federal judges in the District of Minnesota talked to The New York Times about cases, some of which are ongoing, in a manner that the Department of Justice views as a clear violation of their ethical duties,” Blanche said. “Their conduct has undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary in Minnesota.”

According to the complaint, U.S. District Judges Patrick Schlitz had a 90-minute interview with the publication, and six other federal judges in Minnesota also spoke to the Times. Schlitz, appointed by President George W. Bush, said to the newspaper that the Trump’s administration’s disregard for court orders during its immigration crackdown in the state “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” Schlitz said while declining to discuss active cases.

“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” Tunheim said to the Times.

Blanche attacked the judges’ comments in the article as “blatantly false,” saying that the DOJ has asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the judges, who should “recuse themselves from every case involving DHS, either criminal or civil in nature, because of the obvious bias they have shown in this article with The New York Times.”

That would essentially grind federal court proceedings in Minnesota to a halt, which is probably by design. Trump and Blanche have railed against federal judges who rule against the Trump administration, calling them activists. While it is rare for federal judges to speak to the press, it is not illegal, and none of the judges targeted by the DOJ Wednesday mentioned ongoing cases. Schlitz even told the Times that he believes the administration’s violations of his court orders were mostly inadvertent.

“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” Schlitz said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.” But even that deference wasn’t enough for Trump and Blanche.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here.

Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”

The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.

The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.

Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told The New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world’s biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.

Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.

This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).

The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”

The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the Constitution.

As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey’s relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm’s length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”

An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from The New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”

Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.

Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.

Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.

Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.

In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!

And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.”

There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.

In his back-and-forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”

The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”

And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long term.

Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.

Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.

October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.

None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.

President Donald Trump is under fire for reportedly financing a series of self-celebratory campaign ads by using funds that Congress appropriated to the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee are now demanding accountability from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Murphy of Connecticut sent a…

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Donald Trump is planning to hit the campaign trail for 32 days before the midterm elections.

That would put the president on the campaign trail for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3, effectively placing Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

The break-neck pace of the schedule has also spurred health concerns for a president who was recently caught out-of-breath after descending a set of stairs and climbing into his limo.

A spate of election-bound, pro-MAGA personalities have already broken from Trump and his agenda in an attempt to curry favor with their local electorates. The growing list includes Florida Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds (the latter of whom is running for the Sunshine State’s governor), Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, and Texas Republican congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz.

Some hopeful office-seekers have even stripped their websites and campaign materials of Trump’s name, taking advice that the White House offered in July when staffers explicitly encouraged midterm-bound Republicans to split from Trump and his sinking reputation.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of AI and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published late last month suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way this time last year.

Republican attitudes towards Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of surveyed conservatives said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

But Trump refused to acknowledge the party’s divergence. Speaking with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “they all want me to go.”

“I’m one person,” Trump said. “They all want me to ​go campaign.”

The Trump administration is trying to deport a Hasidic Jew for protesting against Israel. 

The New York Times reports that Yehonatan Ovadia, a religious teacher in Rockland County, New York, had his visa revoked by the federal government for participating in an October 2023 protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza where an Israeli flag disappeared from a local town hall. 

Ovadia belongs to Satmar, an anti-Zionist religious sect that believes a Jewish state cannot be established before the arrival of the messiah. Shortly after the protest, he and another member of the sect were charged with hate crimes before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and paying a fine in early 2024. 

In August, the federal government revoked his religious worker visa and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Ovaida, an Israeli citizen who has been in the U.S. since 2022, said he took part in the protest but didn’t tear down the flag. His lawyers sued the government later that month, arguing that the government was punishing him for religious and political expression and conflating that with antisemitism.

“He’s against the Israeli government and the existence of the state of Israel for religious reasons, but to claim that he’s an antisemite is the peak of absurdity,” said Eric Lee, one of his attorneys.

“We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace,” Ovadia told the Times in a telephone interview.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America,” the  Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “The Trump administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews and steals property.”

The White House has targeted noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, including students and permanent residents, ever since President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to go after them for antisemitic activities. When Ovaida applied for an extension to his religious worker visa in 2025, the government demanded court documents and police records, and then stripped him of his legal status. 

