The New Republic

“There’s no Dracula here,” the head of the Norwegian welcoming committee proudly tells a Romanian family in an early scene in Fjord. They have just arrived in the picturesquely chilly hamlet of Ålesund, where Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth) is the principal of the local elementary school, a locus of sleek, platitudinous inclusivity. (“Love doesn’t have borders,” one of the teachers remarks.) His latest hire, Mihai Gheor­ghiu (Sebastian Stan), is an IT whiz who has moved from Bucharest with his Norwegian-born wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), and their five children—two moody high schoolers, a pair of adorable preteens, and an infant—in tow. A former aeronautical engineer, Mihai is now applying his talents to Wi-Fi, a humbling, downward trajectory that seems to exacerbate his natural reticence.

Mats is trying to break the Nordic ice by joking about vampires, but the gag is lost on Mihai, a devout Christian who sees paternity as a cross to bear, and his faith as a cudgel to wield in a daily crusade against malign progressive forces. These include YouTube, which is banned in his home, much to the shock of the extremely online children next door, who retreat nightly into their iPad playlists. Lisbet, who works as a nurse in an elder-care facility, appears more moderate than her husband. She’s a genuinely kind, considerate person, who is skilled at her job and possesses a lovely bedside manner. Still, she can’t help sneaking a crucifix, unsolicited, into the casket of a recently deceased patient.

The trickiness of the Gheorghius’ position as true believers living in a hotbed of agnosticism manifests initially in a series of misunderstandings and microaggressions, like when Mihai is admonished for plunking out “Amazing Grace” on the school’s piano. (“Can we have something more cheerful,” he’s asked.) Later, there’s another, more unsettling skirmish involving a kindergarten class discussion around gay marriage: Mihai’s younger daughter, Judith (Teodora Sabina Barau), claims she’s been told at home that it’s a sin. Then a gym teacher notices bruises on the back of Judith’s older sister, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), marks that weren’t visible before the class started doing full-contact wrestling drills.

From there, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film mutates fully from a modern, mirthless comedy of manners to full-on horror show, with Norway’s child protective services unit descending on the Gheorghius’ modest home and taking their children away until such time as their parents can mount a legal defense. Their first lawyer is so appalled by Mihai’s bossy attitude that she quits. Her replacement, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), is Mats’s wife, who tries to dampen her own skepticism about the pious interlopers and their ideas about what it means to lay on hands.

The family’s plight echoes the 2015 Bodnariu case, which saw Romanian-Norwegian couple Marius and Ruth Bodnariu separated from their five children following accusations of corporal punishment, and which served in the European press as a flash point for discussions of religious persecution, xenophobia, and the zealousness of Norway’s Barnevernet (child protection unit). The latter was described in one petition, signed by dozens of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers, as a “dysfunctional organisation which makes far-reaching errors of judgment with serious consequences,” and Mungiu leans into the characterization. Terrified at the prospect of handing over her baby, who is still in the midst of breastfeeding—and having difficulties latching—Lisbet tries to push back, only to be informed, with an unmistakable air of even-keeled menace, that it would better, for all involved, to run through the formalities as smoothly as possible. The implication is that good intentions might be paving the road to you-know-where. So much for Scandi tolerance.

From his own perch on the proverbial fence, Mungiu tries to see the big picture. “If you have a mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism,” he said at Cannes, implying a shared continuum of radicalization. The movie’s mindset is oh-so-equanimous; it’s just asking questions. Such as: whether the secular Norwegian humanists, with their meticulous procedures and concern-trolling protocols, are genuine guardian angels or bloodsuckers? And is Mihai—who admits under interrogation to giving his children the odd slap on the butt, but also worries he’s being misquoted, on the record and in an adopted language—a true fire-and-brimstone monster from the Old World? Or is he a victim being impaled on the stake of political correctness? “They never had Communism,” scoffs a weathered, battle-weary Romanian official, who gets called as institutional heavy artillery once news of the Gheor­ghius’ plight breaks containment. He knows overreach; in a movie filled with selectively deployed euphemisms and double-talk, this old hand speaks in the cracked voice of historical—if not moral—authority.

The talking points here are many: not just political polarization and cultural relativism, but also generational conflict, euthanasia, surveillance technology, and the discombobulating echo chamber of internet activism, which begins driving the action once the Gheorghius become semi-willing mouthpieces for the online anti-woke mob. Mihai’s friends back home have collected thousands of signatures, and encourage him to post in the comment sections of various wing nut influencers; there’s a thick irony in this Luddite turning into a YouTube cause célèbre. The sheer density of socially relevant themes and the loosely ripped from the headlines plot, combined with Fjord’s precisely engineered form and above-the-line pedigree—not only the established award-magnetism of its acclaimed writer-director, but also the commercial clout of its Hollywood-ratified stars—are such that a good, liberal-minded film festival jury in 2026 has little choice but to bestow prizes on it.

Big ones, as it turns out. Fjord took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and is already being earmarked for possible Oscars beyond the foreign-language category, as Parasite, Drive My Car, and Anatomy of a Fall were before it. The latter is the real precedent here; like Justine Triet’s 2023 film, Fjord finally adopts the structure of a courtroom drama, one pitting Norway’s bureaucracy against a defiant clan of outsiders. There are, inevitably, plot twists, surprise witnesses, and impassioned testimonies; crucially, the onus of judgment—legal and otherwise—is placed on the audience. We’re privy to more evidence about the case and how the Gheor­ghius operate behind closed doors than the presiding judge, but only just barely. The real subject of Mungiu’s script, beyond all the aforementioned topical maladies, is—wait for it—the elasticity of truth, and how there are two sides to every story, whether or not they’re created or perceived equally.

Ideally, a drama like this one, calibrated for dramatic and ideological ambiguity, would challenge consensus; that a tribunal of international a-listers found common ground in Fjord’s morality play suggests it may be a safer bet than it seems.

Feeling good about feeling bad, to the point of getting off on melancholy, is a hallmark of contemporary European art house cinema. Mungiu is a master of the form. Since his first Palme in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a pressurized portrait of a student trying to get a back-alley abortion in the waning days of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian director has honed his style to a fine point. Mungiu is a staunch realist who favors spare, unvarnished compositions and quotidian scenarios; his preferred form of punctuation is the pregnant pause.

The upshot of such austerity measures is that Mungiu’s films, including Fjord, wear their seriousness as a badge of honor. The director traffics in symbols and subtext; each strategically locked-off frame and declamatory piece of dialogue is an invitation to read between the lines. (“We don’t do evangelization at school,” observes one educator, several scenes after the church-versus-state setup has been established.) The problem is that Mungiu’s subtlety is often inscribed in all-caps. For instance: When Lisbet is surprised at home by the child-welfare services representatives who have arrived to take her kids away—even potentially the baby who’s been struggling with bottle feeding—the Navy blue cross of the Norwegian flag can be seen through the living room window, the billowing standard of the nanny state.

There are other on-the-nose moments, like an early allusion to an impending avalanche and later the loaded image of a senior citizen in a wheelchair, gazing out at the harbor, hoping to topple in. These awkward moves contrast with the nearly flawless work of the actors, starting with Stan, who doesn’t just disappear into the role (something he didn’t quite manage as Donald Trump in The Apprentice) but captures a withdrawn nature that comes off as authentic. Because of the way Mungiu parcels out information, Mihai is simultaneously the film’s protagonist and its most mysterious figure; he stridently voices his opinions, but we rarely if ever see the action from his point of view. There’s a similarly adept conceptual trick in Reinsve’s performance as Lisbet, which suggests a woman caught intractably between righteousness and denial.

In a different and probably more palatable version of Fjord, Lisbet might begin to question her husband’s backward-leaning beliefs, or break with him for the sake of their children, complete with movie-star close-ups of Reinsve’s tear-streaked face. But there are no explosions here, in private or otherwise. The Gheorghius present a united front, even when Mihai explains in court—once again striving, with a sincerity abutting on condescension, to contextualize his inspirations—that “beating comes from heaven.” This claim leads to the story’s most absurd moment—an invitation by a grandstanding prosecutor to the defendant to slap him—which at least spikes the pulse of this otherwise scrupulously controlled movie.

