Political News

Kash Patel’s FBI has been fudging the numbers to boost the agency’s success rate on apprehending fugitives from its Top 10 Most Wanted List.

Patel announced the addition of a new name to the agency’s Top 10 Most Wanted List on Tuesday, and bragged about the agency’s rate of successful captures under his leadership.

“This FBI has had historic success manhunting Ten Most Wanted fugitives—since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve captured TEN of the Top Ten Most Wanted, 2.5 times the number of TMW fugitives captured during the previous four years combined,” Patel wrote on X.

However, Patel’s FBI has imposed new policies that manipulate that data by adding the names of fugitives who are expected to be imminently captured, according to MS NOW.

Those aren’t the only statistics that Patel is padding: The director also instructed FBI field offices to include any suspects arrested in the presence of agency personnel to be included in official arrest counts, MS NOW reported.

So when Patel claims that his agency had “forty-five thousand violent offenders arrested last year, twice as many as 2024,” that includes suspects in cases led by local police departments and other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The double counting didn’t help to remove more alleged criminals from the streets, but it did give Patel a handy statistic to cite when he’s dodging questions about his alleged excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and other erratic behavior.

Thanks to the doggedness of the alleged victim and Cornell University student press, it looks like New York state prosecutors have decided to maybe do some tiny part of their job and look into genuinely horrifying allegations of a 2024 fraternity gang rape. The allegations are as bleak and awful as they come, with the seven named defendants participating in a group chat that appears to have…

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants Americans to hand over their health data to the government, so it can then be searched by artificial intelligence.

At an event held by the MAHA Institute, run by anti-vaccine activist Mark Gorton, Kennedy said he wanted the federal government to collect Americans’ health data, including doctor’s visits, so it could be shared with independent researchers and be searchable by AI, The Guardian reports.

RFK Jr. seemed to believe the data could help AI prove the long-debunked connection between vaccines and autism.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said at the event Monday.

“Your health information should follow you wherever you go,” Kennedy added, noting that tech companies, insurance companies, and health care providers are already doing that through apps, and that health records are easier to access for the government as a result. Kennedy is already collecting data from the agencies in his department, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Medicaid is a really useful vehicle for studying … because there are hundreds of millions of lives in there, including tens of millions of children who’ve been in that program for 10 or 20 years,” Kennedy said. “Medicare gives us enormous amounts of information on older Americans and people with disabilities.”

Regarding AI, Kennedy said that it has been a boon to his efforts.

“Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that’s what we’re doing today,” Kennedy said. “[AI] can help researchers find patterns across millions of health histories that human beings could never find by reading those records one at a time.”

Throughout his remarks, Kennedy kept bringing up vaccines as a major, if not the main, reason for his initiative, mentioning that the CDC has a Vaccine Safety Datalink that compares health outcomes for unvaccinated and vaccinated people and is looking at vaccine ingredients, their timing for infants, and other factors.

The whole thing has alarming implications. Kennedy already has faced criticism for proposing an autism registry and been lambasted by a federal judge for using fake studies created by AI. Kennedy didn’t mention any safeguards for Americans’ health data in his remarks, and his entire vision seems to be based on his anti-vaccine agenda. Despite, or even because of this, he still has a job in the Trump administration.

As gas prices continue to soar amid a seemingly endless war in Iran, the Trump administration is finally delivering relief to drivers burdened by high gas and record diesel prices: letting automakers keep making cars that use lots of gas. On Monday, the White House announced that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had finalized plans to roll back Biden-era corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards. Previously, automakers were expected to achieve a fleet-wide fuel economy average of 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031. Under the new rules approved on Monday, that average is expected to be just 34.9 miles per gallon. Reaching it requires a roughly 1 percent improvement each year, as opposed to the 8 percent annual improvement expected under Biden.

Predictably, the administration pitched the rollback as a godsend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said its “Freedom Means Affordable Cars” initiative would “significantly reduce the cost of vehicles” and “revive the beating heart of American manufacturing and unshackle the nation’s automotive industry to produce safer, more affordable cars that American families want to buy.” Meanwhile, legacy U.S. automakers General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—the European company that owns heritage brands like Dodge and Jeep—have welcomed the news, saying the new rules would “align regulations with market realities.”

But Trump’s relaxed standards get the problem of fuel prices inside out and upside down. It isn’t Biden’s supposed “EV Mandate” that’s been plaguing drivers and Detroit. While the administration has framed its war on fuel efficiency as a means of boosting the U.S. auto industry, carmakers’ Trump 2.0–era pivot away from fuel efficiency is coming back to bite them. At home and abroad, especially, consumers are opting for foreign competitors’ hybrid and EV models, which typically cost less to buy and drive. Coupled with tariffs that are raising costs across the board, this White House could end up being historically bad for Detroit.

For as much as Republicans have accused climate hawks of leading a war on cars, Trump’s foreign policy has done more to penalize driving than even Biden’s most zealous green bureaucrats. Gas prices in the U.S. have risen 43 percent since the start of the Iran War, costing drivers an estimated $43 billion. Those expenses come on top of new car prices that are now hovering around $50,000, not to mention rising borrowing costs and auto insurance premiums. Trump has imposed punishing tariffs on Canada—by far the largest export market for U.S. automakers. Just three months into a 25 percent import fee, sales of U.S.-built cars in Canada have dipped from 35.4 percent to just 28.4 percent. Those tariffs have prompted retaliatory duties from our northern neighbor, and are scheduled to double on January 1. Taken together, these developments represent a threat not just to sales in Canada but to U.S. manufacturing, which has been structured around longstanding free-trade agreements among North American countries. GM and Stellantis have already reported billions of dollars in losses as a result of tariffs. More than a third of the 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs lost since January 2025 are in motor vehicles and parts production.

All this is taking a visible toll on the auto industry. Ford sales are expected to drop by 8.8 percent for the first three-quarters of this year, with a 6.2 percent drop projected for General Motors, per Cox Automotive. The two legacy Detroit brands are on track to lose more market share in the U.S. than any other U.S. automaker, bringing overall “Big Three” market share to an all time low of just 36 percent. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, these companies have written off tens of billions of dollars worth of Biden-era investments in EVs and more fuel efficient models to focus on selling gas-powered trucks and SUVs, including the powerful and gasoline-thirsty V8 engines. As gas prices have risen, a big beneficiary of Detroit’s doubling-down on expensive gas-guzzlers have been brands offering relatively affordable hybrids to consumers wary of pain at the pump. Hyundai’s sales are likely to overtake Ford this quarter; hybrids now account for one in seven vehicles sold in the U.S., up from just 3 percent in 2020. Analysts expect domestic hybrid sales to double over the next decade. These trends could even help Toyota take General Motors’ spot as the United States’ best-selling automaker.

