Political News

Yet another person with close ties to Donald Trump’s White House has been linked to a pro-Russia Balkan regime.

Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, works for a political lobbying firm that has a $35,000-per-month contract to represent a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. She traveled there as recently as August.

A photograph circulated by Evi Kokalari, a conservative Albanian American activist, showed the younger Wiles wielding a rifle and standing next to a man that CBS News identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. The image appeared to have been initially posted to Wiles’s Instagram story with the caption “mostly work + some serious fun!”

Continental Strategy, Wiles’s employer, confirmed to CBS that she traveled to Republika Srpska in August, but said she has not lobbied the U.S. government on its behalf. Yeah, she probably wouldn’t have to do much—her mom would do it for her. As of Thursday afternoon, Wiles’s page on her company’s website was inaccessible.

This news comes as MAGA world has turned its ire on two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, who took time out of their presumably busy pre-midterm elections schedules to travel to the Balkans to assist in that territory’s elections. The two men were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to provide counsel on voting issues to the government, which is led by far-right nationalists. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Both LaCivita and Blair are connected to Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect them from the White House’s ire. Trump tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants,” but his chief of staff’s child may be harder to disown.

“We tamed electricity, invented the light bulb, developed the airplane, harnessed the atom, unleashed the power of personal computers, created the Internet, pioneered superintelligence, and invented almost everything else of genius and great importance anywhere in the world,” President Donald Trump boasted on Thursday. “We will always be on top. There is nobody that can compete with us.” 

The remark came from the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit, an initiative by the Trump administration to accelerate American scientific research and development with artificial intelligence technology. 

Trump announced that a group of companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, and Amazon—have committed over $2.4 billion to the Genesis Mission, which advertises itself as uniting Department of Energy labs with “industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.”

The additional investment into the Genesis Mission, which the president launched in a November 2025 executive order, comes as his administration continues to eliminate government funding for critical scientific research, among them, as my colleagues have extensively reported, studies into chronic diseases and climate change. 

Trump also awarded several leaders of those tech companies with the National Medal of Science: Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices’ CEO Lisa Su. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell CEO Michael Dell were given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

As CNBC pointed out on Wednesday, each of the medal recipients has contributed financially to Trump or Republican causes. Musk was Trump’s biggest financial supporter, at nearly $300 million, in his 2024 presidential campaign. Nvidia’s Huang donated to help fund the White House ballroom and gave $1 million for Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony. Microsoft, under Nadella, also contributed $1 million to the inauguration. Dell is a longtime Trump donor who provided $6.25 billion for “Trump Accounts”—$250 seed contributions for 25 million children.

And according to his most recent financial disclosures from September, Trump bought or sold shares in Nvidia, Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Tesla, Advanced Micro Devices, and Dell.

Trump, in other words, is replacing established research institutions with the for-profit corporations who have curried favor with him. Whether AI will be able to replace millions of dollars in lost federal research funding at bulwarks like the National Institutes of Health is less clear.

The Trump administration’s mission to Make America Healthy Again took a literally shitty turn, with a nationwide outbreak of diarrhea-causing cyclospora this summer—and new data shows the public is noticing the government’s mismanagement. A Gallup survey released on Thursday finds the public’s confidence in the government’s role in food safety at a new low. Just 47% of Americans have “a great…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Mamdani calls for AI regulation ‘at every single level’…

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On Thursday afternoon, President Trump awarded national medals for advancements in technology and science to six CEOs and founders: Google’s Sergey Brin, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Advanced Micro Devices’ Lisa Su, Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk. These six awardees collectively donated at least $6 billion to Trump’s campaign, his inauguration fund, his White House ballroom, pro-Trump super PACs, and other Republican initiatives aligned with Trump’s agenda, a New Republic analysis found.

Congratulations to all six individuals for realizing that the president can be very easily bought. 

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, current Gemini AI head

Google’s parent company, Alphabet (which Brin co-founded), donated $22 billion to the Trust for the National Mall, a fund that will help construct Trump’s White House ballroom plan. The donation was made as part of a settlement in Trump’s January 6–related lawsuit against YouTube. Google separately  donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Brin himself donated half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee last year, and spent more than $100 million in an effort to kill California’s proposed wealth tax. 