Mungiu is determined to maintain an appearance of objectivity, even as he creates a series of contrived escalations. There’s a difference between diagramming the problems of characters trapped by their class positions and moving them around like pieces on a chessboard, and Mungiu tends to do the latter. He is clumsy in his handling of the contrast between the Gheor­ghius’ tense but tight-knit family dynamics and Mats’s implied coddling of his own moody teenage daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen). When Mats loses his patience with her at the dinner table and bangs his fist, like Mihai, the scene is staged for our benefit, as a gotcha moment: Look who’s the hotheaded authoritarian now. Mihai, meanwhile, is not as bad as he’s made out to be: He seethes and copes without definitively crossing any lines, at least on our watch. The film drapes these characters in ambiguity, less out of open-mindedness and more as a way of quietly flattering certain factions—like, say, sophisticated viewers who see themselves as hovering above the fray, or reactionaries unduly pleased to see social workers presented, however ambivalently, as stooges of totalitarianism.

It’s not quite a spoiler to say that the forecast avalanche arrives before the end of Fjord; Mungiu treats it conspicuously as an anticlimax and an indicator of other, less visible things being dislodged. By only barely disguising his metaphors, he stakes his claim to art-cinema Valhalla, and yet the final act leaves the machinery exposed, with a shameless coda that finds Noora racing against time to catch a ferry out of town. Her long-repressed parting words are predictable, as is the fact that they’re lost on the breeze; what we have here, the film says, is a failure to communicate. Mungiu might mean for Fjord to cut through the noise and register as a howl into the void, but it’s finally more like an echo chamber: loud and discombobulating, spacious and hollow.

Claire Valdez, the New York state assemblymember now running to represent New York City’s 7th congressional district in the House of Representatives, joined a union long before she ever entered politics. It’s her history with unions that she credits with giving her the experience she needed to think about running for office in the first place. “I think my perspective as a political person really started with the fact that I was a worker and that I did not control my hours.… And that sense of kind of powerlessness is one that is shared by so much of the working class,” she told me in an interview earlier this year.

That changed when she started work at Columbia University, which was unionized, she said. “My union gave me—it really gave me—time,” she said. She started to use that time to learn about political organizing and think about the way she could help make workers’ lives better. That ultimately led to her race against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, in the congressional primary in June, which she won by more than 20 points. The race was often portrayed as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed her, versus the machine, socialism versus the establishment. But there was another way to frame the battle: the union member versus the political insider.

At least five other candidates are new to national politics this year but are running for seats in the House and Senate because of their experiences with unions. Like Valdez, their rhetoric is worker focused. They believe that their worker-led agenda is key to Democrats winning back some of the disillusioned middle-income voters who have flipped to President Trump or stopped showing up for elections at all. Earning their votes is essential for the Democrats to return to power. But the key question is, assuming the Democrats do return to power, will the presence of these union member legislators result in a governing agenda that really tries to deliver for working people?

First, these candidates have to win in November. Some are running in states and districts where they have an advantage—Valdez is almost certain to win her heavily Democratic New York City district—but others don’t have it so easy.

What the candidates —who include Troy Jackson, a former logger running for Senate in Maine; Bob Brooks, a Pennsylvania firefighter running in the state’s 7th district; Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and labor leader running as an independent in Nebraska; Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter and forest worker organizer running for Montana’s 1st congressional district seat; and Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running in Ohio’s competitive 7th district—have in common is that their campaigns promise to truly represent the workers left behind in today’s economy, and especially by the Republicans so many put faith in in 2024.

They are promising that, if elected, they will force a potential Democratic majority to finally deliver on policies the party has promised for years, like increasing wages, lowering the costs of health care, and providing federally guaranteed paid sick days and family leave.

In Maine, Jackson, the former president of the state Senate, rose to the Democratic nomination after Graham Platner’s implosion this summer. While he’s not entirely new to Maine state politics, his campaign leans hard on his history as a fifth-generation logger, and his campaign website shows him in coveralls and a baseball hat standing in front of a yellow bulldozer.

His task is unseating five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins. Collins has tried to have it both ways by portraying herself as an independent who’s not in the Trump MAGA camp while still mostly supporting Trump: That, plus her incumbency, gives her an advantage with independent-minded Maine voters. But the political gods have blessed Jackson with a newly reported scandal from the news outlet ProPublica. Collins was at the center of an FBI probe in which a defense contractor allegedly donated to her 2019 campaign in exchange for contracts. ProPublica reported that Trump stopped the probe when he returned to office.

This plays into Jackson’s case against Collins, which he’s made at least since a Democratic candidate debate in July. “Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said onstage then.

His campaign has been hammering her over the scandal. But before that, his position as the candidate to help working-class Mainers against Washington insiders may have already been working. Recent polling shows him with a slight edge, though definitely within the margin of error.

All of the other candidates face uphill battles trying to turn red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th district, Brooks, the firefighter, is trying to overcome a slight Republican advantage to defeat the one-term incumbent Representative Ryan Mackenzie. Cook Political Report rates the contest as a toss-up, and it’s a critical seat for Democrats to win if they want to gain control of the House. Brooks is betting on voter dissatisfaction with the Trump economy. “The number one thing I hear from my neighbors is how unaffordable life has gotten, and that’s what I’m running to fix,” he said in an email. “I’ll fight for universal health care, crack down on private equity buying up our housing, and work to pass the PRO Act so workers have bargaining power again.”

While Democrats have long supported unions and been endorsed by them, rank-and-file union workers have split with leadership over the past few election cycles to sometimes support Republicans, especially Trump, who has made a big show of wearing hard hats and climbing into big rigs to give the appearance of fighting for working Americans. Brooks is trying to push back against that illusion. Like the other candidates, he is speaking like a member who knows how to fight on the workers’ side of the bargaining table.

“I decided to run for Congress because I’ve watched career politicians like Ryan Mackenzie fail the working people of the Lehigh Valley,” Brooks said. “Washington is a dumpster fire, and Mackenzie is the arsonist who helped light it.” Brooks, a firefighter, promises to put it out.

Forstag, the smoke jumper, is running for the Montana seat against Aaron Flint, a combat veteran and radio host. The district leans Republican after shifting toward Democrats this year, according to the Cook Political Report. (The seat is being vacated by Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who also served as Secretary of the Interior in Trump’s first term and left amid numerous ethics investigations.)

Forstag has been endorsed by Our Revolution, and his district is home to the college town of Missoula, where New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined him for a rally in May. There, he struck a similar tone to Brooks. “If we want to build a country that works for working people, we need to start sending working people to Congress,” he said at the rally.

In Ohio’s 7th, Poindexter, the ironworker, is gaining ground after his R+5 district has moved from a relatively safe seat for Republican Max Miller, who’s faced horrific abuse allegations concerning his ex-wife and daughter, to a toss-up.

Poindexter highlights another critical promise these candidates are making; they say they will support unions, not just working families. “I don’t have to be pro-labor, folks. I am labor,” Poindexter said in July at the North Shore AFL-CIO headquarters in July, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. “My friends, my family—I would not be able to look them in the eye if I went to Washington and forgot where I came from.”

“Working people are tired of politicians who talk about their struggles without having lived them,” an AFL-CIO spokesperson said in a statement, echoing the sentiment. “For too long, the people writing the rules on wages, health care and retirement have no real experience with what those rules mean for the rest of us.”

For Michael Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, the decline of unions helps explain why Democrats have stopped truly representing working people and also stopped getting credit for the policies they do pass. Unions were a trusted intermediary that helped voters connect their daily struggles to the political solutions that could help them; even more critically, they gave working people a true seat at the table.