Even bigger storms are brewing. General Motors’ chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, recently warned that the company’s competition in the U.S.—which largely bars Chinese cars—was intensifying as the U.S. becomes a “safe haven” for foreign automakers being pummeled in their domestic and international markets by brands like BYD and Geely. It might now only be a matter of time before those brands are allowed to compete in the U.S., too; Trump has even signaled he’d be open to it. Legacy automakers’ decades-long dominance within the United States’ safe haven for big, expensive trucks and SUVs may be numbered. As the competition gets closer, they might have buyers’ remorse for following Trump’s lead.

In case you needed any evidence that Republicans have absolutely no dirt on former special counsel Jack Smith, look no further.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Senator Eric Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. For context, Schmitt added, that was the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed her affair with prosecutor Nathan Wade. 

“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” Smith answered, and suggested that he hadn’t spent any time in Atlanta, and had never met with Willis or Wade. 

Then, Schmitt accused the former special counsel of perjury. 

The Missouri Republican’s staff displayed a poster board that the senator claimed showed a series of text messages from Smith’s team that allegedly discussed his plans to attend the Hawks game. Almost as soon as it was put up, it was pulled down again. 

Smith was unable to offer a response to the accusation, noting, “You just took it down really quick.” Schmitt refused to hold the board up again, instead calling Smith a “dirtbag.”

Later, Smith circled back to clarify that he remembered attending a college basketball game in February 2024 between the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa during which Caitlin Clark had played.  

Senator Amy Klobuchar then offered a possibility: “Could it then be that University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” she said. 

Schmitt interjected that Klobuchar was trying to “rehabilitate the witness.” He insisted that the text messages—which again, he’d not allowed anyone to review—“could have obviously been related to the prosecution that was coordinated in his office in Atlanta.”

“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar said. 

Shortly after, Klobuchar was able to confirm Smith’s story. 

“The game was in fact in Maryland, Mr. Smith,” she said. “And I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team, which I knew knowing my midwestern sports, and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.”

🤡 Eric Schmitt beclowns himself during Jack Smith hearing 🤡

Schmitt concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory that Smith traveled to Atlanta to go to a Hawks game and collude with Fani Willis, and briefly displayed his "evidence" on a poster board before accusing Smith of… pic.twitter.com/wDMiVrrKBF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2026

Republicans appear so desperate to attack the former official, who says he found proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump committed “serious crimes” related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and steal classified documents to advance his own career, that they are willing to resort to absurd antics and allege ill-informed conspiracy theories.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday that if Republicans are victorious in this year’s midterm elections, they will continue the agenda that has led millions to oppose and disapprove of the Republican Party. “What we would do in the next two years is exactly what we have been doing already and that is putting the conditions in place for a strong America,” Johnson said in an interview on…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Iowa Republicans turn away from Trump as midterm peril mounts…

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The Trump administration’s brand-new, ultra-secure, “damn good” AI chatbot can’t be hacked —yet.

The new technology, hosted on America.gov, was unveiled during a summit Tuesday morning. It’s supposed to act as the new face of the federal government, a way for the general public to access publicly available government information in a familiar chatbot format.

In relatively brief remarks, Donald Trump pledged that the access point was built with cutting-edge technology that would not save or risk user data.

“With America.gov, for the first time in history, the government is offering an experience that matches and in some ways even exceeds the state of the art,” Trump said.

“It’s built from the ground up with your privacy and security in mind,” Trump said. “They’ve used a brand new technology—it’s absolutely brand new. It’s amazing, people don’t even have access to it for the most part, to ensure that your personal information is not collected or stored and your conversation disappears when you leave and everything stays totally private.”

But his confidence in the burgeoning portal only extended so far.

“Cannot, in theory, be hacked into,” Trump continued, ad-libbing that when “they figure a way to do that, we’ll end it.”

“Because they always figure a way, right?” Trump said. “If anything does happen. We think it might not happen.”

Trump on his new America dot gov website: "It cannot in theory be hacked into. And when they figure a way to do that, we'll end it, because they always figure a way, right?" pic.twitter.com/EI551hjSkB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2026

The site was created by Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia with the intention of centralizing numerous government databases and websites for easier public consumption, creating a pathway for users to access federal information without needing to navigate the “maze” of government websites.

The administration said that the platform could eventually be used as a waypoint for passport applications, name changes, campsite reservations, and even Medicare plans.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing right-wing backlash over an ad featuring a white man playing video games who got off welfare thanks to the state’s work requirement. 

Several conservative personalities lashed out against the ad on social media for depicting “Brad,” who chooses not to work and plays video games on his couch instead, over the right-wing stereotypes of women and people of color living off of government assistance.  

Some critics online don't like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period. WATCH-> https://t.co/W9BAjVRkSA

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 28, 2026

“This Republican ad calling out welfare leeches uses a young white male named ‘Brad’ as the villain. Meanwhile, back in reality, women are significantly more likely to be on welfare than men. And black people are astronomically more likely to be on welfare than white people. So the number of single young white male ‘Brads’ abusing the welfare system is minuscule,” posted Matt Walsh. “Practically non-existent. But of course Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain. Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” 

Failed far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback also disliked the ad, but was surprisingly less racist. 

“White men named Brad don’t typically commit welfare fraud,” Fishback said. “I’d recommend you start with the baby-momma with a BMW who just got back from her Carnival Cruise.”

“Almost zero white men under the age of 62 are on welfare. 69% of all immigrant classes are on welfare. The GOP is filled with anti White leftist,” posted right-wing poster Paul (@WomanDefiner). 

Right-wing influencer RAMZPAUL said Sanders “needs to apologize for her blood libel.”

“Sarah Huckabee never had a real job. Her daddy was a two-time governor. She never worked in the private sector. She never served in the military. Her entire qualification was her daddy,” the influencer added. “Maybe she should be cut off the taxpayer funds and get a job as a waitress. She may also want to cut down on the Cheetos.”

Sanders doubled down on the post on Tuesday, posting, “Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period..” 

Despite MAGA’s outrage, statistically in Arkansas, between 52 and 54 percent of food stamp (SNAP) recipients in the state are white, as are 57.8 percent of those on Medicaid. But Sanders’s program won’t solve any problems, as adding work requirements doesn’t reduce poverty, and in some cases, makes people poorer. Regarding programs like health care assistance, most recipients are already working. 