Ovaida’s lawyers plan to request his release at a bond hearing Wednesday. If the government gets its way, Ovaida could end up being deported to the country he was protesting against.

When we look back on the second Trump administration, history is not going to be kind to the six Supreme Court conservatives who’ve eagerly assisted in President Donald Trump’s most brutal policies. The latest mortal stain is that they stepped aside to allow Trump to continue third-country deportations with no due process. The administration likes to deport people to countries they…

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Thanks to a 1980s anti-drug trafficking program, cities across the U.S. are being forced to turn over their license plate reader data to the Trump administration.

404 Media reports that the federal government is using the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program to collect data from Flock, Axon, and other cameras used by local police, so that it can be used for a national surveillance program. The plan is to centralize the data on the government’s servers and make it available to other law enforcement agencies. Data collected by HIDTA can also be shared with the National License Plate Reader Program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The program allows the federal government to get around local and state restrictions against Flock and similar license plate reader companies without oversight. 404 Media learned about the plans through public records and court documents.

The HIDTA program is part of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was just recognized by the Trump administration for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”

In many states, local police departments can’t even set up license plate cameras without agreeing to send their data to the federal government, 404 Media reports. In Georgia, for example, cities have to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send their data to the HIDTA program.

Flock cameras are experiencing a backlash from the American public over their warrant-free surveillance and collection of data. They’ve been abused by local police to spy on people unrelated to law enforcement investigations, and have inspired protests at municipal meetings. And they collect far more than license plates: One hacked camera revealed the camera catalogs people, bicycles, small details such as bumper stickers, and, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s bag.

This latest news shows that the Trump administration could be doing anything it wants with the vast amount of data that these cameras collect, skirting the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A centralized database such as the HIDTA could be misused by ICE, the FBI, or any number of unscrupulous Trump administration officials.

Ken Paxton, you in danger, girl. On Wednesday, The New York Times published secretly obtained audio in which the Texas Republican nominee for Senate admitted that President Donald Trump’s midterm convention hurt the GOP more than it helped. “So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” Paxton says in the recording, which the Times reported…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Supreme Court conservatives ensure midterm chaos…

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Another Republican senator is begging the Trump administration to reduce its immigration raids.

West Virginia Senator and Trump loyalist Jim Justice—mostly known for parading his massive bulldog around Capitol Hill—drew a line in the sand in a Tuesday interview with Politico. Notably, Justice is not running for reelection and does not currently have to win voters over to his side.

“Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” he said.

“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong.… And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say, ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”

“This is a stunning shift from Senator Jim Justice,” former Obama and Biden immigration policy adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “The alternative to ICE sweeps is legalization. People who have lived in your neighborhood for 15 years won’t have a path to legal status until both parties come together to create one.”

Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall (who is up for reelection) also made headlines for a similar rebuke of the Trump administration just last week.

“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” Marshall wrote on X after a spike of ICE activity in multiple Kansas towns. “I’m closely following what’s happening in SW Kansas and have been in direct contact with Secretary Mullin and local law enforcement as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe.” Marshall is up for reelection this November.

ICE conducted a massive immigration raid in West Virginia earlier this year named “Operation Country Roads.” They arrested and detained more than 600 people in two weeks, the vast majority of whom were eventually revealed to have no criminal record—a far cry from the dangerous people ICE constantly claims to be prioritizing.

The Trump administration has resorted to trying to bribe Americans to let data centers into their communities.

“The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community get paid a dividend, you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right,” Trump said Tuesday evening. “They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.”

“And by the way, I’m very good at real estate,” Trump added. “Some of those data centers are absolutely beautiful.”

The president then blamed the hardware sites’ bad reputation on Democrats, suggesting that there was no sensible or justifiable reason that the public could be opposed to their creation.

Trump did not elaborate on how he would ensure that Americans received their share of data center profits, or how much that sum could be.

Data center development is necessary for building out artificial intelligence. Yet despite collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the critical infrastructure, the tech industry has done a remarkably bad job at marketing its product to American communities contemplating their futures alongside them.