In a piece published in The Contrarian on Labor Day, Podhorzer wrote: “Today, too many Democratic and media professionals talk about working people the same way that Coca-Cola executives would talk about regaining a prized market segment they’ve lost to Pepsi—which is not the way anyone in a democracy should be talking about its citizens, regardless of their demographic group. That most commentators ask how Democrats can ‘win back’ the working class—not ‘represent’ or ‘answer to’ them—reveals this dynamic in action.”

Even if these candidates win, advancing a worker agenda in Washington will be a tough task. Decades of labor law have tilted the playing field in favor of corporations, and these candidates will have to convince the Democratic Party as a whole that it’s a fight worth taking on, even when there’s so much else to do.

But for them, fighting for unions once in office is a fight that’s critical for the Democrats to take on. “This is a really essential time for people who have familiarity with the labor movement, who have been union members themselves, to step up,” Valdez told me. “Union density is still low, and far too few workers are able to organize with their co-workers … and so I think that’s a really important aspect of the affordability crisis that we talk about a lot.”

The political ascent of Donald Trump has forced me to adjust upward my estimation of the American public’s gullibility. That Trump is a fraud is something I would have been able to perceive when I was 7 years old. Yet Americans twice elected him president. If I possessed the ability at age 7 to see through Trump (and I was no kind of prodigy), then gullibility about Trump can’t logically be a matter of his base lacking a college education (“I love the poorly educated”). Rather, it reflects the public’s perverse attraction to promises it understands to be hollow. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley observed way back in 2008, “The routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as … money.” 

Trump does Kinsley one better by attaching his obvious lies to promises of money. The most ludicrous example is Trump’s pledge, restated this week, to give every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Set aside that this is essentially a bribe for votes; it’s also never going to happen because doing so would cost $1.3 trillion. Trump has a history of pledging to send out money that never arrives. Last year he promised $2,000 rebates to compensate American families for his tariffs. That didn’t happen. Neither did his promise last year to share 20 percent of DOGE savings with U.S. citizens (possibly because DOGE saved no money at all, but rather added $244 billion to the federal deficit). 

Now Trump is claiming fictional economic development projects to be underway in two states where Republicans are at risk of losing Senate seats. These are Iowa (where Republican Representative Ashley Hinson is in a dead heat with Democratic state Representative Josh Turek) and Alaska (where incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan is trailing Democratic former Representative  Mary Peltola).

The make-believe project in Iowa is a $15 million Mesabi Metallics steel mill that will create 1,750 jobs (plus 6,000 temporary construction jobs) in Iowa’s Lee County, where Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks may also lose her seat. A White House press release called it “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States” and posted a Des Moines Register front page with the headline “Steel Project Hailed As ‘Transformational.’” “This deal is done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured reporters at an Oval Office ceremony that Hinson attended on September 28. “They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal.” Trump pitched in: “They’ve already started building.”

But Lutnick and Trump were lying (and shame on the Register’s Bri­anne Pfannen­stiel for not calling them on it). The deal was not done, and Mesabi Metallics certainly hasn’t already started building; it hasn’t even purchased the land, according to Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, who reviewed Lee County land records after Trump’s announcement. (Iowa’s TV news reporters are beating the crap out of the Register on this story.) Lutnick’s “this deal is done” comment was in response to a question about whether the deal was contingent on the state granting tax breaks. But if the deal was not contingent on state tax breaks, why did Republican Governor Kim Reynolds scramble to call the legislature back into session four days later to provide up to $1.4 billion in tax incentives? Five Republicans voted against it, including Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs, who chairs the state Senate’s Ways and Means Committee. Dawson told CNN that the state would end up losing $880,000 in tax revenue for every job created.

Despite that dismal accounting, the bill passed, and Reynolds signed it into law Friday night. Still, that doesn’t mean Mesabi Metallics has yet secured the billion-dollar state tax break on which the deal pretty obviously is contingent. As Amanda Rooker of KCCI in Des Moines reported October 2:

The credit would be based on the project’s qualifying investment, which can include land, site preparation, infrastructure, construction and certain business assets. The Iowa Economic Development Authority would determine how much of the credit to authorize, up to the 10 percent limit.

The company would … have to meet certain requirements before receiving the credit. The project, or a designated portion of it, would have to be operating, and at least half of the jobs associated with that portion of the project would have to be added to the company’s payroll. Those jobs would have to pay at least 140 percent of the state’s qualifying wage threshold

No permit applications have yet been received at the county level, according to KWQC’s Christensen. 

There’s also some question whether Mesabi Metallics will follow through. Lana Zak of CBS News reported October 4 that Mesabi and its Indian parent company, Essar Group, “have a long history of missed deadlines and unfulfilled job promises.” In 2008, Zak reported, Essar announced plans to build a $1.6 billion iron mine and steel mill in Minnesota that promised to create 700 jobs. It was never built. KCCI’s Rooker reported that as recently as July Mesabi was planning to build the Iowa steel mill in Kentucky, and it isn’t clear its talks with Kentucky state officials have entirely ended. Memories are still fresh of Trump’s 2017 promise that Foxconn would build a plant in Wisconsin that would create 13,000 jobs. Nine years later, a much scaled-back plant has created only about a thousand jobs. 

For all the unacknowledged obstacles to “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States,” Iowa’s steel mill is a slam dunk compared to a $54 billion liquid natural gas pipeline Trump’s promised for Alaska that Trump announced at a separate Oval Office ceremony on September 30. The pipeline, Trump said, is to be paid for by South Korea in partial fulfillment of its 2025 pledge to spend $350 billion in the United States (in exchange for lower tariffs). A Commerce Department press release said the United States and South Korea had “agreed to commence working on the Alaska LNG project.” 

Almost immediately, South Korea disputed this. “Putting figures or using definitive language goes far beyond what was agreed,” Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry, and resources, told the South Korea news agency Yonhap on October 2. Indeed, the veteran Alaska commentator Dermot Cole (he spent 37 years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Minor and four at the Anchorage Daily News) reported that there are no signed agreements. Seoul Broadcasting Service reported: “The South Korean government has never agreed to this.” Cole quoted “a leading official of Korea’s ruling party” saying, “The Alaska LNG project will be decided on the basis of sufficient review in accordance with our domestic legal procedures in accordance with the principle of commercial rationality.” 

Trump also announced on Truth Social that South Korea had agreed to spending $8.4 billion on an enhanced oil recovery project, prompting the South Korean government to reply that it had no earthly idea what Trump was even talking about. Trump responded by threatening to double South Korean tariffs.

The South Koreans did, however, confirm that a separate Trump announcement on September 30, of a $22.3 billion gas-fired plant to power an AI data center in La Salle County, Texas, was truthful. Texas, of course, is another midterm trouble spot for Republicans, with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democratic state senator, pulling ahead of Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

In this case, though, Trump’s announcement is unlikely to do Talarico much damage because Talarico is already campaigning against new data centers. “A lot of these giant data center companies are running over local communities,” Talarico said the day Trump announced the gas-fired plant, “and these giant data centers are popping up in people’s backyards and there’s no input.” Even Republicans are split on whether building data centers is a good idea, with 46 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed. 

The irony is priceless. For once Trump tells the truth, and it bites him in the ass. Maybe he should stick to lying.

In the autumn of 2001, a new national security threat arrived by mail. Envelopes carrying a fine, nearly invisible powder had begun traveling through the postal system. One letter reached a tabloid’s newsroom in Boca Raton, Florida, killing a photo editor within a few weeks. Other letters arrived at NBC News and the New York Post. In mid-October, a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was opened in the Hart Senate Office Building, releasing anthrax spores and shutting down the building for months. By the time the letters stopped, five people were dead and 17 more infected.

Still reeling from September 11, lawmakers scrambled. How easily could a biological weapon be acquired or made? What might happen if the attack were larger and more sophisticated?