And, as one commentator pointed out, Sanders has only ever held political jobs thanks to her father, former Arkansas Governor and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and has never had to apply for a real job herself. 

Facing grim odds in the midterm elections, Republicans had been holding out hope that as Election Day drew near, polls would tighten and the GOP’s odds at keeping their congressional majorities would improve. But with just one full day left until October—the point in an election cycle when voter decisions are hardened—that hope is gone. A spate of polling released Tuesday brought only more…

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Former special counsel Jack Smith swears that President Donald Trump committed “serious crimes.”

In his opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Smith reiterated the findings of his two indictments against the president of the United States.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

“After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a bathroom and ballroom where events and gatherings took place,” he said.

Smith’s team determined that Trump kept a hold on those documents in order to help advance his business interests.

The former special counsel’s statements were practically identical to his January testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that his investigations uncovered proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump had engaged in criminal activity.

In December, Smith testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the House committee. He has long sought to testify in a public hearing, but was rebuffed by Republicans until Tuesday in favor of one behind closed doors.

5 minutes agoWalter EinenkelTrump says war will be over any day now and it’ll go down in history as “one of the most important things that we did.”@AcynCopy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 16 minutes agoWalter EinenkelJack Smith reminds the Senate that Trump threatened various witnessesCopy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 34 minutes agoWalter EinenkelCrypto scammer…

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Utah Senator Mike Lee was the only lawmaker to vote against a bipartisan bill that would have banned the demolition of presidential memorials such as the Kennedy Center without congressional approval.

The bill in question—the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act—was the brainchild of Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Maine Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Democratic-Republican duo tried to pass the bill via unanimous consent, a procedure that fast-tracks votes and skips debates on non-controversial matters by only passing a measure if the entire chamber votes the same way.

Lee, however, apparently did not feel that protecting presidential memorials was a pertinent issue, despite the president’s recent machinations surrounding the Kennedy Center, and the ensuing looming threat of the historic theater’s destruction.

“Unfortunately, a colleague objected to this common-sense bill,” Merkley wrote in a statement after the vote. “Trump’s threats are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and should infuriate every American who values our nation’s history and the rule of law. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars putting Trump’s name on memorials and monuments as if he is a king, we should be focused on putting money back into the pockets of working families and honoring America’s greatest cultural institutions, not destroying them.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has worked tirelessly to plaster his name on the Kennedy Center. Part of that effort included replacing the center’s board with a spate of Trumpian loyalists (and appointing himself as its chairman), and leveraging that power to find avenues to affix his name and brand on the revered performing arts space or its grounds. He has been profoundly unsuccessful in doing so, however: Trump has faced numerous legal obstacles in his quest to rename the Kennedy Center, in no small part because the site itself is under the jurisdiction of Congress.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center needs him—and his brand—to survive. Yet tax documents obtained by Zeteo earlier this month disproved that conspiracy, revealing that it was actually Trump’s intimate involvement in the building’s affairs that triggered the beginning of its rapid decline.

After the Monday night vote, Trump’s team filed an appeal in the legal saga reiterating his claims. Justice Department attorneys argued 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.”

“The stakes are existential,” the attorneys posited.

The most unusual ritual in American politics in the scorched and cynical runup to the 2026 midterm elections takes place as often as five times a day—in restaurants and breweries, in rec centers and old churches, in train depots and art spaces, and in at least one possibly haunted pioneer museum—when Rob Sand, the 44-year-old Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, asks someone in the audience to hit a note.

“It starts, ‘Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,’” Sand reminds them. “I will not kick us off.”

He has been building up to this moment since he first grabbed the mic. Sand, a trim and uncannily youthful state auditor with a shock of light brown hair, starts every appearance on his 99-county tour with an invective against the “two private clubs” that dominate politics. The major parties win by convincing us to “be scared of our neighbors,” he says. So he leads a round of applause for the Republicans in the room, and for the independents and Democrats, too. Finally, to “show each other that we can actually work together,” he invites everyone to sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.”

Sand campaigns at the Dubuque County Fairgrounds. Over 500 people attended the event, one of the largest town halls of his campaign. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Someone might whisper “Vicky!” or “Amy!” a little too loudly, and then someone else (Vicky? Amy?) gets it going. Some people close their eyes. Some look around. But by the end—in two-stoplight towns and urban satellites alike—they are starting to sound alright. In the back room of a speakeasy-themed bar on a courthouse square in a Missouri River county that Donald Trump carried by 39 points, an older man in a shirt that says “Iowa: We all are going to die” tells the candidate that he and his wife have “been harmonizing for 43 years,” and Sand, after savoring the moment, poses a variation of the same question he often asks:

“What if politics just felt like that all the time?”

You may have noticed that it does not.

Set aside the constitutional crises and the democratic backsliding and the corruption, and just consider the vital signs: Trust in Congress is at a modern low of 9 percent; just 17 percent of Americans believe elected officials care what voters think; more than a third report losing relationships with friends or family over politics. If this civic miasma has left the country grimmer and scarier, sleepless and vengeful and suspicious and just generally feeling bad, well, it has also done a pretty poor job of addressing the actual problems that make people feel even worse.

Sand asked a large crowd at Rustic Brew in Hampton to raise their hands if they had been touched by cancer. Nearly everyone in the room acknowledged the cancer reality in Iowa, a state now ranked second in the nation for new cancer diagnosis.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

When I tagged along for 10 campaign stops over three days just ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday, the subjects Sand was asked about most often were toxic water, cancer, data centers, and a succession of healthcare horrors. Iowa is No. 2 for cancer-rate growth and 48th in economic growth. It has been teetering on the edge of a recession for more than a year, battered by a trade war with the world and a not-a-war with Iran. Its public schools, once memorialized on the state quarter, are sliding down national rankings, as teachers battle book bans and legislators drain the budget to pay private school tuition for kids who already attend one. Farmer bankruptcies are rising. The population in much of the state is shrinking. Iowa is dead last in OB-GYNs per capita, and one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws is keeping it that way. For these reasons and many more, 49 governors had a higher approval rating last year than Iowa’s retiring Republican, Kim Reynolds. The state was once synonymous with participatory democracy. Now its politics is stagnant and beginning to stink—an algae bloom where a reflecting pool once stood.