These donations don’t include other clear links between Google and Trump, like the tech company’s decision to hire Trump ally Carlos Trujillo’s lobbying firm, Continental Strategy, to lobby the White House.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

Huang donated an unspecified amount to the construction of President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom last year, and attended a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. His company, NVIDIA, also announced it would be pledging $1 billion to Trump’s Genesis Mission AI project on Thursday morning, shortly before Huang received his award. 

Lisa Su, president and CEO, Advanced Micro Devices

Su’s AMD company donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, and pledged to give 15 percent of its processor sales revenue from China to the Trump administration.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, xAI CEO, X Corp. CTO

Musk, who also served as a quasi-member of the Trump Cabinet as head of DOGE, has extensive financial connections to the Trump administration. In 2024, he wasn’t just Trump’s largest donor, he was the biggest political spender in the entire country, shelling out $277 million directly to Trump and other Republican campaigns. Musk helped form Trump’s America PAC and ran a $1 million election “lottery” scheme to pay Republican voters. 

Michael Dell, Dell Technologies founder, chair, and CEO 

Dell and his wife gifted the Trump administration $6.25 billion to the president’s “Trump accounts” program for children. 

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Nadella’s company, Microsoft, contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and an undisclosed amount to his White House ballroom. 

Trump has disclosed millions in stock trades in the companies run by all six individuals.

North Carolinians were blissfully unaware that they survived one of the “great water hurricanes” of all time—until Donald Trump said so at the White House summit for scientific achievement Thursday.

All hurricanes lash rain as a fundamental part of the storm system, but the president suggested Thursday that there was a difference between a cyclone and what he described as a “water hurricane.”

“I will tell you personally, because I was involved, we had a hurricane—one of the great water hurricanes of all time—delivered more water than at any time that we can remember on record,” Trump said in the midst of a speech intended to celebrate Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink technologies.

Yet somehow it’s not the first time that Trump has leaned on the bizarre phrase. The president previously pitched the idea during a presidential campaign stop in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in October 2024. He lamented the role that water had played during Hurricane Helene—a Category 4 storm that ravaged the state and simultaneously sparked Trump’s interest in dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I must’ve been the first [to visit the area], I followed that storm right in,” Trump said two years ago. “But I saw the devastation, I came back the following week because I didn’t want to get in, it was a travesty, it was a vicious, it was water, the water was the worst we’d ever seen, it was a water hurricane, that’s what it was.”

Pretty much everything Trump said about hurricanes at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age summit Thursday was blatantly dishonest and, ironically, logically unsound. Despite the damage it wreaked, Hurricane Helene was not the most severe rainfall event in U.S. history. That distinction would go to Hurricane Harvey, which battered portions of Texas and Louisiana across eight days of rainfall in 2017.

He was also not involved. Trump visited the Tar Heel State once to formally acknowledge the wreckage, making three stops across North Carolina on October 21, 2024—nearly a month after the storm had passed.

“The power of nature. Nothing you can do about it, but you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House. It’s been not good. Not good,” Trump said at the time.

The storm inspired an unfounded MAGA conspiracy that the Biden administration was utilizing FEMA funds to assist undocumented immigrants. But even after North Carolinians voted Trump back into office, the Trump administration made it remarkably difficult for the state to access the emergency relief.

Instead, the Trump campaign initiated a GoFundMe where Americans could privately donate cash (on top of their taxes) to help rebuild the damaged regions of North Carolina. They managed to raise $7.7 million, but that money effectively disappeared within a year.

Trump’s team distributed the money to a handful of Christian charities with close ties to the president, including Mtn2Sea Ministries, Water Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, the Clinch Foundation, and Sweetwater Mission. As religious entities, none were legally required to publicly disclose their expenditures, making it next to impossible for the press, the communities in need, or those who donated to actually track down the dollars.

Hurricane Helene killed at least 250 people across seven states, making it the second-deadliest storm to hit the mainland in U.S. history. More than 100 of those fatalities happened in North Carolina.