At a congressional hearing that November, lawmakers cited findings from a 1993 report titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks.” Written in plain language, the report described various weapons’ effects, the technical aspects of monitoring and controlling production, and the trade-offs among nonproliferation tools. It happened to specifically warn that under the right weather conditions, 100 kilograms of anthrax released in the nation’s capital could kill up to three million people—a casualty outcome that, “pound for pound of weapon,” could exceed a nuclear bomb’s. According to one journalist, “in the rush to sort out fact from fiction, rumor from real scientific fact, Congress was using reliable information from a group that was charged with studying the real ramifications of bioterrorism.”

That group, the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA, had in fact been defunct for years. Created in 1972, OTA had been a small but proud agency that worked for Congress alone, helping lawmakers navigate science and technology issues with nonpartisan expertise. When advances in genetics raised the prospect that a blood test might reveal a disease-causing mutation, it was OTA that examined what that knowledge might mean for privacy, insurance, and discrimination. Over the years, the agency took on acid rain, mammograms, telecommunications, drug abuse, missile defense, intellectual property, pest control, electronic surveillance, agricultural technologies, and the disposal of nuclear waste, among hundreds of other issues. Wherever Congress might be caught flat-footed as the world changed, OTA could be found nearby.

Congress appreciated the help. A 1990 survey of congressional staff reported that zero percent of respondents found OTA “not useful.” (Half of them said “very.”) A 1993 study by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution concluded that “the agency is considered highly credible by members of both parties.” Nonetheless, in a mad rush to slash federal spending in the mid-’90s, Congress defunded it. “We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology,” lamented Republican Representative Amo Houghton. A few years later, as a biological weapon made its way through the mail, Congress reached for the work of a team it had let fall by the wayside.

Right about now would be a good time to bring OTA back. In recent months, a parade of senior researchers and executives from the country’s top technology companies has issued alarms about artificial intelligence, using terms like “human extinction.” Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, wrote that companies like OpenAI and his own former employer are “gambling with our lives.” The prospect of advanced artificial intelligence escaping human control is not a new worry, but the very public warnings by industry insiders have very suddenly shaken Washington.

Company leaders have their preferred approaches. OpenAI wants mandatory national safety requirements and industry-led standards. Anthropic has called for independent safety evaluators inside companies and a slowdown in development. Nvidia argues that slowing down is unnecessary and that speed and safety are a “false choice.” The executive branch, meanwhile, has its own technical experts, while lobbyists, trade associations, academics, labor groups, and AI safety organizations press their own theories of problems and solutions. Congress is hearing from no shortage of people with something to say about the way forward.

The issue facing Congress, at least initially, is not one of selecting a particular approach among a clear set of options. It is to determine which claims being made are true, what remains unknown, and what each proposed intervention would likely accomplish. The principal and overwhelming challenge is to wade through an extraordinary amount of information—much of it technical, some of it contradictory, and most of it laden with uncertainty. It is precisely the sort of problem OTA was designed to solve.

This September, Axios reported that more than two dozen members of Congress and governors said they either don’t use artificial intelligence or have used it only rarely. Axios called it a “striking admission.” A House Democrat, meanwhile, called it “fucking absurd”—that people overseeing the technology might not be regular users.

This view of things suggests that if only lawmakers knew more, from personal experience or otherwise, they would legislate better. But we similarly expect Congress to legislate on issues like war without serving in the military and on agriculture without ever having tilled the land. Why, in this case, should we expect them to be users of a particular technology in order to regulate it? Of course, we don’t actually expect lawmakers to be personal experts in most things. No one seems to have an issue with lawmakers overseeing the work of NASA absent experience with space travel. But we do expect them to rely on the expertise of others—to gather it, to assess it, and to make informed decisions with it. The problem facing Congress is not really a question of knowledge but a question of capacity.

Congress is drowning in advice. Lawmakers are inundated from think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, advocates, and armies of experts from the executive branch, all telling Congress how to do its job. Talk with anyone on Capitol Hill today, and what you will not hear is a complaint about too few meetings with too few people offering their ideas. What Congress lacks is the ability to make sense of it all: to sort through the torrents of information flooding the institution and pull out what’s important—and also true—so that lawmakers can make informed choices. A lack of capacity is the underlying deficiency.

This is made all the more difficult because most of the information coming into Congress has a source with something at stake. Advice givers are rarely providing lawmakers with unvarnished analysis. As a member once griped to me during a 2019 interview on Congress’s capacity constraints: “We all have our biases here, but we also sometimes just want information we actually think is free of political leanings. This is harder to find than you think.” Which is to say, Congress lacks the ability not only to make sense of all the information but also to feel confident about its impartiality. Enter OTA.

To understand how OTA worked, consider a debate over commercial explosives. In 1980, Congress was contemplating a bill that would have required manufacturers to add chemical markers to explosives, known as taggants, that supposedly made it easier for law enforcement to trace the materials after a bombing. When a bomb detonated, investigators could theoretically recover the markers from the debris and trace the explosive back through the supply chain. Explosives manufacturers strongly opposed the idea, telling lawmakers that the solution was both costly and ineffective. Also chiming in were federal, state, and local law enforcement; aviation and airport-safety officials; and scientists and weapons engineers. Each had pieces of important information—some of it contradictory—and also preferred outcomes. The questions involved, moreover, were technical: For example, would the markers actually survive an explosion? Would they yield useful information? And at what cost?

Lawmakers turned to OTA, whose job it was to gather the evidence and make it legible. What questions could be resolved? What was still unproven? OTA wasn’t performing original research as much as it was analyzing the scope of what was known, in light of scientific uncertainty and disagreements. In this case, it found that taggants could in fact be useful to law enforcement. But its analysis also raised genuine technical concerns regarding their safety and the costs of a tracing regime. It did not collapse those findings into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down answer, but rather laid out the various policy paths Congress could take, with the trade-offs of each. Congress ultimately came out where the manufacturers wanted it to, declining to impose the taggant mandate. But OTA had given lawmakers a basis for getting there that did not depend on taking the manufacturers’ word for it. OTA equipped lawmakers with the capacity to make an informed judgment.

Having an independent source of in-house expertise also helped strengthen Congress’s hand in its dealings with the executive branch. In 1983, the Reagan administration moved to expand the government’s use of polygraphs to investigate leaks of classified information. Congress asked OTA to examine whether the machine could actually do what its proponents promised. OTA concluded that the technology could register physiological signs of stress but could not reliably tell whether that stress arose from deception or some other form of anxiety. Congress imposed a temporary moratorium on the proposed expansion while it considered the evidence. A few years later, as it weighed restrictions on private employers’ use of polygraphs, it again drew on OTA’s findings. The resulting Employee Polygraph Protection Act generally prohibited private employers from using lie-detector tests.

In neither the explosives nor the polygraphs case did OTA tell lawmakers what to do. It did not tell Congress that taggants should or should not be required; instead, it laid out for lawmakers what each choice would likely buy, cost, and risk. Nor had it told Congress that the executive branch couldn’t pursue leaks or that employers had no legitimate interest in theft and fraud. But it had separated the promise attached to a technology from the evidence for what it could accomplish. OTA acted as an “impartial ‘honest broker,’” said Representative Houghton. “Members of Congress are deluged with advice from many quarters, but it is often tinged with the underlying bias and political agenda of the bearer.”

Perhaps almost to a fault, the agency was fanatical in its commitment to analysis, not prescription. OTA’s leadership and staff knew that in a highly partisan environment, any move in the wrong direction—any whiff of seeming like it was taking sides, on policy or politics—would imperil its reputation, and ultimately its usefulness. So its mandate was treated seriously: Translate an issue’s complexity into relevant knowledge for members and staff, and articulate the potential trade-offs associated with different courses of action. Said John Gibbons, the agency’s director, in 1984: “There are many advocates of particular solutions—even the scientific community is an advocate in its dealings with the Congress—but OTA is unique in its almost idealistic mandate to remain free of advocacy.” That restraint had some costs. OTA could leave both sides of a policy dispute dissatisfied: It would not bless anyone’s preferred solution, and it would not reduce a hard question to a recommendation lawmakers could simply adopt. But this was OTA’s own trade-off. The agency supplied Congress with the best available account of what a policy choice would do and avoided any suggestion about which choice to make.