His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

Sand doesn’t talk much about what’s happening in Washington. But he argues that Iowa’s leaders have prioritized power grabs and culture wars over problem-­solving and that it’s time to “rotate the crops” after nearly a decade of one-party rule. Voters seem ready to give divided government a try. This November, Democrats expect to finally break the GOP supermajority in the state House. The race for US Senate is an unexpected toss-up. And Sand has a narrow edge in his bid to be the first Democrat to be elected as Iowa governor in 20 years.

But that’s where it gets a bit more complicated. Because if Sand is on familiar ground in his indictment of Republican governance, he and his fellow Democrats are more divided on how to turn the page. Much of the left, in much of the country, is fixated on payback and power—governing trifectas and sweeping reforms. Even mild-mannered 77-year-old Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is promising “Nuremberg 2.0.” Sand strikes a different chord.

For much of his career, Sand has been discussed, often outside Iowa, as a kind of electoral cheat code—a bowhunting, churchgoing, small-town Democrat whose background and congeniality could reclaim the party’s beating heartland: “The Democrat Who Republicans Fear in Red-State America,” as The Wall Street Journal once called him. And in a key sense, they’re right; he has two statewide wins to prove it. But for even longer, Sand has been, sometimes quietly and sometimes very publicly, arguing for something else. Temperamentally evenhanded, he is a zealot about polarization. Sand does not want to turn a red state blue, he insists. He wants to be the candidate who gets you to stop thinking like that altogether.

Sand, an avid hunter and outdoorsman, poses at his office in Des Moines. He calls his room at the state capitol the “public-sector Cabela’s.”Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Sand grew up in Decorah, a college town of about 7,500 in the state’s far northeast corner, nestled amid rolling hills on the outdoor enthusiast’s paradise of the Upper Iowa River. Decorah is scenic, fairly liberal, and famously Norwegian—a place where people joke about being in mixed marriages because they ended up with a Dane. Sand’s mother was a physical therapist. His father was a doctor. Before I could ask the mayor, Andy Carlson, how he knew the family, he told me that Dr. Sand had delivered him.

As a teenager, Sand dabbled in improv and caught capons at a poultry barn for $5 an hour. He sometimes tells crowds he learned the power of democracy as a skateboarder. “He’ll probably get mad at me for saying this, but they were, like, skating off Darin Peterson’s roof,” Carlson recalls. (“It was a low roof,” Sand told me.) Sand met with the parks and rec director about building a skate park, pitched the city council, and got buy-in from local businesses tired of kids loitering on their curbs. The experience, he says—using words no one has ever used to describe a quarter pipe—fostered “a belief that our system of self-governance can help us solve problems together.”

This appeal to common ground is impossible to miss at Sand town halls. Every line on his résumé becomes a lesson in unexpected harmonies. There was his decision to re-register from an independent to a Democrat (in part because President Bill Clinton balanced the budget with Republicans). The decision to name his second son Axel (it means “father of peace”). And his decision to leave the Iowa attorney general’s office to run for auditor (because CPAs could use a prosecutor in the office).

Notwithstanding the skateboarding­-off-roofs thing, or maybe because the ­skateboarding-off-roofs thing comes wrapped in a Tocquevillian gloss, Sand has acknowledged that “some people think of me as a bit of a square.” That includes his brothers-in-law, who nicknamed him “Baby Jesus,” and his wife, Christine, who compares him to Mr. Rogers. He is a teetotaler from the Upper Midwest who went to Brown University and never smoked pot. Sand’s TV ads over the years have leaned into this affect, depicting him as a paragon of Nordic efficiency, turning off the lights on his showering wife and holding a stopwatch as he chops onions.

Since running for auditor, Sand has stuck to a tradition of holding annual town halls in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. He says it should be mandatory for all statewide elected officials.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

But looks can also deceive. A Brown professor from that time, John Tomasi, recalled his first impressions: “tall, skinny, huge blue eyes, the worst hair I ever saw in my life.” Tomasi thought Sand’s mother had cut it with a bucket over his head, only to discover that Sand had been moonlighting as a model in Europe and that the mop was the work of a renowned stylist “with a single name, like ‘Chago’ or ‘Chara.’” Sand began modeling shortly after arriving at Brown, looking to make a quick buck. He graced the pages of Arena Homme+ and Vogue Italia and posed for Terry Richardson in an ad called “Adole-scents.” Sand, in his book, wrote that such experiences “taught me about where I feel at home.”

The origin story of overcoming differences came at Brown, where Sand went door to door to introduce himself to the entire freshman class and penned a generally liberal column for The Brown Daily Herald. One day during his sophomore year, Tomasi arrived at his office to find Sand waiting with another classmate—Stephen Beale, a founder of the conservative Brown Spectator.

“It was the most unlikely couple I could have imagined on campus,” Tomasi recalls. “What they said to me was that they never had a course at Brown that would help them understand why an intelligent person could be a Republican.”

The result was a student-led seminar on contemporary conservative thought. A draft syllabus Beale shared with me featured readings from Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek, but also Pat Buchanan and the founder of the anti-immigrant website VDARE, Peter Brimelow. “What made [Sand] distinctive was his desire just to understand the other side,” said Beale, who could recall only one session that sparked a heated argument: their discussion of The Bell Curve, the 1994 book purporting to link race and IQ. “He really criticized that.”

Iowa farmer and entrepreneur Caleb Renner at a campaign stop for Sand at Rustic Brew in Hampton.Danny Wilcox-Frazier A Sand campaign staffer sets up before a town hall at Robey Memorial Library in Waukon.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

There was a part of me that wondered, as I watched every aspect of his life story become a parable for common ground, if Sand wasn’t laying it on a little thick. Iowa Republicans certainly think so. But flip over any rock and you find the same bugs. He used his college thesis to argue that public financing of elections could transcend ideological divides. At 22, he wrote a letter to The Gazette in Cedar Rapids making the case for “honest, straightforward discussion” to overcome polarization. And for one month in 2007, while building houses in post-­Katrina New Orleans, Sand kept a blog.

It was in many ways a twentysomething’s chronicle of a twentysomething’s pursuits. But a familiar tone poked through. He was eager to answer questions, “even especially the antagonistic ones!” Sand pored over news reports and policy papers and concluded that the cure to the storm-wracked city’s ills lay in electing “problem-solvers instead of politicians.”

As the 2008 Iowa caucuses loomed, Sand, now in law school, made his debut in the national media as an electoral talisman. He was a “typically overscheduled twentysomething,” Newsweek reported­—an exemplar, the magazine noted in a follow-up story, of a voting bloc “theorists call ‘millennials.’” While Sand had chosen to model in Milan four years earlier instead of caucusing for Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, he was determined not to miss out on the caucuses again.