The state is still dealing with the fallout of the storm: state officials are still working to provide internet and housing assistance for thousands of people that lost their homes to the hurricane, according to a factsheet released by Governor Josh Stein’s office in September.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad to be open to the public.

Speaking to Jack Posobiec for Real America’s Voice on the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, Hegseth was asked about the decision to execute Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian in 2009 on the base before being shot, wounded, and arrested. President Trump approved Hasan’s death by firing squad to take place December 3, the first such execution in over 60 years.

“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said. “We know what it is, it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

What Hegseth means by “public” is unclear. Will it be broadcast live? Will spectators from outside of the military be allowed onto the Texas base to see it? We’ll probably learn more in the coming days, but current Army regulations allow for at least two media outlets to be present for the execution. No legal execution has ever been broadcast live in the U.S., and the country’s last public execution was in 1936.

Since he was convicted of a military crime, Hasan’s execution required approval from Hegseth and then Trump, which was granted. Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t want this to be the last firing squad execution. In April, the DOJ announced it was bringing back federal firing squads for death penalty sentences. President Biden had paused all executions and commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole as he was leaving the White House.

For what is perhaps the world’s stuffiest, most self-important, and—sure—rarefied cultural award, the Nobel Prize in Literature is also often quite funny. That a lot of people take it far too seriously has been the premise of the tens of thousands of words we have written about it, stretching back more than a decade.

Still, the best joke about the Nobel in those eleven years was one we didn’t write. In 2016, the Swedish Academy Academy awarded world literature’s most prestigious honor to Bob Dylan, who promptly did everything he could not to accept it. This was funny in part because we had predicted that Dylan would not win the prize—not that year, and not ever. But this couldn’t lay a glove on the bigger joke that Dylan had won at all. It was a lesson in humility that we’ve carried with us ever since: The Nobel Prize in Literature is always funnier than anything we could write about it. 

It was a lesson we should have already learned. In 2007, cameras ambushed Doris Lessing outside her London home as she was coming back from grocery shopping. She had just won global literature’s biggest prize, the assembled journalists excitedly told her. “Oh Christ,” she responded. She had already won “every bloody one” of Europe’s prizes. The Nobel, she sighed, completed the “royal flush.”

Lessing was as expertly deadpan and awkward as the best of British comedy. It wasn’t entirely clear if she was irritated because she won the Nobel Prize, because she was impatient to put away her groceries, or because her house was surrounded by the worst and most obnoxious people on Earth (British journalists). What was clear, even then, was that this kind of thing likely would not happen again—anyone currently Laureate-worthy (even William Vollmann) would almost certainly carry a cellphone while shopping (even while doing the kind of shopping Vollman does). In any case, it was a great video—and one I thought would never be equaled, let alone surpassed, in the annals of Nobel announcements. 

This video of Japanese fans reacting to the news that Haruki Murakami had—once more—gone un-Laureated on Thursday morning is just as perfect and every bit as funny. It may be even better: 

Video: A Haruki Marukami mega fan reacts with sadness to the announcement that his favorite novelist did not win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. In their haste to create an announcement sign, someone misspelled the name of the winner, Anne Carson. https://t.co/uip4EoL0uX

— Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@mrjeffu) October 8, 2026

An anguished man holds up his arms in genuine pain while desperately clinging to a sign attesting to his love for Murakami (and wearing his favorite author’s signature item of clothing—a T-shirt that is a little too loud). Then the camera pans to an older man wearing a ridiculous pink beret, sitting next to a younger one wearing a Forrest Gump t-shirt. Then, the camera cuts again, to a woman holding a white board containing the name of the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature: “Ann Carson,” the Canadian poet. Her name is actually “Anne,” though that misspelling only pushes an already perfect video into the pantheon.

The torment, the stupid T-shirts, the sense of absolute, absurd devotion: It is exactly like a crowd scene you would see in the middle of a college football bowl game. It’s genuinely funny. This is what it’s all about. (It is also—down to the Forrest Gump shirt—exactly what Philip Roth went through every year in early October as he sat in his agent Andrew Wylie’s office at the crack of dawn waiting for a call that would never come.)