Over the course of its life, OTA published roughly 750 products for its congressional clients across a bewildering scope of topics. As it happens, there are few policy domains where science and technology do not play a meaningful role. The work was substantial and consequential. Indeed, OTA staff may have been committed to impartiality, but they understood the stakes. After news reached staff that the agency was being disbanded, most chose to stay on till closing day, “vigorously pursuing its mission to the last,” reported The New York Times. “Even as they empty desks, pack boxes and circulate resumes, staff members working in offices a few blocks from the Capitol are rushing to complete and distribute as many studies as possible before the deadline.”

In the 1990s, despite its broad appeal across Congress and across the aisle, OTA became a minor casualty in a much larger fight over the federal budget. Certain members thought it wise to show the public that Congress, too, was tightening its belt as it simultaneously recommended eliminating a much broader array of federal programs. But it was hard to see the move as anything other than optics.

For one, OTA’s funding peaked at $21.3 million in 1995—in inflation-adjusted terms, less than the cost of returfing the grass on the National Mall. But OTA also paid for itself many, many times over. A single OTA study in 1994 on the Social Security Administration’s computer procurement policy saved the government an estimated $368 million—more than 16 times OTA’s budget that year. Its broader impact on evidence-based policymaking is harder to quantify in dollar terms. But as one analyst put it: “If conducting [an OTA study] costs less than one-tenth of one percent of the money at stake in a decision, and increases the odds that we’ll get the decision right, that is a considerable bargain.”

There have been calls for reconstituting OTA in some form or another since not long after it closed its doors. A notable one came in 2019, when a House appropriations committee approved $6 million to begin reopening OTA. (In 1995, the agency was defunded, but the statute creating it is still on the books.) In 2020, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recommended “reestablishing and restructuring an improved” OTA. Indeed, no serious proposals—and there are a number—imagine simply recreating the agency as it existed in 1995. Analyses, including by the Congressional Research Service, have suggested a number of new design recommendations if it is one day brought back. In 2019 and again in 2023, a bipartisan, bicameral group folded some of these recommendations into companion bills that would have created an updated OTA.

However, the money did not survive the final appropriations process, the recommendation did not make it into the House’s eventual modernization package, and the bills stalled. Still, in recent years, Congress has repeatedly recognized the problem.

There have also been other efforts to provide Congress with more support. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office created a Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team, which now produces technology assessments, short explanatory “spotlights,” and audits of federal science and technology programs. It has done serious work, including on generative AI, deepfakes, biotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces. A reconstituted OTA could be viewed as duplicative.

But STAA is a team within an agency whose central job is auditing how the government spends money and carries out its programs. OTA solved a different problem: sorting through a barrage of information in order to clarify options, often in close partnership with lawmakers and their staff. As the Washington Post editorial board once argued: “GAO’s institutional culture centers on audits and investigations, and it lacks the hallmarks of OTA in its heyday,” which include “experts with whom legislators can build relationships.” Indeed, the relationships mattered as much as the mission. OTA staff attended meetings with lawmakers, commented on draft legislation, and generally made themselves accessible. Lawmakers even sat on OTA’s governing board. GAO, meanwhile, is not deeply embedded within Congress; it operates at arm’s length. An OTA annual report from 1981 proudly underscored the opposite: that the agency functioned as a kind of “shared staff.”

The OTA was a model of legislative expertise so distinctive that other democracies came to study it—and, in various forms, to borrow it. In the late 1980s, Britain sent a delegation to examine the agency, and in 1989, it established its own Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Germany followed with the Office of Technology Assessment at the Bundestag in 1990. So did France, Finland, Japan, and the European Parliament, among others. The agencies differed in their designs but generally reflected a shared idea that lawmakers confronting the consequences of new advancements in science and technology should not have to depend entirely on another branch of government, outside interests, or their own overextended staff. The great irony of the decision to shutter OTA was that so many others thought it a good enough idea to replicate themselves.

Even the White House stood up its own science and technology body. In 1976, it created the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the president and coordinates policy across the executive branch, and which still exists. Only Congress decided it could do without its own source of independent judgment.

Naturally, as civilizational-stake issues like artificial intelligence mount, a reconstituted OTA is not the only solution to Congress’s capacity problem. For decades, the institution has been shedding staff, as have its support agencies. Between 1975 and 2015, the combined staffs of the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office fell by 45 percent, with minor fluctuations since. Over the past two decades, despite being charged with making the country’s laws and overseeing the entire federal government, Congress has allocated roughly one-tenth of one percent of the federal budget to itself. The result of this self-inflicted hollowing-out has probably not been more capable policymaking. For those who want Congress to do something useful, starving the institution has been an unhelpful approach.

Bringing back OTA should be one component of a broader effort to seriously invest in congressional capacity—to dispense with the idea that somehow, an ascetic legislature is capable of doing the work expected of it. A revived OTA alone is not coming to the rescue, but it is one easy and obvious and urgent place to start.

Donald Trump has been holding rallies in red states, and in a pair of articles, The New York Times reported that his crowd sizes have been diminishing. This triggered an epic tirade from Trump: He raged that his rallies are “PACKED” and claimed they are “HOTTER” than ever. He even accused the media of dishonestly ignoring their “thunderous applause” from “thousands and thousands of people.” This comes as Republicans themselves admit that the rallies actually reveal the weakness of the Trump-GOP position, which is requiring Trump to desperately energize his most loyal supporters to salvage races in deep-red areas. As one Republican told CNN: “This is a five-alarm fire.” We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who’s been writing well about Trump’s struggles with his unpopularity. We dig into the latest polling showing red-state Senate races trending Democratic, discuss whether GOP-leaning voters will really be able to support Democrats, and look at how MAGA may be getting deenergized by Trump’s failure to vanquish liberals in the culture wars. Listen to this episode here.

President Donald Trump had a petty meltdown on social media Monday after news outlets reported on the light attendance at his weekend rally in Ohio.

Trump held a rally at a 4,500-person capacity high school gymnasium in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. By the time he finished speaking, several areas of an upper deck had completely emptied out, The New York Times reported.

Multiple photographs of the event confirmed that there were empty seats in the upper sections, but in a series of lengthy posts on Truth Social Monday, Trump claimed the reporting was false and called for the news outlets stating otherwise to be arrested.

“The Ohio Arena was already full to the brim—And yet these people were still trying to get in,” Trump wrote in one post, including a 30-second clip of a large line of people waiting in the parking lot outside ahead of the rally. It’s not clear, however, that these people were not admitted.

The president claimed that there had been no empty seats (though photographs show that isn’t true), and that “thousands of people had to be turned away” from the event.

“The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country,” Trump wrote. “When Bernie Sanders has 500 to 1,000 people, they make it sound like it’s the biggest event that ever took place. When PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP has 50,000 people, they make it sound like nobody showed up!”

In another post, Trump continued to insist that the so-called “arena” was “totally MAXED OUT.” (Again, it was a high school gymnasium.)

Trump then tried desperately to spin the empty seats, which he’d previously claimed did not exist. “What does happen at all of my SOLD OUT Rallies, is that the people in the upper sections tend to migrate down to the Main Floor—The ‘migration’ process always happens! The Times knows this, and so does everyone else. I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!”

“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” he wrote.

The Times wrote that Trump’s dismal turnout in Ohio was part of a wider trend of waning enthusiasm for the president’s speaking events, which have come to feel less like pep rallies and “more like a farewell tour.”

Trump even took aim at his favorite show, Fox & Friends, on Sunday for choosing not to cover the less-than-bursting event.

President Trump’s reaction to the death of a lab worker in Russia due to a suspected plague is not reassuring.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he was concerned, and he tried to explain the U.S. government’s response, saying that he was concerned about what he called “the pneumonia plague.”