“Dean was polarizing,” Sand explained. “Obama brings people together.”

Two men listen at the doorway as Sand speaks during a town hall at Sanity Room in Independence.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

In hindsight, Barack Obama might have given a lot of people the wrong idea. The 2008 caucuses were the springboard for hope and change and turned Iowa into a fleeting symbol of bridge-building possibility. Obama carried the state twice, handily. Sand is the only Democrat to win an open statewide race since, and presidential results have not been close. Some of the biggest rightward shifts anywhere in the Midwest came in Sand’s backyard. While Decorah went nearly 2-to-1 for Kamala Harris, its county swung from Obama +23 in 2008 to Trump +9 in the last election.

Sand sometimes addresses this change by asking his interrogator a question of his own: What did Obama and Trump have in common? His answer is that they rejected the status quo. This can take you only so far. (How similar are Reconstruction and Jim Crow?) But it underpins a deeper argument—that Iowa was never as “blue” as Obama made it seem, nor as “red” as Trump’s successes might suggest. Its true heritage, Sand argues, is a culture of give-and-take: Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley; divided government; independent redistricting; public town halls where a voter can stand up, like the man in the Norman Rockwell painting, and tell a gubernatorial candidate that it is time to create a special hunting season just for crossbows. Iowans still don’t feel served by the status quo, Sand believes. His events are crafted to make them feel at home.

At the town halls, after the group finishes singing, Sand speed-runs through the rest of his unlikely-bedfellows story. There was his career as a white-collar prosecutor (mentored by a Republican) and his successes as auditor, in which he started a government efficiency program that was copied by a Republican in Mississippi. (It is nothing like DOGE; Sand delivers homemade pies to school districts and local governments that find innovative savings.) Then partisanship struck.

Following Sand’s 2022 reelection, wary of his ambitions or maybe just tired of his investigations, GOP lawmakers gutted the auditor’s power to conduct oversight of state agencies. Sand says he is running now in part because they left him with little to do. Republicans, anticipating he will win, have already moved to limit the next governor’s powers. This is emblematic, he argues, of a decadelong trend of Republican leaders in Des Moines using their power to consolidate even more of it, usually at the expense of other governmental bodies.

Meta’s Altoona data center has been featured in TV ads touting the industry’s benefits. But the data center boom has led to a pushback from both parties in the state. Sand tells voters he’d end tax breaks for data centers. His Republican opponent is calling for a full moratorium on new construction.Danny Wilcox-Frazier A grain elevator in Eldon—home to the American Gothic House. Tariffs and high fuel prices have hammered the state’s farm economy in Trump’s second term.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“Power corrupts,” he begins, “and absolute power—”

The choir finishes the sentence: “corrupts absolutely.”

Early signs look promising for Iowa Democrats. Last year, the party flipped a state Senate seat in a district where Trump won by 11 points, breaking a GOP supermajority. Doug Gross, a former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, told me Sand was Democrats’ most impressive candidate in years—someone who could speak to voters’ “dissatisfaction” while bridging cultural divides. In Council Bluffs, I met the kind of voter Sand’s campaign dreams of: a young Republican who brought his mother to the event after listening to Sand talk about tracking a 206-inch buck through Des Moines on a podcast called MeatEater; he liked what Sand said about partisanship. J.D. Scholten, a populist state representative who nearly flipped a deep-red congressional seat in 2018, calls Sand a “model of how to run in the Midwest area right now.”

Most of Sand’s proposals, such as his promise to reverse Medicaid privatization or to require private schools that accept voucher funds to open their books to auditors, are not revolutionary. That’s the point. He wants people to make peace with divided government and acknowledge that the “broken clocks” in their communities are still right twice a day. If Trump 2.0 represents the culmination of an era of declining political trust, Sand offers a vision for how to get it back. It means mandatory prison time for public officials who steal public funds and mandatory town halls for every statewide politician.

Blessing Health hospital in Keokuk has been closed since October 2022. The state’s rural health facilities are in crisis. Sand has warned that the Trump administration’s budget cuts will make the situation worse.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

The only time you’ll catch Sand calling for radical structural change concerns the partisan electoral system itself. Sand recommends a 2020 book called The Politics Industry, by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, which argues that the two-party duopoly drives toxicity and inaction by warping incentives for cooperation. The book proposes a two-tiered reform: The top five candidates advance from an open primary, and voters use a ranked-choice system to sort the finalists in the general election. It’s similar to the system currently used in Alaska—an oasis of power sharing and independents.

Sand’s favored variation—when we first met, he described it as “a piece of what Alaska does and a piece of what Fargo, North Dakota, was doing”—would see the general election conducted under what political scientists call “approval voting.” Vote for every one of the five you’d be okay with; the most-approved candidate wins.

“If you made me king for a day…that would be it,” he says. “When we have a political system that actually is oriented to solve problems, we will have fewer problems.”

Sand’s talk of “two private clubs” can make for a sometimes-awkward arrangement with the one he is ostensibly leading. At many of his events, a field organizer who says she met Sand after forming a college study group devoted to cross-partisan news analysis (there is a Rob Sand on every campus) invites attendees to volunteer with the Iowa Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign. Then Sand takes the mic and says parties are ruining America.

Sand told me he intended to pull his weight with party fundraising but wasn’t going to lighten up. “I think there’s a lot of people—and I’ve heard from some of them multiple times—who don’t like the way I talk about the system,” he says. “They don’t like some of the phrases that I use, and so they tell me that. But I take their calls and I answer their text messages. I treat them the way that I would want to be treated, and it’s okay for us to have disagreements. At the end of the day, there are some people who want me to be, quote unquote, ‘more of a Democrat.’ I am who I am.”

His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

No one in Iowa expects Democrats this year to win a trifecta of the sort that has remade the politics of neighboring ­Minnesota and Illinois. But when I asked Sand whether he would like one down the road, he gave a long answer that included a description of the class he designed at Brown and a leadership seminar he once attended but did not include the word “yes.” Even when he is being a company man, he can go to great lengths to avoid sounding like one. In 2020, worried that Republicans might tamper with the state’s independent redistricting system, Sand encouraged people to vote for Democrats “to stand up for nonpartisanship.” When he talks about downballot races this year, he says Republican leaders have told him that they want smaller majorities.

“I’m not someone that runs around saying that the answer to 10 years of one-party control is to give the other party 10 years,” he tells voters. “If you think that that’s the answer, I invite you to visit California or New York. There, you will find problems. Some of those problems are different because the parties are different, but many are the same because human nature is the same.”