Despite our history of bad calls, we remain as certain as ever that Murakami will never win the Nobel Prize, and this video only makes us more convinced. The problem isn’t that Murakami writes exclusively to jazz on pristine 180 gram vinyl or that he does so surrounded by perfect, bespoke beechwood furniture. Nor is it that the Swedish Academy is biased against cat people (they prefer labradors) and jazz (they have penciled in Yung Lean for 2050’s Nobel), or that they do not appreciate the challenge of achieving truly al dente pasta (they only eat meatballs). The nonexistence of rich and rewarding friendships with women in Murakami’s work or its suffocating sterility may even be points in his favor. 

The beautiful video of Murakami’s fans ripping up their (frankly ridiculous) T-shirts gets at the real problem: Murakami will never win because he’s in another tier of influence than practically every other “literary” novelist. The iteration of the Nobel Prize in Literature that has been in place since the scandal-plagued annus horribilis of 2018 is serious and refined and uninterested in fandom and mania. It is inarguable and unimpeachable. It does not approve of people rending their garments on behalf of their favorite novelist (who has, incidentally, published an entire book about his garments).

Carson, for what it’s worth, is inarguable and unimpeachable, a consummate Laureate for a Nobel Prize now exclusively bestowed on the consummate. The honorific attached to the work of the two scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a day earlier also applies to her writing: It is devoted to “solving the mystery of life’s asymmetry.” Abstract, intertextual, genre- and form-bending, Carson is technically a poet, though that term only goes so far. When Carson was informed by the Swedish Academy that she had won the Nobel Prize, she was at her home in Iceland, where she is a citizen. She told them she was there “listening to the wind.” 

Writing about music may be like dancing about architecture, but listening to the wind is actually what Anne Carson has done over and over again in more than 20 works written across four decades that have been described as “poems,” “novels,” “plays,” and “librettos,” among other descriptors. But “Anne Carson listens to the wind” is closer to the truth, which is probably ineffable—or at least only capable of being described by Carson herself. 

Take Nox, among her most famous works, which is a suite of interconnected poems published in an accordion-like fold-out box. The box is not a gimmick: It’s essential to the work itself, which is devoted to the death of her brother. (It is also really hard to describe without visual aids—specifically a box—so you’ll have to trust us.) Carson has always been committed to form—box-shaped and otherwise—but naturally she has other preoccupations: grief, longing, and, as Carson writes in The Gender of Sound, the way that patriarchal culture puts “a door on the female mouth.” That door, Carson writes, has been present “from antiquity to the present day,” which gets at another feature of her work, a deep and explicit interest in classical literature, and the way that it continues to reveal great continuities despite thousands of years of social upheaval.  

Carson, if it’s not already clear, is an unusually tactile writer. This is true both literally (see the aforementioned box) and in a more expansive sense: In nearly all her work, Carson has shown an interest in getting beyond form and even language. When she says she is out there in Iceland listening to the wind, she’s being as honest as the wind herself—and not just because Iceland is among the windiest places in the world, windwise. (According to unconfirmed reports, Carson is currently in discussion with New Directions about the feasibility of packaging a new prose poem in a wooden box that will contain authentic wind from Hvannadalshnúkur. If the supply chain holds, look out for Hvannadalshnúrtúre this winter, retailing at $89.99, though that price may fluctuate based on the openness of the Strait of Hormuz.) 

Carson’s whole deal—ruminative, form-bending, wind-obsessed—makes her an especially fitting winner in 2026, the year artificial intelligence entrenched itself in intellectual life and began (or continued, if you assume that James Patterson has had a prototype LLM churning out dozens of fast-paced thrillers since the 1990s—though, don’t worry, his collabs with Bill Clinton and Mr. Beast were all produced the old-fashioned way) to strangle book publishing. To present a thorough list of 2026 AI literary controversies I’d probably need to ask Claude for help, which would sort of undermine my point. 

In any case, it’s already obvious that publishing has proven to be highly vulnerable to AI scams, deceptive writers, and corporate hacks trying to optimize and scrape the life out of literature. It will get worse before it gets better, which makes writing like Carson’s work particularly appealing. There’s no way Anne Carson, author of The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, is going to be captured by the machines or turned into a Hulu microriginal. Carson is not just averse to literary celebrity but reluctant to do any publicity at all, something that is practically heroic in the current environment—her reticence makes Doris Lessing look like Joyce Carol Oates. (Which isn’t to say that she’s averse to modernity. There are surpising flickers of contemporaneity in a lot of Carson’s work, and until her win this morning she was most infamous in 2026 for a London Review of Books ode to Rosalia.)