Unaware of any benefits, the public has instead become highly attuned to the inordinate resource drain the centers create: A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Meanwhile, Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

The president’s 2026 financial disclosures also reveal that he’s invested a sizable sum in tech companies pursuing AI projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

But Trump’s opinion on the matter is seriously at odds with that of the American public. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

The growing divide between the president’s sentiments and the reality lived by the American public should serve as a reminder that Trump—who is worth an estimated $6.5 billion and owns hundreds of business entities and properties around the world—has almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Trump will never be hard pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive “groceries”; and will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he said in June, while profiting off it) or needing to split the cost at the gas pump between credit cards.

Last month, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor,” a sobering reminder that Trump simply does not understand or care about the interests of the average American.

When it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings, the agents are never to blame. The administration refuses to meaningfully investigate them and actively blocks states from doing their own investigations. Depressingly, this tactic works best when ICE succeeds in murdering someone—because then there’s no way for that person to describe what led up to ICE’s violence…

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A new poll from the Associated Press and KFF shows that while half of rural voters support the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again policies, most also say those policies have not benefited their communities.

About 7 out of 10 rural voters went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But now, about 8 out of 10 rural voters polled say the administration’s healthcare platform—which includes abandoning long-standing vaccine policies, researching ultraprocessed foods, criticizing Big Ag, and promoting a red-meat-heavy diet—has “had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live,” according to the AP/KFF poll of 2,241 rural voters, released today. 68 percent of those who self-identified as MAHA supporters agreed: while they support Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA platform, it isn’t making them healthier.

At Mother Jones, we’ve been tracking the fractures in the Make America Healthy Again movement in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Read more below.

Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.Forget regulating food—manly MAHA cares about meat, testosterone, and erectile dysfunction. The California Lawmaker Forcing Big Food to Clean Up Its ActWhile DC dithers, Jesse Gabriel has quietly become America’s de facto food safety chief. Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

The public has some questions about President Donald Trump’s stance.

Our most macho-presenting president since perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson was seen standing in an awkward, knock-kneed fashion in a video clip from his “Super Intelligence” tech executive press conference on Tuesday. 

The president’s head, neck, and  upper body face one way, while his torso, knees, and feet seem to all face in completely different directions. His rotund abdomen appears to protrude forward, and he moves as if it is physically painful for him to turn his waist and hips when addressing the reporters surrounding him. 

The clip was posted by White House communications adviser Margo Martin.

.@POTUS discusses changing the name from Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/30AM8nuTjx

— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) September 29, 2026

“Lmao bro wtf is this stance,” the large Wu Tang is for the Children account posted on X.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE STAND LIKE THIS BEFORE,” another large liberal account inquired. “I’d seriously love to hear from some medical expert. Is this a sign that he has hurt his leg or is it somehow a sign of cognitive decline.”

“The only person I’ve ever seen stand like this was a child who shit their pants,” said another account. 

Perfect posture has zero correlation in regards to being an effective and productive politician; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most effective presidents ever, was paralyzed from the waist down for the entirety of his four terms. But for a president as dedicated to projecting strength and power as Trump is, this is a bad look—especially as chatter about his physical and cognitive decline grows louder every time he falls asleep on camera or walks gingerly. 

President Trump’s plan to make his triumphal arch a military center with snipers, drones, and ammunition is news to the people in charge of building it.

The Washington Post reports that officials with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the National Park Service are unaware of Trump’s military plans for the arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., near Arlington National Cemetery. They said Tuesday that they will proceed with the existing designs, have not heard from the Department of Defense, and plan to have the landmark open to tourists.

Trump said in a September 20 Truth Social post that the arch would be a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” that would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

That appears to be a contrived reason to get legal approval for the arch, which Trump wants to begin construction on in November. If Trump pushes the military plans, “A new or supplemental review would be required,” the executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, Rebecca Miller, wrote in a letter to the administration.

“Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for DCA is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea,” Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said last week. “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security. Which is obviously idiotic.”

Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence chatbot used to tell the ugly truth about the president—but now it’s playing dumb.

It appears that someone at the General Services Administration has tweaked the Trump administration’s new America.gov chatbot to prevent it from debunking president’s many lies.