Although he does not spend all that much time punching left, it is not hard to find areas of significant friction. While Sand has vowed to veto any “culture war bill” that comes to his desk, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he’s on board with barring transgender athletes from participating in girls’ high school sports in the name of “fairness”—something Iowa’s Republican leaders have already done. He does not think soda and candy should be covered under food stamps and said at one town hall that “I don’t understand why people in my party ever wanted to ban private health insurance.”

Northwest Iowa is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. But the state’s industrial farming operations have damaging downstream effects. Voters at Sand town halls want to talk about water quality and cancer rates more than almost any other issue. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

For his running mate, Sand picked Dave Muhlbauer, a cattle and hog farmer from a big Democratic family who serves as supervisor in a county that went 71–28 for Trump—a “bridge builder,” Sand says. But he sometimes tells crowds that he thought seriously about picking a Republican or an independent. When I asked what the sticking point had been, he said, “I don’t want to get super into it” and sort of looked up at the ceiling for 10 seconds, as if trying to decide whether he really did. Sand eventually asked to go off the record. On the record, he’s said it was “hard to do, given some of the issue divides in the parties,” and there was difficulty in finding “folks where you have a demonstrated record on an issue, where there is still overlap.” The parties, after all, are different.

The one thing voters across the political spectrum seem to want to talk about in Iowa right now is whether their water is slowly poisoning them. For years, the state’s cancer rates have been rising while its water quality has been deteriorating. Researchers have placed at least part of the blame on industrial agriculture, which spreads nitrates, forever chemicals, and pesticides into the air, soil, and streams.

Heather and Cordell Hughes with their son, Jagger, spent time at Pleasant Creek Beach after kayaking. “It is what it is,” said Heather when asked about the high E. Coli levels that have caused the state’s Department of Natural Resources to post “Swimming Not Recommended” signs at this and other beaches. “We won’t let it stop us from living our lives. We are perfectly healthy, but I told our son don’t swallow the water.”Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“It’s killing all of us—everything, not just our children, our animals,” a woman told Sand in Council Bluffs. A voter at the same event told me, “They took away all the sensors so we don’t know what’s in the water,” which sounds conspiratorial but more or less happened: As the water crisis intensified, Reynolds and the legislature slashed funding to the University of Iowa’s monitoring system, forcing nonprofits and counties to pick up the bill. Test no nitrates, see no nitrates.

More than just a public health threat, the loss of something so elemental represents a massive failure of self-governance. The election could hinge on what kind of solution Iowans want. Sand, when discussing the state’s years of inaction, evokes Jesus confronting the money changers: “I would love to flip some tables over on water quality in the state of Iowa.” But he has not been the loudest voice on the issue. During the year Sand spent developing a policy, the ultra-­MAHA Republican nominee, Zach Lahn, was explicitly linking cancer with monopolistic corporate agriculture. Sand doesn’t call out Big Ag, nor is he picking a fight with the Iowa Farm Bureau by floating punitive measures. When cancer comes up, he acknowledges the toxins in the water but often broadens the list of culprits to include alcohol, smoking, and radon. Sand’s most ambitious idea to clean the water is to provide more incentives for farmers to participate in conservation programs like wetlands restoration. Cooperation.

 
“I would love to flip some tables
over on water quality
in the state of Iowa.”

Beaver Creek, south of Iowa Falls, Iowa, surrounded by farm fields with numerous tile drainage pipes draining water from the fields directly into the creek.

This is a neat distillation of Sand’s long-standing approach to most structural problems. There is an aversion to bluster, an emphasis on deliverables, a belief that stakeholders often accused of standing in the way would work collaboratively if politicians would let them. It also happens to be the area where Sand’s biography is most vulnerable to a populist critique. His current campaign, like all of his previous ones, is heavily financed by his wife and her family, the Lauridsens—owners of an Iowa conglomerate that makes additives for soup stock and pet food, among other things, and that Christine Lauridsen Sand currently runs as CEO. The Laurid­sens have contributed $11.5 million to Sand’s gubernatorial run, including $7 million before he officially announced. In a 2022 contest that he survived by 2,893 votes, family money helped Sand outspend his opponent 40–1.

Lahn, who upset a Trump-backed congressman in the primary by castigating hedge funds and corporations, told voters at the Iowa State Fair that Sand had been “coronated” because of his wealth and was propped up by a company “which, by the way, makes a lot of the products that end up in our streams and are causing sickness in our state.” The Lauridsen Group declined to comment, but Sand, challenged by a voter at a recent town hall on this idea that his secret ingredient is literally a company that makes secret ingredients, argued that the firm reduced the industry’s excesses by turning waste products into commodities. The family’s money was real, but so were his grassroots contributors; at last count, Sand pointed out, he even had more small-dollar Republican donors than Lahn. Ultimately, it was about trust.

Could Sand, the voter demanded, really separate his family from his responsibilities? “Watch me,” he said.

RelatedZach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?

These questions of who is really what they claim to be hang over the race. Lahn maintains that Sand is using an agreeable disposition and affinity for gas station pizza to mask a secret California-style liberalism. Sand’s most persistent argument against Lahn is that he is an interloper, a “part-time Iowan” who commutes by private plane from Wichita, and in fact has poured his own considerable fortune into the race. (Sand does not generally add, but could, that Lahn moved to Kansas after fighting Medicaid expansion in Montana on behalf of the Koch network, then founded a private school funded by fertilizer magnate Chase Koch and later—after both men divorced—married Koch’s ex-wife.) Sand’s Derek Zoolander era has also come in for a critical reappraisal. At a community center in the town of Harlan, as Sand asked for donations to combat negative ads, an elderly lady in the front row interrupted to ask very nicely if he had really been “a European underwear model.”

“For starters, I’m American,” he said. He changed the subject to volunteering.

Cornfields near Masonville. Iowa is the number one producer of corn in the United States with annual harvests in the range of 2.5 billion bushels of corn.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Listen to Sand for long enough and you might start to notice that something important seems to be missing from his diagnosis of America’s fraying civic culture. Perhaps some larger force, or figure, pushing people toward cruelty and division. Across the 10 events I attended, Sand spoke for more than nine hours and mentioned Trump zero times. When I asked him about it, he looked at me like I had grown a rack of antlers.

“Why would a guy who is the state auditor, who is running for governor, talk about the president?” Sand says. “Like, this is one of those really big-picture things where I think, again, I’d really like all of us to totally hit the reset button.”