Like Lessing, Carson has her (wrong) detractors, and their ranks will certainly grow in the coming weeks. In a stinging 2024 piece in The Nation, the classicist and Odyssey translator (and The Odyssey hater) Emily Wilson compared Carson to two writers: the Instagram poet Rupi Kaur and the Hulu novelist Margaret Atwood. That is, to be fair, the kind of thing that I used to do when we wrote articles handicapping the Nobel betting odds every year, especially in that column’s later, more Don Rickles–infused era. As far as hating goes, one can only respect it. (“Zaniness”? OK, sure. we would have said her prose made Sigur Ros’s lyrics seem intelligible. And that her next book would be an improvement because it would contain no words at all—though it would be “contained” in a perfectly carved ebony box. And also probably something about the whole Rosalía thing.)

Maybe we’ve gotten soft, but we don’t really believe any of that. Zany or not, Carson is notable because she’s sui generis. They broke the mold when they made her. (Shattered Fagments of the Mold is currently on backorder. Each fragment comes packaged with a sliver of the other kind of mold, harvested from the fjords of Iceland. Cannot be moved across state lines.) 

Both the lovers and the haters can agree that Anne Carson is an original, a macro one, even as the Nobel Prize in Literature itself has become increasingly predictable. As the Swedish journalist, novelist, and ace Nobel watcher Jens Lijenstrad noted to me Thursday morning, over the past ten years the prize has consistently rotated between men and women and Europeans. Bettors have noticed this, which is why Carson, Canadian-born and female, rocketed up the betting odds in the hours before the announcement. (Odds are next year’s winner will be a European man: Congratulations, Mircea Cărtărescu! And more importantly congratulations to his fans—when he wins you have my word that I’ll buy both of you shots.) 

As the post-scandal years roll past, it’s becoming clearer that the Nobel Prize in Literature is now solely the province of a fairly narrow set of practitioners of high literature who possess a sterling reputation and attract modest sales. Not too long ago, you could count on some weird thrills and variations—a highbrow but still popular writer followed by a French litterateur whose novels depict a man who finds himself returning again and again to a woman he met once, during the war, when things were harder, but also simpler, when one could feel the tectonic shifts of history and the tobacco-stained breath of politics on the wind. There’s not so much of that going around these days. More than it’s ever been, the Nobel Prize is targeted to graduate students and booksellers, which is to say the unemployed and the underemployed, but also the broodily bespectacled. 

That is not to say it has been without conflict. The decision to award Carson was controversial within the Swedish Academy, according to the Swedish literature podcast Gästabudet. While you should generally discount anything you hear from podcasts, unless the speaker is Bill Simmons and the subject is a Miramax film about poker from the late 1990s, I have heard similar rumors from Scandinavia, though they’ve all come secondhand and have to be qualified as “gossip.” That fractiousness, real or otherwise, isn’t especially surprising given the realities of the Prize, which can only be awarded when the majority of the 18-person Swedish Academy agrees on a candidate. 

It seems likely next year’s Nobel will follow the pattern and be awarded to a man, most likely a European man. Still, the (rumored) infighting could mean that the winner will be a compromise candidate aimed at smoothing over internal divisions, which could point to a swerve, like when the then-unknown Abulrazak Gurnah won in 2021, or someone “safe,” though what that means in practice is anyone’s guess. 

What next? Every fall, like clockwork, articles that should have been tweets pop-up bemoaning the fact that numerous great writers never won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges all died un-Laureated, as did Philip Roth, if you’re into that kind of thing. These tired exhortations are often presented with a whiff of forbidden truth: Big Nobel is trying to conceal something important from you. The Nobel Prize in Literature is actually not a comprehensive prize for Best Book People, these articles insist.