“Well, I hate to see them having it, it’s a rough, it’s a rough disease, you know that’s a disease that we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter, they’re like an army. And we don’t have the same medical,” Trump said. “Even with great advancement, the germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore, so, uh, but we’ll help. Anybody that has that kind of a problem, we’re always willing to help, we’ll help.”

Trump’s word salad evokes memories of his disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term, as well as his bizarre explanations. It’s pretty clear that the president was briefed on the suspected outbreak in Russia, which has led to a quarantine in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, but didn’t understand what he was told.

Unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China is also how news of the Covid-19 outbreak spread. That led to a pandemic that left about 2.05 million people worldwide dead of confirmed Covid-19 cases, with the U.S. making up 400,000 of those deaths, close to 20 percent of the total.

Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “always willing to help” belies the fact that his administration has cut funding to Ebola response in Africa, which has exacerbated the spread of the infectious disease on the continent. Hopefully, this outbreak in Russia is contained early, because Trump can’t be trusted to handle another pandemic.

The Supreme Court appeared to be splintered over how to decide a major climate litigation case from Colorado at oral arguments on Monday. The eight justices who heard the case—the first of its new term—signaled no clear consensus on how they will resolve the case, though most of them were more skeptical of the fossil fuel companies that asked the court to intervene.

The case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder, pits two fossil fuel companies against the town of Boulder, Colorado. The town sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in state court in 2019 for damages over the harmful effects of climate change, arguing that their products contributed to a range of climate-related woes and that they knowingly lied about the harms they imposed on the community for decades. Boulder, like many Western communities, is wrestling with higher drought and wildfire risks, all of which it blames on oil and gas production.

The two companies have sought to squelch the litigation on multiple grounds. One is statutory: They argue that Congress preempted state and local governments from suing them for climate-related harms by enacting the Clean Air Act, which sets up a national regulatory scheme for air pollutants like carbon emissions. The other is constitutional. Boulder can’t sue them for alleged harms in one state caused by out-of-state oil and gas production on federalism grounds, the companies claimed.

Beyond the precise legal points, the companies have also leaned heavily on the near-existential consequences that they will face from litigation. “If Boulder’s claims are allowed to go forward, some 90,000 municipalities across the country will have the ability to make national and international energy policy by asking juries to impose catastrophic damages on selected fossil fuel producers,” Kannon Shanmugam, who argued for the companies, told the justices in his opening remarks.

At least one justice appeared to strongly sympathize with the companies’ stance. Justice Brett Kavanaugh told Shanmugam that he thought a raft of previous Supreme Court rulings “make crystal-clear that interstate air and water pollution are matters for federal law unless Congress specifically preserves state law.” That position would strongly favor the companies since Congress did not explicitly carve out this type of litigation for the states to pursue in state courts.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to lean toward the companies’ position on preemption. Her apparent position was slightly more balanced than Kavanaugh’s, suggesting that Congress had not displaced the states altogether with the Clean Air Act. Barrett suggested, by way of a hypothetical, that “here was some room for some state law nuisance claims for pollution, but it was just much more circumscribed,” perhaps excluding the broad case that Boulder is pursuing here.

She also appeared sympathetic toward Suncor’s arguments on federalism and extraterritoriality issues with the Colorado lawsuit. “Everybody agrees that state tort law is a form of regulation,” she told Kevin Russell, who argued on behalf of the town. “But what if Colorado passed a law purporting to cap emissions in the other 49 states? Is there any principle that would prevent that?”

Russell argued that they were fundamentally different methods of approaching the same actions. A lawsuit like this one, he argued, “doesn’t prohibit them from engaging in the conduct. It requires them to internalize a portion of the cost of their activities by paying for some of the damage that those activities inflict.” Russell added that the companies “ultimately don’t disagree with that, they just say this case is social because it involves water and air.”

Boulder argued that their lawsuit, which is based on traditional nuisance claims, was hardly novel or ground-breaking. They rejected the companies’ allegations that the town was trying to enforce Colorado law in other states against their will, or that Congress had preempted such lawsuits altogether. “It has never been thought that only federal law can provide a remedy, simply because the tortious conduct and the injury occurred in different states, because the harm was widespread, the damages were large, or the defendants were part of an important industry,” Russell told the court in his own opening statements.

Other members of the court’s conservative majority appeared to lean toward that stance, as well. Chief Justice John Roberts sounded skeptical about the federalism argument in particular, quizzing Shanmugam on a hypothetical in which someone from one state throws a rock at someone in another state. “[The rock] wasn’t directed at State A,” he asked. “But, if you’re in B and you’re aiming at C, but you hit somebody in A, that doesn’t make a difference, does it?”

Shanmugam agreed in principle, but countered that it was too difficult to establish who threw the rock at all, so to speak, in this case. The companies have argued at every stage of litigation that Boulder can’t prove that their particular emissions caused the harms for which the city is suing. Shanmugam said that there was no support in precedent for creating such an exception to what he described as the “venerable prohibition against extraterritorial regulation.”

The chief justice also had pointed questions for Russell and Boulder. “Presumably if you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit [and] they’ll probably copy your pleadings,” Roberts asked him. “How would you think that will work out on the ground?” But this may have been a less hostile question than it sounds: It gave Russell the opportunity to point out past examples of major multistate litigation, such as asbestos litigation in the 1990s.

Justice Elena Kagan made a similar comparison in her own questions. “In multiple respects, this suit appears to be based on the old 1990s tobacco suits that were brought by states and local governments,” she told Shanmugam, where they alleged that tobacco companies had misled the public about the harm of their product. “I suppose the opioid litigation more recently follows the same model,” she added. “This is chapter 3.”

The court’s liberal justices, for their part, appeared skeptical of resolving anything at this stage—either by punting on procedural grounds or by remanding it to the Colorado Supreme Court for further clarification on certain aspects of the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch also did not seem to embrace the companies’ preemption argument. At one point, he implicitly compared the case to one where a car manufacturer’s negligence in one state caused harms in another state. “Is there anything anomalous, in your mind, to applying state law here to worldwide conduct?” he asked Russell, who replied no.

Finally, Justice Clarence Thomas’s questions were more Delphic than usual and largely focused on questions of jurisdiction. That aspect of the case could still be decisive to the outcome. One of the questions presented to the court is whether it has jurisdiction to decide the case at all. Suncor asked the justices to intervene after the Colorado Supreme Court rejected its motion to dismiss the case. Since the companies may yet prevail at trial or another later stage of the litigation, Boulder argued that it would be inappropriate and unlawful for the Supreme Court to intervene now.

The jurisdictional question could allow the justices to punt on this case without reaching the ultimate merits about preemption, federalism, or climate change harms. Another complicating factor is the last-minute recusal of Justice Samuel Alito, who announced last month that he would not be participating in the case. The court does not generally shirk cases because of recusals from one justice. At the same time, Alito’s absence could further complicate efforts to form a five-justice majority by making a 4–4 deadlock more likely.

Even a 4–4 split is hard to predict, however, because the justices appeared to be pulled in multiple directions on the case, and no clear consensus emerged from oral arguments. Sending it back to Colorado state courts might be the likeliest outcome by default. After all, if the court is unable to reach a decision in this particular climate litigation case, it will have no shortage of future ones to revisit the matter.

The Democratic party will refuse to approve any of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations in the event they take back control of the Senate, drawing perhaps the strongest line in the sand against the White House to date. 

“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices—MAGA justices—on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News in a Monday report. 

The rest of the ranks echoed the sentiment. 

“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, referring to Mitch McConnell’s 10-month obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a spite-fueled move that resulted in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the court instead. “I don’t think you know you want to go down that road... But clearly you know McConnell and Trump used... their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”

“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Senator and Senior Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal said. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

This report comes just a day after conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News he was considering retirement, saying it was “something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term.” Alito is 76 years old, and fellow conservative Justice Clarence  Thomas is 78, leading both sides of the aisle to start thinking about their replacements. 