In fact, Sand does talk about how policies in Washington are hurting Iowa. Lahn’s practically giddy support for DOGE, and its attendant slashing of cancer research and food assistance, seem to be fair game. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is throwing rural hospitals into further crisis, is toxic, too. But he insisted to me that the man behind it wasn’t worth his time: “People know who the president is—I don’t need to remind them.”

In an era when the stench of national politics has seeped into every facet of life, it is jarring to go to a political event that avoids it entirely. But it wasn’t just Sand. The singing seemed to have an effect. The closest anyone came to uttering Trump’s name was a woman who brought up the “dictator-friendly Republican Party.” Sand gently cut her off. “I want to bring a lot of people in, and we’ll just talk about Iowa,” he said. That was that.

But if Sand can avoid talking about Trump on the trail, he would find it harder to avoid dealing with him in office. The administration has subjected Democratic governors to federal investigations, blocked their projects, denied their requests for disaster relief, and sicced masked agents on their communities. Sand speaks about the administration’s militant crackdown on immigrants sparingly. Would he co­operate with ICE like the current governor? Sand didn’t want to compare himself to Rey­nolds, he told me: “I’m happy to co­operate in doing good things. I’m not going to cooperate in doing bad things.” I brought up the mass deployments to Illinois and Minnesota. What, I wondered, had Sand learned from that experience?

“I guess if we had those situations here in Iowa, I’d just be interested in assessing them as they are happening here, assuming they would be the same,” he told me. “Obviously, the tactical decisions at the federal level have changed a lot since then, and so I don’t think that we would find ourselves redoing what happened there, and I don’t want to prejudge what might be happening in Iowa later based on what happened there.”

Sand wants a chiller civic life. A politics you can escape from at Thanksgiving, rooted in the idea that more of us would be singing the same tune, more of the time, if the incentives were simply better aligned. Sometimes he’ll literally just offer the mic to a Republican in the room to say whatever they want. And, as if to prove his point, it’s often kind of boring.

Lyle Grimm pushes chickens into the freezer after slaughter at Grimm Family Farm in Williamsburg. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

But it is also hard to avoid the sense that one reason Sand so studiously avoids touching the stove is not because the stove is a construct we really need to get away from or because Iowans really aren’t that interested in the stove, but because the stove is actually very fucking hot. His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

At the last stop on my tour, a reporter asked him about the Supreme Court’s decision that week to uphold birthright citizenship. It had been the correct decision, Sand said, but it should not have come to that. The reasons it did get so far are worth acknowledging, though. Surely someone who has read Pat Buchanan and Peter Brimelow understands that there is a powerful political movement that doesn’t want to play nice and doesn’t want to harmonize. How, I asked Sand, could he expect to overcome these forces without confronting them?

“I don’t think that reflects most people, I truly don’t,” Sand says. “I think that the vast majority of people, they’re supporting the party they’re supporting because they agree with it more—but that doesn’t mean that they’re thinking that it’s doing a bang-up job.”

And then, just like that, he returned to a more comfortable space. “Look at how low the Democratic Party’s approval ratings are,” he says. “A lot of that’s from Democrats. Why? Because our two-party system sucks at solving problems. People want results.”

If you are a podcast-ready, 44-year-old white male pushing a New Kind of Politics, people are inevitably going to start to talk about what comes next. The chatter has followed Sand since college, when friends speculated that their buddy would run for president. Twenty years ago, when Sand ran Denise O’Brien’s campaign for Iowa ag secretary, she says she believed even then “that Rob would be our governor.” In his first year as auditor, he was already being followed by a Republican tracker. In May, The New York Times included Sand on a list of possible 2028 presidential candidates. Sand is, depending on the publication, “the most dangerous Democrat in Iowa,” the party’s “bowhunting influencer,” or maybe even “Kennedyesque.” Sand is also, according to Sand, kind of tired of being talked about like this.

Sand takes questions at the Dubuque County Fairgrounds.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“People from somewhere else talk about it like they’re from somewhere else—I’m the state auditor in Iowa, I’m running for governor,” he protested when I asked about his national reputation.

Some of the frenzy of interest and speculation, however, is self-inflicted. It was Sand who pitched a profile of himself to the Times after he was elected and took the reporter bowhunting. One supposes a reporter for The Atlantic did not end up sitting shotgun in his truck three years ago after a day of hitchhiking.

“I know that there’s a lot of people who pay attention to all this stuff, and they get excited about it, even if it has no impact on their life because it’s half a country away—I probably would have described myself that way a long time ago,” he says. “But as I have gotten more and more responsibility, I’ve had to narrow my focus of the things that I read about or care about, because I really can have an impact if I know a lot about stuff that’s happening right here.” Politics is “a hobby for a lot of people,” Sand says; Iowa is life.

But if the job he really wants is indeed the one he’s running for right now, his story resonates outside the state because of the question Sand invites people to answer. It is one that Democrats have been asking for 10 years, and forever—both in Iowa and about it. It is not really so different from the impulse that once compelled a 25-year-old law student from Decorah to triumphantly email a Newsweek reporter hours after Obama won the caucuses and promised to move “beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger.” It is the dream of a Different Kind of Democrat, someone strong in the ways people think of them as weak, a unifying figure from the heartland who can clear away the fog and leave you wondering, if only for a moment, What if politics just felt like this all the time?

Everything is terrible in Trump’s America, but it’s important not to forget that it is also very stupid. It turns out that when you let a mush-brained despot like President Donald Trump back into the White House, you get the sort of tacky despot behavior like exiling the ex-girlfriend of one of the despot’s large adult sons—himself no doubt a burgeoning baby despot—to a faraway land. And then…

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Another one of the people President Donald Trump hired to investigate the cases against him has quit.

Kurt Olsen resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida Monday after spending months working on the probe into Trump’s classified documents case, as well as the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As many as eight people have now left the office. The departures spell doom for the investigation, which was looking into officials from the Obama and Biden eras, but thus far had not resulted in any charges.

Olsen has a history of election denial-related work. His previous position was a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” according to the FBI, and in 2020, he worked with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to try to convince the Supreme Court to overturn that year’s presidential election results.

Olsen was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee in 2022 over allegations that he “contacted various high-level officials at the Department of Justice” to file challenges to the election results on the president’s orders, speaking with Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He also was behind the search warrant to search Fulton County, Georgia’s election offices earlier this year. The FBI seized boxes of ballots and other 2020 election materials.