Well, yes. There are many reasons why these writers didn’t win (in order: horny, goofy, horny, Jewish, horny, woman, Argentinian, Philip Roth), but above all they didn’t win because the Nobel has historically eschewed the concept of the “laundry list.” Way back in 1901 when the first Prize was awarded, everybody knew that Tolstoy was canonical, which is one reason why it was given to Sully Prudhomme, a melancholic French poet who lived in obscurity and died less than eight years after his selection as Literature’s Next Top Guy. If the Nobel has not always favored the esoteric, eccentric, and non-canonical over the canonical, it has at least attempted to balance the obvious and the surprising. To put it somewhat differently, it has often proceeded from the presumption that the literary canon is always in flux and that no one can be really sure which writers will be deemed important in 100 years time. 

Today the Nobel seems trapped between its newfound consistency and its old-school tendency toward novelty, rewarding writers who fit the bill (even if they provoke controversy within the Academy) but still tend toward various kinds of marginality. For now that means no to Murakami and yes to Cărtărescu. Perennial betting favorite Can Xue will probably win in a couple of years and perennial betting favorite Salman Rushdie probably will not. Fair enough.  

In 2023, after Jon Fosse won the Nobel, we noted that the Prize was “so back.” Two years later, after László Krasznahorkai won it, we opined that it was “boring now,” more or less for the same reasons that excited us when Fosse won. Like the Nobel, this column contains multitudes. 

Vice President JD Vance returned Thursday to his quixotic effort to make widespread fraud stick, this time going after U.S. universities and leaning into his racist othering of foreign-born workers. “Some of America’s most elite universities bring in foreigners again to undercut the wages of American residents,” Vance said, flanked by Attorney General Todd Blanche. But it wasn’t…

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The Trump administration wants to prosecute Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was one of the star witnesses for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Punchbowl News reports that the Department of Justice wants to criminally indict Hutchinson, accusing her of lying to the January 6 committee about what she saw that day in 2021. The DOJ’s civil rights division presented evidence to a federal grand jury on Tuesday, and is expected to present additional evidence and witnesses in the coming weeks, unnamed sources told Punchbowl. NBC News confirmed the report. Hutchinson, who worked for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has not yet received a subpoena from the grand jury.

Republicans have been calling for Hutchinson’s prosecution for years, with Representative Barry Loudermilk referring her to the DOJ in March and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signing off on it. In 2022, Hutchinson testified that President Trump wanted to join his supporters and march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but his aides and Secret Service detail said it wasn’t safe.

Hutchinson said that Trump then tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, and when a Secret Service agent grabbed his arm, he grabbed the agent’s neck. Hutchinson also testified that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and said Meadows overheard the president say Vice President Mike Pence “deserves it” in response to the MAGA faithful chanting “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol.

The DOJ’s civil rights division usually handles discrimination cases, and it’s not normal for the office to oversee a case of lying to Congress. The division has resorted to hiring questionable candidates to fill vacancies, including lawyers convicted of crimes themselves. These substandard lawyers will hopefully have a tough time convincing a federal grand jury to pursue revenge against one of Trump’s perceived enemies, who simply testified what she witnessed on January 6.

The midterm elections are 26 days away, but President Donald Trump has already cost Republicans at least one Senate seat. North Carolina’s open Senate seat will all but surely flip blue on Nov. 3, with polls showing Democrat Roy Cooper leading GOP nominee Michael Whatley by 10 percentage points, 50.7% to 40.5%, according to FiftyPlusOne’s average as of Thursday afternoon. Hell…

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Vice President JD Vance was asked to define socialism on Thursday. Instead of even trying to sincerely engage with the concept, the Harvard-educated lawyer and author offered a brain-dead, tailored-for Fox News answer.

Vance was fielded the question at a press conference in which he announced that Microsoft and other tech firms would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.

“Oh man.... It’s a hard term to define these days because very often socialism … classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So I don’t know what the term means anymore,” he said.

“I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you wanna replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”

There are quite a few different definitions and perspectives on socialism. There are the so-called “sewer socialists,” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who believe that Americans should have “whatever they need to live a dignified life” and that it is “the government’s job to deliver on that.” The more specific, classical definitions go beyond filling potholes and housing affordability, advocating for a future in which wealth is redistributed from a small minority of elites to the working class. It can have both market and non-market models and takes various economic and social formats.