“A major reason why I’m running to serve South Carolina and why it’s so important to keep the Senate conservative this November. Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Senator Darline Graham wrote on X last Friday. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”

The White House continued its press ban Monday, blocking the news outlet Politico from traveling on Air Force One with President Trump.

Politico was scheduled to be the White House print pool representative, and Trump administration officials offered its spot on the plane to other news organizations who are part of the pool. In solidarity, several print organizations said no, CNN reports.

The night before, the White House’s email to the press corps offering guidance on Trump’s trip did not mention any news outlets who were traveling on Air Force One, which is not normal, and could be a sign that media organizations are trying to send a message to the president. Last month, Trump banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House, only to be rebuked by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who ordered the ban immediately lifted while the outlets’ court challenge received a full hearing.

At the time, the rest of the White House TV pool refused to cover Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House, leaving only Chinese state media to have video of Xi’s entrance September 24. At the state dinner for Xi that same night, a dumbfounded Trump asked where all of the cameras were.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Trump appeared to be confused about Kelly’s order and is still bent on punishing news outlets for coverage that he doesn’t like. The fact that other mainstream media outlets aren’t trying to take advantage of Trump’s ban to get increased access to the president is a good sign. Enabling Trump’s latest attacks on the press would result in watered-down, less critical news coverage of a president who thinks he is above any laws or checks on his power.

Rick Jackson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, is the latest MAGA candidate to delete mentions of President Donald Trump from his campaign website.

A version of Jackson’s website from June stated that he “will work with President Trump to protect Georgians from the consequences of Washington’s failures.” As of Monday, the mention had been removed, MeidasTouch reported.

This sudden deletion (read: defection) comes after Jackson spent months tirelessly tying himself to Trump. In February, his campaign aired a 30-second Super Bowl commercial comparing him to the president. “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything,” Jackson said. On the campaign trail, Jackson promised voters he’d be Trump’s “favorite governor,” and framed himself as similar to Trump, but with a “southern tone.”

All of this was done without Trump ever actually endorsing Jackson. The president reluctantly bestowed his endorsement to Jackson in July, after the businessman defeated Trump’s original pick, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, in the Republican primary runoff in June.

Jackson’s sudden switch-up is part of a wider trend of Republicans toning down their ties to the president ahead of the midterm elections. Jackson is at least the second candidate to remove Trump from his campaign website, after Florida Representative and gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. The shift appears to indicate that the Republicans’ leader has become the party’s biggest liability.

President Trump’s ill-advised, poorly executed war in Iran was foreshadowed months before.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s handling of Yemen’s Houthi militia attacking ships in the area in 2025 had Pentagon leaders raising concerns that would come to fruition during the Iran war the next year.

Specifically, Department of Defense officials Dan Caldwell and Alex Velez-Green were worried that an extended military campaign against the Houthis could deplete U.S. missile stocks, which ended up happening one year later. Last year, in March 2025, President Trump announced Operation Rough Rider, a bombing campaign in Yemen that would become infamous after the national security adviser at the time, Mike Waltz, mistakenly invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into a group chat of senior administration officials discussing the early bombings.

The campaign resulted in 1,000 targets being bombed, with Houthi commanders and ammunition stocks being targeted, but also scores of civilians being killed. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the operation a success, but others in the Pentagon, such as Caldwell and Hegseth’s first chief of staff, Joe Kasper, questioned whether the operation had clear and achievable objectives, again similar to the current Iran war.

A spokesperson for Hegseth, Kingsley Wilson, told the Post that the operation “achieved decisive success against Houthi forces,” resulting in “severely degraded radar networks, air-defense systems, ballistic-missile and drone launch sites, weapons depots, and production facilities while removing multiple mid- and senior-level commanders from the battlefield.” It also “substantially reduced immediate threats to vital international shipping lanes, compelled a clear tactical shift by the adversary, and helped create conditions for a ceasefire that strengthened freedom of navigation in the region.”

Those “successes” seem at best hollow now, as Houthi forces took over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea last month. Last year’s operation ended in May 2025 with an Oman-brokered ceasefire and Trump declaring victory, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.”

“They gave us their word that they wouldn’t be shooting at ships anymore, and we honor that,” Trump said.

In reality, the Houthis weathered the U.S. attacks. They shot down at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, and two F/A-18 fighter jets were lost at sea. Trump lost interest in Yemen shortly afterward, to the chagrin of some in U.S. Central Command. Some officials reportedly said at the time, “You ignore Yemen at your own peril.”

That seems all too apparent today, and the U.S. is stuck in a conflict with Iran and its Houthi allies with no clear end in sight. The war has stretched on and continues to hurt the U.S. and global economies, with Trump unwilling to acknowledge that the war should never been waged, was horribly executed, and now needs to end regardless of how bad he looks.

Suddenly, gas prices have absolutely nothing to do with the Iran war, according to the U.S. president.

After spending months denying and downplaying the fact that gas and diesel prices have become more expensive, Donald Trump finally conceded Monday. The only catch to his admission: The rising price tag is definitely not his fault.

“What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz, because Record Numbers of Barrels are coming out now on an almost daily basis,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday.

Instead, Trump blamed the sky-high prices on Ukraine, claiming that its recent attacks on Russian oil refineries had aggrieved the global oil market. (It’s worth noting that Ukraine would likely stop attacking Russian infrastructure if Trump’s buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin stopped invading Ukraine.) Trump also wagged a finger at “Blue States like California” that are trying to veer away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources.

Provisional ship-tracking data obtained by Reuters revealed that, in the last month of September, oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz had roughly returned to prewar levels. Millions of barrels of oil from European reserves are also expected to help lower prices in the near future, following an urgent plea from Trump to G7 leaders last week.

But American wallets are still hurting. The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.36 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.68 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.32 a gallon.

Collectively, Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and oil since the war began seven months ago, according to an analysis by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University published last month.

Consumers have spent roughly $59 billion more on gas and $48.6 billion more on diesel, according to the university’s tracker. That breaks down to an increased price tag of approximately $822.20 per U.S. household.

Vice President JD Vance claimed Monday that Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded propaganda videos are actually “not partisan.”

The Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections—even though it’s illegal to use government funds for campaign purposes.

Speaking to the press ahead of his trip to Alaska, Vance tried to downplay the administration’s blatant law-breaking by claiming the television spots did not endorse any particular candidate or party.

“I’m sure that some people don’t like it, but if you look at the message of those advertisements, they’re not partisan, they’re not—you know, it’s not like we’re advocating for a particular candidate,” Vance said. “We’re trying to tell a story, I think, about how great the United States of America is.”

The vice president compared the advertisements to videos that the Obama administration produced about the Affordable Care Act. “You have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance continued. “It’s part of actually, I think, living in the constitutional republic.”

In 2010, the Department of Health and Human services paid to produce short 30-second ads explaining the changes that the Affordable Care Act made to Medicare, including free check-ups, cancer screenings, and lower prescription drug costs. Not only did these videos have a clear public service function, but they were also not self-aggrandizing or partisan.

By comparison, Trump’s television spots are wildly partisan. One spot, called “King of the Jungle,” features images of Democrats targeted by the Trump administration edited alongside videos of lions hunting in the wild. Another, called “God Made Trump,” presents the president as a messianic figure. One ad called “Resilience” shows multiple moments in Trump’s life before he became president. And in another, the president begs voters to “Love Me.”

In order to make the videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

America’s FBI directors are expected to be fiercely independent. Kash Patel is not.

Instead, Patel appears to be completely under the thumb of the White House, bending over backwards to enact the president’s retribution campaign, according to a new report by The Atlantic.

Whereas Patel’s predecessors have historically tried to create distance between themselves and the Oval Office, Patel reportedly receives numerous calls from the White House and its allies throughout the day. Some of his orders come directly from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or other executive branch officials, according to current and former officials that spoke with reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick.

“I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official said.

The White House did not deny that Miller tells Patel and his agency what to do. Instead, it seemed to reinforce Miller’s broad influence over Trump’s executive branch, confirming that Miller “interacts with all law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.”