Now that Olsen and many others have left a Department of Justice office tasked with going after Trump’s enemies, it is unclear what happens to those efforts. Is the probe fizzling out, or is Olsen leaving because it was going too far? Trump’s revenge and election activities only raise more questions, as the Trump administration has no results for its efforts just over a month before the midterms.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

I just published a book that exposes Russian disinformation operations. Now I—that is, a fake version of me—have become part of a Russian disinformation operation.

How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America chronicles the shadow war of clandestine influence and disinformation operations—many implemented to aid Trump—that Putin has been mounting against the United States for a decade. It ends with the warning that Moscow would likely attack the ongoing midterm elections to help Trump and the GOP. Within days of the book’s publication two weeks ago, media outlets reported that Russia’s disinformation operatives, using phony accounts on social media platforms, had started hurling derogatory material at Democrats.

Last week, this covert disinformation operation widened to spread scurrilous allegations against Democratic candidates—phony accusations that were falsely attributed to me.

So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.

In the book, I report on several secret Russian disinformation units that produced and disseminated false allegations about Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign. One was dubbed Matryoshka by disinformation trackers. (That’s the name for those iconic Russian nesting dolls.) It zapped out on X and other social media platforms assorted lies about Harris: She had an abortion when she was 17. She was exhibiting early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her grandfather was a communist. Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

When news organizations recently revealed that Matryoshka was at it again, this time concocting videos that purported to be CNN news segments covering Hollywood celebrities trash-talking Democrats (Nazi whores!), I reported that these covert operatives were also generating and posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.” And there were others.

While I was working on that story, @antibot4navalny, a group of anonymous activists who monitor Russian disinformation, informed me that Matryoshka had also posted on X a supposed Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic Party had paid $289 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would run reports that “promote gender transition among minors.” I quickly published a piece exposing this absurd disinformation. After a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X, the company took down this fraudulent video.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”

This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”

Here are screenshots from that video:

Mother Jones Mother Jones

To be clear, none of this is true—though Enemies of Democracy for Dummies is not a bad idea for a book.

Again, a lawyer for Mother Jones reached out to X. But by then, it was the weekend, and this fake CNN video claiming I had published a book full of dirt on Democrats that would affect the election remained online. It looked as if it initially drew nearly 200,000 views, but I was reliably informed that Matryoshka was using bots to juice this number and that this post likely had only reached a few thousand X users.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate.

As with the previous fake and nonsensical video reporting that Mother Jones had revealed a $289 million payment from the DNC to CNN’s chief for pro-trans coverage, this one seemed a bit too silly to have much impact. It was more of an irritation than a cause of great concern.

Then came other fake videos.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate. One “revealed” that a Democratic senatorial candidate “is a closeted gay man who hides his sexual orientation in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle.” It said he had previously been accused of “embezzling public funds to pay for the services of male sex workers.”

With ominous synth music playing, this video segues to footage of me and written text in which I purportedly state that in my Enemies of Democracy for Dummies book “I present evidence” this Democratic candidate “dated underaged boys and had sexual relations with them.” The quote continues: “As a gay man, I find it outrageous that a gay man would hide behind a woman to maintain his lavish lifestyle.” (Not that it matters, but I’m not gay.) The video ends with a card saying, “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Throughout this one-and-a-half-minute video, the Mother Jones logo appears in the top right corner.

The other videos are all in the same style. (For obvious reasons, I am not linking to them or mentioning the candidates by name.) They claim that a Democratic candidate for governor who served in Vietnam “is suspected of killing 37 civilians” in a massacre during that war, that another Democratic gubernatorial candidate recruited minors into sex work and “while working for the Girl Scouts…organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party,” that a third Democratic candidate for governor caused “a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol,” and that another Democratic gubernatorial nominee sold crack to college students, “resulting in 17 deaths,” and so on.

Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels.

Each of these videos features me offering a colorful quote about the allegation and noting it’s straight out of Enemies of Democracy for Dummies. Similar to the bogus video about the DNC payment to the CNN chief, some of these X posts show nearly 200,000 views. But the real numbers are likely much lower. They have not, as of this writing, gone viral. (X did not respond immediately to a request to delete the posts with these videos.)

So the journalist who wrote a book to call attention to Putin’s disinformation crusade against American democracy is now being used by Moscow’s disinformation operatives to subvert the midterm elections for Trump’s benefit.

I’ve been asked by colleagues and friends if this is frightening. Not yet. Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels. And, as we all know, it’s tough to beat back a lie on the internet. We’re all vulnerable to a cyber assault.

There are five weeks to go to Election Day. How extensive might Putin’s war on the midterms become? How far will he go to boost Trump and the Republicans? If Trump tries to spark chaos and a crisis with accusations of vote fraud or actions to interfere with the election and the vote tally, Putin’s disinformation army can be expected to do whatever it can to bolster any false claims and conspiracy theories flying about—or to cook up its own.

One reason I wrote How Russia Won was to counter the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative peddled relentlessly for years by Trump, Republicans, MAGA influencers, and right-wing media personalities who have denied Russia has been covertly intervening in US elections. By echoing Putin’s own denials, these useful idiots have been complicit in a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy. My point was to show the United States has been under continuous assault from Moscow, as Russia has schemed to assist Trump and the Republicans. With this disinformation operation incorporating truly fake news about me, Putin’s Matryoshka crew has proved the premise of my book.

President Donald Trump’s inner circle is already bracing for a “f*cking rough” round of midterm elections.

With just weeks until November, Trump advisers have privately acknowledged that there is little chance for the president’s party to prevail, CNN reported Monday night.

“It’s obviously going to be f*cking rough,” one adviser told CNN. The best case scenario is for Republicans to lose the House, but narrowly retain control of the Senate, the adviser added.

As Trump’s polling has hit humiliating new lows, he has opted to use the midterms as a referendum on his presidency—leading some GOP candidates to quietly scrub any mention of “Trump” from their campaign platforms, and others to openly criticize his policies.

Trump intends to spend much of October on the road “spending money, and helping every one of them get elected,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday.

One official told CNN that Trump intends to be “playing hard in Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio,” and to focus on battleground districts. Another official, however, told the outlet that even in purple states, Trump will only be visiting more conservative areas. Next week, the president will head to Alabama and Oklahoma.

This story was originally published by The 19th. President Donald Trump has revived a policy change from his first term that gives immigration agents broad authority to deny green cards and visas to applicants who have received public benefits—or whose families have. The change to what’s known as the public charge rule took effect on Sept. 18. Trump’s first-term attempt to change…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | GOP is already deep in the stages of grief as midterm losses loom…

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