Regardless of what you think socialism means, it is certainly not “replacing American workers with foreign workers” and wanting boys to play girls’ sports.

This was a confusing, unintelligent answer from a man who’s supposed to be quite smart. What does Vance have to lose by just answering the question in good faith, especially as someone uniquely positioned to answer it? I bet Secretary of State Marco Rubio would have had a more interesting response.

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities to be inhumane.

The Department of Homeland Security shot down a plan to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane, a government contractor told NPR News Thursday.

At a meeting with the DHS deputy director, the contractor pitched constructing a FEMA-style camp, believing that would be more humane than building megaprisons inside of warehouses. But his company’s plan was rejected.

“No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people,” the contractor told NPR.

The contractor believed that the directive to construct facilities with the worst possible conditions came from the White House itself—specifically Stephen Miller, who was not present at the meeting.

“Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted,” the contractor said.

“Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I’ve never been in that position before.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told NPR that the contractor’s comments were “false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller,” and that the comments were “defamatory.”

Under Miller’s leadership, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, insufficient food and water. Immigrants have been denied adequate medical care, and legal counsel, and were even locked in cages. As of earlier this week, 28 people have died in ICE custody in 2026. In 2025, ICE reported 33 detainee deaths, the highest in two decades.

MAGA world has turned its fire and fury toward two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, after it was revealed that the pair were more interested in assisting a pro-Russia Balkan regime than helping Republicans win the midterms.

“This has opened the floodgates,” a person close to the White House told Politico Thursday. “The knives are now fully out for these two.”

Donald Trump tapped both men to oversee his midterm advertising campaign. But LaCivita and Blair were not stateside last week amidst the Republican blitz, instead visiting a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska ahead of its regional elections, according to several sources that spoke with The New York Times Tuesday.

Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, according to the Times, has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Blair and LaCivita were paid well for their time and, presumably, their connection to the president, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington-based law firm affiliated with Republika Srpska’s government.

Trump, for his part, was apparently unaware of the duo’s travel plans. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump immediately tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants” and “do not work for me.”

Yet the sudden disownment is a convenient revision of Blair and LaCivita’s broad influence on the MAGA movement. Both have held significant positions within Trump’s orbit: Prior to running the president’s midterm spending campaign, Blair served as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. LaCivita worked as the chief strategist of Trump’s primary super PAC, MAGA Inc., and later became chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee.

Both are also connected to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect Blair and LaCivita from the White House’s ire.

“[Trump] has been livid for awhile over how things have been heading, and he hates nothing more than when people make money off him, especially when those people abandon him like this,” another person close to the president told Politico, noting that Trump could “could cut them off forever” if the situation continues to go south.

But outside of the White House, political strategists have viewed LaCivita and Blair’s disembarkment as a sign of Trump’s troubled waters.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained to Politico that “if your top political advisers are not paying attention to the midterms and instead are paying attention to taking money off the table in a foreign country, that seems to indicate to me that they’ve moved on from Donald Trump as their top priority, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that.”

Others were simply stunned by Blair and LaCivita’s foreign affairs. James Carville, who worked on former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, told Politico that the entire scandal was “jaw dropping.”

“Everything I did, I cleared with the White House,” Carville said. “When I saw this I did one of those sitcom spit takes.”

When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president. 

On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him.” “The list of his failures,” El-Sayed wrote, “goes on.” 

It’s not that people are calling El-Sayed’s criticisms wrong. They’re pointing out that they exist.

NEW: Footage and interviews reviewed by CNN repeatedly show Abdul El-Sayed — who is set to campaign with Barack Obama — calling Obama’s presidency a failure and that the country was no better off after eight years of his presidency. https://t.co/saLMgrldVY

— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) October 7, 2026

In a statement to CNN, El-Sayed praised Obama: “He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine.” 

“Despite all he did, there remains so much left to do,” he added. “That’s where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, picks up.”