FBI Operations Director Joe Perez told The Atlantic in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

Patel’s primary mission seems to be lending institutional credence to Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. Yet despite spending months repeating promises of supposedly imminent arrests, Patel has yet to produce actual results for Trump’s cause.

But the FBI wildcard has invariably escaped consequence from his MAGA boss, even in the wake of numerous controversies.

Over the last year, the podcaster-turned-agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayers’ dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

His alleged substance abuse issues have also caused problems. Patel ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report earlier this year about his alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

But Patel has nonetheless hung on to his credentials within the Trump administration. The windfall, according to a Republican operative that spoke to Fitzpatrick, is due to the fact Patel “is the only guy who never says no.”

“And the president likes that,” they added.

Meanwhile, Patel has been remarkably brash and cavalier while dealing with his critics. In response to three pages of detailed questions about his connections to the White House sent by Fitzpatrick, Patel responded: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

Fitzpatrick noted that she had never asked or written about a gold-plated jet ski or the English Channel, writing that she “did not understand this response.”

However, a quick Google search turned up an MS NOW report from July about Patel that included an image of a jet ski. At the time, Patel had responded to the article via X, writing: “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass.”

“Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website,” Fitzpatrick observed.

President Trump has the lowest approval rating in Kansas of any president since Herbert Hoover—who was widely blamed for causing the Great Depression. This is yet another ominous sign for Republicans ahead of what has become a midterm battleground for the Senate.

This comes in the midst of a neck-and-neck campaign between Democrat Reverend Adam Hamilton and incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, with most polls showing them locked at 45 percent. This is the closest Kansas has been to flipping blue in nearly 100 years, making Trump’s historic unpopularity there a clear cause for alarm.

"I would say Donald Trump is probably at this point in his term the least popular Republican president since Herbert Hoover" -- Enten details how Trump is down 20 points of approval in Kansas relative to his first term https://t.co/1bJkA1rlWO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

“President Trump is historically unpopular for a Republican president in the great state of Kansas.... I absolutely buy the idea that this [Senate] race is close because just take a look at these,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Monday morning. “In his first time … Donald Trump had +5 points. Look at how much less popular Donald Trump is than he was in term number one at this point. He’s way down in the basement, 15 points underwater—that’s a 20-point shift away ... 16 less points popular than any other Republican president at this point in the term.”

Republicans are worried that Trump’s unpopularity will spill into the race between Hamilton and Rogers.

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

Marshall isn’t really helping his case, either, as his tenure has been defined by timely waffling on ICE and controversy spurred by his past aggressive, high-interest medical debt collections during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“This to me is potentially a mathematic perfect storm,” Enten continued. “A historically unpopular Republican in Kansas and Donald Trump, and a historically popular Democratic Senate candidate in Adam Hamilton—that may be the equation that gets Kansas its first Democratic senator in 94 years.”

On her way out of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem may have gotten one of her donors a sweet deal.

President Trump fired Noem from the Cabinet in March over a series of scandals including how DHS handled contracts. But she didn’t leave the agency until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, took over on March 25. Just before she left, the department agreed to pay $108 million to Daedalus Aviation Corporation for a Boeing 737 private jet with a bar, two bedrooms, marble showers, and a table covered in manta-ray skin.

The firm had acquired the plane for less than $90 million, and it wasn’t the only plane deal DHS made to the corporation. The agency bought two more luxury jets from it for $106 million, far more than the $83 million the company paid for them. It also bought two 17-year-old 737s for $45 million each, more than their typical market value, according to The New York Times. All five of those planes were bought on Noem’s last morning at the DHS.

Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, gave $10,000 to Noem’s political action committee, American Resolve, in 2024. After she was appointed as DHS secretary, Walters’s companies got over $900 million in agency contracts. DHS hired his business Salus Worldwide Solutions to fly Noem and her aides on chartered jets, as well as to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Daedalus was given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.

When Mullin was confirmed as Noem’s successor, he looked into backing out of the deal but was worried about paying a financial penalty. Mullin spoke to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was also concerned about the penalty. She told him not to block the plane purchases, and ultimately, he didn’t.

The planes DHS bought from Daedalus were mostly unused as of August. The whole deal smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit their foreign business partners and political allies.  

In the latest installment of the most corrupt administration in history, the dynamic duo behind multiple botched peace agreements has secured a massive deal to purchase a series of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, The New York Times reported Friday. 

One private firm had already reached a tentative agreement to purchase Lukoil assets earlier this year, but that deal was stalled as a new group of investors emerged—each with direct financial ties to Kushner, Witkoff, and President Donald Trump.

The new group of investors is led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025 and another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee through Eldridge Industries, his investment firm. 

One major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi–based fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Sheikh Tahnoon previously dumped $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Witkoff and majority-owned by the Trump family. Then the U.S. president lifted export restrictions on AI chips to the UAE. Nothing to see there, certainly. 

Another major stakeholder in the sale is a Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, who have helped finance Kushner’s shady luxury hotel project in Albania.

For Kushner and Witkoff’s friends, the best thing about this part of the peace deal doesn’t actually require any peace. The Trump administration has reportedly signaled that it is open to making deals with Russia before the war actually ends, and one person familiar with the matter told the Times that included the Lukoil sale. The potential deal stands to be extremely lucrative for the American buyers as the purchase would release the assets from Russian sanctions, causing their value to instantly increase. 

Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white-collar crime and ethics adviser, told the Times that the deal was “an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements.”

“And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?” Chen said.

News of this deal comes on the heels of a report exposing Kushner’s investment firm as the largest stakeholder in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. 

And just one day before the Times report dropped, Kushner himself took to X to insist that he does not let his business dealings influence his diplomatic work.

The president feels absolutely no remorse about doxing Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

Donald Trump rationalized the stunning overstep while speaking with reporters Saturday, defending the decision to post Cotton’s personal phone number as a method to pressure him into bending to Trump’s position on daylight saving time.

“We want to get away from this ridiculous way and custom of—every twice a year, turning your clocks back, turning your clocks forward, being late to dinner, being late for very important meetings, it’s ridiculous,” Trump said.

“We don’t want to change clocks twice a year. It’s very expensive, it’s got many problems,” Trump continued.

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July, moving to officially do away with the notion of daylight savings within the 50 states. But Cotton’s staunch opposition to the bill—largely over the prospect of dark winter mornings—has stalled its progress in the Senate.

While addressing the matter on the Senate floor last year, Cotton warned that in some parts of Arkansas, sunrise would not occur until after 8 a.m. if they chose to do away with daylight savings, forcing children, commuters, farmers, and construction workers to begin their days in darkness.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton wrote on X Saturday, responding to Trump’s remarks. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”

Trump’s pressure campaign was not as well received by Cotton’s fellow Senate Republicans, however. In an interview with NBC News, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said that Trump “can go from zero to a–hole in about three seconds.”

“Every now and then, there are disputes in Congress that have existential significance for the future of Western civilization. Daylight savings time is not one of them,” Kennedy told Kristen Welker on Sunday. “I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cell phone number. I don’t think that’s going to help convince Tom.”

Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt—who resigned from her post in August to spend more time with family after birthing her second child—just got a new job at Fox News.

“Karoline’s firsthand experience in the White House and on the presidential campaign trail gives her a distinct understanding of today’s political landscape,” Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott said in a statement.

In her own statement, Leavitt promised to bring “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.”

Leavitt joined the Trump administration in 2019, and in 2024 ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before returning to serve as White House Press Secretary. She was the youngest press secretary ever at 28 years old, and has still not been replaced. She often made headlines for complete falsities, lying about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, blaming a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight on DEI, calling the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and she saying that wrongly deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a “foreign terrorist” and “MS-13 gang member” who was “engaged in human trafficking.” All lies.

Trump’s “machine gun” will appear on across various shows and time blocks on the right-wing network, using her voice and institutional legitimacy to push what will likely be an unapologetically pro-Trump agenda.