After the tool’s launch on Tuesday, if you asked whether there was “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election, the chatbot would state that “No. Official findings did not show widespread voter fraud that changed the 2020 presidential election result.” On Wednesday, however, the chatbot refused to answer, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote on X.

“I help with official U.S. government services and information. I do not provide political commentary. If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or how to use a government service, ask that and I can point you to official sources,” the chatbot now replies.

The platform provided the same answer to a question about whether Trump had truly inherited the “worst inflation in history,” even though it had originally stated that inflation was not at a “historic high,” Dale posted on X.

The New Republic found that several queries that originally yielded damning-fact checks now summoned similarly canned answers that undermine the usefulness of the tool altogether.

One X user on Tuesday asked: “How many people will lose access to Medicaid and other social services because of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill? One sentence.”

The chatbot initially returned an answer citing the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 10.4 million people would lose health insurance by 2034. The next day: “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of how legislation will change Medicaid or other benefits.”

An inability to address changes to health care benefits seems like a pretty major issue for a tool meant to help answer questions about federal services.

In other cases, the chatbot walked back honest answers to simple questions about Trump’s policies.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, asked: “Is it accurate to say that the Big Beautiful Bill on average made the poorest people in America even poorer, and the richest people in America even richer, when looking at total household resources? One word answer only please.”

The chatbot initially responded simply, “Yes.” The next day it said, “I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups.”

One X user asked for an estimate of how many children would die as a result of federal funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The chatbot had initially returned an answer citing a study that estimated 4.5 million additional deaths of children under the age of five by 2030. The next day, it said, “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of deaths from legislation.”

Experts have expressed concerns that AI chatbots are overly sychophantic—but clearly the president’s new AI tool takes that to a whole new level.

The Kennedy Center has financially collapsed in the 19 months since Donald Trump took control.

The venerated performing arts space is “in free fall,” having already bled dry most of its cash reserves, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center was a dying relic that needs his name—and brand—to survive. But a Post analysis of the living memorial’s financials indicate that isn’t true. The center was more financially sound throughout the decade than it was most years before the pandemic. Its downward spiral began when Trump took the reins in February 2025.

“This was a pretty stable—large, complicated, but stable—organization,” Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program, told the Post. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”

The Kennedy Center did not turn a profit on its performances, but that was expected. The federal site is primarily a congressionally founded living memorial, as well as a nonprofit arts organization. Its lifeblood were ticket sales and donations.

But both of those stopped when Trump needled his way onto the center’s board and into its programming.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University, told the Post. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Most of the people in charge of procuring donor money were let go by Trump officials. Richard Grenell, a political consultant and Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, was in charge of the center in March when he announced that the center’s development staff had been cut from 94 to 16 people.

The center’s latest tax filing revealed more issues, including a $48 million write-off for pledges that it no longer believes it can collect, according to documents reviewed by the Post.

“This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast,” Gahl-Mills told the paper. “It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”

The Kennedy Center has also chewed through most of its debt reserves, which are projected to hit $9 million by the end of the week—an enormous sink from the $18 million recorded this time last year. That would suggest the space is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash to spend, as almost the entire remaining sum is collateral for the loan on the Reach, the center’s 2019 expansion.

Another indicator of the center’s waning health is its recent decision to dip into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a donation tranche that has historically been untouched.

But its financials are only expected to get worse: The center expects ticket sales to plummet by about two-thirds this year. Gift sales were also down: in Ihe first quarter of 2026, donations fell by about 40 percent compared to the last four months of 2025, according to an internal report obtained by the Post in June.

Meanwhile, Trump is still scheming to affix his name to the property. After a vote to protect federal memorials failed to pass the Senate on Monday, Justice Department attorneys echoed Trump’s claims in court, arguing in a legal filing that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”

5 minutes agoWalter EinenkelSee if you can decipher what this Minnesota Republican is trying to say@atruparMinnesota state Senate Republican candidate Andrea Zupancich when asked about supporting Trump’s trade war: “How can we stand behind the trade war? We need to open up. We need to be able to make sure that America comes first, and I believe he is 100% behind our steelworkers. He is behind what…

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