The New York Post extended the supposed concerns to other Democrats, pointing again to El-Sayed campaigning with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, despite El-Sayed publicly endorsing the Uncommitted movement in 2024, supporting calls for Democrats to withhold their primary votes from Joe Biden in protest of US military aid to Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the movement declined to endorse Harris ahead of the national election—instead urging supporters to “vote against” Trump—El-Sayed actually did endorse her, in a marked break.

El-Sayed, the implication runs, is not such a good friend to his fellow Democrats after all. But intense critiques of Obama are something he has in common with both wings of his party. Countless Democrats and progressives have previously criticized Obama, in private and in public, from the former president’s left and right flanks, and supported him afterward (or, for some of those who actually held national office at the time, during). In party politics, done right, political alliances cut across ideological and policy disagreements. That’s just strategic campaigning—which Obama still plans to do alongside El-Sayed in October.

Is this a real story? Because it’s so blindingly stupid, it can’t be real. “The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be exercised ahead of the midterms, according to two administration officials,” The Atlantic reported Wednesday. “But those in favor believe that further action after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to…

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Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is targeting multiple universities that he claims “bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents.”  

Vance singled out Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the University of Pittsburgh at a press conference, saying that the government would be investigating them. 

Vance said the Trump administration believes that these institutions exploit the J-1 visa program, which allows foreign students to work and conduct research in the United States. The investigation will also include a team examining visa fraud. 

“Something weird is going on at these universities,” Vance said. “They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”

In the same press conference, Vance defended tech CEO Elon Musk’s contributions to the country as a positive example of a foreign student. Musk came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa as a student but never enrolled in the Stanford University graduate courses his visa was tied to, instead working illegally on a tech startup. 

“It’s one thing if you were to bring in a person like Elon Musk. I think 99 percent of American citizens look at somebody like Elon Musk or Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, and say, obviously, ‘If that person wants to come in and build something great in the U.S., we support that,’” Vance said, before attacking companies and institutions who hire foreigners as accountants and pay them far less than American citizens. 

A reporter pressed Vance about Musk, noting that he didn’t build his companies overnight, and asked how the government would determine if a prospective immigrant was the next Musk. 

“Does the person coming in fill a position that simply cannot be filled by an American worker? That’s question number one,” Vance said. “Question number two, very importantly, is this person a truly elite human being, are they truly bringing in a special set of skills, and abilities, and work ethic, and competence?” 

Vance seems to be trying to thread a needle by saying some foreign students are OK but others are not. Musk committed the very fraud the Trump administration claims to be trying to combat. But the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is the world’s richest man, supports Trump, and has racist ideas about immigration, so he gets a pass. 

Vice President JD Vance was forced to eat his words in real time, accusing Microsoft of hiring too many foreign workers on the same day President Trump plans to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Vance criticized Microsoft while announcing the tech company would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.

“We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America. Particularly the American technology sector, we’re the bigger boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ … American workers,” Vance said at his Thursday morning news conference. “So our message to Microsoft is, ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign, indentured servants.’”

This is a common argument against the H-1B work visa program, which allows foreign professionals to work in the United States.

Vance was questioned about the ironic timing of his comment just minutes later, and tried to have it both ways.

“You had some harsh words for Microsoft at the top of your speech just then,” a reporter raised. “In that case, why is President Trump awarding the nation’s top technological medal to the CEO of Microsoft this afternoon?”

“Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things. They also laid off 6,000 American workers while replacing them with 6,300 H-1Bs,” Vance replied. “And our message to Microsoft is not that we wanna harm your company, it’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.”

The last time Vance waded into the H-1B debate he ended up dragging his wife Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, into the fray.

“You can believe on the one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system, while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country. And look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India, and, you know, I love my in-laws.... They’ve been great contributors to the United States of America,” he said at a Turning Point USA event last spring. “But I also think when you become an American citizen … one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country, and not the country you came from before.”

Vance seems to have applied that thinking to Microsoft today—perhaps without running it by Trump first.

President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will give the National Medal of Science to racist billionaire Elon Musk and a group of technology executives who have donated to Trump, his administration, or the Republican Party. In a statement, the White House said the Trump cronies were “incredible leaders in science and technology” and that they are “helping ensure America keeps…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Watch these Trump voters regret their choices in real time…

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